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.
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