Crossing the Line (The Baltimore Banners Book 1) (5 page)

     "So then ask."

     "Huh?"

     "I said, then ask. You're the reporter. Interview me."

     "I can't interview you right now!"

     "Why not? That's what you do, isn't it?"

     "Yes, but—"

     "Then do it."

     "I..." AJ's voice faded and she clamped her lips so tightly together they almost hurt. She mentally counted to five then let out a deep and exasperated breath. "I cannot interview you while you're sitting on my bed. It's not done that way. I have a whole list of things—"

     "Okay, fine. Here's the deal." Alec stood and closed the distance between them, so close that AJ could smell the faint scent of soap on his skin, could feel the warmth radiating from his body. "We either do the interview right here and now, or you pack some things, come home with me and do it by the terms of the bet."

     Alec stared at her, his eyes almost daring as he held a large duffle bag between them. Funny, but AJ hadn't noticed it earlier, and she wondered briefly how he had gotten it out of her closet without her realizing it.

     "You have one minute to decide."

     AJ looked up at Alec, into his dark eyes, and felt a funny flip in her stomach. She had no idea what he was up to and she had a feeling that this whole plan of hers was about to backfire. But in the end, she really didn't have much choice.

     She clenched her jaw and yanked the duffel bag from Alec's hand. "Fine. I'll meet you in the living room in five minutes."

**

     Alec sat on the sofa, staring at the wide-screen TV in front of him without really seeing it. His attention was focused more on the girl curled up on the recliner, her legs tucked under her, a frown on her face, papers scattered across her lap.

     She had been sitting that way for at least two hours and Alec wondered why her legs hadn't fallen asleep yet. Except for reaching up and rubbing her temples with a wince every few minutes, she hadn't really moved. If he sat that way for any length of time, not moving, he'd not only have leg cramps, he'd start to go insane with the inactivity.

     His hand clenched momentarily around the soda can he was holding and he resisted the urge to stretch his own legs. AJ paused in jotting down whatever she had been writing and looked over at him, her face almost serene in its blankness. A few seconds went by before her blue eyes cleared and one corner of her mouth tilted ever-so-slightly, as if she just realized where she was. It occurred to Alec that she had been so lost in whatever she had been doing that she really had been somewhere else, at least mentally.

     The thought almost scared Alec. Not just because it was evidently very easy for her to lose herself like that. No, what worried him was that he was fairly certain that he had figured at least a little bit in wherever she had been mentally. And he did not like the idea of someone being so focused on him...unless, of course, that someone was in bed with him. Then being focused on... He shook his head, wondering where in the hell that idea had come from.

     "Are you okay?"

     Her question, asked so quietly in the stillness of the living room, caught him off-guard. Alec took the last sip of the soda, trying not to look at her too much. "I was just wondering the same about you. How can you sit so still like that for so long? That would drive me crazy."

     AJ stretched her legs out in front of her, making a small little noise of contentment as she did so. Alec swallowed and tried not to notice the shapely length of her calves, or the way her bare toes wiggled as if she was trying to restore circulation to them. He suddenly wished that he hadn't offered to keep her company earlier, that he had just disappeared into another part of the spacious condo once they had gotten here.

     But the thought of her wandering around, nosing through his personal things, had stopped him from making his own exit. Oddly enough, though, she hadn't seemed very interested in looking around. Other than the brief tour when he had carried her bags to the spare room, she had pretty much stayed curled up on the recliner. In fact, except for pausing on the downstairs balcony and openly admiring the waterfront view of the harbor, she didn't appear to be interested in anything other than the papers in her lap.

     "It doesn't bother me. I guess I'm just used to it."

     It took a second before Alec understood what she was talking about, that she was only answering his question from not even a minute ago. He raised the soda can to his lips before realizing it was already empty, then hastily sat it down on the coffee table in front of him. He searched for something to say, but nothing came to mind readily, so he reverted back to a question he knew he had already asked her.

     "So, what is that stuff you're so engrossed in, anyway?"

     AJ reshuffled the papers in her lap then arranged them into a neat pile before placing them on the side table next to her. She reached around and turned off the reading light behind the recliner, suddenly casting herself in shadows. She winced, then quickly rubbed her temples before facing him. Her blue eyes were suddenly darker as she turned her gaze on him.

     "I told you, just background stuff I might use for filler. Not that there's much background info out there on you. At least, not much more than what I already knew."

     "You do know that it's really weird to hear you talk about me like that, right? Like I'm some kind of...of...I don't know what. Like an object or something."

     "Trust me, Alec, you're not an object. All that's in here," she looked away long enough to tap the pile of papers to her left, "is a bunch of dry, boring statistics. You know: when you were drafted, games played, average saves, blah, blah, blah. Absolutely nothing personal or informative or even interesting. It's all superficial. I told you before that you were more than welcome to look it over if you wanted to."

     "No, I'll pass."

     She tilted her head to the side and quietly studied him, her expression thoughtful. "Suit yourself. But I'll be honest. For someone who's been in the public eye for as long as you have, it's remarkable that there's nothing more out there about you. It's like...I don't know, it's like you've deliberately hid behind this blank wall, and you've done it so well that people stay away from you."

     "I happen to like my privacy. My life is my business, nobody else's." Alec hadn't meant for the words to come out so harsh, but she had hit too close to the truth.

     "Alec, there's nothing wrong with privacy. I like mine, too. But there's a difference between being private, and hiding." She gestured again at the papers. "This stuff isn't just boring, it screams that you're hiding from life."

     Again, her words hit too close to the truth. But phrased the way they were made him sound like a recluse, a hermit who wanted no involvement with the world around him. But that wasn't him. He just liked...being private. He stood up, planning on getting another drink, but stopped. He cleared his throat and then asked his own question to change the subject.

     "So if it's all that boring, how you could get so wrapped up in it for the last few hours?"

     AJ laughed, a soft sound in the surrounding quiet that had a surprising effect on Alec, one that he didn't even want to acknowledge. She lifted herself from the recliner and walked by him, passing so closely he imagined he could feel the heat radiating from her. Alec stepped back involuntarily, once again caught off-guard by his body's reaction to her. And once again, he blamed it on stress and lack of sleep.

     AJ stopped less than a foot from him, staring up at him with those blue eyes that suddenly sparkled in the low light. A half-smile curved her lips and she folded her arms across her chest. Alec's eyes automatically drifted down, and he had to force himself not to stare at the fullness of her chest and the painfully appealing amount of cleavage revealed with her arms crossed like that.

     "I wasn't 'wrapped up' in it, as you say. I was thinking about the best way to approach this whole interview, the best way to get you to open up without having you think I'm going to cut your heart out and use it to finger paint my article." She looked at him for a few more seconds, a flash of disappointment sparking in her eyes, then turned and headed for the stairway.

     AJ paused, her bare foot resting on the bottom step, and looked back at him one more time. Alec swore her eyes were even darker now, a sense of something resembling disappointment reflected in their depths. "And Alec, could you do me a favor?" Her voice was quiet, barely more than a whisper and laced with some quiet emotion he couldn't name.

     "What?"

     "Could you please stop staring at my chest whenever I talk to you? You claim you're afraid of being treated as an object, that people see only what they want to see and that everything is superficial. But you're doing the exact same thing to me that you've accused everyone else of doing to you. I gave you credit for being better than that."

     Alec stood immobilized for long moments after AJ disappeared upstairs, not quite believing her last words. Had he really been that obvious?

     He thought back over their last few encounters. Not only had he been obvious, there were times when he had been downright rude. Never once had it occurred to him that she would be bothered by his comments or his glances. She had never indicated that she even noticed, let alone was upset by it until tonight.

     No, he realized, that wasn't exactly true. Now that he thought about it, there had been times when AJ had made remarks to him, subtle or even sarcastic. But not once did he ever stop to consider...

     Calling himself a complete moron, he walked through the downstairs and turned off the lights, muttering to himself as he did so. His footsteps were heavy as he climbed the stairs, pausing briefly outside the closed door of the small guest room he had shown AJ hours earlier. Guilt went through him, quick and dull. It was the smallest of the three guest rooms in the sprawling condo. Definitely functional but nowhere near as roomy as the others. He could have at least given her one of the spare rooms that had its own bath so she could have some privacy.

     Alec shook his head and continued down the hall to his own room, his thoughts still turning inward. Was he really as shallow and callous as that? Was he really that inconsiderate?

     He ripped the shirt over his head and tossed it toward the clothes hamper on his way to the bathroom. Turning the faucet as cold as it would it go, he leaned over the sink and splashed water over his face, shivering slightly as it dripped onto his chest and ran down his stomach. Alec pulled a towel from the rack and rubbed it over his face and chest.

     Tomorrow he would move her into one of the other rooms. The thought didn't do much to relieve the guilt he felt, though. For so many years he had felt the frustration of people judging him only for what they saw on the surface, or making certain assumptions based on what they saw instead of who he was. Beyond the frustration was anger that people could be so shallow, so superficial.

     The realization that he was the same, that he had been guilty of doing just that, ate at him with a sour burning. Alec splashed more water over his face to wash away the feeling, refusing to look at his reflection in the mirror.

     The dark thoughts stayed with him as he left the bathroom. He pulled back the covers on the large bed then turned off the light, pausing as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The room wasn't completely black—lights from the harbor twinkled through the French doors leading to the private balcony, and he stared at their reflection in the glass.

     AJ had accused him of hiding. He didn't agree with her. There was a difference between hiding and valuing privacy. Just because he didn't want people in his business didn't mean he was hiding. But lately, there had been this feeling of...something missing. Not emptiness, but not quite a completeness, either. Hell, he didn't know how to describe it, and he didn't think it was really worth looking into, either. It was just a phase, one he was sure would go away.

     But he couldn't shake the uncomfortable feeling that AJ had gotten just a little too close with her observations.

     Sighing with a weariness he understood but didn't want to acknowledge just yet, Alec moved to stand at the balcony doors. He tended to stare out at the lights reflected on the black surface of the harbor and just think. Or sometimes he just stared, his mind blank as a peaceful quiet seeped through him.

     The peaceful quiet wasn't coming tonight, he already knew that. With another sigh he turned away from the balcony and walked out of the room and across the hall. He didn't need a psychic to tell him he was getting ready to make a mistake:
that
was going to be a given. But maybe he could ease just enough of the guilt to let him sleep.

     Alec hesitated in front of AJ's room for a second, then rapped lightly on the door with his knuckles. Silence greeted him so he knocked again, a little harder this time. There was still no response. Surely she hadn't fallen asleep that quickly, had she? He envied her if she had. Very rarely would his mind succumb to the sleep his body asked for; too many thoughts whirled around him at night.

     Alec knocked once more, deciding that if there was no answer, he would leave well enough alone and rectify his guilt in the morning. He was just about to walk away when he heard shuffling behind the closed door. A few seconds later, the door slowly opened. AJ stood on the other side, wearing nothing but an oversized t-shirt that barely came to the top of her thighs. Alec swallowed, hard, at the sight of her long bare legs, and was about to say something when he noticed the rest of her.

     She looked like shit.

     Her hair was disheveled, damp strands clinging to her cheeks as she held the side of the door in a white-knuckled grip. Her eyes squinted up at him, and he could see that they were rimmed in red. At first he thought she might have been crying, but as he looked closer he realized her face was pinched in what looked like pain.

     His next thought was that her arm and shoulder must hurt more than he realized. Alec took a step closer to her then stopped when she didn't move to open the door more than the few inches she already had. He pushed on it gently, only a little surprised that she took a step back to allow it. Her eyes squinted shut and she looked away.

     "AJ, what is it? Is it your shoulder?" He was closing the little bit of distance between them when she stepped back, nearly stumbling. She mumbled something that sounded like "lights" as she made her way back to the bed, gingerly groping for the edge before tumbling back onto it. She flung one arm over her eyes as her left leg dangled over the edge, almost as if she didn't have the energy to pull it the rest of the way onto the mattress.

     Alec paused half-way into the room, not knowing what he should do. She looked awful, and even he could tell that something was wrong, something more than just the bumps and bruises she had earned earlier that afternoon.

     The soft whimper coming from the bed caused him to move further into the room instead of leaving. There was something so needful, so vulnerable in the sound that he had to at least offer to help. But first he needed to find out what was wrong.

     Alec approached the bed warily. The only light in the room was the weak light shining in from further down the hallway. It was barely enough for him to make out AJ's figure on the bed.

     "AJ? What is it? What's wrong?" He reached out a tentative hand and placed it on the arm covering her eyes. He was surprised when she flinched, even more surprised at the cold clamminess of her skin.

     "Don't." The quiet word was hardly a whisper but still commanding. Alec swiftly removed his hand from her arm then stood there, feeling helpless.

     "Is it your shoulder? Do you need me—"

     "Migraine. No noise."

     "Oh." A migraine? She had that much pain from a headache? Alec shifted on his feet and glanced around the dark room, wondering what to do. Should he just leave her alone? Or should he try to do something? Was there even anything he could do?

     Alec turned toward the door and reached out to close it. He had no idea what he could do to help her, but he couldn't just leave her alone, not when she was obviously in pain.

     Another whimper came from the direction of the bed, a little sharper and more drawn out this time. From the sound, Alec guessed that she thought he must have left the room. He didn't think for a second that AJ would allow anyone to see any kind of weakness coming from her, especially him. Well, she would just have to deal with it.

     He closed the distance to the bed then gently lifted her leg the rest of the way onto the mattress. Her body stiffened for a quick second at his touch, telling him again that she had thought he left. Alec felt a rush of disappointment at the realization but quickly squashed it; he hadn't exactly been warm to her the last couple of weeks so why would she expect anything different now?

     "Tell me how to help, AJ."

     Several long minutes went by. Alec was beginning to think she had either drifted off or was ignoring him before she finally spoke, her voice so quiet he had to lean so close to hear her that his forehead nearly touched her arm. Even then he couldn't make out everything she said.

     But he heard enough to realize she was asking for a cold cloth. He hurried from the room, mindful of making too much noise, and quickly returned with a cold wet washcloth. He also had a bottle of prescription-strength ibuprofen and a glass of water.

     Alec lowered himself on the bed next to AJ, doing his best not to jostle her. "I brought some aspirin. Would that help?"

     She barely nodded her head then tried to push herself to a sitting position. The obvious pain that little bit of movement caused her made Alec wince, and he quickly put his arm behind her shoulders and propped her up just enough that she could wash the pills down.

     Instead of letting her lay back down on the mattress, Alec shifted his position behind her so that her head was resting on his stomach. Belatedly he realized that it wasn't the most comfortable position for him: his back was against the headboard but he was slouching too much. There was no doubt his back would be screaming in stiffness before long. But it seemed to be comfortable for AJ so he didn't say anything, just sat there and laid the cold cloth over her eyes.

     It wasn't long before Alec realized he was stroking the hair back from her face. He paused, surprised at the intimacy of his actions, then continued. It seemed to be relaxing her, and it certainly wasn't hurting him.

     A little while later, Alec was forced to reevaluate his earlier assumption. He wasn't hurting, but he was quickly becoming uncomfortable.

     AJ's hair was fanned across his stomach, the soft strands tickling the skin at the waistband of his gym shorts. The silky smoothness of her hair in his hands and on his skin was causing his body to react in a way that surprised him. Yeah, he had felt some currents between them. No, he wasn't stupid enough to deny the fact that she was attractive. But that didn't mean he was attracted
to
her. Which was why his body's reaction caught him by surprise.

     But maybe it shouldn't be. AJ had a lush body, he couldn't deny that. And he was a guy. He doubted that there were many sane, straight guys who wouldn't have some kind of physical reaction if a lush female body was pressed against them. Not that she was actually
pressed
against him...

     Alec sighed and tried to force his thoughts in a different direction. AJ's breathing was soft and almost even, and there was no doubt her earlier pain had lessened somewhat, at least in sleep. Taking a chance, Alec shifted positions, hoping to at least get a little more comfortable, if not away from the bed altogether.

     AJ moaned as soon as he moved, another whimper of vulnerability. Her hand twitched for a brief second then came to rest on his thigh, just at the hem of his shorts. Alec groaned himself then clenched his jaw.

     It was going to be a very long night.

**

     AJ squeezed her eyes tighter against the light she could sense trying to intrude on her and rolled onto her stomach. The sharp pain from last night was gone, replaced by a dull throb that was so much more bearable. She swallowed, grateful that the migraine had been a minor one.

     Probably due in part to the medicine Alec had given her. She remembered him coming into her room sometime last night. She would have to thank him—

     AJ's whole body stiffened as bits and pieces of last night came back to her. What had happened after Alec had given her the pills? She remembered feeling someone stroke her hair away from her face, remembered feeling the comfort of arms around her...

     AJ opened her eyes, honestly afraid of what she would find. She turned her head to the side and her heart stopped.

     A pair of deep, dark brown eyes stared back at her, so close that she could see the flecks of gold in them and the line of darker brown that ringed the irises. The intensity in their depths unnerved her, and not just because they were mere inches away.

     AJ swallowed. The action kick-started her heart into overdrive, and for a brief second she thought she might actually start to hyperventilate. But she didn't move. She couldn't: she was held in place by the intense study of those eyes.

     "How are you feeling?" Alec's voice was a husky whisper in the grayness of the room, hypnotic with the warmth of the words.

     AJ nodded, not trusting her voice. And still Alec studied her, as if he was trying to decipher some secret. She finally lowered her eyes in an attempt to escape the heat of his gaze, and immediately wished she hadn't.

     Alec was stretched out next to her, so close she could feel the heat of his body even though he was lying on top of the sheet that covered her. Her eyes took in the sight of his half-naked body. A generous sprinkling of hair covered his tanned and muscled chest, just enough for someone to tease with their fingers. The dark hair tapered down to a narrow line that disappeared into the waist band of the gym shorts he had on last night...gym shorts that may have been loose but not so loose that she didn't notice...yeah, he was definitely very nicely built—all over.