The Thrill of Victory

by Sandra Brown

  To safeguard against his knowing how badly she wanted him to stay, she assumed an aloof and hostile expression. "There's nothing you can do here except further aggravate me, so you might just as well go."

  "I came to drive you to the hospital."

  "I'm not going to the hospital. I told you that yesterday. I've got two weeks-"

  "Look, Stevie"

  "No, you look, Mackie. This is my life, my decision, and nobody-"

  The doorbell rang. "Ms. Corbett!" Someone began shouting through the door. "How do you feel about having cancer and giving up professional tennis?"

  "Oh," she cried, "why don't they leave me alone?" Nerves already frazzled, she ducked her head and covered it with her arms.

  Eventually the persistent reporter gave up or was hauled away by one of the policemen who were supposed to be guarding against such intrusions.

  The house fell silent again. She flinched when Judd laid his hands on her shoulders.

  "At least let me get you away from here for a few hours." He swiveled her bar stool around, separating his legs and positioning her knees between them.

  "Why would you want to do that?"

  "To make up for being such a jackal and sniffing out blood yesterday."

  "But you didn't write the story."

  "In a way, though, I still feel responsible." She made a scoffing sound. "I know you think I'm a sorry excuse for a journalist," he said, "just like I think you're a sorry excuse for an athlete.

  I drink too much, party too hard and have a great capacity for self-indulgence. I'm unreliable and sarcastic. But basically, underneath this ruggedly handsome exterior, I'm a nice guy." ''Oh, sure."

  His face broke into a roguish grin that made her tummy flutter. "Give me today and I'll prove you wrong."

  She wanted to consent, but hesitated. For all his charm, he might still be working on a story about her. Maybe he was planning an in-depth character profile that would portray her as the shallow "deb of the tennis courts," as he had once dubbed her.

  "I don't think that's a very good idea, Mackie.

  I'll take my chances here."

  Almost simultaneously her telephone started ringing and the doorbell pealed again. "Did you plan that?" she accused.

  He chuckled, delighted with those unexpected endorsements of his idea. "Providence is on my side. Go get whatever you might need during the day. We won't be back until after dark tonight."

  The instructions were given as though the matter had been settled to his satisfaction.

  "Mackie, even if I wanted to spend the day out on the town with you, which I don't, it wouldn't work anyway. We're both too well-known. We couldn't go anywhere in the city without being recognized and hounded."

  "That's why we're going out of the city." 'Out of the city? Where?"

  "You'll see.

  "How do you plan to sneak past all those reporters?"

  "Will you quit stalling and go get your things?" he asked impatiently.

  Stevie warily studied his face. It looked no more trustworthy than a pirate's. They would probably spend the day quarreling. But the alternative of being held under siege in her own house was even more gruesome.

  Mind made up, she spread wide the short skirt of her white cotton culottes, which she had on with a T-shirt and sandals. "Can I go like this?"

  "Sure can. Get your purse."

  In under five minutes, she reentered the kitchen carrying a canvas tote bag into which she had stuffed everything she might conceivably need. Judd was at the sink, rinsing out the coffeepot.

  "You make yourself right at home, don't you?" ' 'Hmm.'' He unhurriedly dried his hands on a dish towel, then tossed it aside. "I do."

  He stepped forward, slid his arms around her waist, pulled her against him, angled his head to one side and settled his lips upon hers.

  Stevie was caught so totally unaware that she didn't put up a struggle or utter a single sound of protest. He kissed her lightly, gently bouncing his lips against hers, until they rested there.

  On its way up to her neck, his hand grazed her breast. It brushed against the tip and caused it to bead. His touch couldn't even be counted as a bonafide caress, but Stevie's reaction was very real. A sudden infusion of heat spread through her middle. Its intensity heightened when he readjusted their bodies, fitting his into the notch of her thighs.

  As his fingers closed around her neck, his tongue playfully probed at the seam of her lips, lazily, halfheartedly, as though he didn't give a damn whether she parted them or not. If she did, fine. He would kiss her. If not, fine. He would be amused, not angry or disappointed.

  Stevie parted them.

  Then his tongue, warm and wet, entered her mouth and leisurely explored. At least the kiss started off leisurely. The change came on so gradually that it wasn't noticeable until the thrusts of his tongue went deeper, the strokes became faster, and the suction of his mouth grew hungrier. The whole character of the kiss altered.

  Likewise, so did their responses to it.

  When Judd's response became so obvious it could be felt through their clothing, he quickly set her away. She gazed up at him with a mix of desire and bewilderment.

  "Why did you kiss me like that?"

  "Curiosity." He croaked the word, cleared his throat and repeated it. "We've both been thinking about it, right? Ever since I saw your breasts yesterday, we've been wondering what it would be like to be together. Now that our curiosity has been satisfied, we can relax around each other and enjoy the day. Right?"

  Stevie knew that if she became anymore relaxed, she would melt into a puddle of wanting woman on the kitchen floor. But she nodded wordlessly.

  Going along with this idea of his would probably end up being a big mistake.

  You missed your calling." They were underway.

  Stevie spoke to him over the thrum of his sports car's engine as he weaved it through traffic.

  "You should have been a criminal."

  His plan of escape had called for her to create a diversion at the front door of her condominium by poking her head outside just long enough for the reporters and film crews to think she might be prepared to give them a statement.

  Then while they were clambering across her lawn toward the entrance, Judd and she had slipped out the back, jogged down the alley and, undetected, got into his car, which he'd left parked on the next street.

  'I thought about going into grand larceny," he said expansively, "but figured that it required too much ambition and hard work."

  Smiling, Stevie settled comfortably into the leather upholstery. The moment they had left her condominium, a sense of freedom had stolen over her. The break from her normal disciplined routine was in itself a luxury. Most mornings by this time, she had already put in hours of physical conditioning and practice. She remarked on her delinquency to Judd.

  "When did you start playing tennis?" Glancing over his shoulder to make sure the lane was clear, he took a ramp onto the interstate highway and headed east, leaving Dallas behind.

  "I was twelve."

  "Late for most players who get as far as you have," he observed.

  "A little, but I can hardly remember a time when I haven't intimately known the feel of a racquet in my hand." She thought back to the night she had first expressed an interest in playing the sport. "Out of the blue, I told my parents that I wanted to try out for the junior-high tennis team." She had made that startling announcement over supper. "Mother and Daddy looked at me as though I'd said I wanted to move to Mars."

  "Tennis?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "That's a rich kid's sport," her father had said, returning to his meal. "Pass the potatoes."

  "What did they have against tennis?" Judd asked.

  "Nothing really. It's just that they couldn't relate to it. My mother had no interest in athletics whatsoever. Daddy only liked sports like football and basketball and, of course, those were for boys."

  She had been an only child, a female only child, who knew that her gen
der was a vast disappointment to the gruff stranger she called Daddy.

  "So how did you get their permission to play?"

  "After dinner, I broached the subject with Mother while we were doing the dishes. I explained that the school had racquets and balls I could use. I wouldn't have to buy anything. She said okay."

  Stevie went on to tell Judd that by the time she reached high school she had a passion for the sport. She saved baby-sitting money to finance the lessons she took at an exclusive club in north Dallas.

  "We weren't members. Any member's bar bill might exceed what my dad earned in a month."

  There was no rancor in her tone. She'd never been bitter over her family's modest economic level, only impatient with her parents' disinclination to improve it.

  "I was playing in a tournament on the club team when I met Presley Foster."

  "You're wearing your shoes a size too large.

  Your backhand stinks and your forehand isn't much better, though you've got good, basic strokes. You show off for the spectators more than you concentrate on your strategy. If you get two points behind, you automatically sacrifice the game. Your serves are hard and fast, but inconsistently so. You don't put forth any effort unless you have to, and that's a damn bad habit to get into."

  She paraphrased Presley Foster's first words to her. Judd whistled. "Geez."

  She could look back on it now and laugh. "I felt like all but the very top of my head had been hammered into the ground. Then he said, 'But you've got talent. I can refine it, make you a world-class player. You'll hate me before we're finished. I need two years.'"

  One week after her high-school graduation, she had left with the famous coach for his camp in Florida. Her decision had been incomprehensible to her parents. Tennis was no job. Tennis was a game. She went despite their objections.

  She might have no future in tennis, but she certainly had none by staying at home and stagnating with them.

  "I didn't know what hard work was until I came under Presley's tutelage," she told Judd with a wry smile.

  She had been dreadfully outclassed by the players who had begun tournament training in grade school and had attended Foster's tennis summer camps. Most of them had played tennis to the exclusion of everything else. Some had had no childhood at all. Tennis was everything.

  "I was nineteen before I went on the circuit."

  She gazed out the window at the landscape whizzing by. Judd drove competently, but fast.

  "I was playing a tournament in Savannah, Georgia, when I received word that my parents' house had been destroyed by a tornado and they'd been killed." ' 'They died in that storm? The one that tore up half of east Dallas?"

  "Yes. Practically the whole neighborhood was destroyed. I was lying face down on my bed in the motel room in Savannah, crying, when Presley stormed in and demanded to know why I wasn't on the court warming up for my scheduled match."

  "My parents are dead. You don't expect me to play today, do you?"

  "I damn sure do! It's times like this that a player shows the stuff she's made of."

  She had played. She had won. She'd flown to Dallas after the match to arrange her parents' funeral.

  "Six months later," she said, speaking to Judd in a reflective, faraway voice, "Presley was in mid sentence when he gripped his chest and, without another sound, died of a heart attack. I played a scorching match the following day. He would have expected me to."

  Neither her parents nor her mentor had lived to see her become the top-seeded woman player in professional tennis. This year she was on her way to getting the Grand Slam. Then she would retire, knowing she had proved her father wrong.

  Tennis wasn't just a rich kid's sport. It was a demanding and jealous master, one for which she'd sacrificed a college education, romance, marriage, family-everything.

  Now that she was so close to mastering it, she couldn't let anything, anything, stand in her way.

  Becoming aware that Judd was watching her closely, she unclenched her jaw and her fists and forced a tepid smile. "What about you? Did you always aspire to become a sportswriter who uses his victims' blood for ink?"

  He made a face and shivered.' 'God, you make me sound horrible."

  "You've written some horrible things about me in your articles. Why should I spare your feelings?"

  "I guess a few blows below the belt are fair."

  He winked at her wickedly. "Come to think of it, a few blows below the belt might even be fun."

  She ignored his sexual insinuation. Thinking about the kiss they'd shared-and there was no sense in fooling herself into believing that she hadn't participated-could prove hazardous.

  The safest tactic was to pretend that it hadn't happened.

  Judd Mackie was a reputed lady-killer. She had been victimized by his scathing prose many times. She wasn't going to fall victim to him in another area as well.

  "Just out of curiosity, Mackie, why me?" She turned toward him, crooking her knee and tucking her foot beneath her hips. "Why have you singled me out to throw poison darts at?"

  "Why should you care? You've got the rest of the world's population eating out of your hand.

  What difference does it make to you if this burned out, bummed out sportswriter gets his kicks by taking shots at you in his tacky column?"

  "It's annoying."

  "Not to my readers. Ever since that first article years ago-"

  "For which I demanded a retraction."

  He gave her a smug smile. "I printed several paragraphs of your letter, remember? Readers loved it. I got so much play out of it, I deliberately cultivated the antagonism between us."

  "Why?"

  "It makes for good copy."

  'What did I ever do to deserve your contempt in the first place?"

  "It's not so much what you've done or haven't done. It's what you are. What you…"

  "Well?" she prompted when he left the sentence unfinished.

  "It's what you look like."

  That admission stunned her into silence. Finally she said, "Which is?"

  "Cute. I find it very hard to take you seriously as an athlete when you look like a Barbie doll wearing a tennis dress."

  "That's chauvinistic!"

  "Unabashedly."

  "How I look is totally irrelevant to how I play."

  "Probably, but that's a chauvinistic pig for you," he quipped with an unapologetic grin.

  "And if I had a wart on the end of my nose, would that make me a better tennis player in your estimation?"

  "We'll never know, will we? But probably. At least I'd be less inclined to write snide things about you."

  Leaning against the car door, she gazed at him with patent dismay. "For all these years I've ‹‹¦‹ wondered what I did to incur your wrath. And it really has nothing to do with me at all. What it boils down to is your own reverse snobbery and sexist prejudice."

  "That's a broad generalization… forgive me for saying no pun intended. I'm not prejudiced against women athletes at all."

  "Just me. Is there anything I can do to change your mind?" ' 'You could get ugly.'' "Or get cancer."

  Taking an off ramp, he came to an abrupt halt at the stop sign. Turning his head toward her, he said, "That's another of those blows beneath the belt, Stevie. But I'll overlook it on one condition."

  "What?"

  "Tell me you can cook."

  "Cook?"

  "Cook. You know, in a kitchen on a stove.

  Putting food products into pots and pans and making them edible."

  "I can cook."

  "Good," he replied, slipping the car into first gear and turning onto the intersecting, two-lane highway. "But nothing with a sauce. I don't like sauces, except for cream gravy on chicken-fried steak. Sauces are for sissies."

  "Oh, please," she groaned. But she was smiling.

  At the next crossroad, he pulled up in front of a combination grocery store and filling station.

  "Let's go shopping."

  A half hour later, he
pulled the car onto a narrow country road. The trees growing on either side of it formed a dense green canopy overhead. The hardwoods were intermingled with tall, straight pines.

  "Where in the world are we going?"

  The town where they'd made their purchases hardly deserved that designation. Besides the grocery store-filling station, it had only a feed and hardware store, a post office, a fire station, a Dairy Queen, a school and three Protestant churches.

  "To my grandparents' house." He laughed at the astonishment she registered. "That's right.

  Not only do I have a mother, but I have a father.

  Or did. This farm belonged to his parents. They willed it to him. When he died a few years ago, the property was handed down to me. I sold off the pastureland, but kept the twenty acres surrounding the house."

  "Twenty very beautiful acres," she noted.

  "Thanks."

  The house was another surprise. It was situated in a clearing surrounded by massive pecan trees that were just coming into full leaf. There was a windmill, a detached garage and a barn.

  All were painted white and trimmed in green. All could have used a facelift. The flower beds bordering the porch were overgrown with weeds.

  There was an air of desolation and neglect about the place.

  "It needs some work," he remarked, understating the obvious. "It looks better on the inside, I promise."

  "It's charming," Stevie said graciously. She alighted from the car, then had to duck under a spider web that had been spun from one tree to another.

  Judd unlocked the front door with a key he took from beneath the welcome mat and ushered her inside. They were greeted by the dim, hushed, musty atmosphere of a house left vacant for a long time.

  Standing in the wide hallway, his voice slightly echoing, he said, "Initially this was meant to be a weekend getaway, but I can rarely leave town on the weekends because so many sporting events are going on. And it's just not practical to come during the middle of the week. As a result, I don't get over here as often as I'd like or as often as the place deserves."