“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.