* * *
RUBY WOKE UP the next morning to the smell of bacon and pancakes, with a second note of coffee in the air. She stretched her arms above her head, luxuriating in the comfortable bed, slick sheets and the warmth Micah had left behind. The coffee was inviting, but she pulled her hands back under the sheets anyway and turned over onto her side. Two days ago, she’d run fifty miles. She could laze in bed and let a handsome man bring her breakfast in bed. Or at least a cup of coffee.
Every muscle in her body was tired. The muscles that weren’t tired were sore and would be tired tomorrow. Skipping any aerobic activity last night had been a good idea. Probably also this morning. She needed to conserve energy so she could actively participate next time.
She closed her eyes until she heard the sound of Micah rolling down the hall and into the bedroom. When she could feel him in front of the bed, she eased her eyes open and looked into his warm blue eyes. Balanced on his lap was a wooden tray, and on top of that tray sat a steaming cup of coffee and a plate brimming with food. She counted six pancakes in the stack and an equal number of pieces of bacon. She assumed one of the little pitchers had cream and she hoped the other had real syrup.
“Are you going to sit up so I can put your food on your lap?”
“Yes!” Her stomach muscles protested her attempt to scramble up in bed. Chastened by how quickly steady soreness had turned into pain, she eased herself up into a sitting position.
“Thank you for the food.” The tray pressed down on her legs. Her thighs weren’t a fan of the weight pinning her to the bed, but she ignored them. Her stomach’s loud growls took precedence, silencing even the aches in her abdominal muscles.
“There’s more where that came from.”
She’d eaten after the race and yesterday, more because she knew she had to than because she’d been hungry. The mental, physical and emotional strain of the race had overwhelmed all other bodily urges. The only thing she’d felt hungry for at the time had been Micah’s touch, and she felt she’d only been able to handle that because he’d done all the work. This morning, she was ravenous.
“Thank you for everything. For the help at the race, the breakfast and taking such good care of me.”
“If you’re talking about your orgasms, you’re welcome.” Then he smiled and put the late-morning sun shining through the curtains to shame. He cocked his head and examined her from head to toe. The T-shirt of Micah’s that she wore and the thick sheets covering her weren’t enough to shield her from the heat of his eyes on every inch of her skin. The warmth in her blood relaxed some of her most tense muscles when she blushed.
“You’re welcome for the rest of it, as well. We could do it again. I can take the tray back to the kitchen and be back here in a flash.”
Maybe a morning of sex wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. She lifted up the tray to hand back to him and nearly dropped it. Not only were her arms tired, but her hands were feeling the effects of holding them in a fist for seven hours, even if they had been loose fists. A little cream had spilled out of one pitcher onto the tray and syrup was dripping from the other. Looking down at the mess, she couldn’t help but laugh as she put the tray back on her lap. “Give me at least a couple hours, unless the idea is that I lie back and possibly fall asleep.”
He laughed. “That sounded okay, except for the fall-asleep part. Eat your breakfast. We have time.”
She crumbled the bacon into pieces over the stack of pancakes, and she poured syrup over the whole plate. “I have to go get Dotty,” she said before taking a bite. Salty-sweet and starchy goodness filled every corner of her mouth. She moaned.
“How are you going to keep her active enough while you’re recovering?”
“My plan is to sit in a comfortable chair in the backyard with a beer and throw a tennis ball until my arm falls off. Unless you have another idea.”
“If she’ll stay with me, I can take her when I train.”
“Oh, she’s a good dog. She’ll stay. Thank you.”
“No problem, but I expect you to bring me breakfast in bed the morning after my next marathon.”
“Deal.” Micah’s next marathon. Future plans. As though they were a real couple. The idea energized her more than any amount of coffee or sugary food could.
When he reached out to touch her face, the flirtation in his eyes turned to concern. She flinched before the pads of his fingers touched the road burn on her cheeks, and he pulled his hand back so that it hovered over her skin.
“How does it look?” she asked. Her skin itched as if she’d washed her face with poison ivy. The itch might be a sign she was healing, but it was more irritating than the aches in her muscles.
“Like shit, but I’ve seen worse.”
“You’ve probably had worse.”
“True. Though I didn’t shake the cobwebs out of my head and run another twenty-five miles. That was hard-core, Ruby.” Electricity buzzed between his hand and her skin as he moved his hand down the side of her body before his touch settled on her hip. If she was sore there, she didn’t notice.
He cupped her hip bone in his fingers and gave a squeeze she felt deep in her core. It took her abdominals clenching in pain again to remind her why she was supposed to rest her body. He must have noticed, because he pulled his hand back to rest on his lap.
“I’ll tell you what, you go get Dotty and give her as much exercise as you can. Take a shower, and I’ll pick you up later. We can go to a movie. Then you can sit, fall asleep and we can pretend it was a date. Maybe dinner afterward?”
“Sounds perfect.”
The glow of a good breakfast and a hot date to look forward to lasted until she drove out the parking garage and was blinded by the sun reflecting off paparazzi cameras. Digital cameras didn’t make the snap that a film camera did, but she flinched anyway.
“Were you with Micah Blackwell?”
“Ruby, is Micah helping you challenge your Olympic ban?”
“The lawsuits, Ruby! Is Micah helping you settle the lawsuits?”
The questions blurred together in one long yell of what, who and how much. Because of course she should only want to spend the night with Micah if she was getting something out of it. Because she was Ruby Heart, runner, cheater, user and villain. And Micah was the man who’d called her out for it all.
She could retreat into the building and find sanctuary or she could roll up her window and drive past them like she hadn’t done anything wrong. Because she hadn’t.
But back at home she stepped out of the shower to find a message on her phone from Micah saying he’d been called into work, didn’t know when he’d be done and he had to cancel their date. No matter how quickly she ran to edge past her crimes, the world and its punishments kept pace.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
RUBY SAT ON her couch, petting Dotty and completely at a loss with what to do now that a date was no longer in her future. Anything strenuous in the next couple weeks might kill her recovery and make the one-hundred miler an impossibility. Sitting around wondering about the paparazzi was doing her no good, either.
Ruby got up off the couch and walked stiffly to the dining room and her laptop. She eased herself into a chair and started looking for the picture. One Google search was all it took to find the photo on a trashy internet gossip site. She may have felt euphoric as she left Micah’s, but her face was scuffed up, she was hunching her sore muscles and her eyes were bloodshot. She looked like something the cat had chewed up and barfed out. The site made a brief mention of whose apartment building it was, referenced the interview from five years ago and took a swipe at Micah’s disability that implied their relationship must be the most bizarre kind of twisted. Micah’s natural charm was reimagined as a twisted ability to manipulate her into self-harm—the explanation for the road burn on her face, she assumed. She finally h
ad some understanding how complicated people will make their thoughts to deny a disabled person agency. If the site wanted to hint that she had been abused, the simplest thing to do would be to accuse Micah of it, but they couldn’t even grant him the power to do his own dirty work.
The author of the short paragraph really should be given some kind of writing prize, because he or she had crammed the motive for Micah’s abuse into the small space, too. Micah, of course, was jealous that she had managed to come out of her suspension with her physical body intact. No mention was made about how he was a successful sports reporter for the largest sports network on the planet or how he competed in his own marathons. There was no discussion of how Micah had created a future for himself after his accident while Ruby had responded to her crimes with a self-imposed house arrest—or that maybe she might be jealous of him.
Ruby could walk. Micah could not. Obviously, the jealousy must only go one way.
She was angry. Micah would be furious.
Her phone rang and she answered without looking at the caller ID, expecting to hear Micah’s voice on the other line. Instead, her mother’s voice trembled out, “Will we have to go through this again?”
Ruby blinked, not believing what she was hearing. The photo had been taken a couple hours ago. She had just found it. How had her mother known to scour the internet for gossip? As far as Ruby knew, she hadn’t made a gossip page in years and she thought her family had all canceled their Google alerts.
“Go through what?”
“Seeing pictures of you on the internet. Hearing people gossip about you at the salon? Your father’s colleagues insinuating that we didn’t teach you any morals.”
You didn’t teach me any morals. You taught me that running and winning made me special and you would only love me if I did those two things. She couldn’t have that conversation over the phone. She was too exhausted to have that conversation at all.
“How did you find the picture?”
“Is it true?” Her mother’s voice was so weak Ruby had to turn the volume up on her phone as high as it would go. “You and that reporter who ruined your life? Is it true?”
Ruby sighed. Exhaustion or not, the conversation needed to be had. “Mom, are you home? Is Dad home?”
“Your father is on the phone, trying to do damage control.”
What damage had been done to her parents? This wasn’t even about them. God, her mom hadn’t even asked the essential question of whether or not the abuse allegation was true; she’d just complained that they would be humiliated at the office and the salon.
“Mom, I’m coming over. We need to talk.”
“Do you need Josh to go there and help you pack?” Hope wavered through her mom’s voice.
“I’m not moving back. I’m visiting. So we can talk. Dotty and I will be over shortly.”
“You know your father doesn’t like animals in the house.”
“You have a patio. Wear a sweater.” Ruby wasn’t certain she could face this conversation without her dog’s comforting chin resting on her knee. She would call Micah and ask for his support as well, but if her parents had heard about the photo, then surely NSN had heard about it, which explained why Micah had been called to the studio.
Ruby got Dotty into the car and, on the drive over, told her dog everything she was going to tell her parents. With her head almost completely out the back window, Dotty probably couldn’t hear Ruby, though she wagged her tail when her name was said. And Dotty didn’t disagree with Ruby, which was good enough for now.
Ruby parked her car by her parents’ front door rather than pulling through to the garage. She didn’t live here any longer and she didn’t want her parents thinking she was considering a move back. She even rang the doorbell. The thick wood of the doors couldn’t hide the way the ding echoed through the emotionally empty spaces and high ceilings. Despite the warning that Ruby was coming over, her mother looked shocked to open the door and find her daughter and her daughter’s dog standing there.
Her mom looked down at Dotty, who looked up with her pink tongue out and her black eyes deep with love. The dog was going to be disappointed; this conversation wouldn’t end in hugs and cookies. Dotty was still wagging her tail when Ruby’s mom raised her gaze from the dog to Ruby’s face and opened her mouth in shock.
When several seconds had gone by in silence, Ruby said, “I can take the dog through the back gate.”
“What happened to your face?”
“I was pushed, and not—” Ruby rushed to clarify before her mother could accuse Micah “—by the reporter. Can we sit down? I wasn’t kidding when I said we need to talk.”
Her mom stepped back, and Ruby unhooked Dotty from her leash as soon as the dog’s nails clicked on the white marble floor.
“The dog...” her mom started.
“Is as well trained as I ever was. She’ll stay by my side unless told otherwise.”
Her mom nodded. “Your father’s waiting on the patio. He fixed us some drinks.”
Her mom trembled as she walked past the expensive furnishings. For the first time in her life, Ruby was far enough removed to wonder at her parents’ relationship. They had always seemed locked together on the same side of every memory in her childhood, though her mom provided the pull and her father the push. But as her mom glanced several times over her shoulder both at Dotty and at Ruby’s face, Ruby wondered how much of the great plan of the Heart family had been ruled by her father, with her mother going along because it was easier that way. Ruby thought she saw curiosity about the dog in her mother’s many glances, and maybe a hand twitch to touch Dotty’s magnificent coat. But each time she thought she might have seen in her mother’s movements a desire to break her father’s rule about animals, her mom shook her head and faced resolutely forward.
Out on the patio, her father greeted her mother by giving her a tumbler of whiskey and placing a hand on her back. “When you told us about the interview with NSN, you promised we wouldn’t have to go through this again,” her father said, his only greeting for Ruby. “We shouldn’t have given you permission to run again.” They were much the same words her mother had said over the phone, only her father’s voiced boomed where her mom’s had quivered.
“I never agreed not to run.” Another whiskey sat on the bar cart, presumably for her, though Ruby had never liked her alcohol neat. She poured herself a glass of water instead. “I agreed to abide by the terms of my suspension, which was full disclosure of what I knew about doping clinics that Coach was involved in, no participation in any athletic competition for five years and no participation in any competition related to the Olympics for the rest of my life. Until there is a 50K or 50-mile race in the Olympics, I have followed the terms to the letter. I haven’t even signed up for a turkey trot.”
“And what about your promise to your family?”
Ruby turned her attention away from the glass of water to look her father in the eyes. Her mother looked off to the side. Her father squared his shoulders and puffed his chest out into the wool of his sweater, clearly expecting his daughter to retreat. Ruby set her glass down and took a step forward instead.
“We remember the conversation differently, Dad. You said you never wanted to hear me speak of running again. And so I haven’t. Not to you and not to Mom.” Her father had probably also meant that she was never to run outside of the neighborhood, but he had obviously assumed she would obey the spirit of his law out of fear and that he didn’t need to specify each letter. His mistake, not hers.
“Not only do you ignore the terms with which we had agreed to keep you under our roof, but you get yourself back into the spotlight. With the same reporter who ruined your career.”
Her muscles ached to sit down and her knees might collapse on their own, but she remained standing. A hundred-mile race was waiting for her in the spring. She would stand
during this confrontation with her parents, no matter how long it took.
“Make no mistake, Dad. I ruined my own career.”
“Your coach...” her mom protested.
“My coach, the man Dad picked out and told me to obey, certainly led me to believe that doping was no big deal. And you and Dad taught me that I was only special as long as I was winning, but I was the one who agreed to have someone else’s blood pumped into my body. Whatever the circumstances that created the opportunity for doping and led me to say yes, I still said yes. That responsibility lies with me. I own it and my guilt and my shame, and you can’t take them away from me. But I won’t let you use them against me anymore.”
“I forbid you from running again.”
“And I’m telling you that you don’t get to dictate my life. Not whether I run and not who I spend time with.” Like running fifty miles on already fatigued legs, saying those words exhausted her as well as filling her with a triumph that would keep her standing until the earth shook under her feet.
“My firm will stop defending the cases against you. We’re close to settling such that you get to keep any money made before your second Olympic trials. If my firm pulls out, how do you think you’ll find the money to pay back everything?”
“I can hope my memoir sells as well as my agent thinks it will,” she lied.
Her parents’ faces turned white against their matching navy sweaters. “You wouldn’t!” her mom said, her voice as firm as Ruby had ever remembered it.
“I need money to live. As Dad said, I might need far more money in the near future.”
“How could you do this to your family? Even if you hate your father and I—after all we’ve done for you—at least think of Josh and Roxanne.”
Roxanne would again suffer through faculty parties where people asked more questions about her infamous sister than her research, but that wasn’t under Ruby’s control and she wasn’t going to disappear for the sake of her sister’s ego.
Winning Ruby Heart Page 22
