Winning Ruby Heart
Jennifer Lohmann
It's a race to their beginning…Exposing world-class athlete Ruby Heart's cheating scandal five years ago made reporter Micah Blackwell's career. Falling in love with her now could end it. Yet watching her determination to return to the top, he can't resist the woman she has become. Working with Ruby to tell America her story, Micah falls deeper under her spell. But at a crucial moment, his feelings for her conflict with his job-the very thing that once saved him.Now he must choose between his skyrocketing career and the unlikely love of a good woman… .
It’s a race to their beginning…
Exposing world-class athlete Ruby Heart’s cheating scandal five years ago made reporter Micah Blackwell’s career. Falling in love with her now could end it. Yet watching her determination to return to the top, he can’t resist the woman she has become.
Working with Ruby to tell America her story, Micah falls deeper under her spell. But at a crucial moment, his feelings for her conflict with his job—the very thing that once saved him. Now he must choose between his skyrocketing career and the unlikely love of a good woman….
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Micah’s tone was deceptively mild. “What are you doing here, Ruby?”
“You asked why I was running. I did answer that question.”
Micah’s face remained impassive, though his arms tightened about his chest, the line between his biceps and triceps clear. He had good definition, and she wanted to know what lifts he did and how he did them.
How would that ridge where the deltoid leads into the biceps feel under the pads of my fingers? And down the arm, on the brachialis…? Ruby had to shut down those thoughts immediately. Wondering about his exercise routine could be justified as an athlete’s curiosity. The other…well, the other wouldn’t and couldn’t happen.
Dear Reader (#ulink_73d5ff13-ee84-5061-a595-f8938acb98b5),
Few beginnings of books have as clear an “aha” moment as Winning Ruby Heart. I was in my car, listening to Born to Run by Christopher McDougall on audiobook when I switched over to the radio in time to catch a piece on Lance Armstrong. Voilà, Ruby Heart was born. I’d wanted to have a female athlete as a heroine for a long time, and running was the perfect sport. There’s an active amateur community, there are races all over the country and it’s feasible for Ruby to be twenty-nine and only starting to be at the top of her game.
I imagined Ruby, sitting in an interview chair and absolutely not understanding what she’d done wrong, throwing mud on her reputation with every excuse. The man interviewing her was destined to be her perfect match. All it would take was a second chance.
If you’ve read my books, you know I like to recommend a book in my letter (often it’s a cookbook) and this recommendation is my favorite so far. While researching spinal cord injuries, I came across the book Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence by John Hockenberry. Micah’s character was already established as a cosmic twin of Hockenberry’s. Confident and conquering, all wrapped up with a sense of humor and an eye for the absurd. What more could a reader ask for?
Enjoy,
Jennifer Lohmann
Winning Ruby Heart
Jennifer Lohmann
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#ulink_e970c581-d199-59cc-89f4-d1b1f5e47bfe)
JENNIFER LOHMANN is a Rocky Mountain girl at heart, having grown up in southern Idaho and Salt Lake City. When she’s not writing or working as a public librarian, she wrangles two cats and a flock of backyard chickens; the dog is better behaved. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, and runs regularly (when the dog looks up for it and it’s not raining, or too hot or too cold).
To the Romance Lovers Book Club.
The first Thursday of the month is always my favorite day.
Contents
Cover (#u55085d81-ba07-5d59-9035-f0be6a4c72e0)
Back Cover Text (#u35f15b92-9394-55d9-ba8a-c4f6e147ef1b)
Introduction (#ubd480c6a-083b-5736-9273-77fab83c1fc7)
Dear Reader (#ulink_6a270d0c-0834-559f-9664-76d68ceb6eaa)
Title Page (#uaa1c9a91-fcae-596a-b123-0b85bcf3b6e9)
About the Author (#ulink_d94810b5-921a-5f56-a6f5-6eb1ea6b7602)
Dedication (#u8521912d-3432-5c7e-b077-f8432e426274)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_c0bf7222-084f-5263-a3e0-3b9f67b75636)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_1b2329f7-c2c1-5b8e-bd35-6dc54d9fe049)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_d77d5047-8f19-5d91-9b0e-c248ecac111d)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_f42cea9d-fb80-5b02-9ed8-4e4e9b19b93b)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_bef07227-60fb-5e33-bfc3-023615bba017)
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_d9fc44a0-b6cd-536c-aaf4-69019d1ae676)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_9a2b5f04-7da2-54d0-91db-db4f355e63c6)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_a977c28c-7878-5e3f-bbc0-a64df2db9c74)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_d6b260d9-cab0-566d-84bd-c27c51e59292)
THE WOMAN IN the neon green baseball hat looked familiar to Micah Blackwell. There was a loose-limbed smoothness to the way she milled among the other racers at the starting line that tapped at a memory in his brain. He drummed his fingers against the side of his wheelchair, waiting for her to turn her head and let the little bit of sun prying its way through the cloud cover onto her face. He wanted to see her eyes.
The woman, bib number 86, caught him staring at her. She twitched as if to dart off in another direction and then seemed to calm herself. The brim of her cap threw her entire face and neck into shadow when she turned her head from his gaze, and Micah saw the lips of the man next to her moving, apparently in response to number 86’s question. The movement of her head was smooth as she looked around, but the bounce of her pigtails on her shoulders exposed her nervous energy, as did the way she shook out the muscles in her arms and legs. Even the shaking seemed familiar.
Micah was so focused on the ripples of muscles in her sleek, powerful thighs that he almost missed her skittish look over her shoulder and the way she tried to ease through the other runners out of his sight. With only a hundred people in this race, the crowd wasn’t so big that he couldn’t follow the green bounce of the hat.
“Amir,” Micah called to his photographer without taking his eyes off the woman. “There’s a runner in the crowd—bib number 86. I want you to make sure you get video of her.”
Amir’s thin face emerged from behind his camera. Sports was a world of big—big men, big egos, big cameras—and Amir always seemed lost among the oversize swagger. But big men often forgot that small men could be a threat, and before they knew it, Napoleon was their emperor. Amir could stand there with the gargantuan camera on his shoulder while the men who Micah interviewed forgot the camera even existed. Which made Amir one of the best photogs in the business. And he was Micah’s photog. Two physical misfits working their asses off amidst a world of Achilles’ and Hercules’.
“I thought we were covering Currito.” The problem with having the best photog in the business was that Amir knew he was the best and so he felt comfortable arguing. The National Sports Network had sent them here to cover Currito, a Mexican-American runner who had seemingly come out of nowhere to finish in the elite pack at Western States and then gave a colorful interview about painting and mystic visions to the local sports guys. Despite Micah’s multipart series on ultramarathoners being only in the planning stages, when Currito had told them he was running a race within driving distance of the NSN campus, they’d signed out a production van and driven to Iowa.
Neither Currito nor Amir nor bib number 86 knew it, but the ultra series now had its new star—and it wasn’t Currito. Luck favored the watchful, and Micah had been watching. “We are, but I’ve got a feeling about that runner. There’s something about her....” His jaw tightened as his brain nearly spit out the memory and then yanked it back before a name came to him. “Get Currito, too, but...” The drizzle was obscuring more than his view of the runners.
Amir looked as if he was going to argue again, but Micah raised an eyebrow. “Okay.” Shrugging with one shoulder while the heavy news camera was balanced on the other nearly toppled the small man.
Micah caught a low flick of green through the legs of the runners, then followed the arc of the throw back through the crowds, which parted in time for him to see a head of unremarkable brown hair parted into pigtails. Runner 86 lifted her chin in a self-confident, defiant gesture as the gun went off.
“Aah...” The memory exploded into Micah’s conscious with a golden flash. “Ruby Heart, I’ve got you now.”
The drumming of his fingers against his chair quickened along with his heart rate as Ruby ran past him, her stride shorter than he remembered from watching the Olympics five years ago. She seemed to be trying to disappear into the crowd, instead of bursting out of it. Noting the angle of her knee as she kicked behind her with each step, Micah wondered if he was right about her identity. The stride didn’t look quite right. But the comparative power of Currito as the star of the ultra series balanced against disgraced Olympian Ruby Heart running again was worth the risk. Rumor had it an anchor position at NSN was about to open up, and Micah wanted it.
“Amir, I need to do some research at the hotel, so it’ll just be you and King.” Micah cocked his head toward the other reporter from NSN who had made the trip out of curiosity to watch, quote, “pain freaks run.”
“What?” The one eye of Amir’s that Micah could see was wide with horror.
“He’d probably leap at the chance to have input into the story.”
His cameraman choked. “Sure. And when I use the camera to beat him to death for his input, I’ll make sure NSN sends the bill for a new camera to you. And I’ll expect you to post bail.”
“Okay,” Micah said with a shrug and a smile. King was not a popular figure with the support staff at the network, but Amir would get the footage Micah asked for, King’s interference aside.
“Why can’t...” Amir stopped. Micah finished the question in his head. Why can’t you send King back to the hotel in your car to do the research so I’m not stuck in the production van with him? One of the great conveniences of a hand-driven car was that no one could borrow it. “King’s gonna want to know why we’re waiting to film that woman after Currito runs by.”
“If I’m right, you won’t have to wait long.” Listening to Kingston “Call Me King” Ripley howl with pain when he realized that one of the biggest sporting news stories of the year had run right past him and he’d missed it would feel almost as good as the ratings Micah knew were coming his way—as well as that anchor position.
“King won’t like it,” Amir said. But this argument flopped on the dirt, sucked in a few last gasps of air and then stilled like the dead fish it was.
“King will like it too much.” The man would think he had a chance to take over this story, and he didn’t even have the foresight to know what the real story was. “Look, King is loud, obnoxious and he can’t withstand a direct charge. Ignore his bluster and any advice he gives you and stick to getting the footage I want. Half Currito, half that woman. Good shots of the face. I don’t want anyone to doubt who she is when I’m done.” Micah thought for a minute, then added, “And try to make it look as if you’re not focusing on her. I don’t want to spook her.”
“Who is she?”
“And give you a name for King to weasel out of you? Hell no.” If rumors about the upcoming anchor opening were true, King would be fighting Micah to the death for it, and getting an interview with Ruby Heart would be equivalent to securing the nuclear arsenal. “Get the shots—I’ll confirm the name afterward.” The rough, wet dirt stalled his exit, but Amir knew better than to offer help. Micah wheeled himself over the rocks and sticks in the trail to his car and drove off.
Back at the hotel, he connected to the wireless and started digging. Most of the pictures he found were of Ruby as the world had known her—sharp points of her short platinum hair aimed directly at her painted red lips, looking more like a younger, edgier version of Marilyn Monroe than an athlete. But buried on her college’s website was a team photo from her freshman year. There, Ruby Heart looked like the girl next door. Her hair was still short, but it lacked the snap of her Olympic haircut and was the same mousy brown he’d seen today. The eyes clinched it. Without the heavy makeup, there was nothing to hide those doe eyes gracing the face of the girl who would become America’s Darling two years after this photo was taken. Even in the picture of her during his interview, after her cheating had been revealed to the world, her brown eyes had dominated her face, giving her an aura of innocence.
“You understand what I’m going through, right?” she had asked him after the camera stopped rolling on that memorable interview. “We both had our passions taken from us.” Her voice had sounded so young, adding to the blameless look she’d had on her face and almost making him agree with her. As if their careers had ended the same way. “It wasn’t fair.” He’d added whiny to the list of her defects. When he’d told her that her entire athletic career hadn’t been fair to her competitors, she’d jumped back as if he’d swung a fist at her.
Micah pulled himself away from the memory, found the list of participants in today’s run and looked for the name. According to the website, no Ruby Heart had registered, but there was a Diana Heart. A Wikipedia page didn’t offer Ruby’s full name, only a short summary of the girl’s soaring rise to greatness and her crashing fall. Icarus, with his wax wings climbing higher and higher toward the sun until the lies he’d woven into the wings melted from the heat. Only Ruby had been the genuine flying article and she’d strapped wax wings onto her back anyway.
Her stupidity left a foul taste in his mouth the bitter coffee couldn’t overpower.
The current Wikipedia photo was Ruby at her apex, with the American flag raised high over her head in a stadium of adoring fans. No amount of makeup could hide the pure joy overtaking the exhaustion on her face. The other photo on the page was a still from his interview of her—Ruby’s blond hair looking limp and fake, her eyes hurt and confused. Micah wondered how often the pictures were swapped out as the remaining few who cared—both fans and detractors—battled it out in cyberspace. Someone had cared enough about her to note that her suspension for doping was over.
While he didn’t recall the specifics of her complicated settlement, after she’d provided enough information to close several clinics, her lifetime ban had been converted into a suspension from all non-Olympic sports. Micah had a vague memory of the prep material he’d gotten for that interview, which had included Ruby’s full name and the fact that she went by her middle name.
Pitiful, really, to have disappeared from the American psyche so completely that all it took was a set of pigtails and different first name for people in your own sport not to recognize you.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_fa64f56d-9378-5c7e-a22d-c6cf4f056bd3)
BACK IN HER hotel room, Ruby Heart turned the television on for company, tossed the remote onto the bed and then eased her tired body into the chair at the small desk and prepared to indulge in her grocery store sandwich and chocolate milk. Her medal for finishing sat piled atop its ribbon, its tacky glitter weighing down her race bib. When she flicked at the medallion, her fingernail bounced off the cheap metal with a mournful ting, which her favorite medal—the gold one she’d had to give up—hadn’t had. She picked the medallion off her bib and turned it over in her hand. It might lack the sparkle of the Olympic gold, but no one could argue that Ruby hadn’t earned this one.
She had crossed the finish line of the fifty-kilometer race on her own two feet—which had been her number-one goal—in four hours and forty-three minutes, which was short of her second goal by three minutes. The race medal clinked against the desk when she dropped it. Three measly minutes. It had taken being handed a beer by a volunteer for Ruby to remember that she wasn’t competing against anyone other than herself. And still those minutes rankled. She allowed herself thirty seconds to clench her teeth before she took a deep breath and focused on what her goals had been. New goals for a new Ruby Heart.
As long as Micah Blackwell hadn’t recognized her, then she only had to prove something to herself, and crossing the finish line had done that, even if she’d skipped out on the postrace festivities. She hadn’t wanted to risk him catching sight of her again.
The short cameraman standing next to Micah at the start had been filming at several points along the race, but the camera had been rolling long before she’d run past it and had kept rolling; she’d looked over her shoulder several times to make sure. The cameraman was probably getting filler for whatever story they were planning to run on Currito. Ruby was nothing. Less than nothing. Her past was forgotten and her future was nonexistent. Even if Micah had recognized her, no one would be interested in her story. She was the detritus of American sensationalism.
Today was also proof that she could stay that way—run a competitive race, return home and not hear her father say, “Do you know what it’s like for me at the office?” Or her mother complain about the gossip at the salon. Or her sister about the rumors on campus. Or any number of the other places her family had gone during the two weeks when the cameras had been camped outside her house and she’d been trapped inside.
She swallowed a bite of her sandwich, chewing through the bread and the ideas of risking another race. She’d finished, but there were those three minutes... She bit her lip, then licked the little bit of mayo off. Had today proved it could be done, or had it only been proof it could be done once?
Micah’s warm, confident voice came over the television, and Ruby rolled the desk chair back to watch. After Micah introduced him, Currito talked about his race and his training. His black curls bounced about his face and his dark skin was shiny with sweat. “It’s all mental,” the runner said. “I’m not saying anyone can run one of these things, but it’s your mind that works hardest.”
“You’re also an accomplished artist,” Micah said on the television as he leaned back in his chair and opened his arms, inviting the world in. A trademark move, and she’d fallen for it along with a hundred other interviewees. After an interview during the Olympics, one of the gymnasts had said it felt as though he was inviting her onto his lap to whisper intimacies in his ear.
He smiled at the runner and, even though she knew better, Ruby leaned forward, pulled into Micah’s magnetic orb. “Could you tell us a little about how your art affects your running? Or your running affects your art?” After seeing him in a thousand interviews, Micah’s shallow dimples remained a surprise in an otherwise stern face and clearly disarmed the last of Currito’s natural reserve. Ruby sympathized with the runner; she, too, had fallen victim to those dimples, thinking they offered sympathy when they were simply a weakness in the muscles of the cheek.
“Oh, yeah, man. Painting is what I think about while running. The pain, it takes on colors and strokes.”
Ruby almost didn’t hear the knock on the hotel room door over the runner describing an injury and the painting that had resulted from it. The shuffle of her bare feet was silent on the carpet. Through the peephole she only saw the door of the hotel room across the hall and the thick fingers of a man’s hand, distorted by the glass. She was debating ignoring the prank when she heard, “Ruby Heart, I know it’s you.” It was Micah.
Her shoulders fell, causing a ripple of soreness through her body. I almost got away with it. The story of her life.
Before she opened the door, she closed her eyes for a moment and tried to pull her muscles together around her heart. She was allowed to run in non-Olympic competitions again. They hadn’t banned her for life from all sport. With as many defenses banded around her as possible, she twisted the lock, opened the door and looked down.
His eyes flickered over to the television, still playing his long interview with Currito. It was what Micah was known for—long, in-depth, personal interviews with sports figures who told those dimples all their secrets, forgetting they were being filmed. The National Sports Network’s Barbara Walters. He looked up at her, then rolled his wheelchair forward, and she had to step back or be run over.
“I’m sorry, but you have the wrong room.”
“Shut the door, Ruby.” He sounded exasperated, with a tinge of disgust. “I assume you don’t want people to realize who you are.” No disarming interview face for her. Instead, his mouth was pursed and his blue-gray eyes hidden in the shadows of the room’s poor lighting. That this was her hotel room with her sweaty running clothes on the bed didn’t matter; with his broad shoulders and expectant gaze, he commanded the room as he’d once commanded entire college football stadiums. The spell he’d cast over her through the television danced about on her skin, tempting her to dump all her secrets onto the floor for him to rummage through and find wanting.
The crunch of her teeth slamming together when she snapped her mouth closed reverberated through her head.
Ruby stood, her hand on the door handle, debating her options. Sadly, Micah was right. She would prefer him in her room to the entire hotel learning that Diana Heart was a poorly constructed alias for Ruby Heart. It was unlikely that anyone other than Micah cared who Ruby Heart was, but unlikely wasn’t the same thing as impossible. She shut the door and looked at the reporter who had forced her to look at the ugliness of herself.
You didn’t have your passion taken from you. You had someone shove your failure into your arm and then you pissed your dreams away. Five years later the scorn was as fresh as rotted meat. The sensation of being both mud on the bottom of someone’s shoe and the most fascinating thing in the world was as strange now as it had been back then.
The television flickered. Ruby stood by the door, watching Micah watch the end of his interview with Currito. The runner talked about joy, about blasting past personal limits and about purity. After a short mention of some special on ultra running, the interview cut to a commercial. Micah backed his wheelchair up to the bed, grabbed the remote and turned off the television. “Interesting man, Currito.” Micah rolled his r’s when he said the man’s name. He’d grown up in Arizona, she remembered, and had learned Spanish as a child. “He’s got a compelling background, the kind that makes for good interviews and inspires Americans to root for him. A fighting spirit—constantly pulling himself up with his bootstraps. And he still believes in the purity of the sport.”
Ruby heard the condemnation in what Micah left unsaid. Currito hadn’t grown up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. He hadn’t gotten a scholarship to the University of Illinois and he hadn’t had a mother standing behind him, providing for him, seeing to his every need so that all he had to think about was racing. Currito worked for a living; he raced for fun. And Currito hadn’t cheated.
“Yes. He’s a very nice man.” She didn’t need to be told what advantages she’d had and what gifts she’d thrown away. Micah may have been the first to explain this to her, but he hadn’t been the last. “Did you come here just to talk about Currito?”
“Why are you running?”
Because she’d seen the Christmas letter her mother had put together with glowing reports of her brother Josh’s engagement to the perfect Christine and her sister Roxanne’s appointment as editor of a top economics journal—“an honor at any age, but especially when she’s so young.” At the bottom of the letter had been that one sentence, “Ruby is doing well and still at home.” She’d read that one line over and over, wishing her mother had found something else to say about her youngest child. Then Ruby had realized she didn’t have anything else to say about her life, either.
She could continue to define herself by her sins or do something else.
But Micah’s velvet voice couldn’t fool her into any more confessions, so she said only, “It’s good exercise.” She’d had plenty of one-liners ready to tell a curious person if someone realized who she was, but none of them were appropriate for the man who’d barged into her hotel room. She hadn’t seen the cameraman, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting around some corner. Cameras flashing. Microphones shoved in her face again. Her mom’s nerves sending her back to the hospital. And the never-ending stream of comments from people judging her. Not just her doping, which deserved judgment, but her hair and her lack of breasts and her thighs and the way she smiled.
Male athletes who slip and repent seemed to receive forgiveness from the American public fairly easily. Maybe it was her perspective, but Ruby had never seen a famous woman forgiven, only hounded.
In her irritated state, she couldn’t resist uttering her next statement. “It’s very meditative,” she said. “You should try it.”
Her parting shot hung in the air above Micah’s head. If she reached out, could she snatch the words back? No such luck.
He chuckled, which made her feel worse. “Running isn’t really the sport for me anymore, though you’re right, it was meditative. Wheelchair marathons serve a similar purpose for me now.”
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t, well...” She knew about his marathons. Four years ago, she’d been in Grant Park during the Chicago Marathon, pretending she was enjoying a day in the city. The wheelchair marathoners had flown by in a blur of wheels, helmets and arms. One in particular had caught her eye and she’d stood at the top of the bleachers to watch him speed to the finish.
The marathoner had been so full of movement, so alive, and she hadn’t been sure if the need that had filled her body had been desire for movement or desire for the man. Until he’d taken off his helmet and she’d realized the surge of lust had been for a man who hated her.
“It’s wasn’t a nice thing to say,” she finished lamely. It’s not a nice thing for you to be here, her fear whined in her head, but that was an excuse, and she had been done with excuses for five years.
“No, it wasn’t.” His biceps bulged when he crossed his arms over his chest.
“I’ve seen you. At the marathons.” Her voice hitched, dammit.
The brief flicker of openness on his face disappeared. “You didn’t answer my question. What are you doing here, Ruby?”
“You asked why I was running. I did answer that question.”
His face remained impassive, though his arms tightened about his chest, the line between his biceps and triceps clear. He had good definition, and she wanted to know what lifts he did and how he did them.
How would that ridge where the deltoid led into the biceps feel under the pads of my fingers? And down the arm, where the brachialis meets the brachioradialis. She had to shut down those thoughts immediately. Wondering about his exercise routine could be justified as an athlete’s curiosity. The other...well, the other wouldn’t and couldn’t happen.
Her head jerked up from his arms to his face when she realized he was talking and she hadn’t heard a word. She could tell by the raise of his eyebrows that he hadn’t missed her singular focus on his arms, though he didn’t say anything. To her relief, he repeated his question. “Why did you compete in a race?”
Ruby is doing well and still at home. “I get sick of running by myself.”
His sigh was heavy, disgusted. “That’s not an answer.”
“If you have questions that you want answers to, ask me for an interview.”
The way he seemed to grow taller in his chair could be a trick of the eyes, but she didn’t mistake the way his dimples deepened, beckoning her into his sphere. Come into my lair, my pretty. “Since you conveniently raised the subject, NSN is actually working on a series about ultra runners—and I would like to interview you. Amir is down the hall and the hotel would be happy to provide us with an appropriate space, I’m sure.”
Of course they would. The clerk downstairs was a woman, and she knew how quickly female defenses fell at the siege of Micah’s charms.
For those athletes still enjoying their glory, Micah’s interviews were probably warm, intimate experiences. For her, it would be a poison-filled trap.
“No,” she said, certain of this one thing, if only this one thing.
He huffed in response, his eyebrows raised in surprise—faked, she was sure. She ignored his act and continued, “I came here to run in a race and see how I did.” Those three minutes poking at her pride nearly overwhelmed Micah’s presence, but she shook off her disappointment before he could sniff it out. “If I’d wanted to be interviewed by Micah Blackwell of the National Sports Network, I would have called you up and let you know I’d be here. I didn’t, so I don’t.” Because she managed to make those words come out strong, unlaced by her fears, she straightened her shoulders and looked him in the eye.
“USA Track & Field deserves to know who you are and what you are doing. The American public deserves to know.”
“No!” She’d surprised them both by yelling the word and she took a deep breath to calm herself. “For years, the press and the American public had their nose in every little thing I did. My haircuts. My nail polish. The color of my sports bra. And, only during Olympic years, my running. You’ve had your rule over my life. You’re all vultures—you can find another scandal to pick at. I wanted to run in a race with other people. I did that today, along with ninety-nine others. I’m no different from any of them.”
Even under the brunt of her anger, Micah’s face was open and placid. Whatever emotion had driven him to her door he’d buried deep inside, where she couldn’t see it, replacing it with curiosity. Share your intimacies with me. Confession is good for the soul. What a liar his face was. Confession opened wounds from which fresh blood poured. It riled up the vultures until they circled over her life and waited for it to be destroyed. “You didn’t seem to mind the press’s attention until you got caught doping and they took away your gold medal.”
Her jaw clenched and she had to spit out her response. “You’re here because you think I will get you good ratings, which means you’re no better than I am. And before you lecture me—” Ruby put her hand on the doorknob “—I sure as hell know more about my sins and their consequences than you do.” She opened the door. “Now get out, before I call the front desk.”
“I still want an interview.” Micah didn’t appear to be going anywhere. His hands weren’t even on the wheels of his chair. “You should think about it. I’ll be far kinder to you than King Ripley will be if he figures out who you are.”
Except Ruby was certain she could outsmart King Ripley. “I am sure it’s considered bad etiquette to wheel you out of my room against your will, but I didn’t invite you in here, so I don’t really care.”
Micah cocked his head and regarded her, his scorn caressing every square inch of her bare skin. The sensation was familiar enough that she relaxed her shoulders. He was nothing she hadn’t endured before and couldn’t endure again. Besides, she was smarter this time. A different and better person. He didn’t have to know that Ruby Heart was a new person because she knew.
“I think I could stop you,” he said. Several long seconds went by with his arms still crossed over his chest, the bulges of his deltoids straining his T-shirt sleeves. Would he call her bluff? Finally, he put his hands down and left her room without saying another word. Ruby shut the door with a soft click, then leaned her forehead against the wood and took a deep breath, closing her eyes against the memories of a phone constantly ringing and camera flashes invading her peace.
She breathed deep into her abdomen before she opened her eyes again. This was the only race she was allowing herself to run. Without an interview, any story Micah did about her was dead as soon as she drove home.
She turned back to her desk, the egg-salad sandwich—now warm as well as soggy—wilting on its plastic wrap next to a small bag of potato chips and some carrots. She was no longer hungry, but she’d been an athlete for too long to confuse food with emotions. Besides, she thought as the bag of chips wrinkled when she cracked it open, she didn’t have to taste the food to gain nourishment.
* * *
MICAH HADN’T GONE five feet when he stopped and reflected back on Ruby, both the woman in the hotel room and the girl he’d interviewed five years ago. Despite being twenty-four when she’d won her gold medal, and in the public spotlight off and on for the previous four years, after she had captivated the world by winning the silver medal in a sport Americans hadn’t known they’d cared about, Ruby had been a girl existing in a silly, cloud-filled dream world where putting one step in front of the other until her chest broke the finish line was the only thing that mattered.
The juxtaposition between the Ruby of then and the Ruby of now was jarring. If she’d denied being Ruby Heart, he might have even believed her. Five years ago, Ruby’s hair had been bleached blond and razor sharp at her chin. She’d worn heavy black eyeliner and bright red lipstick. Everything about that Ruby had been composed to catch—and hold—your attention. Like the rest of America, the costume had fooled Micah into believing Ruby was slicker and worldlier than she actually had been. Not until he’d rewatched his interview with her on YouTube with five years of distance could he see the bewilderment in her eyes under all that makeup.
This Ruby Heart, with her pigtails, wide brown eyes and smattering of freckles, had all the innocence of the clichéd girl next door, designed to be forgotten once your front door shut. Only now Ruby’s eyes had the harshness of a woman who knew what it felt like to have a knife in the back combined with a sense of resignation, as if she expected another stab at any moment.
Had she really changed from that attention-seeking girl she’d been? She’d turned down an interview, but Ruby was a runner, and she might also be the kind of person who liked to be chased. Which was fine; Micah still enjoyed a good hunt.
One thing was certain, she still had the same glorious body. Her T-shirt and gym shorts meant there had been plenty of bare skin for him to appreciate. When she’d moved her arms, her biceps had expanded and collapsed and he wished he’d managed to make her take a step toward him. With so little body fat, her legs were a lesson in muscle anatomy, and they rippled when she moved.
Micah had always been a leg man, and his tastes hadn’t changed just because his own legs were now the downstairs neighbor he waved at but who never waved in return. Calves made shapely by high heels were not the legs he fantasized about. He liked the condensed power in a female athlete’s thighs—a ham man, his teammates had said. His college girlfriend had played tennis, but her thighs in that swinging white skirt had nothing on Ruby in gym shorts. All that power in a sleek, racing version.
Micah rubbed his face, then squeezed the bridge of his nose, forcing himself to remember why Ruby was in that hotel room and not fresh off another Olympic triumph. Pigtails were as much a costume as the red lipstick had been. She needed no pity. And she didn’t deserve his admiration of her body. She’d been given the opportunity to compete on the greatest stage the world offered her sport and she’d responded by filling her veins with the blood of another person. Blood doping was a gruesome way to cheat, making a mockery of both the sport and the people for whom that blood meant the difference between life and death. A vampire, draining the sport and the athlete of all its integrity. A monster.
And, after her interview, she’d had the audacity to expect pity from him.
He put his hands back on the wheels of his chair and refused to think of Ruby’s thighs in any way other than belonging on the hot seat while Amir filmed the interview of Micah’s career. He would show the world how little a doping athlete changed, no matter the tears they produced in a confessional. And then he’d take the promotion NSN offered.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_92aae7b3-7210-50ee-a24a-186e743879bf)
MICAH HAD ARRIVED back in Chicago late Tuesday night and wasn’t expected in the studio until after lunch on Wednesday, so he stopped at his favorite restaurant for a bite to eat before work. The lunch hour meant Micah had to force his way through the other regulars, all of whom greeted him, to get his wheelchair to a table. But Sheila, the hostess, always took special care of him and got him a table for four, which was great until King showed up. “Is this seat taken?” the other reporter asked while pulling out a chair and sitting down. Micah didn’t bother to say no; King would only pretend that the restaurant was too noisy to hear.
After asking the waitress, Patty, for a beer, King turned to Micah with the manly joie de vivre that could lure inexperienced athletes into ignoring the cameras and pretending they were in a high school locker room. Savvy athletes, however, treated the wink-wink, nudge-nudge with the same distant professionalism they offered reporters in the locker room after a game, making the majority of King’s interviews some of the most boring two minutes of sports reporting on television. The man kept his job only because the few times he got an athlete to confide, internet GIF memes were sparked and YouTube hits records set. Often, those athletes didn’t have long careers. Micah tapped his fingers against his chair and waited for the inevitable intrusion that would come after the small talk.
King took a long pull on his beer and set the bottle down with a thunk. “Amir says you spent the entire race in your room and then the night in a runner’s room.” Micah didn’t believe Amir would sell him out, especially after King turned his head to one side, as if offering up his left ear for girlish intimacies, and nodded knowingly.
“I think,” King said, tapping his index finger against his lips, “that you knew this runner before you met her at the race.”
Micah threw the man a bone, since King didn’t have the investigative skills to do anything with this conversation. “I did know her before.”
“From college?”
“No.”
King lifted his brow for an elaboration, but Micah didn’t offer one. The other reporter shrugged off the small insult, took another long pull of his beer and then signaled for another. “A friend, then. Your connection to the elusive Currito?”
Micah had long since stopped being amazed that King couldn’t conceive of a nonplatonic reason for Micah to interact with a woman. In an industry dominated by men who didn’t even bother looking to see whose dick hung the lowest—because, of course, they would win—Micah knew his supposed celibacy was a curiosity. He had heard all the rumored reasons for why he never had a date at office parties, ranging from some sort of self-imposed sexual exile out of a dislike of women with strange kinks to the ongoing question of how well his plumbing worked. The folks in the first camp would probably be disappointed to learn that there weren’t hundreds of women lined up outside hotel rooms across America with fetishes for men who couldn’t wiggle their toes. The one woman with such a kink who’d found Micah had been strange in bed. It was not an encounter he wanted to repeat.
Lack of imagination generally meant his coworkers credited Micah’s physical body for his sparse sex life instead of recognizing that Micah worked too damn much. At least, that was the reason most of his girlfriends never made it far enough past “short-term” for his coworkers to meet them.
King, Micah knew, fell firmly into the camp that believed Micah couldn’t get it up anymore. Much to Micah’s amusement—and many women’s disappointment, he was sure—King didn’t seem to understand how a woman could find sexual pleasure unless a man stuck an erect penis into her vagina and then bounced his ass up and down in the air. Once, after ten hours of drinking on a flight to Sydney, King had told Micah that lesbians had to use “accessories.” Micah had yet to decide if King’s indirect approach was better or worse than the strangers who flat out asked intrusive questions.
The memory of the conversation reminded Micah that he didn’t want to be sitting in public with King and alcohol. Unfortunately, Micah had talked himself into a King-created corner. Denying now that he hadn’t spent the night in Ruby’s bedroom would only push King and his beers into asking what Micah hadn’t been doing when he hadn’t been in the room—wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Saying that Ruby hadn’t been his connection to Currito would also stretch King’s imagination to the breaking point.
“A friend,” Micah said simply, before pulling his cell phone out of his pocket and checking the time.
“You are a mysterious man, Micah Blackwell.”
Micah nodded, the statement overwhelmingly true from King’s point of view. “And, given that I overestimated how much time I have for lunch, I’m likely to stay that way.” When the waitress arrived at his signal, he asked for his lunch to go.
King peered across the small table at Micah and harrumphed. “You think you can keep this a secret.” The ensuing silence would almost have been suspenseful if King hadn’t been flicking his index finger from his lips to point at Micah and back again, over and over and over in some falsity of a knowing gesture. “Now I am interested and on your trail.”
“Okay.” Micah backed his chair away from the table and swore under his breath when he hit the chair behind him. The benefit of King moving the chairs out of his way as he navigated through the restaurant was overshadowed by the exaggerated way in which the man drew attention to what a stand-up guy he was by “helping.”
“Micah, man, stay longer next time,” said one of the cooks from the kitchen, who met him at the front door to drop a sack of food in his lap. “None of this eatin’ and rollin’ when I’ve got a fantasy baseball team to manage.”
Micah handed Patty a wad of bills before turning to the cook. “Frank, you know I’ll be back for lunch tomorrow and you can pick my brain then.” They exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then Micah was out the door with a wave.
As he made his way to his car, he wondered if he should track down Ruby and warn her of King’s interest. Not that King was likely to remember the rise and fall of Chicago’s native gazelle. He’d been busy working his way up the sporting news food chain covering high school football in Texas during that time. However, it was a convenient excuse to ask her for that interview again. No way was he letting her play the part of reformed recluse.
* * *
MICAH ENTERED HIS office on the sprawling suburban Chicago campus of the National Sports Network to find the message light on his phone blinking and no fewer than five sticky notes on his monitor. Since all the notes were from his boss, Micah listened to the phone messages first. There were the usual calls from publicists and agents looking for spotlight stories, two from viewers who had managed to bluff or gruff their way past the operator and one call from King, assuring Micah that he was onto him and would solve the mystery of the female racer.
Micah wouldn’t give King the chance. King wouldn’t even think to ask the interesting questions, like how she’d managed to negotiate her lifetime ban down to five years. The details of her settlement with the governing body were locked up in a nondisclosure agreement, but whatever she’d done for the reduced sentence, her coach had been arrested and the once-great sports agency run by her agent had been dismantled in disgrace. Suggestions that the governing body had gone easy on her because she was white, young, cute and rich had been the dominant theme in any conversation about her punishment.
Micah logged on to his computer and hunted around the old news stories about Ruby, an itch at the back of his brain. The Ruby he remembered had been completely focused on running, but selling out an entire system of cheaters implied that she’d been listening when the people around her talked about the supply chain. She’d claimed not to have been included in the decision making and had simply followed the recommendations of her coach. If Micah was willing to grant her the benefit of the doubt in order to follow his train of thought, then everyone around Ruby had assumed she was too dumb to be a liability and she’d proved, to herself if to no one else, that they’d all underestimated her.
Micah’s realization only made him more determined to prevent King from getting that interview.
He didn’t have time to return the calls, and there was no need to go see what his boss wanted, because Dexter, one of NSN’s executive producers, sauntered up to Micah’s door and leaned against the metal jamb, his arms crossed and curiosity etched across his dark skin. “King Ripley came back from lunch telling everyone you got lucky while in Iowa.”
“As usual, he had access to all the facts and came to the wrong conclusion.”
“But you did have Amir take video of Ruby Heart running.”
That explained why there had been five stickies on his monitor instead of one. When Micah had first started at NSN, he’d been surprised at Dexter’s clairvoyance. Now it was both a blessing and a curse. “I did.”
Dexter’s dreadlocks swayed as he nodded. “And you’re sure it’s her?”
“She didn’t deny it, though she said she’d never do another interview.” The anger he’d seen in her face when she talked about press intrusion into her life had to be a part of whatever new role she was playing.
“And you want her to be in the ultra series.”
“The feature,” Micah said. Ruby may not wish for the spotlight, but the spotlight wished for her.
“Get the interview first. We’ll run that and see how interested people are.”
As soon as Dexter left the office, Micah searched through his contacts until he found Mike Danforth’s number. Five years ago, Mike Danforth had worked in the same office as Ruby’s agent. Mike also owed him a favor and would probably see nothing wrong with Ruby sweating under the hot lights of another interview.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_c77e5223-b503-5d83-a2a8-03a918a556ce)
RUBY WALKED INTO her parents’ large Lake Forest home and put her running bag on top of the washing machine. Neither the clunk of the bag on the appliance nor the buzz of the overhead lights were enough to distract from the usual deathly silence of the house. Not that the house was emotionless, because cold was an emotion, at least as Ruby had experienced it for the past five years.
She grabbed a towel from her bag, wiping the sweat from the back of her neck. Running had been her passion, her chore and her job. Now it was a gift she both gave and received, and she didn’t ever take it for granted. She’d been itching to get out and run again after a few days’ rest, and today’s volunteer shift at the animal shelter had been especially lovely with the warmer weather and partially cloudy skies. By the third dog she took out for a run, Ruby had settled into a routine and had been able to banish the constant specter of Micah Blackwell.
Her daydreams were nightmares where an interview reinvigorated press attention. At night, though, Micah’s chocolaty voice invited her into his world and she dreamed about what his deltoids and trapezius must look like to support his pecs. She explored the rest of his body in her dreams, too, only to wake up hot and excited.
She walked to the kitchen and got herself a banana and a glass of chocolate milk. When she turned to head down to the weight room for some stretching, she found her mother floating in the doorway, the light linens she wore given a weightless quality with the slight breeze of the fan. Her mom looked thin, which wasn’t unusual, but the black circles were back under her eyes and her cheeks had a sunken quality Ruby didn’t remember having been there this morning.
“You promised.” Her mom’s fingers fluttered together with the same airy quality of her clothes, giving the impression that her mom had so little substance the air from a fan could blow her away.
Her mom’s voice was also several octaves above normal, a sign her mother was more wounded than hurt, so Ruby only asked, “What did I promise?” before taking a gulp of her milk. In another lifetime, she would have rushed to her mother to apologize and beg forgiveness, even before knowing her crime. Also in another lifetime, she would fear finishing a race without knowing her mother would be at the finish line.
In this lifetime, her mom didn’t even know there was a finish line.
“Running.” Her mother’s voice cracked between the two n’s. “You’ve been running.”
“Mom, I’ve been volunteering at the shelter for three years. Why are you complaining about it now?” Ruby’s running used to be a source of pride for her mother. At track meets, in church, and at the grocery store, her mother had always been the first person to exclaim over her daughter’s athleticism and how her daughter was going to be an Olympic champion. Ruby had won her first big race by running right into her mother’s open arms.
Now every time Ruby returned from her shift at the shelter, her mother eyed the running shoes left by the door with the same disgust she gave an errant cuticle. One of the many hard things Ruby had learned five years ago was that her mother’s love was conditional on Ruby’s success.
Ruby didn’t even know what success looked like anymore. Three measly minutes. If she’d run each kilometer only four seconds faster she’d have been looking at her goal from over her shoulder rather than staring at its butt.
“Where were you last weekend?”
“I was visiting Haley.” Her cousin had been pushing Ruby to move on with her life for years and had been more than willing to provide an alibi.
“Shopping for wedding dresses, you said.” Her mother’s voice lost its tremble, becoming sharp and pointed. “I called Marguerite and she didn’t see either of you.”
Ruby nearly choked on her banana. Both Haley and Ruby had been certain her mother wouldn’t do more than call Haley to confirm. Since Ruby had started to express interest in a life outside of this house, her mother had become more concerned with her whereabouts, but she’d never gone this far. Chewing and swallowing her food gave Ruby time to come up with an answer. “We weren’t looking for her real wedding dress. We went to the big bridal outlet to get a sense for what Haley might like.”
“I don’t see how that took all weekend.” The quiver was back.
Something specific had sparked her mother’s paranoia, but Ruby would play along with this game as far as she could. She took another bite of her banana and waited.
“Mike Danforth called.” Ah. Well, if anyone was going to call from the agency she’d destroyed, Mike was the best option. “Micah Blackwell—” the name hissed out of her mother’s mouth as if it were a name that should never be spoken “—wants an interview with you. Why?” The fear on her mother’s face didn’t surprise Ruby—the year after the scandal had been scary for everyone—but the concern did.
“Who can say?” She shrugged. “March Madness is over. Maybe NSN needs to fill airtime.”
“You know what your, your...”
Mistake? Scandal? Embarrassment? Failure? Sin? Crime?
“...incident cost the family. You wouldn’t want to put us through that again.”
“I remember. And I don’t.” Her father knew—to the penny—how much the legal bills would have been, if my firm hadn’t taken care of it for you. The pill bottles left scattered around the house were a reminder of the emotional cost to her mother. Ruby’s sister, Roxanne, was still miffed that her research had been overshadowed by questions from even the crustiest academic about her infamous sister. And Josh was kind enough to regularly mention how much experience his sister’s problems had given him as a young associate. Josh also said those words while giving Ruby a hug, so she knew her brother’s sarcasm wasn’t mean-spirited.
Ruby rinsed out her glass and put it in the dishwasher, then threw out her banana peel. “Mom, I really need to stretch. Did you want anything else?”
“Don’t forget how important it is to all of us that you stay out of the spotlight.”
What about me and my life? Ruby knew saying those words would prompt her mother to talk about the sacrifices the family had made for Ruby’s sport, the energy and money they’d thrown away and how her brother and sister had had to fend for themselves. Ruby knew the resources her family had put into her running, but in hindsight she wondered if it had all been for her.
Down in the weight room, Ruby laid out her mat and began her regular series of stretches. The room had been built for her when she was in high school and college coaches had started showing up at her meets. And after college she’d gotten new weight benches and a private coach. The room was the temple to her success and the dumbbell racks her altar.
She’d stayed away from her weight room for an entire year after the Olympics. It had taken another year after that for her to feel comfortable being surrounded by herself in all the mirrors. Now, checking the alignment of her spine as she reached forward and grabbed her toes, Ruby wondered if the room was more a cloister than a temple, designed to keep her in and obedient. She’d only started coming into this room regularly when her father had reminded her how much it had cost the family. “Your brother always wanted a game room,” her dad had said, as if her brother hadn’t already been off at college and done living at home when the weight room had been put in.
Regardless of everything, she loved this room. She loved the smooth wood under her feet and the way the light bounced off the mirrors. She loved how the mats gave gently under the pressure of her feet when she pushed a loaded bar over her head, and the sharp smell of iron against iron when she pushed another weight plate onto the metal bars. She loved how the speakers drowned out her anxieties when she plugged in her iPod. The room was a sanctuary and also one of the reasons she hadn’t moved out of her parents’ house yet.
But why should she feel trapped here? She wasn’t just a runner, she was the runner. The runner who’d made Americans care about middle-distance running again. The runner who’d graced the covers of Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine and People.
Someone else’s blood in her veins hadn’t been the only reason for her success. Ruby’s best skill when running had always been her ability to escape from the crowd, no matter how tightly others tried to box her in. She’d been the story of her first Olympics because in her first heat, she’d slipped through gaps no one else could see to beat the favorite.
Intrusive Micah, her anxious mother, stupid Mike Danforth, this beloved room—she realized now that they were all trying to box her into the role she’d accepted. Disgraced Olympian. Someone who should hide from her past. Someone who should be ashamed for the rest of her life because there were no second chances and there was no forgiveness.
Ruby could stay in this room, in this house, for the rest of her life. Or she could duck out of the trap and find something new.
Ruby cut her stretch session short, rolled up her yoga mat and headed to her room.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_5976e6ff-29e7-5ba7-b5a3-3c00a33cf905)
“HOW WAS THE ultramarathon?” Micah’s father asked as they left his hotel and headed for the lakeshore. His father still traveled too much on business, though he regularly stopped on his way back home to visit Micah.
Parking his son at the child’s grandmother’s and sending regular checks had been a coward’s way of fathering, but they’d both decided it was better to forgive. After Micah’s accident, when his father had been the only person to look him in the eyes as the doctor told him he would never walk again, Micah had understood that brave men faced their past and letting go of childhood hurts didn’t make him weak.
The other pedestrians gave them a wide berth, like a school of fish parting around a video camera in a nature documentary. The unfamiliar object seen and its foreignness avoided because it couldn’t be ignored.
At the crosswalk, Micah handed over a couple bucks to the StreetWise vendor before answering his father. “It was fine.” He debated elaborating. When they reached the other side of the street and Grant Park, he said, “Ruby Heart was there.”
“With her mother?”
An enveloping hug between mother and daughter had been one of the iconic photographs of Ruby’s stratospheric rise to fame. After Ruby’s cheating had been revealed, Mrs. Heart had vanished and Mr. Heart had appeared as the parent of supreme importance.
“No. She was alone.”
His dad snorted. “Her mother always did look too brittle to survive adversity.”
“Brittle?” The woman had been thin, with a cutting quality to her face that Micah had always associated with wealthy women and crystal champagne glasses, neither of which he would ever identify as brittle.
“Yeah, I got the sense—even in photographs—that if Ruby fell, her mother would break.”
They stopped at another light, the traffic on Columbus speeding past them. Micah looked up at his father, who didn’t appear to be joking. “I always got the sense her parents supported her.” Actually, at the time of her scandal, Micah had found the closeness of her parents in her life—she’d been twenty-four and still living at home for God’s sake—to be a sign of weakness.
His father shrugged before stepping forward to cross the street. “I guess they filled the role of a track team for her once she left college, but all I saw was a mother seeking fame through her daughter. Maybe I’m not being fair to the woman.”
“She isn’t your mother,” Micah replied, directing the conversation away from anything resembling sympathy to Ruby Heart.
“No, but the benefit of my mother is that once you realized she couldn’t be pleased, you could stop trying.”
His father hadn’t reached that point until Micah was nineteen, and it had taken a crippling accident for Micah to get there. From what Micah knew of his own mother, part of the reason she’d run off had been because she hadn’t even wanted to try to live up to his grandmama’s strict standards. Grandmamas love little boys who win football games.
“She’s dead now, so I guess I don’t have to worry about it.”
They crossed the rest of the park in silence. Only when they stood at the crosswalk on Lakeshore Drive, the whoosh of cars and busses nearly drowning out his voice, did his father respond. “I’m sorry, you know.”
“I know.” His father apologized anytime grandmama was brought up in conversation. He had never claimed he didn’t know what he’d left his son to deal with, but he’d also never shied away from any punishment Micah dealt out during his rehabilitation. And the first time his grandmama had said, “Cripples belong at home,” and Micah had been too doped up to do more than grunt, his father had ordered her barred from the hospital.
The light changed and they crossed the wall of revving car engines and exhaust before arriving at the lakeshore.
“Ruby looked good,” Micah said, changing the subject. With her natural plain hair, she’d looked fresh and warm and healthy. A Midwestern milkmaid whose slender figure hid muscles that could bench-press a cow before outrunning all the boys. Weak women were for weak men.
She’d gained some weight in her five years out of the public eye, adding a suggestion of curves to what would otherwise be a stick-straight figure. She looked less of a fantasy and more of a real person one would want to sit across a table from and share a meal with. A crazy dream. She was also a cheater.
“Yeah?” his father said, the question in his voice the only acknowledgment either of them would give to the interest Micah had given Ruby’s career before her doping was revealed.
His father had to slip behind him on the path to make room for some bicyclists. After the bikes passed and he caught up with Micah, he asked, “Are you going to interview her again?”
“She said no, but I’m not giving up.” Not to mention that Micah had determined the anchor spot was his and Ruby was the key. Despite the paucity of current information available online, he didn’t think Ruby was truly forgotten in the public’s mind. After all, the American public loved two stories more than any other: Judas’s downfall and the possibility of his redemption.
His father stopped to look out over the blue of Lake Michigan. “If I were her, I doubt I’d want to be interviewed by a man who couldn’t take no for an answer.”
“She’ll come to me.” Micah let the fact that he’d had Mike call her stay buried under the surface of the rippling water.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY Micah was sitting in his office when the phone rang and he knew, without recognizing the number on the caller ID, what voice he would hear on the other end.
“What part of no didn’t you understand?” The words were tight—angry—and Micah imagined the clench of her jaw as the words punched their way past her teeth. Well, she couldn’t fake doe-eyed innocence anymore. Indignation was probably as close as she could get.
“The part where you call me.”
“Yeah, to tell you to leave my mother alone. To tell you to tell Mike to leave my mother alone. I have no interest in helping NSN pay their satellite bills. Did that once, don’t plan to do it again.”
“Not even to show the world how you’ve reformed?” He threaded the carrot on the rope and dangled it in front of her. “A new person with new hope and new dreams and no needles sticking out of your arm. The TV-viewing public will eat that up.”
“Lance Armstrong might be free. Or a baseball player, any baseball player.”
“But none of them ever graced the cover of People with the headline Meet America’s Darling.”
“You have me mistaken with someone who wants to return to their past. Find another redemption story. I’m not biting.”
The phone clicked and Micah stared into the silence of the receiver. What did she think running a race was if not an attempt to return to her past? When he set the phone back down in the cradle, he knew he had her. He simply needed the right bait.
* * *
“YOU CAN’T PLAY that trick a second time,” Ruby’s cousin Haley said, the exasperation in her voice loud and clear, even over an echoing cell connection. “You know Aunt Julie called my mom, right?”
“There has to be something else you need to do for the wedding that your favorite cousin and best friend is essential for.”
“Aunt. Julie. Called. My. Mom.” Haley huffed. “Like I was a teenager sneaking out to a college party.”
“And the dress shop.”
“What! Really?”
“I should have foreseen that, honestly. Mom has always been thorough.” Only as Ruby realized that neither her brother nor her sister had managed to sneak out of the house as teenagers did she wonder if her mother had been as ignorant of the doping as she’d claimed.
“I can barely stand this sneaking around, and you live it every day, Ruby.”
“I rarely have to sneak.” Like the crazed wife in the attic, unless she threatened to make the papers, her parents simply pretended she wasn’t there.
“You really should move out.”
“I know.” Haley had been telling Ruby to get out on her own for years now, since that first sponsorship offer had come in. Ruby was more tempted now than she had ever been. She could make friends other than her cousin. Maybe even invite a man over, if she could find one who wasn’t constantly trying to one-up her, or one who didn’t lord her past over her.
Micah? No, he failed the second criteria. And he could probably fake liking her enough to interview her, but not beyond the cameras rolling. She wasn’t sure she’d trust him even if he were nice to her.
Who was she kidding? It wasn’t as though she could afford to move out on her own. Her only skill was winning middle-distance races. And all the money she had from sponsorship was frozen while the two lawsuits against her by a shoe company and a sports-drink company moved through courts at their glacial pace. She’d question the credentials of any school that wanted her for a coach, and any private athlete who hired her would be tested for drugs so often their veins would collapse. Her college major and the degree it was printed on would be worth money only if she put it on eBay and accepted bids.
None of which she would say out loud, even to her cousin, who already knew it all. “My parents were there for me when I needed them. And they still want me here.” A close-enough interpretation of the look of panic her mom got whenever Ruby mentioned looking for an apartment.
“Your dad went all lawyer-happy when you needed him. And your mom fell apart. And they want you at the house because they fear the gossip, not because they like your company.”
In this, her cousin was both right and wrong. Both her parents had been available and supportive—or at least available—when Ruby had needed them. But the last time their support had come in the form of a hug was five years ago. All of which only made Ruby more determined to run another race. No matter what her parents thought, running had always been for her.
“Plus,” Haley continued, “before you run another race, how do you know that reporter isn’t looking for you?” Was her cousin trying to convince her to move out or to hide in a bunker?
“According to NSN’s website, he’ll be at a Brewers game that weekend because they’re honoring some ex-player he’s going to interview. In fact—” Ruby’s excitement grew with every word she spoke, both at the thought of another race and beating Haley in this argument “—because the Brewers are in Milwaukee and I’ll be in Indiana, I’ll be farther away from Micah than I have knowingly been in five years.”
Haley let out a big puff of air. “Fine. But I think you’re overplaying your hand. Move out of that house. Get a job. Live a normal life.”
“Just one more race.”
“Said the addict to the heroin needle.”
* * *
AS MICAH REWATCHED some of the film Amir had taken of Ruby, an itch developed between his shoulder blades. There was something off about her stride and a look of pain on her face that couldn’t be the fifty-kilometer run, because she was only five kilometers into the race, which had been her best distance as an Olympian. He looked at her finishing time, which he’d written on a sticky note and stuck on a printout of the photo of her with the American flag high over her head. The itch paced in a circle between his scapulae, nearly wearing a line in his skin.
Ruby had been slow. Even assuming she was trying to get her ultra legs under her, she had still run a slow race. And if she was only running one race—as she claimed—he thought she would have put everything she had into getting the best time possible. Four hours and forty-three minutes was someone’s best time for a fifty-kilometer race, but it sure as hell wasn’t Ruby Heart’s best time.
Micah shifted his shoulders around but couldn’t get the itch out of his back. He drummed his fingers against his desk, then pressed Play on the film again. Ruby had tossed her hat in an attempt to hide from him and Amir, which meant the camera had much better shots of her face, even through the drizzle that had plagued the race. He slowed the film, reassessing what he saw. The look on Ruby’s face wasn’t pain—it was restraint.
Even if she was consciously holding herself back, he knew top athletes as well as he knew his own grandmama, and she couldn’t have been happy with that time. The four hours and forty-three minutes would needle at her brain and pride until she had to see if she could finish better. And even if she was curtailing her normal power for a very good reason, her natural competitiveness would win out. A woman who cared enough about an Olympic gold medal to stick a needle in her arm wasn’t going to let such a poor time stand as the only record of her ultra career.
He stopped the video and opened a browser. She had run one 50K race and he would guess she would run another. Micah navigated to an ultramarathon website and started searching. He stopped when he came to the trail run in Indiana in three weeks. A 50K, with at least a few spots still open. Easy driving distance from Chicago. The arrow of the mouse twitched on the screen as he considered the chances she wouldn’t be there.
If he was wrong, well, he and Amir would have more footage for NSN’s series, so the entire trip wouldn’t be completely wasted. But he wasn’t wrong. He would see Ruby’s tight ass and sleek thighs encased in running shorts as certain as the yuppies at Wrigley Field would spend more time on their cell phones than watching the Cubs play. Micah picked up his phone and called his boss.
* * *
THREE WEEKS LATER, Amir slid into the driver’s seat of the production van with a huff that Micah ignored. His photographer was a baseball fan and had found the last trip out to an ultramarathon—this one in Idaho to film Currito—to be “about as fun as watching a slug climb a rock.”
Despite Micah being a sports guy, Amir’s slug description sounded more interesting than a baseball game to Micah, a secret he would take to his grave. Watching the ultramarathoners push their bodies to the limit of possibility fascinated Micah, and he felt a certain kinship with a sport based on the idea of giving the middle finger to the world’s perception of what was possible for one body to achieve.
What had possessed Ruby to even try an ultramarathon?
They were on I-94 when Amir asked the question that must have been gnawing at his brain since he’d learned about the change of plans. “If this Ruby Heart really is an—how did you say it?—embarrassment to everything sports stands for, why are we skipping out on what should be a great baseball game, not to mention the festivities afterward, to drive to Indiana and watch people run on dirt for eight hours?”
“We don’t have to stay for the whole race. Just until Ruby finishes.”
“Five hours, then.”
This race was hillier than the one in Iowa had been, but Ruby would be trying to run faster. “No more than four and half.” Micah had also looked at the race times for the top runners for this race. Ruby wouldn’t be at that level yet, but she would be gunning for it, even if she didn’t realize it, and those runners did this race in four hours.
“Still, there’s nothing interesting anywhere near this race.” Amir braked to avoid hitting the car in front of them, then moved to the left lane and passed a long line of cars while muttering under his breath about stupid drivers and stupid Indiana. He had made the same complaint in Iowa and Idaho and would probably repeat it again if they watched the ultramarathon in Chicago. “Why lower your standards to follow this fraud?”
“You never complain when I interview baseball players. And you didn’t complain about the Tour de France, either.”
“Sure.” Amir shrugged. “I like baseball and I’m not foolish enough to complain about a trip to France.” Amir had been his photog for almost three years and remembered those interviews as well as Micah did, though through a different lens. “But while the baseball players and the cyclists both wear tight pants, none of them have pigtails.”
Micah didn’t say anything. The pigtails probably spoke to some disturbing fetish hidden deep within, but he thought they were hot.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_3c33757f-f3ef-5936-8e33-47597146fe2d)
RUBY STOOD AMONG the other racers at the starting line, tapping at the dirt with the toe of her running shoe. The weather was perfect. Most of the race would be spent in the trees, so the bright overhead sun would be welcome, rather than a hindrance. The temperature was cool enough that she shouldn’t overheat at kilometer twenty and there was—thankfully—no rain in the forecast. Her main concern was that the loop crossed two streams and she’d not had much practice running with wet feet.
Still, she thought, lifting her head to look at the morning sky visible through the bright green spring leaves above her, she’d invited the deities Nike and Hermes along for the journey and they’d obliged. She could feel them crouching among the other racers. There would be no measly three minutes to haunt her drive home this weekend.
Haley had flatly refused to provide an alibi for another weekend. Her cousin had said she didn’t have a problem lying to Ruby’s parents, but Haley was all out of plausible excuses and she didn’t have the energy to think of implausible ones the Hearts would believe. Ruby had been about to forfeit her entry fee when her mom had announced that she was taking a spur-of-the-moment spa weekend, which meant her father would use the opportunity to stay in the city and work. Or whatever else he did.
She shifted her weight from side to side, partially to keep muscles pliable and partially to move the uncomfortable knowledge of how naive and self-centered she’d been far enough into the back of her head that she didn’t have to stare at it throughout the race. When she’d been training she’d been so focused on herself. Her entire family had been focused on her. All the spare resources went to Team Ruby. She hadn’t even noticed how unhappy her family was until she didn’t have anything else to occupy her mind and they no longer had her to rally around any. Her career hadn’t been the glue that held them together; it had been the butterfly bandage barely keeping them from falling apart when really they’d needed stiches. Now they were left with a scar that would never go away.
This time around she was racing on her own, with her own meager resources. Even though she wasn’t doing it to win, her entire family—maybe not Josh—would say she was being selfish. And they’d be right. She was here to find the good parts of Ruby Heart again. She hadn’t realized that for her first race, but she knew that now. Ruby Heart had been a scandal and she’d done something horrible, but she couldn’t be all bad.
She shivered as it felt as if a mouse ran down her spine. The crowds were sparse enough that she could glance around and see each and every person waiting for the gun to go off. Including the man she wanted to see least, the man who could wreck her whole plan to rediscover Ruby Heart. Micah Blackwell was watching her from the sidelines with his head cocked, a vague smile on his face and his hands on the wheels of his chair as if he were going to dart away from the sidelines to race after her at any moment. Right behind him stood his cameraman and the giant camera stared at her with its black, unblinking eye.
The starting gun boomed and Ruby burst forward. Try to catch me, she wanted to yell. She wanted to laugh. Micah could chase her all he wanted, but she was Ruby Heart, and he would never catch her.
* * *
MICAH SAT ON the sidelines, tapping his fingers against the wheel of his chair and watching Ruby work to keep her muscles warm for the race. The neon green hat Ruby had been wearing at the first race must have been completely abandoned in Iowa, because she wore a different hat today. The mud-brown canvas wasn’t nearly as eye-catching as the neon had been, but it didn’t need to be. The set of Ruby’s shoulders would attract as much attention as any ugly hat. Her hot pants were a velvety gray, and she wore a tight yellow running shirt. When she moved, he thought he saw a gray parrot silhouetted in the fabric of the back of her shirt. Not quite trying to hide in the crowds today. People would remember the parrot. He was going to remember the way her muscles shifted and moved, like watching a panther stretch.
Her body stilled. She had seen him watching her. Then she straightened and her shoulders rolled back. As the countdown got closer to one, Ruby tilted herself forward. When the gun went off, her muscles contracted for a blink of an eye before she burst forward. Ruby Heart was back. And different.
* * *
SHE FINISHED IN just under four hours, fifteen minutes, smashing her past race time and on a harder course, and all that was left to do was to enjoy the euphoria of finishing a race and eat her banana before she fell over. Instead, she took a sip of her beer and looked around. The congratulations friends and family offered other runners boomed over the clamor of the band onstage. The spectators also offered assistance. “How do you feel? Have a seat, I’ll get you some chips. The guac is real good.”
The top finishers in the race hung around, chatting with one another like old friends and cheering for the runners crossing the finish line. Step over that line from pain into party, their cheers promised. Supportive. Encouraging. A reminder of what it had been like to be a member of a team, even though these were all individual racers.
Her runner’s high put a goofy smile on her face and she stood there, not certain where to put her hands, where to look, wishing she had someone to hold a plate of chips and guacamole for her. Finishing one small plate of food was enough to make her feel ready to take the shuttle back to her hotel, so Ruby left the postrace celebration.
She, Ruby Heart, used to being surrounded by coaches and her mother at the end of a race, accustomed to the cheers of an Olympic stadium, had been the only racer on the bus ride back. Of course, old Ruby Heart had been accustomed to winning, not achieving personal bests.
The last of her race euphoria abandoned her when she crossed the threshold into her hotel room. As the sweat crystalized on her body in the dry hotel room air-conditioning, she wondered, who is Ruby Heart? Whoever she was, she needed to find dinner and rest, or else it wouldn’t matter who Ruby Heart was, because she’d be as stiff as a stadium seat in the morning and would have to drive like a zombie with her joints all locked up.
The phone next to the bed rang and Ruby had the relief of having something to do. “Hello?”
“Ruby?”
The velvet voice said her name, like it did in her dreams before turning on her. You had someone shove your failure into your arm and then you pissed your dreams away. When she hadn’t seen Micah at the finish line, she’d convinced herself that his presence at the starting line had been a figment of her imagination. And been disappointed that he’d given up so easily.
A part of her—one larger than she cared to admit—wished Micah were at her door. Company, any company, would be nice, but especially company that understood what it meant to create and then smash a personal goal.
But those desires were overshadowed by terror that the press wolves were only waiting for the call of their leader to descend upon her. With no talking, not even the television, to drown out the beats, the drum of her pen tapping the hotel pad filled the room.
Ruby put the pen down. Pretending to be someone she wasn’t, lying to herself and everyone around her about her true nature, isolated her. Cabin fever, only without the fresh pine scent of the woods.
Lying created multilevel problems, like the fear deep in her breast that her falsehood would be found out. Because she knew what happened when the world discovered you’d been lying to them. Only this would be worse, because their anger would be unleashed at Ruby’s true self, rather than a publicity designed cover girl.
These ultra runs were about conquering your mind as much as your body, so she drew on the reserves of mental energy that kept her putting one foot in front of another and responded without a hint of fear in her voice. “Hello, Micah. Couldn’t get the hotel staff to give you my room number this time?”
“Didn’t have Amir follow you to your floor.” His tone was gentle and correcting, but also offered something. He was playing nice today.
She wondered what else he would offer in exchange for her story and how hard she could push him away before he snapped. “That you did that is incredibly creepy.”
He chuckled. “You’re right. In this case, the bald truth serves me better than a well-crafted story. In Iowa, Amir was on the same floor and discovered your room number by sheer luck. Luck failed me this time. But that’s okay, because I’m not calling for business.”
She picked up the pen. Put it down. Stood to walk around the room, only to be stopped by the cord. The last phone in the world to have a cord was in her hotel room. The bed squeaked when she sat back down on the brown-and-orange-striped comforter. “And I’m not the same naive fool I was five years ago, so tell me a story I might believe.”
There was silence on the line for a while before Micah said, “Okay. I’m here on business, but I know I’m not going to get an interview today. Amir is still partying with the racers, so a camera isn’t even available. But I’d like the chance to convince you to sit for an interview. And not just an interview—an entire feature series where you can tell your story.”
“Over the phone?” She could leave the receiver sitting on the bed, take a shower and he could try to persuade her all he wanted. If she turned the volume on the phone all the way up, maybe she could listen to his voice stroke her skin while the water rushed over her.
“Over dinner.”
Ruby was so shocked she couldn’t say anything for several seconds. He really thinks I’ll say yes to dinner? Then she opened her mouth to say no, and the intake of her breath was the loudest sound in the room. The joyous group in the hall, probably a runner and her family celebrating the finish, had passed out of her hearing. If she said yes, she would be eating dinner with Micah Blackwell, who probably still hated her. If she said no, she would be eating dinner alone.
“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 (#ulink_11267d55-9f7e-5a21-8b58-95f02b47a08d)
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.
Instead, he was silent for several seconds. Ruby was about to tell him to forget she asked when he said, “Why are you asking me this question and not someone else?”
“Because when everyone close to me was telling me that blood doping was no big deal, you came right out and told me that I was the emperor wearing no clothes.” After that interview, faced with his scorn, she’d been naked, shivering with exposure. “If I specifically ask you for the truth, you won’t lie to me.”
Micah drummed his fingers on the table as he regarded her, again stripping away the protective layers she’d so carefully constructed over the past several years until her raw nakedness was exposed. She shivered.
“Do people lie to you regularly?” he asked.
“Forget it.” She shoved a heaping pile of refried beans onto her fork. It was more than she could fit in her mouth, but the protein in the beans would help her build back the layers she needed to protect herself. “Despite you pretending earlier, this isn’t a conversation. Hell, it’s not even an interview. This is turning into some weird therapy session.”
“You’re the one who asked the question.”
“And you’ve only answered with questions of your own. And how did it make you feel knowing that the people you trusted most said, ‘everyone does it,’ and you wanted to win so badly that you believed them? How does it make you feel that people call you a lying bitch at the grocery store for cheating and a betraying bitch for confessing?” she mocked.
Suddenly cold, she pushed her chair back from the table, using so much force that the back legs caught on the carpet and she had to grab on to the table before she toppled over. Once she’d righted herself, she rooted around in her bag for a sweatshirt, desperate for more cover. But she wasn’t going to run away and hide from him. When she returned to the table, she lifted her chin and looked him directly in the eyes.
The drumming of his fingers irritated her to no end. So did his placid face. He should be angry. Or something. Not this provoking openness that made her ask such questions in the first place. She pushed her beans around the take-out container. Forgive her or yell at her. None of this middle-ground crap.
“So people do lie to you.”
“I assume the ones calling me a bitch are expressing their true feelings. It’s the people who tell me, ‘it’s not so bad,’ that I doubt.” He was doing it again—getting her to answer a question without answering one himself. She scooped beans onto her fork and took a bite, again getting more beans than were possible for her to swallow easily. Maybe now she’d think and chew before giving in to his questions.
Micah took a big sip of his drink. Ruby mashed the beans with her tongue, wishing she were eating something chewy, like bread, so she could pretend her food needed several good chomps and fight her body’s reflex to swallow. Could she outchew him?
Just as she decided he wasn’t going to answer, Micah spoke. “I did hate you. After that interview, when you were so naive and stupid and blind about the trust you’d abused. And you had the audacity to compare your cheating to my disability. Like a freak accident that changed my body forever is the same thing as your calculated decision to modify yours. You hid out in your parents’ house, coming out only when it was convenient for you and, for the most part, your world has not changed. Meanwhile, I have to fight for the world to recognize that my life has as much worth now that I can’t wiggle my toes as it did when I could.”
She swallowed, the taste of her food overwhelmed by the bitterness of her past ignorance. “Yes, I’m...”
“Stop.” Weariness overcame his face. “Apologizing only makes it worse.”
“Can I agree that I was stupid?”
To her surprise—and apparently to his, as well—Micah smiled. “Yes, you can agree with me on that.” He cocked his head to the side and the pendant lamp caught a twinkle in his eyes. God, he was good-looking. “I like to be agreed with.”
“When you said hate, you used the past tense.”
“I have better things to spend my energy on than keeping alive a feeling as powerful as hate for you.”
About as much worth hating as a pebble stuck in his tire, she was sure. “So why interview me about ultramarathons? Why not Geoff Roes or Jenn Shelton or Currito?”
“Geoff has his own movie and Jenn her own book. Currito is an interesting guy, but you getting back into running would be the story of the year. Everyone would be wondering if America’s Darling had really reformed. You’d be back on the cover of People. Sports Illustrated would do another story on you. If Oprah were still on, you’d be invited to sit on her couch. And you know it, too.”
He was right, she did know it. And it was part of the reason she would say no to his requests until cows came home bearing her gold medal. “Since I’ve only recently been replaced as the sports villain du jour, I’m going to keep saying no to this idea you have of a feature on me, no matter how many times you call my mother.”
“Let’s make a deal.” Damn his wide, inviting eyes. He didn’t beg or make her beg, but there was something in the cast of his features and the assurance with which he carried himself that made her want to talk to him. “I’ll answer one of your questions for every one of mine you answer.”
She suppressed the feeling of small victory by clinging to reality. “You didn’t answer the second half of my first question.”
“Do you need my forgiveness to move on with your life?” His left dimple deepened as one side of his mouth kicked up in a smile.
“That’s a really annoying habit, you know.” She refused to be as amused by him as he was by himself.
“If you’d agreed to the bargain, then that would count as one of my questions.” He opened his arms to her. They looked so strong and protective that she wanted to crawl into them, so she looked away and only half heard what he said next. “The bargain is open-ended. You can keep a tally of questions I ask in your back pocket and use them against me.”
The dim hotel room. The buzz of the air conditioner. Light brown eyebrows shadowing blue eyes. She wasn’t safe here, as she’d led herself to believe. But she was better—in this room, life was certain. Micah couldn’t be relied on not to hurt her, but he would be honest with her when she asked, and enough people lied to her while trying not to hurt her that his honesty was enough for right now.
“Whatever I say is off-the-record. This isn’t an interview.”
“I agree to that.”
“Do you swear?”
“You said you wanted my opinion because I wouldn’t lie to you. I said I agreed this wasn’t an interview. Either you believe me or you don’t.”
Ruby put her elbows on the small table, wrapping her hands together in front of her mouth, while she thought about his question. Either you believe me or you don’t. “Trust me enough to close your eyes and leap across the chasm with me,” the soft blue of his eyes said. He raised an eyebrow at her and she looked away again.
She didn’t want to hide anymore. She didn’t want to be hounded, but she didn’t think she should have to live in a hole in the ground, either. She lowered her hands so they no longer blocked her face and looked him in the eye. “I don’t think I know what forgiveness is, so how do I know if I need it to move on with my life?”
Micah made a low whistling noise. Ruby looked down at her food, pushing the last bits of enchilada and beans around in the take-out container. After such an embarrassing confession, she should want to close the container, open the room door and encourage Micah out. Instead, she wanted to hear what he had to say. His opinion mattered—as it had five years ago. Only then it had sent her scurrying into her parents’ house in shame. Now she hoped to use what he told her to bust out forever.
The sucking of air through his teeth that had made the whistle ended, followed by a short laugh. He shook his head. “This is a much weightier conversation than I expected tonight.”
“What did you expect?”
“To lower your inhibitions with a margarita, fill your belly and quiet your mind with Mexican food, and get you to confess the secret, nefarious reason that you’ve started running again.”
A hot glimmer of betrayal flickered in her belly. “You said this wasn’t an interview.”
“You said this wasn’t going to be an interview and I agreed. I made no promises about not using my knowledge to get an interview later.”
His food was mostly eaten, she noticed, compared to the putty she’d made of her meal. She had to eat, so she reached across the table for a chip to dip into her concoction, asking, “And now?” before shoving the mess into her mouth.
“This series can help you.”
“Help me what? Help me win, right?” she said, mocking every lie she’d already been told. This will make you better, stronger, faster. The easy way her coach had led her from adding protein powder to her breakfast shakes to shoving an oxygen mask over her face to finally sticking a needle in her arm. “Tell me a lie I haven’t heard before.” The lip-puckering sweetness of the margarita would help wash the taste of deception out of her mouth, so she wrapped her lips around the straw and sucked in, her sip noisy and harsh.
“The whole world has been told their version of the rise and fall of America’s Darling. Don’t you want the chance to tell your side of the story?” He rested his arms on the table and leaned into her, the magnetism of his personality reaching across the table and pulling her into him as easily as if she had a cord coming out of her chest and he held the other end. “Tell the American public why you did it, what lessons you learned and how you’re a new and better person. Be an example of how a past can be remade into a stronger future. The public loves a good redemption story. Look at Mike Tyson and his pigeons.”
The cord snapped when she laughed. She fell back into her chair, causing the straw to bump her top teeth and the melting lime and tequila to burn the back of her throat. “Did you just compare me to Mike Tyson? He bit off some guy’s ear.”
“It wasn’t a great comparison....”
“He went to prison for rape—it was a terrible comparison.” She was silent for a moment. “Though I suppose cheating is cheating, whether it’s an ear or a needle.”
“And you don’t have pigeons.”
“I have a flock of backyard hens.”
“Really?” A smile as rich and decadent as chocolate melted across his face. Foolish hunger spread across her belly. Why Micah?
“No,” she said, reluctant to admit the truth. Seeing him completely reevaluate everything he knew about her had felt good, even if only for a moment. “My parents would never allow it. I’ve never even had a pet—not so much as a goldfish.” Her volunteer work at the shelter was for her, so she didn’t mention it. Besides, they weren’t her pets. “Look, I get that you’re trying to help. Or you think you’re trying to help. But America’s not interested in a redemption story, and I’m only running to prove to myself I still can. And it’s great.”
“A run around the block can’t teach you your feet still work?”
“A block is hardly the same thing as fifty kilometers.”
And fifty kilometers wasn’t the same thing as fifty miles. There weren’t many ultras in the summer, which gave her plenty of time to train for a longer race. Telling herself she was going to casually run a 50K hadn’t stopped her from putting together a training schedule for a fifty-mile race. And she’d planned to finish in line with the other elite runners, too. No casual run in the woods; it would be a race to the finish even if she crossed the finish line and fell over.
“And the second race?” His words brought her attention back to the present and the foolishness of the fifty-mile dream, especially if she did want to stay away from the attention of the press.
“To prove to myself that my parents couldn’t stop me.” And those three fucking minutes.
“And what will your excuse for run three be?”
She scowled at him.
“King Ramsey knows I was interested in someone other than Currito. And he’s not as oblivious as he seems. He’s going to figure out who you are, and he’ll be a lot more of a pest than I am. Any interview he gives you is likely to be a trap.”
“Getting out of traps is my specialty.”
“Don’t let your newfound sense of success trick you into being stupid. The interview I’m offering could be gold for your reputation. You could get your life back.”
“Said the spider to the fly.”
“What happened to trusting me?”
“I never said I trusted you, only that you would tell me the truth, even if your intentions for not lying to me are questionable. Five years ago you showed me the truth about myself, and it was devastating to me.” An understatement. “That it was also the kindest thing anyone could have done was an accident that I think you would have prevented had you known.”
When Micah reached across the table and took one of her hands in his, the shock waves of his touch reverberated through her body to her belly. His hand was more callused than she had expected. It was also warm and solid and strong. “I’m not sorry that what I said devastated you. But give me a chance to show the world the new person you’ve made from that devastation.”
She wished she could leave her hand in his all night and into the next morning. Crawl into bed with him and feel his strong arms wrapped around her. Find comfort in the warmth of his bare chest against her back. Not just sex, but a night in which she could pretend she was loved. “I hope I’m a new person, but it’s been five years and I’m still running and still living with my parents and I’m not sure what parts of me are new.”
“Be patient.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “One morning, I woke up in a different body than the one I remembered.” Then he laughed and gave her a rueful smile. “Of course, when everyone told me to be patient, I told them to fuck off, that I’d never been patient before in my life and I didn’t intend to start now.” He shrugged and his hand tightened against hers once again. “It’s still good advice, though.”
“You can’t run fifty kilometers and not be a model of patience. Or perseverance.” Not to mention the fifty miles she was planning in the back of her head. Stop that, Ruby. But thinking about Micah was no safer. “And we haven’t even talked about how patient I have been and will continue to be about my finances, because I’ll probably be dead before the lawsuits against me are resolved.”
“Let’s both hope it doesn’t come to that.” Micah slipped his hand out of hers, leaving it feeling limp and empty. “I should go. This has been a far more interesting—and more pleasant—conversation than I expected.”
He backed his chair away from the table and was maneuvering himself out of the tight hotel space when she thought to ask another question. “Why did you interview me? That first time?”
Micah moved so that he was looking at her, his face as expressionless as his voice when he answered, “The ratings, of course.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.” She knew—had known at the time—that her father had only agreed to the interview because he’d confused Micah’s loss of agility in his legs with a loss of agility in his mind. It was a miscalculation her father regretted to this day, though he blamed Micah for the mistake.
“Yes, I know what you mean.” Micah sat, suspended between the table and the door, assessing her yet again. “I was angry at your father and his arrogance. And I could have let my anger get in the way of the fabulous opportunity he offered on a silver platter wrapped up in gold ribbon. Or I could have harnessed my anger to do the best interview of my life. I decided on the latter.”
He put his hands on his wheels and the chair rolled forward, just slightly, then stopped. “Halfway through the interview, I was angrier at you than at your father. Your father is nothing. His position in life is due to his parents’ money, a good education and other people wilting under his bluster. You, though—you were something special.”
She grimaced at the past tense, the mistakes she’d made in her life floating around her. They weren’t threatening specters anymore, but they were ghosts all the same, and no exorcism she’d tried had rid her of them yet. “Patience, you said, right?”
“Whatever you remake yourself into, you won’t be the same as before. And no distance you run will bring that back.”
“I know.” She bit back angrier words. Of course she knew. The details of her suspension had been explained to her over and over and over until she could recite them in her sleep. There were no medals in her future, no matter what she did. She took a deep breath; she’d asked Micah for honesty. “I’m running for me.”
“I think I believe you.” Micah looked at his watch. “I really do have to go.”
“Don’t leave on my account.” She didn’t want to be alone in this hotel room again. When he rolled out that door, the promise of friendship would fade into prepared questions, studio lights and a voice-over turning her life into a movie trailer.
“No, I have to go on my account. I have to use the bathroom.”
She glanced to the doorway of her bathroom, assessing whether his chair would fit. “You can use mine. If you can’t close the door, I’ll step outside.”
“Ruby, I didn’t bring a catheter.”
“Oh.” She felt stupid for not realizing that. She stepped around him, putting her hand on the doorknob and bracing herself to let him out.
“Maybe the arms aren’t so attractive now that you know the details of how I pee?”
Her face got hot, and she was sure she’d turned bright red. “I wasn’t...” She didn’t realize he’d noticed, but she’d probably all but drooled at the ropy definition in his forearms. He wasn’t oblivious.
“Everyone admires my arms. I’m the only person who seems to remember that my legs still exist and are living their own life, even if we’re no longer on speaking terms.”
She had remembered his legs and wanted to see them, but she couldn’t figure out if it was an athlete’s natural curiosity about bodies or because of the way her insides tingled and her breath stilled when she thought of him. Curiosity or desire?
Her motivations probably didn’t matter to Micah. She shrugged. “I had someone stick a needle in my arm and pump a stranger’s blood through my body in order to win a shiny necklace. It would be silly for me to be put off by the plastic you use to pee.”
The smile she surprised out of him was as smooth as sin and just as confident. “Good night, Ruby.”
When she opened the door, the real world rushed in with the sounds of a couple laughing in the hallway, the beep of the elevator and the false brightness of the light outside her door. Micah wheeled out her door, and she watched until he disappeared around a corner.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_f8941884-6e27-5688-8e7a-9086ef3e202b)
MICAH WOKE UP the next morning still thinking about Ruby and their conversation. Not only thinking—which would be acceptable—but caring. Much to his surprise, he was beginning to believe her when she said she was doing this for herself and not for notoriety and fame. The lady may be protesting too much, but he now thought she might be doing it because she really didn’t want the spotlight on her.
A shame, because he was more convinced than ever that the series he imagined would boost his career, along with rehabilitating her image. And, if he was honest with himself, he liked spending time with her. Worse, he liked the tilt of her nose and the slight curves of her breasts as much as he liked her perseverance.
Well, she wasn’t the only one made more tenacious and stubborn by life’s experience. So long as Derek didn’t pull the plug on the whole enterprise, Micah would keep showing up at Ruby’s races with Amir to get footage. Eventually she would say yes. She would cave, if for no other reason than that she would gain enough confidence in her new self that the thought of letting other people tell her story would start to piss her off. Hell, by that point he might have so much footage on her that he wouldn’t need an interview.
He swung himself out of bed and into his chair, respect for her tugging at his conscious. She was trying to redefine herself and her life with notoriety hanging over her head. Whether or not she should have awakened to her new life five or four or three or two years ago was beside the point. Rebirth was a hard and painful process. It didn’t matter if the world was rooting for you or against you, just cracking that old skin and letting the sensitive new bits see the light of day was scary. Many people didn’t even try it until it was too late.
Micah dug a pair of jeans and a Texas A&M T-shirt out of his bag, still mulling over his plans for Ruby while getting dressed. Her worry that the world wouldn’t accept her redemption story was justified. He could cook the story however he wanted, but the viewing public had to be in a mood to swallow rather than spit it out.
He patted the bed for his belt and didn’t feel anything. When he looked up, the silver in his belt buckle glinted at him from the top of his bag, and he weighed vanity against going to get it. Vanity won.
The fact that he’d even forgotten his belt was a sign that Ruby gave him as much to worry about as he gave her. Conflict of interest was spelled out in the lines of her muscles as clearly as his promotion was. He tightened his belt, making sure to note the notch he was using and any pleats or excess in his clothing. The belt was vanity, but it also helped him monitor the condition of his stomach. He’d never have the muscle definition in his abs that he’d had in college, but it was good health practice to make sure he kept up what was physically possible.
If he was smart, he would leave Ruby alone until she came around to his point of view. And he’d keep all their interactions professional from now on. No more intimate dinners in dark hotel rooms with liquor to loosen inhibitions. Only the great outdoors and blinding studio lights.
None of which stopped Micah, before packing his bag, from writing a short note to Ruby to leave at the front desk.
* * *
RUBY HAD PASSED her signed receipt to the desk attendant and was easing her duffel bag onto her shoulder when the clerk said, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and slid an envelope across the desk.
The outside read, “Ruby Heart” in forthright printed letters. She flipped the envelope over and ran her finger under the barely sealed flap. There was a phone number followed by a short message. “Interview or otherwise. Micah.” The handwriting on the note was the same as the envelope. Honest. Blunt. They were qualities she’d never expected to appreciate in a man, but she’d also never expected to look back on a conversation with Micah Blackwell and hope to have another.
She slipped the note into an inside pocket of her purse before she could consider either the interview or the otherwise.
* * *
THREE DAYS LATER, Ruby stood outside the glass doors of the animal shelter and jogged in place to warm up her muscles. In deference to her race over the weekend, she’d made today a short volunteering day. A one-mile loop around a couple blocks times ten dogs would equal ten miles of running. She’d take it easy and slow, making sure her blood flowed through every cell in her body and rinsed out any lingering fatigue. And if a dog wanted to walk, she’d walk.
Three years ago, she’d sought volunteer opportunities because she needed to get out of the house, but every time she left to even take a walk or go to the grocery store, her mother fretted about photographers, running, rumors and scandal. As if they lived in a soap opera. Or like Ruby was Britney Spears.
Haley was the one who’d suggested the shelter. “They always need people to walk the dogs, and your parents aren’t heartless enough to complain that you’re volunteering at an animal shelter.” Her cousin had been right about the first and mostly right about the second. Ruby’s mother had obviously considered complaining and her father had made a snide comment about people who don’t take care of their responsibilities, but her brother, Josh, had countered by pointing out how good it would look if the press found out.
After about a month of walking dogs every day, Ruby had suggested that she take some of the more hyperactive dogs running. Ruby and the dogs had gone through an adjustment period where, with the help of one of the volunteer trainers, Ruby had learned how to be the alpha dog and the dogs had learned how to run with a partner. The idea had been a win for everyone involved. Ruby got out of the house and back into running on a regular basis. The shelter had upped their adoption rate of the bigger dogs, for whom better exercise meant they were less anxious around potential owners.
And Ruby had watched the shelter employees care for and be gentle with dogs too sick, too aggressive or too old to be easily adopted. The employees and volunteers might have become desensitized to the fate of many of the dogs and cats brought in, but their hearts hadn’t callused over. And so Ruby learned both what it meant for the careless to neglect their responsibilities and for the caring to do the hard thing because it was the right thing. More than Micah’s condemnation of her, the articles in the press and the lawsuits, volunteering at the shelter had taught her the cost of shortcuts in each and every frightened pair of eyes that peered through the cages at her as she walked past them.
Ruby reached down to touch her toes. A pair of boots and white dog feet appeared in her sight line. She looked up. Jodie, the volunteer coordinator, stood holding on to a leash attached to a Dalmatian. Even though the Dalmatian was sitting, the dog’s nervous energy was evident in the way it shook and how its eyes darted about. The dog looked young, scared and ready to bolt.
“This is Dotty,” Jodie said. “Dotty has just been surrendered to us. She’s a year old and needs to be worn-out. If you can stay an extra hour or so, we would appreciate it if you could run her five miles before the other dogs and five miles after.”
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