Mistress of the Game

"Of course I remember."

Those tours with her father felt like yesterday.

Lexi had loved every second of them.

"Jamie! Take Thomas the Tank Engine out of your sister's cereal right now or you're going on the naughty step."

Gabe McGregor fixed his four-year-old son with what he hoped was a stern stare.

Jamie said seriously: "I'm sorry, Daddy. I certainly can't do that. Thomas has crashed and bust his buffers. Now he must wait for the breakdown train to rescue him."

"Cheer - ohs! Cheeeeer oooooohs!" Collette, Jamie's two-year-old sister, burst into ear-splitting wails. "Don't wanna train! My Cheer-ohs!"

"Stop crying, Collette," said Jamie angrily. "You're giving Thomas a head-gate."

"Jamie!" Gabe shouted.

Marching silently over to the breakfast table, Tara McGregor removed the offending train from Collette's cereal bowl, dried it with a paper towel and handed it to her protesting son. "Any more moaning, Jamie and Thomas is in the trash. Finish your toast and you can have a chocolate milk."

To Gabe's astonishment, Jamie promptly forgot about his train and focused on stuffing peanut-butter toast into his mouth. Pretty soon his cheeks bulged like a hamster's. "Finished."

"Are you sure he won't choke?" Gabe glanced worriedly at Tara. "He looks like a snake trying to swallow a rabbit."

Tara didn't look up. "He'll be fine."

As usual, Tara McGregor's morning routine was a ridiculous juggling act: cooking breakfast, feeding and dressing the kids, refereeing World War III and helping Gabe remember where he'd put his socks/laptop/ phone/sanity.

Gabe watched his wife frying bacon for his sandwich with one hand while checking e-mails on her BlackBerry with the other. With her glossy red hair, slender waist and long, gazellelike legs, there was an old-fashioned sexiness about Tara that motherhood seemed only to have enhanced. From behind, she looked like Cyd Charisse. From the front, the impression was more innocent and wholesome. Rosie the Riveter meets Irish farmer's daughter. Pale skin. Freckles. Large, womanly breasts. A smile so broad it had knocked Gabe off his feet the first time he saw it, and still made him want to take her upstairs and ravish her now, six years later.

By nine o'clock this morning, Tara would be at the clinic, up to her elbows in dying babies.

She's an angel. One in a million. How the hell did a girl that smart and beautiful ever fall for a guy like me?

Tara Dineen loathed Gabe McGregor on sight.

"That guy? You mean the cheese ball?"

Tara and her girlfriend, Angela, were in a trendy new bar at the Waterfront. Angela had singled out Gabe as a "hot guy." Tara begged to differ.

"What's wrong with him?" asked Angela. "He's got Tom Brady's body and Daniel Craig's face. He's edible."

"And he knows it," said Tara archly. "Look at him, flashing his cash in front of all those toothpicks."

As usual, Gabe was surrounded by a gaggle of models, whom he was ostentatiously plying with Cristal.

"Let's go over there," said Angela.

"No thanks. You're on your own."

Angela made a beeline for Gabe. They chatted for a while, but Gabe's eye kept wandering back to the redhead giving him death stares from across the bar.

"Doesn't your friend want to join us?"

"No," said Angela, annoyed. Why did Tara always get all the male attention? "If you must know, she thinks you're a cheese ball."

"Does she, now?"

Gabe put down his drink. Marching over to Tara, he demanded: "Do you always judge a man before you've spoken to him?"

On closer inspection, Gabe could see that the girl wasn't classically beautiful. She had an upturned nose. Her eyes were set slightly too wide. She was tall and strong. The word strapping sprang to mind. And yet there was something compelling about her, something that set her apart from the Vogue beauties he usually dated.

"Not always, no. But in your case...well."

"Well what?"

"It's obvious."

"What is?"

"You!" Tara laughed. "Come on. The overpriced champagne? The Rolex watch? Your little harem over there? What do you drive? Don't tell me." She closed her eyes in mock concentration. "A Ferrari, right? Or...no. An Aston Martin! I'll bet you fancy yourself as a regular little James Bond."

"As a matter of fact, I drive a perfectly ordinary Range Rover," said Gabe, making a mental note to put his Vanquish up for sale tomorrow morning. "Give me your number and I'll take you out for dinner in it."

"No thanks."

"Why not? I'm a nice guy."

"You're not my type."

"What's your type? I can change."

"For heaven's sake, I'm not your type." Tara gestured to the nineteen-year-old Heidi Klum clones blowing Gabe kisses while they took turns warming his bar stool. "Take some friendly advice and quit while you're ahead."

But Gabe didn't quit. He found out where Tara worked - she was a doctor at a Red Cross AIDS clinic in one of the shantytowns - and had dozens of roses delivered to her every day. He asked her out on countless dates, sent her theater tickets, books, even jewelry. Everything was firmly but politely returned.

After three months, Gabe was on the point of giving up hope when he received an unexpected e-mail from Tara, sent to his work address. When her boss discovered one of his doctors was being pursued by one of the owners of Phoenix, he'd practically frog-marched Tara to the clinic's computer.

"Do you have any idea how much that company is worth? One donation from this McGregor guy and we could buy enough antivirals to see us through the next five years."

"But I'm not interested in him."

"Bugger 'not interested'! People are dying out there, Tara, I don't need to tell you. Now you flutter your eyelashes, and you get Gabriel McGregor back in here with his checkbook, pronto."

"Or what?" Tara laughed. She loved her boss, especially when he tried to lay down the law, bless him.

"Or I'll send you to your room without any supper, you cheeky cow. TYPE!"

Gabe's visit to the Red Cross AIDS clinic at Joe Slovo Shantytown changed his life forever.

Gabe had lived in camps himself. With Dia, he had seen firsthand the hopeless, crushing poverty of the slums. But nothing had prepared him for the depths of human misery at Joe Slovo.

Baby girls as young as two were brought in daily by female relatives after their uncles or fathers had raped them. Apparently the widely held belief that HIV could be "cured" by having sex with a virgin had mutated into a the-younger-the-better theory. Most of the children died from their internal injuries long before they could develop AIDS, their tiny, fragile bodies shattered from the force of penetration.

"Twenty rand buys ten of these child-rape kits," Tara told a clearly shaken Gabe. She handed him a plastic bag with a picture of Winnie the Pooh on the front. Inside was a sanitary napkin, a pair of child's panties, some sterile wipes and a sugar lollipop.

"That's it? A little kid gets raped and that's what you give her?"

Tara shrugged. "They get drugs if we have them. Children are first in line for antivirals. There's nothing else we can do."

After an hour touring the wards - dying girls in their twenties pleading with nurses to save their babies, young men shrunk to skeletons staring listlessly at the ceiling - Gabe excused himself. Tara found him sitting outside, tears streaming down his face. For the first time, she wondered if perhaps she'd been too hard on him. He was so bloody handsome it was hard not to distrust him. But his distress around the kids was obviously genuine.

"I'm sorry. I shocked you."

"It's okay." Gabe's hands were shaking. "I needed to be shocked. What can I do? What do you need?"

"Everything. We need everything. You name it, we need it. Drugs, beds, toys, food, syringes, condoms. We need a miracle."

Gabe reached into his pocket and pulled out a checkbook. Without thinking, he scribbled down a number, signed it, and handed it to Tara.

"I can't do miracles, I'm afraid. But maybe this will help. Just till I can work out something more long-term."

Tara looked at the number and burst into tears.

Their first date was a disaster. Hoping to impress her as a serious-minded citizen, not just another rich playboy, Gabe got them tickets to the premiere of a political documentary that had gotten rave reviews. Tara loved the movie. It was the additional sound track of Gabe's snores she objected to.

"I'm sorry! But you have to admit it was dull."

"Dull? You know it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes."

"Palm Bore more like it," muttered Gabe.

"How could you find that boring? The West's treatment of refugees is one of the most fascinating, complex issues facing modern society."

Not as fascinating as your breasts in that T-shirt.

When they sat down to dinner - Gabe had deliberately chosen a low-key steak house in a quiet neighborhood, nothing too flashy - things got worse. Tara leaned forward, her gorgeous wide-set eyes dancing in the candlelight. For one glorious moment Gabe thought she was about to kiss him.