Straddling the Line by Jaci Burton Page A

fuck her.
    His cock twitched and he had to refocus his attention on the here and now. It wouldn’t do to get a hard-on in front of her. She was skittish enough around him as it was. He didn’t want to scare her away.
    “So today we’re going to start with the basics,” she said, pulling him out of his fantasies about her. “We’ll start with high school sports and work our way up.”
    “Sure. We can do about an hour after breakfast, then I’d like to take a break to work out, if that’s okay.”
    “That works fine for me.”
    “You can make use of the workout facility yourself, if you’d like. I can show you all my equipment.”
    Her gaze shot up from where she’d been examining her coffee cup. “Uh . . . maybe.”
    “Come on. You can’t just sit around here all the time. Your muscles will scream for a workout. Besides, I hate working out alone.”
    She shot him a look. “And yet there’s a gym in your house instead of you going to the gym.”
    “Sometimes that’s by necessity rather than choice. Work out with me today.”
    “I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with you. You’re a lot more in shape than I am.”
    “I don’t care if you just walk the treadmill. It’ll be nice to have your company.”
    She looked like she was making the painful decision to have root canal surgery, but finally she nodded. “I do need to get some exercise. I’ll work out with you.”
    Geez, was it that awful to be in the same room with him? He didn’t know what was up with Haven today. They had breakfast, then Haven grabbed her laptop and they settled in the office.
    “Let’s talk about high school. Did you play multiple sports then as well?” she asked.
    “Yeah. By then I’d settled into football and baseball. The coaches wanted me to choose one or the other, so I’d be looked at more seriously by the college scouts.”
    “And you, of course, declined.”
    “Yes. I was playing well for both teams. Why would I want to quit either?”
    She shook her head. “You were always stubborn.”
    “I prefer to think of it as determined. I had goals.”
    “Really. Tell me.”
    “I knew from early on that I wanted to play professional sports. Back in high school, I hadn’t yet decided which one, because I loved playing both football and baseball.”
    “Yet you went to Oklahoma on a football scholarship.”
    “I did, but I played baseball in college, too.”
    “So you’ve been doing this juggling thing a long time.”
    “Seems like my whole life sometimes.”
    She typed notes into her computer. “And you got drafted by Tampa for football and Detroit for baseball, all in the same year.”
    “Yeah.” He grinned. “That was a really good year.”
    “It didn’t scare you, or make you feel any pressure to be drafted by both a professional football and baseball team?”
    “No. It was like a dream come true.”
    “So, you’d say you thrive on pressure?”
    He liked the way she altered his words. “You could say that.”
    She lifted her gaze from the laptop. “Can I say that?”
    “Sure.”
    “How was it in high school?”
    “In what way?”
    “With your friends—your athletic peers. Any jealousy?”
    He laughed. “Nah. I had good friends. We all worked hard, and we were after the same thing—winning. There was nothing to be jealous about.”
    She tapped the laptop. “I did a little research on your high school career. It says here you had some run-ins with a guy named Jerome Kayman.”
    “That was more of a misunderstanding. And over a girl. It had nothing to do with sports.”
    She arched a brow. “Fighting over the same girl?”
    “Uh, no. It was more like Heather Whitfield pitting Jerome and me against each other. Neither one of us knew we were both dating her.”
    “Oh. Oops.”
    “Yeah. Heather was a hell of a flirt. She was head cheerleader, very competitive. She told Jerome she liked him, and they started going out. They dated for a few weeks, though she didn’t tell anyone she was