Текст книги "Loving Him Off the Field"

Автор книги: Jeanette Murray

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Chapter Nineteen

Killian plated the sandwich and goldfish crackers, debating tossing a pudding cup on there for good measure. He wanted her well fueled before he got her into his bed. Then thought better of it. The crackers and sammie—as Charlie called them—were nerdy enough. Why add to it with a freaking pudding cup?

He placed the paper plate down on the table in front of her, and her eyes lit. “Peanut butter and jelly?”

He nodded.

“Crunchy or smooth?”

“Smooth.” Charlie hated chunks.

“Grape or strawberry?”

“Grape.”

She sighed. “Okay. Next time, I’m bringing strawberry, though. You were this close,” she said, putting her thumb and forefinger almost together. “This close to the perfect sandwich. Nice try.”

He ruffled her hair just to annoy her, then sat down. While she dug in, he lifted her legs and placed her feet back in his lap. “What’s with the shoes?”

“Hmm?” she asked around a mouth full of sandwich.

“The shoes. You always wear them. Ever tried heels?”

She winced. “I know I’m short, but come on. Those things are torture. I have a few pair, but I’d rather be able to move than look good.”

“You always look good,” he said. Her eyes went liquid with pleasure, and he forced himself to add, “Good enough to—”

“Eh.” She held up a hand to stop him. “Let’s just leave it there.”

He tugged at the hem of her jeans. “So everything’s about comfort, not style.”

“Mostly. I mean, I don’t wear stuff that’s ripped or stained. I have some pride in my look. But overall, I need to be able to chase after a guy more than a foot taller than me for a game-end interview. Can’t keep up if I’m tripping myself.”

“Good point.” He smoothed the hem back down and let his fingers trail up and down her shins, over the soft fabric of the faded, hundred-times-washed denim. “Is that the only reason?”

She thought for another minute, taking an extra long time to chew. “Maybe not. Part of me thinks I have to stand out somehow. My dream job is only partly talent. The other part is—let’s face it—physical attractiveness. I’m competing against tall supermodel-like women. They’re beautiful, they dress in things that show off their figure, and they get noticed not just because they’re good at their job, though . . . yeah, they’re good at their job, too.” With a self-deprecating laugh, she tore off a piece of crust and let it fall back down to the plate with a plop. “Maybe my subconscious realized I couldn’t compete in the looks department, so it draws me to clothes that contrast with that image.”

“So you’re judging them for looking good.”

She snapped her head up. “That’s not it. They can’t change their genes, and I’m not saying they’re better or worse at their job because they look good in a tight sweater. I’ve had several female role models who were very pretty. It’s just knowing that plays into it that sucks. Even if nobody says it, it’s true. So my inner-thoughts drift toward rocking the boat and not playing into that part of the game.”

He nodded slowly, understanding a little of what she was saying. She distanced herself from other women in the broadcasting business by dressing less attractively and forcing it to be one hundred percent her talent alone. “I still think you’re selling yourself short,” he said, laughing when she rolled her eyes. “And that wasn’t a short joke. At least, not intentionally.”

“So you’re not doing a story on Cassie Wainwright and Coach Jordan then, huh?”

Her eyes narrowed, but she shook her head resolutely and kept eating. He sensed she was a little offended, but he was working up to a point.

“I heard Stephen got a flower delivery. Know anything about that?”

She looked at him for a long minute, her cheeks heating.

“That was nice,” he said quietly. Especially when he knew she didn’t have the money.

“No biggie,” she said, mimicking his retort from earlier.

He reached for her plate and tossed a cracker at her. “That was nice,” he tried again.

Swallowing the handful of crackers she’d just put in her mouth, she took a sip of water before speaking. “He’s a sweet guy. One of the first to actually let me interview him. I did this really dumb piece on his bottle cap collection. Which in hindsight . . .” She trailed off, looking a little sad at the reminder of why Stephen was on sabbatical. “I hope he liked them.”

“I’m sure he did. I’m also sure he liked knowing his secret was still safe.” He waited for her to meet his eyes. “You’ve had two stories land in your lap in the past week, and you’re doing nothing about them. Why?”

“I promised,” she said simply. “My mom said your reputation as a journalist was your biggest weapon. If people could trust you to keep a source anonymous, all the way, they’d keep coming back to you. I don’t necessarily have the whole anonymous source thing on this side of the media, but I do have the trust factor.”

He itched to ask more, but decided one topic at a time. “So if you hadn’t promised, you’d be running with it.”

“Maybe. Depends,” she said, scrunching her nose at that. “Hard to explain. It’s a gut thing. I hate sensational stories just for sensation. I don’t like feeling like what I report on is trashy. If I would feel trashy for having found the story the way I did, I’m not going to run it. It will just feel wrong, even if it got me attention and better assignments.” She fisted a hand over her heart, and it made him smile to see a smear of peanut butter on one knuckle. “How I feel about my work matters.”

He waited for relief to pour through him. Relief that, if she ever found out about Charlie, she’d keep it quiet. It wouldn’t be her go-to story. She’d keep a promise to him to keep it under wraps.

But his son was . . . everything. There was no way he would risk it, even for someone he cared about more than was wise. Maybe, one day, he’d explain. Once she was past this White Whale kick she was on, once they’d seen how far they would go.

Pessimistic? Maybe. But for his son, he would play safe over sorry any day.

* * *

Aileen’s head was ringing. Sweet Christ, could she not get five minutes of sleep without waking up? She cracked one eye and stared blearily at the clock. It told her, in cheerfully glowing red numbers, it was almost four in the morning. She groaned and shut her eye again, praying the ringing would stop soon.

It did, then started right back up again.

With a grunt, she reached out one arm without looking and grabbed her phone. From memory, she slid the bar across the screen to answer without looking and mumbled a dark, low, “He-o?”

There was a pause, and then, “Daddy?”

She raised her head from the pillow long enough to see she’d grabbed Killian’s phone and not hers. Tossing the phone onto his abdomen, she heard the slap of plastic against flesh and his answering ooof.

He pushed at her shoulder and asked, “What the hell?” in a sexy, sleepy voice.

Without raising her head from the pillow, she waved around the area where she assumed the phone landed. “Call,” she said into the soft jersey fabric of the pillowcase. “Some douche asking for daddy. Make them go away. They keep calling. Won’t stop.”

He rose from the bed, and she could hear him say a quick, “Hello?” into the phone before she drifted off.

Some time later—could have been thirty seconds or three hours, for all she knew—she felt him climb back in. The mattress dipped with his weight, and she rolled into his back, wrapping her arms around his warm body and snuggling into smooth, male skin. She pressed a kiss between his shoulder blades. “Sorry I answered your phone. I swear I’m changing my ringtone when I get home tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” he said, then pulled her arms tighter around him. “What’d they say to you?”

“I was still half-asleep, but I think they called me Daddy. I might have heard that wrong, though.” She sighed. “Crank call or wrong number?”

He hesitated so long, she thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he pulled her just a little closer. “One of the guys on the team. We all have the maturity of a seven year old, at the end of the day.”

She chuckled softly at that, then drifted off.

* * *

“This is absolute shit.”

Aileen pulled the phone away from her ear and put the speaker on. If Bobby was going to curse, she’d rather hear it at a distance. She set the phone down on the desk and brought up the example reel she’d compiled for him, at his last-minute request. “It’s not done, Bobby. I told you it was rough, and incomplete.”

“Not the edit job, though really, hack job is a better word for it.”

“So hire more editors and make us stop editing our own work,” she said, knowing he was just rolling his eyes.

“This is boring as hell. He looks like a wax figure. You couldn’t get him excited about anything?”

“The second half is better,” she promised, crossing her fingers on one hand in her lap while scrolling with the other through the clips of video she’d pasted together for him to see.

“Is the second half done?”

She paused.

“Rogers!”

“I’m working on it.” She was about to get fired, she could feel it.

“Jeez, the guy’s dead inside.” She heard some of the playback through the phone, the bit where Killian talked about transitioning from soccer to football at the drop of a hat.

“Don’t say that,” she snapped. But even as she said it, she watched her own version play on her computer, muted, and saw the truth. The Killian she knew when it was just the two of them, in bed or out, bowling or making love, was absent. This was a talking shell. “He’s just . . . camera shy. I’ll work on loosening him up. If we have time, I can reshoot the first bit after he gets more comfortable.”

“Do whatever you have to, because this is crap. I can’t use this at all. Show him your tits if that’ll perk him up.”

She gagged a little at the suggestion. Bobby was such a pig.

“Let me be clear, Rogers. You’ve been skating on thin ice as it is. You’re not pulling in the big numbers, and you’re not bringing in the white whale like you promised. You didn’t bring me the Wainwright interview.”

“Nobody has done an interview with her since she and Coach Jordan first announced themselves,” she pointed out, praying her voice didn’t sound suspiciously evasive.

He ignored that. “And since you refuse to do that one interview with the cheerleaders I asked for . . .”

“The one where I let the Bobcat cheerleaders give me a makeover and put me in a bikini for a photo shoot? Fuck that, Bobby,” she said through her teeth.

“There’s nothing here. I’m unimpressed and tired of letting you skate. Bring me a damn good interview with some actual emotion or start the job hunt.” He hung up without another word.

Aileen stared at her blank phone for a minute, jaw hinged open. He’d all but fired her. It had actually happened.

Well, crap.

She let the interview run again, all the way, without any of the cuts. The entire hour passed by in a blur of awkward silences, long pauses, and shuffling papers. Even between questions, when he wasn’t having to think or speak, she could see Killian had checked out. His eyes were more dull than she’d ever seen them, his jaw was so tight it looked wired shut, and his shoulders kept rising around his earlobes in a subconsciously defensive posture. Like she was lobbing live grenades at him instead of questions.

Maybe the other stuff would be better. The interviews with teammates and coaches. She’d shot just a little of that thus far, but nothing major.

Even as she thought it and started scrolling for the footage, she acknowledged it was a false start. If the subject itself wasn’t interesting, nobody cared what other people had to say about it.

Battleship sunk.

Maybe a plea to Killian would work. She could beg. Much as she wanted to leave Off Season, she still had to pay the rent on her crappy apartment. And since no other networks were climbing over one another to garner her attention, it wasn’t like she could just easily move on.

Which, of course, Bobby knew.

She glanced over toward her parents’ photo and felt the prickle of tears behind her eyes. “Mom . . . why am I even doing this to myself? Is it worth it? Did you feel like it was worth it when you had success? Or am I just going to be let down by that, too?”

Her mother’s smile, forever frozen, was unhelpful.

“Wonderful.” She let her forehead fall to the desk. The Bobcats were traveling to Miami, which meant she would tag along—at her own expense this time—and pray to get two minutes alone with Killian. The longer distance meant more time spent in modes of transportation surrounded by a hundred other people, and less down time at the hotel before and after the game.

Begging wasn’t her style. But when it came to begging or not eating . . . her stomach was going to be making some very pitiful sounds to go along with her pleading words.

* * *

Shutting the hotel door behind him, Killian blew out a breath. It had been a total whopping. Dolphins over Bobcats, 30-7. Not their best showing, and the fans had let them know it. His ears were still ringing from the boos.

He just wanted a quiet room, the trail mix he’d brought with him, a movie, and a soft bed to lounge on.

And someone to lounge with.

The idea popped into his mind before he was even halfway to the remote, and his imagination filled in the details. Stretching out with Freckles in bed, him in sweats, her naked—hey, his imagination, his choice—with her legs draped over his lap and her head on his shoulder. Watching a horror movie on pay-per-view, running a hand down her back to soothe her during the scary moments . . .

His phone was out with her number dialed before he could second guess himself. Five minutes later, she was in his room. Ten minutes later, she was naked.

An hour later, he was sated, with her body draped over his like limp spaghetti, ready for trail mix and a movie.

Her hand caressed up and down his ribcage. “Wanna talk about the game?”

“Nope.”

“Okay.” She said it so easily, as if she’d been prepared to hear that answer and had already accepted it.

He let his hand roam down her back. “What movie should we watch?” The options flipped across the screen one by one. “And your warning is if you pick a chick flick, I’m tossing you out in the hallway without your clothes.”

“Now there’s a walk of shame to remember,” she joked, poking his belly in retaliation. “How about something scary?”

“Seriously?” He stared down at her, wondering if he’d somehow telegraphed his desires. She blinked back up at him, clearly innocent. “You want to watch a horror movie?”

“I’m not a fan of watching them alone in my apartment,” she explained, hugging him tighter. “But I can be convinced when I’ve got someone to squeeze. My startle reflex is pathetic, so I’ll jump and jolt a lot. There’s your warning.”

He debated a moment, letting the image from his imagination spin out once more. But something held her back. “Is it my day, or yours?”

She rolled until her head was pillowed by his stomach, so she lay crossways over the bed. Her feet still barely reached the edge of the mattress. “I didn’t think we were keeping track anymore. But . . .” She closed her eyes and tapped her fingers on his stomach in a pattern he took to mean she was counting something. “Yours, I think. I’d be willing to take it, though, if you’re feeling generous.”

He sifted his hand through her hair. Her eyes drifted closed and she made a little hum of pleasure. The sound vibrated through his torso and his cock jumped at the feel of it. Down, boy. Not now. Later. “Why journalism?”

She snuggled a little more into him, draped one arm over his chest, and sighed. “We’ve talked about that. My parents were both journalists.”

“How old were you when they died?”

“The plane crash was when I was eighteen.”

He waited for her to go on, but she was surprisingly quiet. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.” She drew a pattern over his chest, twirling his chest hairs in little spirals here and here. “My mom was brilliant. Dad used to joke his main goal in life was to keep up with her. He was more into photojournalism, but my mom was the real hard-hitting stuff.” She smiled a little, and he could see she was rifling through memories. “She was the one who would find the most war-torn country, rife with murder and rape and political unrest, and fly straight into the eye of the storm. Dad would follow and catch what he could with photos. Keeping up with her was like trying to keep up with smoke, he said. As many dangerous places as they ended up, it was like they were in some sort of protective bubble. Trouble seemed to bounce off them. They always made it back in one piece.”

“Where were you while this was happening?” He wasn’t sure he liked the idea of a tiny Aileen being left behind.

“Oh, this was all before I was born.” She waved that off. “They still worked once I came along, but it was more local. And by local, I mean inside the continental U.S.” She grinned. “Mom was forever plotting another trip to DC or New York or wherever corruption lived and needed to be blasted out in the open. She took me a few times on the less intense trips. I missed some school, but mom insisted it was more educational than sitting at a desk memorizing the order of presidents. What was the point in knowing the past if you weren’t experiencing your present to the fullest, she’d always say.”

“Nice.” He stroked the backs of his fingers over her shoulder and upper arm, watching goosebumps raise on her porcelain skin. “What happened?”

She knew without him elaborating what he was asking. “Small plane crash. Them and four other people. No survivors. The weather turned ugly mid-flight and there was no good place to put down. Just one of those freak things.” She gave a shaky laugh. “They spent nearly a decade of their lives bouncing around from one developing country to the next, risking themselves in war zones, and they make it back okay only to die in a freak plane accident. I remember thinking how unfair that was. That Mom was sitting up in Heaven rolling her eyes at the totally anti-climatic way she’d been taken out. Probably sounds stupid,” she muttered, pressing her nose to his skin. “They’re dead, no matter how it happened. But that’s what I remember most. Not the sadness, but the rage at how they’d been taken from me. As if dying in the line of journalistic duty would have made it easier.”

“It might have,” he said, his heart breaking for the angry young woman she must have been. On the cusp of adulthood, when she’d needed guidance like never before, it had been ripped from her.

“I always knew I’d be a journalist like her, but print just wasn’t where my heart was.” She grinned up at him, eyes still a little shiny. “And I just found myself inexplicably drawn to hot athletes.” Climbing over him, she straddled his lap. “Can’t imagine why.”

He could. She’d taken the heart of her parents’ profession and twisted it to make it something she wouldn’t be competing with them on. So their memory would live on, untouched by her successes or failures. He rubbed up and down her back. “I want some trail mix.”

She blinked, clearly thrown by the change of subject. “Ooookay. Do you need to make a vending machine run?”

“Nope. I have some.” He rolled her off, then headed to grab the bag from his duffle. He tossed it to her and she read the label.

“There are M&Ms in here.” She looked up, excited. “This isn’t healthy.”

There was no point in mentioning his usual choice of trail mix didn’t contain chocolate. He’d bought it, subconsciously, hoping to share with her. “I’ll just pick those out.”

“And give them to me,” she said, handing the bag back. He opened it and snuck under the covers with her. Dumping a handful in his palm, he held it out and let her pick out the chocolates. “Thank you,” she said, and the words carried more meaning than just for the food.

He kissed the top of her head. “No problem. Now. Zombies, ghosts, or ax murderers?”

“Your pick.” She rifled through his next handful of mix for the chocolate. “Just make sure you aren’t holding this when the scary stuff gets going. Otherwise, it’s gonna get ugly when peanuts and raisins go flying.”

He kissed her again, hiding a smile in her hair a moment before making a selection.