Love in Straight Sets by Rebecca Crowley Page B

right?”
    Spencer nodded. “The first and only time I was on the receiving end of a breakup phone call. We’ve remained friends, but I’ve always thought about the potential for a second-chance romance.” His grin was wolfish. “If she does retire this year, I might just give her a call.”
    The image of the man’s long, bony fingers running up the inside of Regan’s tanned thigh made Ben’s stomach heave and churn. “What about Tanya?”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Tanya,” Ben repeated more loudly. “Your girlfriend.”
    Spencer blinked. “Oh, of course. Quite right. Well, one never knows what the future holds.”
    Adding a creepy wink to emphasize his point, he turned on his heel and strode back across the room.
    “Well, he hasn’t mellowed with age,” Ben remarked once Spencer was out of earshot.
    “I’d wring his neck if I could,” Des replied with unexpected vehemence. “He swooped in on Regan in her first year on the circuit. The relationship was so tempestuous that she finished way below where she should have. Unfortunately he seems to have set the tone.” He shook his head. “I realize her relationships have to be publicly strategic as well as romantic, but why she insists on only dating the most arrogant of the lot is a mystery to me.”
    The manager turned to him with a sudden grin. “That’s what I like about you, Percy. You’re nothing like those self-centered big shots lining up for their turn to have Rumored to be Dating Regan Hunter printed after their name in the press. We’re unlikely to see you grabbing headlines anytime soon, unless it’s a Where Are They Now? retrospective.” Des’s laugh was hearty but laced with threat. “Nope, you’re not like them at all. You know your place.”
    Those words echoed in Ben’s mind as he glanced down the row to where Spencer sat beside Tanya’s manager, his cover-worthy smile probably tied more to the potential to be photographed by one of the many reporters present than to Tanya’s shy, fumbling responses to the panel questions.
    Ben had long grown used to the affluence that went hand in hand with professional tennis. The clubhouse where Regan trained was in the center of her exclusive gated community, which boasted a marina and a golf course in addition to the twenty-court tennis complex. Every morning the brief walk from where he parked in a visitors’ lot to the entrance took him past one immaculately manicured multimillion-dollar house after another.
    Although she was his richest client to date, the main reason he hadn’t been intimidated by her wealth was because he’d grown up in it. While political instability and social tensions roared ever louder through Zimbabwe, his father’s uncanny ability to constantly reposition his business interests and maneuver his way into a winning hand kept his family insulated—and isolated. Shuttling from behind the high walls of their estate to his elite private school to the tennis court and back again, it wasn’t until Ben found himself penniless and alone on the wrong side of the Atlantic that he had any understanding of the suffering and corruption blighting his homeland.
    It had been a hard, painful fall to earth, and he would never pretend otherwise. He went from a pampered tennis prodigy to a destitute refugee almost overnight, and for the first time in his life he had to find a job, make a budget, cook his own meals and wash his own clothes.
    He’d need two hands to count the number of times he burned his fingers trying to iron his shirts for his first job in a tennis pro shop in a gated community not unlike Regan’s. But eventually his skin thickened, his patience improved and he learned to survive.
    And he wouldn’t move into one of those luxurious, beautifully appointed, impossibly expensive fortresses if you paid him.
    But as he replayed all that had happened that day, he became more and more disconcerted.
    Regan said herself that she put a lot of stock in other people’s