They flopped onto a bench at courtside, both pouring with sweat and breathing hard.
“You sonofabitch,” she said conversationally. “Do you always play so hard against girls?”
“Girl? You’re the goddamned Bionic Woman. Don’t you have any pity?”
“You’re the first man to teat me in a long time.”
“The first man? What women have you been playing — Navratilova?”
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I’m...” He stopped, tried to unscramble his brain, finally looked at his watch. The twenty-ninth. “Good God, I’d forgotten.”
“Forgotten what?”
“I’ll be fifty tomorrow.”
“Fifty?”
“I may be the boy in this match, but you’ve got what, twelve years on me?”
“I’ve got fifteen years on you, buster.”
“Oops, sorry.”
“Race you to the beach,” she said, and sprinted off.
He staggered after her down a narrow path to the sea, and as he came around a large boulder, he saw a trail of tennis clothes stretching across the sand and, hitting the water, a lithe, naked form. He hopped along on one foot, struggling with a shoe, then another, then his shorts and shirt. He hit the surf sprinting, loped a few steps through the water, then dived flat and started swimming. She had fifty yards on him but was moving more slowly than he. He caught her a hundred yards out.
“As a swimmer, you’re a great tennis player,” he said, overtaking her at last.
She shoved water in his face and began swimming slowly back toward the beach. He followed a few strokes behind. She found the bottom, waded from the water, and flopped on her back on the wet sand. He fell down beside her. They were both breathing hard from the tennis and the swimming, and he was very conscious of her nakedness, particularly her full, tanned breasts as they heaved with her breathing. There were no untanned strips anywhere. He suddenly found it necessary to roll onto his stomach to conceal his growing concern with her body.
“God, I haven’t had such a workout in ages,” she said, still breathing hard.
“Neither have I,” he said, breathing, if anything, even harder. He knew he was staring, but he could not help himself.
She seemed unconcerned with her nakedness or his. “It’ll be dark soon,” she said, shivering a little. “I’d better go start dinner.”
“I’ll stay here for a minute and recover my health,” he said, embarrassed to move.
She got to her feet and jogged toward the house, collecting their clothing as she went He watched as she paused to rinse herself under an outdoor shower. The setting sun turned her body a hot shade of coppery gold. Then she was gone.
It took a couple of minutes of thinking about something else before he felt it was safe to stand. He trotted to the shower, grabbed a towel on the veranda, and let himself into his room through the sliding doors. He shaved, took a hot shower, and stretched out on the bed, just for a moment.
She placed the cool back of a hand on his face to waken him. It was dark in the room. He lay on his back, the towel covering his crotch. “How about a drink?” she suggested. “Dinner’s in half an hour.”
He looked at his watch. He had been asleep for an hour and a half. “Sure. Make me something local.”
He unpacked his clothes and dressed in light cotton clothes and deck shoes. She had a rum punch waiting for him in the kitchen while she grilled some steaks and worked on dinner.
“I’m afraid it’s frozen vegetables,” she said. “There’s nothing fresh in the house but potatoes, which are baking even as we speak.” She was wearing a loose-flowing caftan of a soft beige material that occasionally revealed the outline of her body as she moved about the kitchen.
“I thought you might be ready for an American meal,” she said.
“Sounds good. The house is wonderful.”
“It’s the only thing I own, except for the Mercedes,” she said. “I’ve been putting it together for four years. It’s just about where I want it now.”
“I should have guessed. It’s like you. Why did you bring me here? You don’t know me.”
“Yes, I do — better than I did yesterday, anyway. Want an instant character analysis?”
“Why not?”
“Well, of course, I know the general stuff about you, the business you built, and all that.”
“I’ll tell you a secret. My brother-in-law built the business. I just worked on the technical stuff.”
“When I met you, you were wound pretty tight. I thought you might break when your friend was killed.”
“I did break,” he said. “I was in a state of complete despair, didn’t know what to do next. I was about to pack it in and go home.”
“But you didn’t. When you got that phone call, you came back fast. That told me a lot — that, and the way you played tennis this afternoon. I beat you pretty easy the first set; then you decided you wanted to win. I was very impressed the way you played the last couple of games of the last set.”
“Don’t expect that sort of performance again. I don’t think I’ve ever played that well.”
“I don’t mean how well you played; I mean how hard you played.”
“Well,” he chuckled, “I couldn’t let myself be beaten by a mere slip of a girl.”
“A mere slip of a girl who had a year on the pro tour. I was never ranked very high; I overtrained for too long, and my knees went on me.”
“It doesn’t surprise me to hear that. You strike me as somebody who goes after things pretty hard.”
“That’s something you and I share,” she said.
He shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever had to go after things hard. I had it pretty easy, except in the Marines, and nobody had it easy there.”
“I learned something else about you during that tennis match, something you probably don’t know yourself. Not yet, anyway.”
“What’s that?”
“You have it in you to be completely ruthless. It didn’t take you long to put aside the fact that I was a woman, and that it might not be very graceful to play your best game.”
He laughed at that. “You’re right, you know; I am capable of ruthlessness, but apart from this afternoon, I can only remember once when I let it get the best of me.”
“Dinner is served,” she said, “but keep talking.” She got the steaks, vegetables, and potatoes on the table and handed him a bottle of red wine to open. “Come on, when were you ruthless?”
“It was in the Marines. I had a Naval ROTC commission from college, and I was one of four platoon leaders in my company — two other ROTC guys and one Academy man, a guy named Hedger. Hedger looked down on us ordinary college boys, thought of himself as infinitely superior. Our commanding officer, a major and an Academy man himself, shared Hedger’s view.
“Now you have to understand, you have to be a little crazy to survive in the Marine Corps, and if you’re not, you have to find a way to get a little crazy. Barry Hedger was my way. I lived to beat him, beat him at any and everything. I worked my ass off, day and night, to beat him at tactics, small-weapons training, personal combat — I even beat him in report writing, something an Academy man really does well. My platoon beat his platoon on the obstacle course, on the rifle range — even in keeping their barracks clean. My platoon sergeant knew what was going on between Hedger and me, and he used it to fire up the men. Christ, they reveled in it! The C.O. was on Hedger’s back constantly to beat me in something. How could an Academy man — one of the top ten in his class, yet — allow himself and his platoon to be bested by a Rotsie officer and his platoon?
“Finally, Hedger snapped, invited me outside one night at the officers’ club, promised to clean my clock. Everybody poured out of the bar, we stripped our blouses, and got down to it. Hedger came at me sort of karate style, half squatting, waving his hands around, making little noises. It’s funny, I hadn’t had a fistfight since grammar school — haven’t had one since, but I kicked him in the knee and hit him once — broke his nose. Oh, Jesus, there was a lot of blood and all, and then some colonel came and broke it up, chewed us both out good, made us shake hands. Didn’t report us to our C.O.