Love Game

Another silence and I could practically hear Jason’s smile.

“You like her.”

“Yes, bloody hell, it’s not frontpage news. I don’t want to leave her stranded, but she’s only the receptionist—”

“But you like her and it’s frustrating as hell, right? To have feelings for someone?”

“I don’t have bloody feelings for her.”

“Right. You’re calling me at three in the morning to tell me you don’t have feelings for her. You just said you liked her.”

“As a person, yes.” I wanted to strangle my agent through the phone. “But I’m calling to tell you that this whole thing is stupid, a huge distraction, and not working.”

“Uh huh. You want to know what I think is happening here?”

“Yes, tell me. I don’t know what the fuck is happening here, except that I’m turning into a giant pussy.”

“For the first time in your life, you’re viewing a woman as an actual human being. Congratulations. Welcome to evolution. Anything else? No? I’m going back to bed.”

“Jase—”

“Goodnight, Kai. See you in a week.”

A click and then silence.

“Bloody useless bastard,” I muttered and threw myself on the bed to stare at the ceiling.

Even more useless were the feelings I had swirling in my gut. Mysterious and alien and good and…

No, not good.

This was bad. It was going to end badly. I had a sharp tongue. A bad temper. The longer Daisy was around me, the greater the chances I was going to say something unforgiveable. It was inevitable. Like a tennis match of mine that started out well and then devolved to crap when an opponent started to win. Because my favorite matches were love games—ones in which I scored all the points on my opponent.

And they scored none.

Daisy

The storm departed and with it, so did whatever kind of intimacy Kai and I had shared that night I told him about the break-in. For the next few days, he was reserved and silent, blowing off our Reiki sessions by keeping himself surrounded by his fitness team.

They’d appeared one morning in a mass of testosterone—trainers and nutritionists who took stock of every move Kai made in the gym and every bite of food that went into his mouth.

“They need to get my pre-Open program set up,” he’d told me. “I’ll be free again in a few days.”

Then Lana had to explain to me the sudden influx of publicists that swarmed the big house. Apparently, there was going to be some sort of media event at the country club in Wailea to celebrate the Open too. When his fitness team was done with him, Kai’s publicity team took over, prepping him, taking promotional photographs and crafting soundbites for the event.

“It’s like a big party,” Lana told me, “to drum up excitement for the Open with press and other tennis officials.”

“Will Jason be here for it?”

“I’m sure he will.”

I nodded, feeling even more useless and squandering of Jason’s trust. He was going to arrive in a few days and see I’d made no progress at all.

The demands made on a professional tennis player weren’t anything I was familiar with, but I suspected my confessing about my qualifications—or lack thereof—was the real reason behind Kai’s silent treatment. Wouldn’t he want to include our sessions in his fitness plan if he were serious?

Or maybe telling him about the break-in was too much.

I wondered if I’d crossed some kind of professional line. Or personal. Kai was allergic to talking about feelings or anything involving emotions and I’d overloaded him.