Page 1 of Lawless in Leather

Chapter One

Damn. It smelled like a ballpark. Malachi Coulter breathed deeper, closed his eyes, and let the grin spread across his face as he took in the mix of sweat and grass and old beer and well-worn wood and leather that spelled baseball.

It made his palms itch for a bat.

It made his gut twist as, once again, he contemplated the possible monumental insanity that had led him to buy a baseball team with his two best friends. He still suspected Alex had put something in that very good bourbon they’d been drinking when he’d gotten Mal to say yes to his crazy proposal. Or maybe Lucas. Lucas was the doctor. He had plenty of access to drugs.

Still, here he was. New York. Though, right at this moment, Staten Island. Part owner of the worst team in the major leagues. The New York Saints. And currently in charge of bringing the security in their stadium up to scratch.

That wiped the grin from his face. Deacon Field was a rabbit warren. A beat-up crazy rabbit warren. Figuring out how to keep it, the players, and the people who would fill the seats safe—because if one thing was for damned sure, it was that no one was getting hurt in his ballpark—had been keeping him awake at night for months now.

Rabbit warren or not, Deacon would be safe.

There would be no repeat of the attack that had changed his life, and the life of his two best friends, now his partners in the rabbit warren and the team that played in it. No explosions and fire and death caused by deluded evil.

Not on his watch.

He’d had practically half a squadron of contractors in here doing what they could but there were limits to what could be achieved without some major remodeling.

Which wasn’t feasible with their budget or the time they’d had before the season started. In fact, he was starting to think the only way it would be feasible to do the work that really needed to be done was if the Saints relocated to a different field for a season. A choice that wasn’t going to be popular with their fans. If it could be done at all.

Yet another thing to worry about.

And now there was only one week left until the first game and he had a to-do list that was so long, he didn’t want to think about it.

Lack of sleep wouldn’t kill him, though, and he found himself arriving for work at the crack of dawn each day, heading for Deacon Field first instead of his own offices and climbing to a different part of the stadium to sit and smell the air. Today, finally, he’d let himself into the owners’ box, sliding back the windows to let the early-morning air seep in and carry the smell up to him.

It was the closest to peaceful things got these days, these first few minutes. The rest was sheer chaos.

Good thing he liked chaos.

OOH, BABY, SHAKE IT!

Music smashed through the morning silence. His eyes flew open. What the fuck?

SHAKE, BABY, SHAKE IT!

Mal stalked to the front of the box, stared down at the field. Took in the twenty or so women wearing skimpy little gym bras and leggings and shorts and groaned. He’d forgotten the damned cheerleaders.

SHAKE IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT!

He gritted his teeth. Cheerleaders. Hell. Baseball teams didn’t have cheerleaders. Alex could call ’em a dance troupe and spout off about getting butts on seats all he wanted but they were cheerleaders and they didn’t belong in baseball. No matter how good they might look prancing around down there, all long legs and long hair and big boobs.

He allowed himself a moment to appreciate the view and found his eyes drawn to the woman at the front of the squad. The one in charge, judging by the way the others were following her moves as she bent and stretched in ways that were arresting despite the goddamned annoying music.

Half a foot shorter than the shortest of the others, her hair a vivid slick of cropped scarlet—unlike the long falls of blond and brunette surrounding her—she was also built sleeker. She lacked the curves that were testing the limits of the Lycra worn by the rest, but as the music changed to some sort of sinuous beat and she started to demonstrate a kind of twisting hip-shimmy thing, he felt his mouth go bone-dry.

Da-a-amn.

It was surprising the turf beneath her feet wasn’t scorching with each coiling move she made.

Sex on legs.

He blinked, tried to bring his mind back to the job at hand.

Hot or not, he didn’t remember clearing a cheerleading practice for this morning. That meant he had to go down there and find out what the hell she was doing on his field.

“And five, six, seven, eight.” Raina Easton bounced to her left, expecting the squad of dancers in front of her to mirror the move. Instead, to a woman they stayed right where they were standing, looking past her shoulder, varying expressions of surprise, approval, and assessment on their faces. Uh-oh. She spun on her heel and took in the very tall man striding across the ballpark toward them, wearing jeans, a dark-gray T-shirt, a perfectly beaten-up black leather jacket, and a thunderous expression.

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