Loving Him Off the Field (Santa Fe Bobcats #2)(64)

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.