Sandra Brown: The Thrill of Victory

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."