Sports Analyst Frankie Sullivan needs a win. As an expert at using data to predict games, the loss of a World Series threw her off her game. Fresh off a nasty divorce, and ready for a new chapter, the New York Eagles is Frankie's final shot at victory.
But things just got a whole lot more complicated.
Former baseball star Charles Avery, the Eagles' new manager, is Frankie's biggest enemy. At her last team, Charlie always made decisions with his heart, clashing with Frankie over her stats and data. This time shouldn't be any different, but Frankie can't seem to stop the way her heart jumps when he looks at her.
She can't let anything happen with Charlie, but as the two attempt a daring move to take the Eagles to the top, her cool head mixed with Charlie's fiery heart might be the ultimate winning formula...
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Praise for FOR THE RING:
"FOR THE RING will call to the hearts of every baseball lover out there. The love of the game is intertwined in every chapter and transported me straight to the home of the Brooklyn Eagles. The forbidden workplace romance between Frankie and Charlie had me swooning wondering will they or won't they. And boy, does their chemistry practically steam from the pages." - Ally Weigand, author of FIRST BASE!
"There's something incredibly empowering in reading the story of a woman who thrives in a male-dominated field. For the Ring is a breathtaking read, filled with heart, heat, and a strong female lead who knows what she wants and deserves every ounce of success. Truly captivating." - Kanitha P, author of the FULL THROTTLE series!
"This is a sweet and charming, slow burn, opposites attract baseball romance. I really enjoyed it, I was invested i the characters and their relationship and their banter was really fun!" - Reader Review
"It's a good day to talk about a lovely sport romance and it's even better when our two main characters are opposites that attract each other that guess what? they will absolutely fall in love!" - Reader Review
Release date:
June 17, 2025
Publisher:
Headline
Print pages:
304
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I speak four languages with varying degrees of fluency. English was my first, spoken at home with my parents, and I was surrounded by it in my suburban Los Angeles neighborhood growing up. Spanish was my next, a slow slog during middle and high school, with a few classmates who could speak it better than our teachers, and then way more vigorous study in college, which got me to conversational level. My third, after a few classes in college, is Japanese. I am in a constant battle with it in my Duolingo app.
The app is mostly winning.
Which is why I don’t really understand the people around me in the Tokyo Dome. At least I don’t understand their words.
But I do understand another language, my fourth, and one I share with everyone in this stadium tonight.
Baseball.
The crack of the bat and the smell of the dirt or the leather of a glove, the rhythm of the game – building, always building to something – is so deeply ingrained in my soul that I most definitely speak the same language as the other fifty-five thousand people packed into the stands for the final game of the Japan Series as Kai Nakamura, the ace of the Yomiuri Giants, stands alone in the center of the diamond.
Ninth inning.
Two outs.
Nobody on.
Two strikes on the batter.
I’ve been here before, on the other side of it.
The Giants are up one to nothing, but it might as well be five or ten or a hundred runs.
The other team hasn’t reached base, not once. Not hits, no walks, not even a fielding error or a hit by pitch.
A swing and a miss.
Strike three.
Sutoraikusurī, in Japanese.
And that collective inhale explodes into a roar that I understand perfectly.
Baseball isn’t my first language, but it is the one I’m most fluent in.
I can’t help it – my gaze drifts across the field, past the delirium of the victors, to look in the visitor’s dugout, where I see a team that has just been dominated by the best pitcher in their league. Their season is over, with nothing to show for it but their memories, tarnished by this final one of watching another team celebrate the championship they’ve coveted all year long.
That feeling? That’s one I know better than most.
And it’s enough to remind me of someone who knows it as well as I do, back in Los Angeles, where we parted on a night a lot like tonight – an unexpected bonding moment, the bittersweet ending of a career and an unexpected kiss that I sometimes still relive with startling clarity.
“Sullivan-sama,” a stadium worker says, interrupting me before the memories take over. And I’m back in the Tokyo Dome, rather than more than five thousand miles away and two years ago at Dodger Stadium. “Sullivan-sama, your car is here for the airport.”
My flight isn’t back to Los Angeles, but to New York, to my new team: the Brooklyn Eagles, the team that had replaced the Dodgers when they left for the West Coast in 1957.
As their assistant general manager, I’m going to help make sure next year finally comes.
And Kai Nakamura is the arm we’ll ride all the way to the World Series.
I don’t stay for the celebration.
He knows I was there. I was right behind home plate for the whole game. The cheeky kid even had the audacity to tip his cap in my direction before the first pitch. He’ll want to celebrate with his teammates, enjoy his championship, but, in a few weeks, when he’s ready, that will be my moment.
Until then, I’ve got work to do.
Conventional wisdom would be to sleep through most of my nearly thirteen-hour flight. There isn’t a lot of business getting done quite yet, just a week after the World Series. Most people who work in the league are taking a day or two to regroup before they evaluate their season and start executing their plans for the next one.
But I’m not going to wait. So, instead of sleeping, I’m bolt upright with a coffee cup that the flight attendant in first class never allows to get below half empty, working on my pitch for Stew.
Stew, whose real name isn’t Stew or Stewart, but who picked up the nickname during his playing days, where he went on a hot streak and only ate stew for four weeks, until his bat went cold, is the general manager and vice president of the Brooklyn Eagles and, more to the point, my direct boss.
My only boss, really.
When he brought me on last year, the Eagles were dead last, not just last in their division, but held the actual worst record in baseball. A disgrace by any measure, but, in New York, it was wildly unacceptable.
Last season the goal wasn’t to win it all.
It couldn’t be.
Worst to first stories might work great in fiction, but they almost never happen in real life.
In real life, you have to scrape and claw your way from of the bottom, and last season we made moves.
But, to get the team to the next level, we’ll have to really take a good hard look at who and what we want to be in the coming years.
Which means my pitch to Stew has to be perfect if I’m going to talk him into the massive amounts of money he’ll have to pry out of the tightly clenched bank account of our ownership group to get the deal done.
Millions of dollars.
Tens of millions, just for the right to sign him.
Hundreds to lock him up for the next decade.
The kid is worth it. Now I just have to convince everyone else.
And I won’t be alone.
Every team is going to be gunning for Nakamura, but my real competition is clear. It’ll be the Yankees and the Dodgers. New York and LA. Other teams will express interest, to make their fanbases happy, but ultimately the deal will be too rich for them.
The Eagles are usually one of those teams.
But they won’t be on my watch.
So, it’s more coffee and dozens of spreadsheets analyzing data from Nakamura and his opponents, his injury history – hell, even his social media activity – and comparing all of it to what his production might be in the major leagues, and then feeding all of it into the algorithm I designed myself in order to have it predict the most likely outcome for his tenure.
Every single time, no matter what I enter in for variables, my results are the same.
He’s just that good.
After my analysis is complete, I’m back into my files, making notes about Japanese customs. I’ve worked on signing free agents from there before, but I need to make sure I’m as well versed as possible. Particularly regarding how to walk the fine line of courting someone’s business: what’s too passive, what’s too aggressive, things that will convey respect and others that will risk giving offense.
Kai Nakamura is going to dominate Major League Baseball.
And I’m going to make sure he dominates for the Brooklyn Eagles.
When the plane touches down at JFK, I’ve consumed enough coffee to make my skin feel like my soul is vibrating inside of it, but the analysis is complete, and my pitch is written, edited and fine-tuned, and I’m absolutely ready to do what I need to do when I see Stew later today.
I’ll just head straight to the ballpark and grab a shower in my office (I negotiated that into my contract when they were desperate to lure me away from the Dodgers and they had absolutely no idea I wanted out maybe even more than they wanted me here). And once I don’t smell like an increasingly dire combination of ballpark, airplane and terrible coffee, I’ll be ready just as Stew swings into his office. I can pitch him right here and now and get the gears into motion before anyone else.
Accepting my coat from the flight attendant, who is still clearly horrified about the amount of caffeine I’ve consumed in the last half a day, I deplane briskly and head straight out to the car that will be waiting for me.
I catch a glimpse of myself, ever so briefly, in the glass of the automatic doors just before they open to the sharp chill of November air and, cringing just slightly, I pull my hair, a bit matted and slightly greasy, onto the top of my head in a messy blonde bun.
My neck protests as I lower my arms – creaky joints were inevitable, no matter how comfortable the seats are in first class.
One of the many joys of simply existing after the age of thirty.
Another is the ache in my feet. I was able to take my shoes off on the plane for a while, but now the pinch in my toes is making itself known as I balance on the heels I wear despite my height, or maybe in spite of it.
Who says tall girls can’t wear heels?
Not Francesca Sullivan.
And if it gives me the advantage of bringing me up to eye level or above with the men I constantly come up against in an industry they dominate, they’ll just have to deal with it.
Stretching my neck, I peer over the heads of the people hovering near the curb waiting for their rides to pull up. The team will have sent a car, probably Vladimir, one of our regular drivers.
Holding tight to the handle of my suitcase, I spot him a few yards away, my last name written on a white card with a tiny Eagles logo at the top in the passenger window.
But before I reach it, a man and a woman with several large suitcases and a baby in a carrier approach the car, waving it down.
Vladimir makes eye contact with me, but stops the car to avoid running over the family.
They must be confused.
Maybe they’re tourists, thinking the car is a cab to flag down, or maybe they have the same last name as I do. Sullivan isn’t exactly rare . . . My mind tries to calculate the odds of that while I stride toward the car, when something else clicks in her head.
The man . . . I know him.
And, yes, we do share a name.
. . . Sullivan.
My ex-husband.
And his wife.
And their baby.
The odds of that are even worse, hundreds of thousands of times worse.
Unfortunately, my brain is too busy reeling to focus on stopping my feet. I just catch the last of Vladimir’s protests that they aren’t the Sullivans he’s supposed to be picking up as he motions toward me.
Shane turns around and, well, at least he looks as stunned as I feel.
“Frankie,” he says.
And it’s the first time I’ve heard him speak in years.
Two years.
Two years, two months, six days and, if I really, really think about it hard, probably five or so hours.
The last time I saw him was during the brief time just after the divorce was finalized but before I blocked his number and every social media account I could find. Okay, maybe my best friend had done that for me. But in person? The last time I saw him in person was the day he came to clean out the last of his stuff from our house back in LA.
I hadn’t said anything and neither had he.
Though there was plenty I would have liked to say. I’m not really the kind of person that censors myself, but that day I kept silent, because I knew once I started I’d probably never stop, and what good would that do? Probably just give him the satisfaction of knowing how much he’d hurt me.
And after the lying and cheating he put me through, he didn’t deserve to know about my pain.
“Is this your car? Babe, I think this is her car.”
His wife.
The woman he’d cheated with.
The woman he’d married almost as soon as our divorce was final.
The woman he’d had a baby with less than a year later.
A baby that, he insisted to me years before, wasn’t something he wanted.
Oh God.
I’m spiraling and they’re just staring at me, waiting for me to say something.
Fortunately, Vladimir is a saint among men. He’s out of the car and by her side.
“Ms Sullivan, I can take your bag,” he says. “I’m sorry, folks. This is a private car.”
“Right,” his wife, Jessie, says, biting her lip and glancing down at the baby in its carrier. I’m not even sure if it’s a boy or girl. “Sorry, we were waiting for our car to take us, but it’s a half hour late and we thought . . .”
“Take the car,” I hear myself saying, though I can’t quite believe the words as they fall off my tongue.
“What?” Vladimir says.
“What?” Shane says at the same time.
“Oh, we . . . we couldn’t. We’ll just wait,” she says.
“No, no, you have a baby out in the cold and it’s probably going to rain. Vladimir can take you wherever you need to go. I’ll just get an Uber to the field.”
Shane blinks at me, his vision seeming to clear for the first time. “The field?”
“Russell Field.”
“You work for the Eagles now?”
“For about a year,” I say, but shake my head. “You should go . . .”
“Wait, you live in New York?”
Seems like maybe he cut me out of his life just like I did him.
Not that it bothers me. It really doesn’t. It just reaffirms that leaving him, leaving that life behind, was the right decision. No matter how much it hurt.
“For a little over a year now.”
Shane and Jessie look at each other, eyes wide like they don’t quite know what to say to that, and I can’t imagine why it should matter.
Then something in my head pings, like a timer going off.
One of the reasons I’m so good at my job, why I can predict down to the smallest percentage point exactly how a baseball player is going to perform in a season, is because my brain tends to analyze the data it’s given and arrive at the most probable outcome.
And the only reason I can imagine either one of them would care about me living in New York is because they also live here, or maybe . . . are about to.
They really do have a lot of luggage.
Too much for just a vacation.
And who vacations in New York in early November?
No one.
“I didn’t think anything could get you out of LA,” I manage to say.
“We don’t want Kaydance growing up there.”
“I grew up there,” I protest, though I have no idea why I’m even responding. Who cares why they moved to New York? I just need to get out of here. They can take the car, like I said. I’ll just get an Uber and maybe I won’t go in straight to work. Maybe I’ll just go home for a little while and take a long hot bath and then sleep for a few hours.
Yeah, that’s it. I’ll be refreshed and ready to pitch Stew and can pretend this never happened.
And then spend the rest of however long pretending that they don’t live here.
Shane doesn’t respond and we’re all still standing there. Him, his wife, the baby . . . Kaydence, a girl probably, Vladimir and me.
“Go, I insist. Vlad take you wherever they need to go. You should get the baby out of this chill.”
“You’re sure?” he asks, his face wrinkling into a deeper frown than usual.
“I’m sure.”
I’m already taking a step and then another back to the sidewalk and glancing around to find the sign for the cab line.
“Frankie,” he says, and I look back over my shoulder. “Thanks.”
Shrugging, I send him a tight smile, the kind you use when there’s way too much to say, but you’re absolutely not going to say any of it.
Turning away, so I don’t have to watch Vlad help them into the car and secure the baby seat and put their luggage in the trunk, I pull out my phone to start ordering myself an Uber.
“Ms Sullivan,” Vlad calls out from behind me, and I stop, not keen on making the older man run to catch up.
“It’s really okay, Vlad, I promise.”
“No, no, I understand. I will take that man to where he wants to go.” Ah, so Vlad put the puzzle pieces together. “But there is another car.”
“Another car?”
“Yes. The team sent another car this morning to pick up a guest from Los Angeles.”
“A guest.”
“Yes, from Los Angeles. Just behind you, ten minutes.”
He motions back toward his car where another has pulled up behind, black and sleek, just like all the cars the team employs.
I can’t see a name in the window from here.
“Who is it for?”
Vlad shrugs his large shoulders. “I don’t know, but if you wait, you can share.”
Okay, so keep to the plan. Get in the car and wait for whoever it is ownership is flying in from LA, get to the office, shower, a change of clothes and then pitch Stew.
That’s my priority: get Stew on board with signing Nakamura and then go from there.
Dragging my luggage back toward the cars, I avoid looking into the tinted windows of Vlad’s car and allow the other driver, a man I vaguely recognize and who introduces himself as Sam, to take my bags and load them into the trunk before he holds the door open for me.
Just as I’m about to climb into the backseat, a voice calls out from the sidewalk.
“You jackin’ my ride, Sullivan?”
That voice.
I know that voice too.
Closing my eyes, as if I don’t see his face he won’t actually be there. No stupid ever-present five o’clock shadow, no ridiculous broad shoulders and thighs to match, and definitely not eyes crinkled with a shit-eating grin, and the slightly premature lines from spending most of his life on a baseball field.
Charlie Avery.
What is he doing here?
CHARLIE
I’ve always liked New York.
Always liked playing here.
There’s something about the city, about the energy, that makes me feel like I can do anything.
And boy, did I.
My bat always got hot when we were in town. Mets and Eagles fans loved to hate me, still do probably. It’s only been a couple of years. Not long enough for that hate to have run its course.
The city is different from LA, sure, but not as different as people from either place want to believe.
They’re both a hell of a lot different from Canton Creek, Iowa, the place listed on the back of my baseball card. Now the mathematics of life have me out of there longer than I was ever in. I can’t even remember the last time I went back. More than a decade ago, for sure, when they named the high-school field after me.
Mom and Pop were still around, proud as all hell, maybe prouder than at any other moment in my career. And Gemma was there too.
That was a good day. One of the last really good days before things went to shit. Before my folks got sick. Before Gemma wanted out.
Reaching up to rub at the back of my head, the cool air hits me as I step out into the sharp bite of the late fall, with a mist that feels like it’s appearing in the air instead of falling from the sky.
Yeah, definitely different from LA. I let that train of thought fly off into the early morning hours, the only time this city is even semi-quiet.
I’m not used to a quiet New York. It wasn’t back when we played the Yankees in the Series.
Not even my hot bat could push the team over the finish line, however, and that elusive world championship I chased my whole career slipped through my fingers.
Yankee fans don’t hate me the way Mets and Eagles fans do.
It’s easier to have respect for someone you beat, I guess.
“Hey, are you . . .” a slightly quaky voices asks from my left. I know that voice. Well, not the voice specifically, more the tone. I’ve heard it hundreds, maybe thousands of times in the last twenty years.
A kid, maybe nineteen or twenty at the most, is squinting at me through the soft mist that’s started to fall.
“. . . are you Charlie Avery?”
“Used to be.”
“Ha! You were my favorite player when I was a kid!”
I let out a soft snort, but allow the kid to think he’s grown.
“You mind taking a selfie with me? My dad won’t believe it. He used to let me stay up to watch when the Eagles were on the west coast swing.”
“Sure.” I lean in while the kid raises his phone, giving a half smile.
“Thanks, man, I really appreciate it. What are you doing in the city? They gonna hire you to do one of those desk gigs on TV?”
At that I really do snort. There’s nothing I’m worse at than TV commentary, following some kind of script to gin up conflict where there isn’t any, except what’s about to happen on the field, like baseball isn’t a game mostly about whose pitcher has a bad day, and if the guy in the lineup you never expected to do a damn thing happens to run into one.
The silence gives it away and the kid changes tracks. “Wait, no way! Ae you here for the job?”
“What job?” I ask, but the kid has me and we both know it. I’ve always been a terrible liar.
The Eagles have been looking for a manager since their last game of the season. Their old skipper, Stew Reynolds, is headed to the front office to take over as general manager. He’s been getting on in years and his wife has been on him to retire. So he compromised. An office job.
“No way. That’s insane.”
“Kid, I’d appreciate it if you . . .”
“No worries. I’ll keep it locked down. No one would believe me anyway. Why would you want to manage the Eagles?”
That’s the real question, isn’t it?
I’ve got my reasons – more than one, really – but they aren’t anyone’s business. Definitely not a stranger’s I just met on the street, even if he is a fan.
“You have a good night, okay?” I say, and shake the kid’s hand before turning and looking at the cars as they pull up. Stew said the team would send a car, but there’s a sea of sleek black SUVs and luxury sedans jockeying for position, even this early in the morning.
There’s one, and, yeah, it’s got an Eagle logo on it, subtle to avoid attracting attention, but definitely there. Except ther. . .
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