Читать книгу Winning Ruby Heart - Jennifer Lohmann - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE

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.