Can a summer fling last a lifetime?
Jamie Lawson always assumed he’d make it as a pro baseball player, until a tragic accident left him maimed and his wife dead. Six years later, he’s opened his own chiropractic clinic, but guilt and grief still haunt him.
Grade school teacher Kira Walker is spending the summer in small-town Minnesota to reassess her life and come to terms with being single. When she lays eyes on Sexy Umpire Man, she thinks a summerfling sounds pretty good…
Inspired by a real-life event in a real-life small town in Minnesota
I’m blessed to have a place like the fictional small town in CURVEBALL (yes, the town in the story is based on a real-life Iron Range town). During summer and fall, I spend as many weekends as I can at my dad’s lake place.
The property next to his contains a baseball field, a small community center, a beach and a playground. Every Labor Day weekend the field is host to a local softball tournament.
The opening scene of CURVEBALL was inspired by a real-life event I witnessed at that tournament a couple years ago. (Of course, all names are changed to protect the innocent LOL!) Everything after that is purely my imagination!
Here’s a quick peek!
“Hey ump! What’s the score?”
Jamie Lawson turned to see a skinny, carrot-top boy, probably eleven or twelve. Since the players were changing sides, he pulled the scorecard from his pocket and gave the kid the score.
He couldn’t help looking at the woman who sat just behind the boy. He’d noticed her earlier—yellow sundress and shoulder-length brown hair that just wouldn’t stay in the clip on her head—but now he could swear she was checking him out.
It was hard to tell with the sunglasses she wore.
Nah.
He turned his attention back to the game. He’d done this umpire thing a long time and it was almost automatic to him; besides, this was just a small-town tournament (not that it didn’t get heated now and then).
He kept sneaking peeks at the woman in the yellow dress, and trying to figure out who she was with. Husband? Boyfriend? Maybe she was dating one of the players?
Concentrate, he told himself. You get paid to make the calls, not gawk at the fans.
He was doing a better job of that when a dog started barking. It was close—right next to the fence. Jamie heard its owner talking, trying to get the dog to quiet. But still the dog reacted to every crack of the bat or smack of the ball into the catcher’s hand.
Jamie was good at shutting out distractions, but the yellow-dress woman had thrown him off. He glanced at the dog, and found it was next to her. An older man on the other side of yellow-dress-woman was wrestling with the dog, and she was saying something that sounded like Quit heckling the umpire!
She looked up and met his eyes. Her sunglasses were perched on her head, and her eyes were wide and muddy-water green. “Sorry!” she called.
He pointed good-naturedly at the dog. “Tell him I make the calls around here.”
Some of the spectators chuckled.
“I’ll see if I can reason with him.” She had a smile that made him want to smile back. So he did.
