Page 39 of The Challenger

He leans forward, chuckling, elbows coming to rest on his legs splayed wide to give me a bird’s eye view of the bulge in his dark denim. “That’s not very coach-like.”

I cross my arms and slump against the bench. There was a single, obvious path here, and we didn’t have to drive far to start making our way down it.

“That’s not very fair,” I say.

“You took advantage of me and then cut and run,” he replies. “Was that fair?”

“You didn’t exactly tell me to stop,” I point out.

“Can’t stop a tornado now, can I?”

I might have created the template for anything goes, but I had no intention of grooming a protégé with the audacity to walk his fingers up my leg, onto my pelvis, and drum lightly above the goods in bold, broad view of downtown Bendigo. Yet I do nothing to stop him. I don’t even trust myself to touch him. Not when the finish line was so close and then moved by a country mile. Moved clear across the country is what it feels like.

“What if you’re runner-up?” I counter, hating myself for sounding so desperate.

“You’re obsessed with my mouth, aren’t you?” he asks, annoyingly changing the subject. “You keep staring at it.”

“You have a great mouth,” I admit, powerless just looking at it. .

“You ever wonder what it would feel like, traveling all over your body?”

His lips land like a velvet cushion between the swell of my breasts. Heat funnels into all my pulsating places, and a sharp little cry of bliss slips out. I lick my lips, trying to control the uncontrollable.

“Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Do you want to see me win?”

He tugs on a curl, willing an answer out of me, his infuriatingly impish smile that of someone in total control. Discipline shapes your destiny is Flynn Dryden’s Truth #4, and if winning means my mouth muzzled by a pillow, and hisFEARLESSfingers sinking deep into my flesh, and that glorious butt pumping deeply, I will spend two hundred hours on the court to make it happen. Maybe three hundred.

And it’s written all over my face.

Why else would Chavez tap my knee with his hand like a father encouraging a daughter to chase her dreams?

“Get me over the finish line, Miss Flynn, and I’m all yours.”

ChapterFourteen

The next morningstarts curled up in bed with a sense of madness drifting in. Why did Chavez have to go and make things more complicated? If he wanted to dispense payback for Brandon and my little on-court stunt, fine. But this? Grind out the entire tournament with the possibility of nada? I chew on a nail and wonder for the tenth time if this is remotely healthy. It alarms me how badly I want him. He does all the right things and even better, all the wrong things. The only way to get through this test of mettle is to concentrate on the small things.

The big picture is too difficult to comprehend.

My phone starts to vibrate on the nightstand, the ringer off, and I groan under the covers. It’s too early, Chavez. Let me sleep. But I am playing with fire if I ignore him. I grope blindly on the nightstand for the phone, lift my eye mask, and squint at the screen wondering what aggravation he will serve up today. When I see the number, it snuffs out any joy from the morning. Nathaniel, hot on my heels like ants at a picnic, needs an answer. What I know about screenwriting can fit on the head of a pin and writing a textbook on string theory is more appealing than watching my life story unspool on the screen.

Then tell him.

I plump a pillow behind my head and my aching muscles scream in protest. “Hi.”

“Did you get my FedEx?” he asks.

“I’m doing fine thanks. How are you? And yes, I did get it.”

The envelope arrived the morning we left for Australia. Within it was another envelope, red as blood, and I was too nervous to open it. Last year he sent me a diamond tennis bracelet, and I found out he’d never bought his wife jewelry when she admired the glittering band on my wrist at their Labor Day gala. I half-expected Nathaniel to go over the top again—a stock certificate for a thousand shares of Apple perhaps—but he stooped low instead. The digital redemption code for my very own copy of the Final Draft screenwriting software is still crumpled in a ball and collecting dust in the corner of my kitchen, unless the maid recycled it.

He takes a puff of his pipe. “Not even a thank you?”

“I’ve been busy, believe it or not.”

“That’s a good sign, right? Not curled up in a dark corner, crying and fighting demons?”

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