Challenging the Center (Santa Fe Bobcats #6)(3)
The waitress, who was probably old enough to be Sawyer’s mother, blushed and gave a little pat on his shoulder. “Enjoy!”
“Suck-up,” Kat muttered.
Peter stared at his own serving of oatmeal, pancakes, and thick-cut ham. “This… is not breakfast.”
“It sure is in the US of A. Pass the hot sauce, please,” Kat said.
Peter passed it without a word and dug into his breakfast, as if ready to tune them both out in order to make eating the unpalatable food more appealing.
Sawyer watched in horror as Kat dumped at least a fourth of a cup of hot sauce over her eggs, then the hash browns.
“That… is a terrible idea.”
“A man who can’t handle hot sauce isn’t a man I want to know intimately.” She sucked off a drop from her finger as she slid the bottle back over his direction.
“Good thing I’m not in the running. Look, the fact is, you want to make a living playing tennis. You’re dropping in the rankings because you’re not practicing enough. You’re not practicing enough because you had to take on a part-time job. You had to take on a part-time job because you lost the few endorsements you’d already had secured.”
“There was an old lady,” Kat sang softly. Sawyer raised an eyebrow. “Who swallowed a cat. She swallowed the cat to catch the bird, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider…”
Peter began muttering in his native language. Thanks to her coach of nearly three years, she’d picked up a few Russian words here and there. If she wasn’t mistaken, she heard son of a bitch and damn in there.
She really only remembered the naughty ones.
Sawyer nudged Peter, who simply stopped muttering. “You’re not helping.”
“I’m here. I didn’t want to be.”
Her agent sighed.
Kat set her fork down, aiming for seriousness now. Apparently, bringing levity to the meeting wasn’t getting the job done. “I understand the concern. Losing the endorsement with Misanka hurt.” The new brand of tennis balls had been a fantastic score, and she’d been thrilled to jump on board before the launch. Being kicked off the launch team had hurt more than her wallet. Her pride…
Shaking that off, she went on. “I’m being noticed more. I’m getting more endorsement offers,” she reminded him, taking a bite of her bacon while her eggs and hash soaked up the sauce.
“The wrong ones. Oh, I’m sorry,” Sawyer added when she raised a brow. “Did you want to reconsider the endorsement for that website where the famous celebrity look-alike porn stars were featured? I could call them after breakfast.”
“Shut up,” she grumbled. “Why do you care, if you make a buck?”
“I care because if you stop playing, it all goes away, even the shit offers nobody sane would take. Everything. Dead halt.”
Exactly. At this rate, with injuries and just plain bad luck, it would all very soon be taken from her hands. So she had to get while the getting was good. “Can’t play forever.”
“But you can play for a few more years. I really wish you’d tell me more about this whole sex tape. What possessed you to—”
“Stop.” Something burned behind her eyes, and she clenched her fork hard enough for the metal to jab into the fleshy part of her hand. “I’m not defending myself to my own damn agent one more time. I told you I didn’t release it. I told you Igor did, or someone working for him. I’ve said it more times than I can count. Either believe me and drop it, or just drop it.”
The sex tape, featuring one unsuspecting Katrina Kelly and her then-boyfriend, rising tennis stud and current number nine in the world, Igor Dorchessky. The video was grainy but close up. Though nothing more than some side boob showed, you could clearly see her face at one point and Igor’s. And it was beyond obvious what was happening, thanks to the sounds and motion. The soft lighting made that abundantly clear. So did the fact that the video had been posted from her phone to her own blog. Igor had proclaimed innocence, going on a rampage about women who couldn’t be trusted, gaining sympathy in the media about being used for his money, his rising success, how he wouldn’t let this bring him low…
And everyone had eaten it up with a spoon. Including, apparently, her own agent and her coach. Despite swearing her innocence, despite the fact that she had, up until that point, been a model athlete with no blemishes on her social networking or playing resume… she was immediately shunned. The few endorsements she’d had at that point dropped her like day-old bread. No company would look twice in her direction any longer. Nobody on the tour would talk to her. She was public enemy number one in the locker room of any tournament she played in. She’d been forced to pick up an extra job serving tables because she wasn’t making ends meet anymore with her tournament winnings.
Vicious circle. And the worst part was… there was no redemption. Everyone simply assumed she did it. Tried, convicted, forgotten. They’d moved on. There was no comeback story for her. No way—that she could see—to prove her innocence. All those years of playing clean, behaving perfectly… for nothing. On her best days, she’d become invisible. The worst thing a pro athlete could be.
And so she’d tried something different. She’d tried being visible on her own terms. They thought she was the Jezebel of the tennis world? Fine. She could play that part. Not that she was going to run around sleeping with people and recording it—hadn’t worked so well the first time, and that wasn’t even her fault—but she stopped behaving in a reserved fashion. A song came on that she loved? She danced to it even if she was sitting on the bench between sets. Party of an acquaintance that was set beside a lovely hotel pool? She had no problems jumping in in her cocktail dress, making a splash, encouraging others to join her in a chicken fight in semiformal attire.