Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Smooth and easy.
Maybe that was how he bamboozled me twenty years ago.
“Tom,” I replied.
“Is everything okay?”
No. I thought. A dude like you is seeing a scheming cow, and no longer with your interesting, talented wife and the mother of your children. So, yeah. No, everything is not okay.
“Mika?” he called.
“Something has come to my attention, Tom, and I need to talk to you about it,” I told him.
“All right.” His vibe was startled, but still friendly.
“Do you have time soon to meet up?”
“Meet up?”
Damn.
This was the biggest part of this whole thing that I didn’t want to do.
I did it anyway.
“Come over to my place for a coffee.”
He chuckled and regrettably, that was wildly attractive too.
“I live in Phoenix, Mika. I’d have to catch a plane to come to your place in New York for coffee.”
“I’m not at my brownstone. I’m at my place in the desert. It’s about half an hour outside Cave Creek.”
He didn’t immediately reply, but when he did, it was incredulous.
“You have a place in Arizona?”
For the most part, I kept this knowledge under wraps. However, when the small number of people I told heard it, this was mostly their response.
Me having a home in Arizona was like Fran Leibowitz quitting smoking, that was how synonymous I’d become with the Big Apple.
And it made sense, that city was my addiction, my life had been there, much of my art centered around there.
But I’d needed new horizons.
Broader ones.
“Sometimes I need space to do my thing,” I told him.
“Right,” he murmured.
“Coffee, Tom. Do you have time?”
“This is out of the blue.”
Now he was fishing.
Why couldn’t he just say yes and come over, for fuck’s sake?
“I’m not asking you to my place to seduce you, Mr. Pierce. I have no interest in that and we both know why.”
Sadly, my tone wasn’t as modulated as I would have liked, nor were my words as carefully chosen.
Then again, I was never good at that kind of thing.
“But it’s important,” I finished.
Again, he didn’t reply immediately, and his voice held caution when he did, which wasn’t a surprise, considering I was speaking to him for the first time in years, asking him for coffee and not being very nice about it.
“Can you give me a hint?”
“It’s about Andrew Winston.”
“Andrew?”
“Are you friendly with him?” I asked, and if he was, there was another promise of him that bit the dust.
“Other than smiling while telling him to go fuck himself over a net as I shook his hand after I beat him, I haven’t spoken to him since we were at your show.”
I was stupidly thrilled to hear that.
I instantly buried that feeling and mumbled, “Then maybe you aren’t the person I need to talk to.”
The problem was, I wasn’t into sports. It wasn’t like I detested them. I just didn’t find them interesting. True, of the many professional sports to pick from, tennis was one of the most interesting, I still didn’t follow it because I not only didn’t care, I didn’t have time to do stuff I didn’t care about.
(That said, I didn’t follow it now, since Tom was no longer playing. I oh so totally watched it then, but only his matches.)
Back in the day, I’d known a number of women who dated sports stars. I’d also come into contact with a number of sports stars.
But that was a long time ago.
I’d lost my husband, had a kid and shifted my focus.
Those circles still courted me, but in the interim, I’d earned the privilege to pick and choose who got my time. Though, I’d always done that anyway.
I just learned to be choosier.
And people like Paloma Friedrichsen and Andrew Winston didn’t get my time.
So Tom Pierce was my only in with that.
At least in tennis.
“He left tennis years before I did, Mika,” Tom kept talking. “And he burned a lot of bridges when he left, not to mention before.”
Interesting.
“So I’m not sure he’s even coaching and pretty much everyone has lost track of him,” he concluded.
Someone hadn’t lost track of him, and that someone was whoever sent me that envelope I got earlier that day.
And that was another thing.
Why was I getting that envelope?
Was it because of Luna?
“Tomorrow,” he went on.
“Sorry?”
“Tomorrow. Text me your address. Tomorrow. Ten o’clock.”
“Don’t you have patients to see?”
The words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them.
What he did with his time was none of my business.
I didn’t even care.
Which was totally a lie.
Amendment: I didn’t want to care.
Guess I was still hanging on to traces of the illusion of who Tom Pierce used to be to me.
Even as much as I didn’t want to care, I’d always admired he’d earned his medical degree after he’d retired from tennis.
Then again, he’d insisted on earning his undergraduate degree before he’d turned pro. He’d been a popular phenom on the junior circuit, gaining celebrity not only because of his game, but because of his looks. But then he’d quit the junior tour after he graduated high school in order to go to college (and play tennis there). When players were turning pro at seventeen and eighteen, or even earlier, the fact he had the talent he’d had, and he’d waited until he was twenty-one to go pro, it blew everyone’s mind.