Jennifer Lohmann - Winning Ruby Heart

“Okay.” Regret and her teeth chewed at her bottom lip, but she didn’t take back her answer. She was intimate with the sound of her own chewing. Even when sitting around the table with her parents, there was rarely any talking. Just forks scraping across plates and the booming way you disappointed us echoed through a room, even when no one said a word. Dinner with Micah would at least be different. “Where should I meet you?”

“Tell me your room number and I’ll bring dinner to you.”

“I’d rather go out.”

“We can do that, but I get recognized, especially at sporting events. Do you really want to sit at a table with me and have someone ask who you are?”

No. But neither did she want the memory of him lingering in this room, even if only for one night. “I just have one chair.”

“Lucky for both of us that I bring my own.”

Right. “I’m in room 415.”

“There’s a Mexican restaurant that is supposed to do good takeout. Give me some idea of what you like and I’ll be at your room in about an hour.”

Ruby gave him a couple generic Mexican-food suggestions, said what she didn’t like, and he hung up, leaving her to be grateful she only had one change of clothes and couldn’t fret about what to wear. The warmth in his eyes would relax her shoulders. His smile would invite her to share intimacies. And all of those were professional tricks designed to lure unsuspecting athletes into his trap. She wouldn’t fall for them.

Which meant she had to push her curiosity and interest in the power of Micah’s shoulders out of her head. She was never going to see him shirtless. And I don’t want to! she told herself, though not strongly enough to believe it. It was just a professional interest in his physique, was all. One athlete to another. She’d ask him about his weight-lifting regime. They could compare notes.

Despite her promises to herself, she took the time to blow-dry her hair after her shower.

CHAPTER SEVEN

RUBY WAS MOVING the small hotel table and chair around to accommodate dinner and a wheelchair when she heard a knock at the door. She looked through the peephole, saw a hand and opened the door. On Micah’s lap was a bag of takeout, and balanced on top of that was a tray holding two plastic cups with what looked like slushies inside.

“Margaritas.” He lifted one of the cups up to her with a smile after she had turned back from closing the door. “To loosen you up.”

“This is not an interview,” she insisted, not even questioning how he managed to get to-go margaritas. She had been right not to want him in this room. He took up too much space. He smelled too good. “And how do you know I drink? Maybe I don’t.”

“Another’s blood was fine, but alcohol is forbidden?” The tone sounded innocent enough, but the words stung. At least he didn’t dance around her crime with euphemisms. The incident, her mom called it, which blanketed the severity of her crime with blandness and implied that if they never called it what it was, it hadn’t happened.

Still, she didn’t need to have her face rubbed in it. Again. She was moving to reopen the door and push him out of her room when he opened his mouth again and said, “That crack was uncalled-for.”

“Especially if you want my participation in any kind of story.” She put her hand on the doorknob.

“I apologize.”

Her hand stopped on the door handle, the metal warming under her palm. She’d expected something less than an apology out of the great Micah Blackwell, especially for a crack about her blood doping. Silly Micah—she’d have accepted less. Her hand lifted off the handle and rested at her side.

“May I pull up a seat to dinner?” He waved to the table with one hand, the other on the wheel of his chair.

He was here now, and if he left, she’d know he’d been here by the smell of his cologne, the Mexican food on the table and the browsing history on her phone where she’d looked up the mechanics of sex with a paraplegic. God, she couldn’t even blame that thought on an athlete’s curiosity about the body. She pasted a bland smile on her face. That last thought was just her contrary, competitive nature talking anyway. He didn’t like her, and that made him a challenge. Contemplating the feel of his skin against hers was proof that approaching life as one contest after another was stupid. A middle ground existed somewhere between competition and the hollow life she was living now and it didn’t involve seeking out the one man who hated her above all else. That was perversity, pure and simple.

He smiled at her silence, completely unconcerned with the mental acrobatics she had to go through to take a step forward. And not to rush at him.

“You may pull up a seat,” she said, her haughtiness no compensation for her nerves. Then she slipped into the chair and let him pass out their supper. She choreographed the movements of her hands above the table so that hers never brushed his. The awareness she felt and her body’s intense curiosity each time their hands came within a hairbreadth was because she’d been living the life of a nun for five years. It was absolutely not because of Micah.

You tell yourself another tall one.

It couldn’t be Micah. She’d never survive.

The aroma of spice and beans wafting from the food overpowered the generic hotel room smell. While he opened the bag of tortilla chips and cup of salsa, she shoved a fork and napkin under his makeshift plate. Swallowing a sigh, she prepared herself to pretend that interrogation and attempted coercion was the same thing as conversation. Second to running, weathering a cross-examination might be her greatest skill.

When he smiled and asked about her drive down here, she realized she’d underestimated Micah. He was practiced at making people feel comfortable. As they made small talk about the changes to Chicago’s lakefront, the weather and the possibility of either baseball team making the playoffs, Ruby wondered if Micah’s skill at easing people’s anxiety had come after his disability, was part of his training to be a sportscaster, a natural trait that had helped make him a star football player or all of the above. Being a sportscaster had a least helped with the magic spell he was trying to weave and she was trying to resist. As far as she remembered, he hadn’t been nearly so charming five years ago.

He also hadn’t been trying, because who would waste the effort charming the sporting princess who’d had it all and been stupid enough to throw it all away? He hadn’t needed to try. She’d fallen prey to his face with probably little effort on his part. A walking, talking, running doll, with little else to recommend her.

“Do you hate me?” she asked, interrupting his story about meeting his childhood hero, Joe Montana.

She saw by his face that he was considering answering her question with a meaningless of course not, when he set his fork down, folded his arms on the table and looked at her. His eyes darkened as he regarded her and thought about her question. She would not squirm. She was not afraid of him any longer. Wary—but caution came from experience and was not the same as fear.

Finally, he said, “Why are you asking that question? Do you mean, do I hate that you can walk and I can’t? Do I hate that you are trying to return to your sport, even if only as an amateur, when I must report from the sidelines? Instead of hating, I could resent—”

She held up a hand to stop him. He might come up with reasons she hadn’t thought of yet and she wasn’t sure her tender decision not to be caged could withstand rough treatment. “Do you hate me for cheating? For throwing away a career and a life and a dream? For disgracing my sport? Can I be forgiven for that?”

The combination of exhaustion, tequila and heavy hotel drapes protecting her from the outside world must have made her willing to ask such a question. If she had let the world into this room by opening her blinds or turning on the television, she’d realize she was opening her heart to this man—again—and inviting him to stick a stake in it. But Micah had made her feel safe, so she’d stuck her neck out and was now waiting for him to drop the guillotine.