Restless Heart Read Online Free Page B

noted that Seth’s jaw was now shaded with a five-o’clock shadow, giving him a dangerously sexy edge that made her heart race.
    She opened her mouth to ask him what he was doing here, but one of the young ballplayers sitting at his table spoke up before she could.
    “Well, snap, Coach, why can’t something like that happen to me?”
    “Face it, Brett,” said one of the others, “you’re not that great a catcher. Didn’t you figure that out back there in the bottom of the eleventh?”
    “I keep telling you, the sun was in my eyes, Chase!”
    “Look,” Seth put in, “I can’t help it if I have pretty women falling all over me. Doggone curse follows me everywhere.”
    He added a long sigh that felt deliciously warm on the back of Destiny’s neck, and it was all she could do to suppress a long sigh of her own.
    Pretty—Seth had called her pretty.
    She was going to stand up any minute now . . . really.
    “Guys,” he said, his arms still around her, “this is Destiny.”
    “Sure is,” Chase said. “I mean, when someone drops right into your lap like that—”
    “No,” Destiny protested, hoping her voice wouldn’t betray her breathlessness, “that’s not what he means. It’s my name . My name is Destiny. Although, really, of all the laps to fall in . . .” She reluctantly pushed herself to her feet. “How come you didn’t tell me you were going to be in town?”
    “ I sure would have told her,” one of the guys quipped, but his grin faded when Seth gave him a look.
    “I was going to look you up later,” he told Destiny, “but suddenly there you were in my lap.”
    “Yeah, I’m nice that way. Saved you the trouble. So . . .” She gestured at the uniformed players gathered around the table. “I didn’t even know you were coaching.”
    Seth toyed with his napkin. “I guess we’ve been out of touch lately.”
    “Guess so.”
    They both knew why. Her parents weren’t the only ones who didn’t agree with her decision to leave Wilmot for Nashville.
    “Why,” Seth had asked her on that long-ago summer night before they parted ways for the last time, “can’t you just work on your singing skills while you’re in college?”
    “Because I finally know what I want,” Destiny told him.
    “What happens when things go wrong? And they will. Things will get really trying and you’ll wish you had something to fall back on.”
    “No, I won’t. Not me. I’m not taking the easy way out.”
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “You have to make things happen, Seth, not sit back and wait for them to happen.”
    “Things happen if they’re meant to, no matter what.”
    “I don’t believe that. I think you make your own luck and seal your own fate. So I need to go after this full throttle, or not at all. It’s how I do things. Don’t you get that?”
    No, he didn’t. Didn’t get her .
    That hurt. So badly that she left town the next morning without stopping over to say good-bye.
    In all the years of their friendship, she’d always been able to count on him. Even when no one else seemed to lend moral support, Seth always had—until he turned against her, along with the rest of the world, when she set out to realize her dream.
    Then again, maybe she didn’t get him , either. After all, she didn’t see why, after going away to college and getting out into the world, he’d ever want to return to his small-town roots.
    Hadn’t he once dreamed of becoming a major-league baseball player?
    “I changed my mind,” he’d said simply, when she’d reminded him.
    You mean you gave up before you ever had the chance, she wanted to say. You were so afraid of failing that you wouldn’t even try.
    Oh well. They were obviously two very different people headed in opposite directions.
    “I’m teaching American History and Political Science at Wilmot,” he told her now, “and I just took over coaching this summer when Dean Reynolds retired.”
    “That’s great. Are you living with your parents,