Love in Straight Sets

by Rebecca Crowley

  “No kidding,” she muttered, impatiently tapping her racket against the sole of her shoe while he resumed his task. The view of his behind was almost as good as the front, and she fixed her eyes on the baseline, biting down hard on her lower lip.

  He was right, when it came to professional tennis he wasn’t at her level—in fact he seemed nowhere near it. If she had any hope of boarding that plane from London with a trophy in hand, she had to keep a tight rein on her training—not to mention her stupid, schoolgirl crush.

  It’s just the pressure and isolation of playing at this level with so much on the line. I’m letting it get to me, she decided, rolling her shoulders.

  Ben might have charmed his way through the feisty teenage girls and bored mothers of the amateur circuit, but this was the big league. She was finally in touching distance of the ultimate prize and wasn’t about to let some smooth-talking has-been ruin it with subpar training and crackpot ideas about half inches.

  Regan narrowed her eyes as he loaded another two balls into the machine. She couldn’t renege on her promise not to fire him—so she’d just have to make him quit.

  * * *

  Ben pulled his baseball cap lower over his forehead as he watched Regan effortlessly defeat her sparring partner, a lanky Slovakian named Ivona. The overcast, breezy afternoon meant they could use one of the outdoor courts, but he could tell Regan’s total lack of visible exertion wasn’t due to the cool temperature.

  This match was too easy. A complete waste of her time.

  She was like one of the impalas in the countryside back home in Zim. They watched you approach with muscles twitching and ears perked forward, almost seeming to trust you until the very last minute when they suddenly jolted and bounded away, springing through the tall savanna grass on long, spindly legs.

  Despite many boyhood hours spent trying, he’d never caught one. Yet as his arms had encircled her small frame, Ben thought he might know what it would’ve felt like if he had.

  Regan bounced on the balls of her feet, her toffee-colored ponytail swinging with the subtle motion, as her sparring partner served into the net. Ben thought again of the impalas, of the way they tensed like coiled springs before leaping over the uneven ground, and the echoing clack of the males’ lyre-shaped horns colliding and locking as they fought.

  She was practically vibrating with untapped power. And he’d have a hell of a fight on his hands dragging it out of her.

  Ivona double-faulted, the net shuddering where the ball struck it, and Regan exploded into furious motion, throwing her racket onto the ground and slapping her palm against her forehead.

  “How am I supposed to improve my defensive game if you can’t even get the ball over the goddamn net? You’re paid to challenge me, not practice your crappy serve. How many times do I have to—”

  “Time-out.” Ben gestured for both women to join him on the sideline. Ivona approached with her shoulders slumped, while Regan crossed her arms and scowled, not moving an inch.

  He couldn’t stop his smirk as he met her dark stare. Turns out coaching a pro wasn’t that far off from working with fourteen-year-olds after all.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ivona gushed in her heavily accented English when she reached him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let’s call it a day and start fresh tomorrow.”

  To his dismay, her lower lip began to tremble and her blue eyes filled with tears. “You’re not going to fire me, are you, Mr. Percy? I can do better, I swear.”

  “I’m sure you can,” he assured her, deliberately evading her question. He knew all too well what it was like to flounder financially at the bottom of this expensive sport, but he also had a job to do. Ivona would have to be replaced.

  “Please give me another chance. I’ll be like a different player. You won’t even recognize me.”

  “Come back tomorrow and we’ll see.”

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Percy!” Without warning Ivona flung her arms around him and squeezed with all the strength one might expect from a six-foot-tall Eastern European raised in the High Tatras. His hands flew to her shoulders as he gasped for air. After a few strangled seconds, he was able to pry her loose and hold her at arm’s length.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” he wheezed. “Time for you to head home.”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you again. I won’t let you down, I promise!”

  As Ivona gathered up her equipment and fled from the court, Ben looked to where Regan still stood, already rolling his eyes in expectation of a shared moment of amusement.

  Instead she was glaring at him as if he and Ivona had just stripped naked and had sex right there on the green clay.

  Ben shook his head as he started toward her. Talk about wishful thinking. As if pro tennis’s most notorious ice queen would ever look at him as anything other than a training tool to be used and tossed away. He’d misread her expression, that’s all. What he thought was a glimmer of jealousy was probably annoyance, or impatience, or—

  “What would your girlfriend say about your little cuddle with Miss Slovakia?” she snapped as soon as he was within hearing distance. “Or is she even taller, blonder and bigger-boobed than Ivona?”

  He stopped short, pinned to the spot by her biting accusation. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  Her fierce expression faltered, and for one fleeting blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nanosecond he caught a glimpse of a deeply insecure girl cowering behind the take-no-prisoners facade. It was gone as instantly as it appeared, but this time Ben knew exactly what he’d seen.

  And he wanted desperately to call it back.

  “Good,” Regan continued. “Because if you did and she saw that, you wouldn’t anymore.”

  Ben doubted that any one of his ex-girlfriends would’ve been all that threatened by Ivona’s five-second hug, but the defiant angle of Regan’s neck and the fight smoldering in her eyes encouraged him to keep that thought to himself.

  “Come on.” He motioned her over. “Let’s pick up these balls. We’re finished for the day.”

  “They have staff to collect the balls. We can leave them.”

  “Humor me.”

  She gave him one of her trademark sighs of exasperation but joined him in slowly traversing the court, retrieving the bright yellow balls and packing them back into the cylindrical aluminum cans scattered around the perimeter.

  “You need a new sparring partner,” Ben ventured after a couple minutes of silence. “But you don’t need me to tell you that.”

  Regan plunked a ball in a can and secured the plastic top. “Ivona was off her best today. Normally she has a good serve.”

  “Even on the best day of her career she’s no competition for you.”

  She shrugged. “We’ve been playing together a long time.”

  “And none of your other coaches suggested you might need someone more challenging?”

  The glance she cast him over her shoulder made an iceberg seem like a tropical paradise. “My other coaches knew better.”

  Ben pressed his teeth into his tongue before his snarky response had a chance to escape. He was an expert in absorbing abuse from his clients, but as the day progressed he was less and less sure he could endure two months of Regan’s constant antagonism.

  They continued picking up the balls in silence, the court quiet except for the rustle of the wind and the occasional plunk of the balls landing in the cans. He was gearing up to revisit the subject of her sparring partner when Regan spoke first.

  “I was reading online about your career last night. How your dad mismanaged all your money and then skipped town.”

  The muscles in Ben’s shoulders tightened until they ached. This was the last conversation he wanted to have with her—with anyone, for that matter. But sooner or later, it alway
s came up. He might as well get it over with.

  “‘Mismanaged’ is a generous term. I think ‘theft’ is what the lawyers called it.”

  “So you got it settled legally in the end? Because where the press articles left off, you were still trying to prove that your father had unlawfully incurred the debts in your name.”

  “Apart from being bankrupt and having to drop out of tennis right as my career was taking off, in the end I was very lucky. I was facing fraud charges in Zimbabwe, but the United States granted me asylum so I didn’t have to go back to stand trial.”

  He studied the tennis ball in his hand before dropping it into a can, not wanting to see the pity that undoubtedly filled Regan’s expression.

  “Anyway—” he shrugged, adopting a lighthearted tone that had no relation to how he still felt about this episode in his life, “—all told, everything worked out. It was a long process, but in the end I got American citizenship, a college education and a way to quit tennis while I was ahead. I haven’t been able to set foot in Zimbabwe since then, but I’m hoping to save up enough money to sponsor a visa for my sister. And instead of slogging out the last days of my career with a feeble serve and a declining ranking, I spend my days working with exciting young players without having to worry about them overtaking me.”

  He shot her what he hoped was a convincing and conversation-concluding grin, but Regan’s face remained clouded with thought.

  “Did you ever see your dad again?”

  He gritted his teeth against a familiar surge of guilt. “He turned up dead in a hotel in Dubai a few years after he disappeared. Heart attack. Too much boozing and snorting coke with dodgy sheikhs will do that you.” He straightened and cleared his throat, signaling a change of subject. “Now that I’ve watched you train, I have some ideas about what needs to change.”

  Her open expression hardened into a scowl with such predictable swiftness that Ben had to smother an endeared smile. Had all of her previous coaches really been so easily put off by her diva act? He had a feeling it was nothing more than a well-practiced, but very thin, veneer.

  “Most of your competitors have played since they were children,” he reminded her. “By the time you picked up your first racket, they all had a decade of tournament experience under their belts. While it’s obviously remarkable that you flew so high so quickly, you missed out on the discipline that comes with years and years of regimented practice.”

  “Like you had?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Didn’t work out so well for you, though, did it?”

  Regan’s eyes were like cold, hard chunks of obsidian as they held his, with so much potential for deliberate cruelty glittering in their depths that he almost flinched. His fingers tightened around the can of tennis balls.

  That’s what she wants, he told himself, grabbing hold of the thin strand of fondness he’d developed only a moment earlier. She’s trying to push you away.

  He forced a grin. “My coach wasn’t nearly as good as yours.” Her eyes narrowed, but he turned on his heel before she could speak. “That’s it for today,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  The smile fell from his face as soon as his back was turned. He was stupid to let the conversation get so personal. She had her ammunition now, and she wouldn’t hesitate to use it.

  Chapter Three

  Regan turned the onion over and over in her hand as she mentally inventoried her kitchen cupboard. Didn’t she buy an onion last night? Or had she only bought garlic?

  Finally she dropped it in the plastic basket and shifted to the bin full of carrots, trying to shove aside her unease at potentially overbuying. No matter how much money she earned, she was never able to shake off the fear of waste that had defined her upbringing.

  Her hand brushed that of a man in a security guard’s uniform as they reached for the same carrot. They exchanged apologetic smiles, and Regan gestured for him to take it. He nodded his gratitude and moved over to examine a head of broccoli.

  Her gaze lingered on him as he held his selection up to the light. It was that kind of silent exchange—so utterly normal that most people probably forgot them as soon as they happened—that drew her to the supermarket night after night, always an hour or less before it closed when it was mostly empty. Employees pushed mops past rows of canned soup, college students counted out change for six-packs of energy drinks and women still wearing their waitress uniforms hefted bulk bags of cereal on their way home to relieve the babysitter. Although she liked success and the fame and wealth that came with it, for a half hour each night Regan pretended she was just like them—that she too had kids to rush home to, or spent long shifts on her feet, or had to budget carefully for her basket full of produce. That she wasn’t rich or special, and tennis was just a boring game played by snobs in country clubs.

  Even before she learned to play, tennis had been at the root of her sense of being on the outside looking in. With her dad managing the shop at the swanky country club near her childhood home, she’d spent many hours hanging on the railing around the pool watching the members’ kids swim or cajoling the chefs to scoop her a tiny version of the big sundaes they served in the dining room. By the time she entered the socioeconomically mixed world of junior high, most of the kids from the elementary school in the rich part of town knew her by sight—and that she wasn’t one of them.

  She supposed they probably still knew who she was, but for an entirely different reason.

  Her phone vibrated in her pocket, shattering her reverie and thudding her back down to earth. She tapped the screen to answer it. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Regan? Is that you?”

  “Of course it is. Who else would it be?”

  Joyce Hunter paused, her long-held distrust of technology evident in her silence. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the supermarket.”

  “At this time of night?”

  “I was busy during the day.”

  “Of course you were.” Regan could practically hear her mother’s characteristic eye roll at her own silliness. “Did you have a lot of practice today?”

  Her lips pulled into an affectionate smile. As endlessly encouraging and supportive as her parents were, they still didn’t fully understand what her day-to-day life was like.

  “A couple hours, yeah,” she fibbed. “Did I tell you I have a new coach?”

  “Good,” her mother enthused. “Let’s hope this one sticks around longer than the others. Anyway, I called to ask whether you’d like to come up for a visit this weekend. It’s the mother and daughter tea at church.”

  Regan frowned. Her mother was not always on speaking terms with reality, but surely she didn’t expect her to make the five-hour drive north for a ninety-minute ladies’ tea.

  “And Irma Parkheath says Garrett will be in town,” she added.

  Ding ding ding! I’ll take half-baked matchmaking for two hundred, Alex.

  “I don’t know, Mom. I’m really busy getting ready for the Baron’s Open. I have to break in this new coach, and—”

  “Garrett lives in Macon,” she plowed ahead, still as blithely oblivious to Regan’s moneyed lifestyle as always. “He has his own business—something to do with computers—and does very well out of it, Irma says. He owns a nice three-bedroom house with a big yard.”

  “I own a five-bedroom house.”

  “Oh. Gosh, I suppose you do. I didn’t think about that.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sure Garrett is a nice guy, but maybe better suited to someone living locally. After all, Palm Beach Gardens is a long way from Macon.”

  Her mother’s sigh was self-critical. “Of course, you’re right. Now that you’re planning to retire I guess I’ve gotten back into this crazy notion that you’ll finally come home, get a little place nearby, reunite wit
h some old high school classmate who’s gotten super hot in the last decade.” Her laugh was genuine but short-lived. “I guess even if you aren’t playing, you will have outgrown this little outpost, huh?”

  There was a lump in Regan’s throat as big as the onion in her basket. She was as desperate for that simple, unassuming life as she was certain it was now forever out of her reach.

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, I guess Garrett Parkheath will just have to try his computer business charms on some other girl. Anyway, you get on your way home to bed now. I bet you’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

  “I will,” she promised, then remembered something she’d been meaning to ask her parents. “By the way, did you get the invitation to my birthday party?”

  “We sure did.”

  “Will you be able to come? You could make a long weekend out of it. We could go to the beach, visit the Flagler Museum—remember you liked that high tea at The Breakers?”

  “Honey, you only turn thirty once. We wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

  “Great.” Regan sighed, relieved. Her parents weren’t comfortable at the five-star functions to which she was invited, and although she’d long since adjusted to handling the public aspect of her career on her own, her birthday party was one event she was desperate for them to attend.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow then. Good night, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  “Night, Mom.”

  The carrot Regan still held in her hand blurred in her vision as her eyes welled with tears.

  On some level she knew she wouldn’t be happy with the simple, unambitious existence she might’ve had if she’d never picked up a racket. It would be full of the family and friends she so dearly missed, but that wouldn’t have been enough to sustain her. She didn’t have her mother’s capacity for uncomplicated joy, her father’s fondness for routine and repetition, or her brother’s contented, uncritical approach to life. Her disloyal heart always craved more challenge, more achievement, and she knew it would only take a few months of steady, low-key predictability for her to feel stifled and stunted and antsy for something new.