"That must mean they want you back.
Should you call them?"
"No way." He refolded the paper and tossed it aside. "Let Ramsey sweat."
The next morning, the postman delivered a letter to Stevie as she was working in the flower bed. It was addressed to Judd. Wiping her hands on the seat of her shorts, she went inside.
"I hate to disturb you, but a letter just came."
She entered the dining room. Judd, she noticed, not for the first time, typed with his index fingers only.
He finished his sentence, then rolled the paper out of the machine and laid it face down on the card table. He had refused to discuss his plot, characters or anything else about his book with her. He never gave her a glimpse of what he'd written and had forbidden her to pick up the wastepaper that littered the floor every morning.
He read the letterhead and muttered scoff -ingly,
"Ramsey." Judd scanned the brief letter, crammed it into a ball and tossed it onto the floor where his other rejections were strewn.
"Well," Stevie asked impatiently, "is he sweating yet?"
"Like a pig. But he hasn't got to the begging stage."
"He has to beg?"
"Sure he has to beg. I want him to get as low as a slug and then grovel."
She laughed. "I take it that means you're not ready to go back."
"What I'm ready for," he said as he came to his feet, "is lunch." He placed his arms around her, clapped his hands on her bottom, gave the firm flesh a hard squeeze and soundly kissed her.
"Fetch my food, woman."
She slipped out of his arms, asking saucily,
"Or what?"
His eyes became drowsy and as sultry as the summer weather. "Or I'll show you what else I'm ready for."
She fetched his food.
You're awfully quiet tonight. Is something wrong?"
Stevie, who had been staring vacantly over their dinner table, blinked Judd into focus. "No, nothing. I'm sorry I'm not better company."
"You're not having any pain, are you?"
She shook her head. "Just tired I think."
"No wonder. You waxed me today on the tennis court."
She smiled, but it was a fainthearted attempt.
"You still gave me a good workout."
Watching her closely, Judd played with his spoon, turning it end over end. "It's more than fatigue, isn't it, Stevie?"
"Maybe. I don't know. I've got a lot on my mind."
'It was seeing that couple."
She looked at him sharply, then tried unsuccessfully to hide her spontaneous reaction by innocently repeating, "Couple?"
"The young couple we saw in the grocery store this afternoon. The couple with the baby."
She looked away, which was as good as a signed confession.
"Up till then we'd been having a great time,"
Judd' said. "You beat me soundly in three sets, but I lost gracefully. We were joking, wrestling over the last bite of Hershey bar, doing our grocery shopping."
"Then you caught sight of those two attractive young people wheeling their basket down the store aisle, cooing to the kid and smiling goosily at each other over the top of his curly, blond head. After that, you clammed up and have had the personality of a turnip ever since."
"I didn't know that my duties as cook extended to being a court jester, too," she said caustically. "Maybe you should have specified that."
He dropped the spoon onto the table with a clatter and held up his hands in a gesture of suri render. "Touchy, touchy. It's you I'm worried about."
"Well, don't be."
"Too late. I already am."
Stevie gauged his expression. It appeared to be sincere. She wanted, and needed, to believe that it was. With a short, self-derisive laugh, she said, I suppose you think I'm the one who's goosey."
Actually that living portrait of matrimonial bliss and domestic harmony left me a little choked up, too."
I'll bet," she said drolly.
It did. I haven't always been a surly, cynical jerk, you know. The owners of this house, my grandparents, instilled in my father some basic values. He, along with my mother, instilled a few in me."
"What happened to them?"
"They got dashed against the rocky shore of outrageous fortune."
"I hope you're not putting that in your novel. It's terrible."
"What happened to them?"
"They got dashed against the rocky shore of outrageous fortune.'
I hope you're not putting that in your novel.
His lips tilted into a half smile. "Not in those exact words, but they sort of capture the gist of the theme."
She lifted her shoulders, then let them drop as she released a heavy sigh. "Okay, as long as we're being open and honest, I'll admit that seeing that poignant little scene got to me. I was envious."
"Envious?" he asked incredulously. "How could you be envious of these rural folk? You've traveled the world several times over, been introduced to royalty, earned a helluva lot of prize money in addition to what you make on endorsements.
You couldn't possibly build a trophy room large enough to hold all that you've received."
"None of which I can confide my troubles to.
I can't curl up with a trophy on cold nights. Or even have a healthy fight with one."
"Know what this sounds like to me? Whining." 'That's exactly what it is," she retorted crossly.
He let a moment go by before asking, "Are you regretting some decisions, Stevie?"
"Yes. No. I don't know, Judd. It's just that…" She paused, trying to convert her random thoughts into understandable language.
"For the past three years, the Grand Slam has eluded me by one tournament. Once I had got it,
I planned to slow down. I would have had to anyway in a year or two because of my advancing age, but I had already decided that if I got the Grand Slam I wouldn't ask for more. I'd retire on top, with dignity and a very respectable career behind me."
Pensively she continued, "But I didn't think much beyond that. Now that the inevitable future is here, it seems so bleak, so empty. There's nothing in it. There's nobody in it."
"No baby."
"No baby," she repeated emotionally. "And probably no chance of having one. Ever." ' 'Do you wish you had had a child sooner?" ' 'Maybe. But hindsight is twenty-twenty, isn't it?"
"With whom, Stevie?"
She laughed mirthlessly. "Good question.
With whom? I never took the time to fall in love, get married, develop a meaningful relationship.
I'm not even certain what that catch phrase means or how it applies to me and members of the opposite sex."
"Now that you've got the time to find out, you might not get the opportunity. Is that what's bothering you?"
"In a nutshell, yes.'
Each fell silent. Judd was the first to speak.
"Sometimes our decisions are forced on us."
"Mine weren't. I freely made my choice years ago. I chose tennis. At all costs, I wanted to be the number one player in the world."
"You are."
"I know. I also know I have no reason to complain. It's all been wonderful." She gave him a bleak smile. "It's just that every once in a while, like today, I'm reminded of everything I sacrificed and start feeling sorry for myself. Now that my career is coming to an end, I'm asking myself, 'now what?'. And I don't have any answers."
She took a deep breath. "In my estimation, self-pity is the most wicked of sins. It's also a big waste of time, unless it's within one's power to bring about a change. In my case," she concluded, laying a hand on her tummy, "I don't have control over the situation. That's the bitterest pill to swallow."
They had finished their meal. Judd helped her clean up the dishes. In that respect, he wasn't nearly as chauvinistic as he pretended to be.
"I'm going on up to bed," she told him as soon as they'd finished the chore.