“then you must be from out of town.”
“Oh, dip!” called one of the other players.
“Yo, Antoine, man, she told you!”
Antoine Vaughn glared at Ayinde through slitted eyes and pulled a towel around his waist.
“Wasn’t that funny,” he muttered, sitting up and hunching forward.
“Hey.”
Ayinde turned around and looked up…and up. “Take it easy on the kid,” said Richard Towne. His uniform left his arms and legs bare. His chestnut skin gleamed with sweat, and his teeth glistened when he smiled. But she wasn’t going to back down yet…not even if Richard Towne—who was one of the most famous athletes in America at that moment, who never gave interviews to anyone, and who was, in person, even more attractive than his pictures—told her that she should.
“Tell him to cover up and I might.”
“Go get dressed, man,” Richard said to Antoine Vaughn, who jumped off the bench so fast it was as if God Himself had told him to put on his jockstrap. Then Richard turned back to Ayinde. “Are you all right?” he asked, pitching his voice so softly that nobody could hear it but Ayinde.
“I’m fine,” she said, even though her knees were now shaking so hard she was surprised they weren’t knocking together. Richard put one world-famous hand on her shoulders and steered her out of the locker room and into one of the courtside seats in the echoing stadium.
“They were just teasing you,” he said.
“It wasn’t funny.” She blinked furiously at the tears that had appeared out of nowhere. “I’m just trying to do my job.”
“I know. I know. Here,” he said, handing her a cup of water. She sipped it, fanning at her lashes, knowing that if just one tear fell, it would ruin her mascara and she’d look like hell on camera.
She took a deep breath. “You think he’ll talk to me?”
Richard Towne considered. “If I tell him to, he will.”
“Will you tell him to?”
He smiled again, and that smile was like stepping onto a beach after three months of hard winter and feeling tropical sunshine on your skin. “If you have dinner with me, I will.”
Ayinde said nothing. She wasn’t quite able to believe it. Richard Towne, asking her for a date.
“I’ve seen you do the news,” he said. “You’re good.”
“Except around naked teenagers.”
“Oh, you were winning that battle,” he said. “I was just speeding things along. So will you have dinner with me?”
Ayinde heard her mother’s voice in her head, her mother speaking in the quasi-British accent she’d affected after spending ten days in London when Ayinde was twelve or so. Make them work for it, Lolo lectured. “I don’t think so,” she said automatically. She would have said it even if Lolo hadn’t chosen that moment to rise up from her subconscious and whisper in her ear. Richard Towne had a reputation.
He laughed. “So it’s like that, huh? You got a man already?”
“Don’t you have a basketball game to play?” Her voice was cool, and she turned away slightly, but she couldn’t keep herself from smiling.
“You’re playing hard to get,” he told her, as he let one finger trail over the back of her hand.
“I’m not playing at all,” she told him. “I’m working.” She looked him full in the face, a move that took all the courage she had. “And honestly, I can’t see having a relationship with a man who wears shorts to work.”
There was a moment when he just stared at her, and Ayinde felt her heart sink, thinking that she’d pushed it too far, that probably nobody ever teased him, nobody would even dare…and that she shouldn’t have said “relationship” when he’d only asked her to dinner. Then, finally, Richard Towne threw back his head and laughed. “What if I promised to wear pants?”
“To work?”
“To dinner.”
She looked at him from under her eyelashes. “A shirt, too?” She wanted to hear him laugh again.
“Even a jacket and tie.”
“Then…” She let her voice trail off,
Debra L Martin, David W Small