Chapter 1 #2
She took the stairs two at a time up to Dom’s office and found him standing at his window, which overlooked the rest of the facility, and in the distance, the coast with tiny umbrellas dotting the shoreline in various shades of the rainbow.
“Hey,” she said, tossing herself into the seat across from his desk.
Dom turned and moved around his desk. “P, welcome back. You ready to go?”
“Yep. Roy said you wanted to see me. What’s up?”
“I wanted to talk through our training plan.”
Penny pursed her lips and waited for him to continue. As nice as it was to be home, there were two tournaments between now and the French Open she could be playing in, both of which Zina Lutrova was headlining. It had been Dom’s idea to skip those tournaments in favor of coming back to train.
“I’ve brought in an old friend of mine to be your hitting partner. He’s just getting back into full-time training himself, so it’ll be the perfect fit for the next few weeks.”
Penny raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
Dom nodded. “Yeah. I want you to focus on your defensive game and building up your endurance. You saw what it was like in Australia this year. Two weeks of tennis is no joke. You can’t fade at the beginning of the second week.
You need to be peaking for the semis and finals, not for the round of sixteen. ”
“Right,” Penny said, clenching her teeth. She wanted to tell him that endurance or lack thereof had nothing to do with the end of her run at the Australian Open. It was the only time her mental focus had slipped. At the highest levels, the mental game was even more important than the physical.
“I am still the world’s number one.” Zina’s Russian accent reverberated through Dom’s office.
Penny’s head snapped to the video screen in the corner and everything else flew straight out of her head.
It was an interview from the tournament in Rome where Zina was playing this week.
“Harrison played a good match, but I did not play my best. It was a fluke,” the young superstar said from the press conference desk.
Dom paused the video as the interview ended.
Penny focused on the smirk Lutrova managed to wear even while discussing a decisive loss at the hands of a player she was claiming to be better than.
That expression alone was enough to make Penny want to grab a racket, fly to Rome, and take Lutrova’s ego down a notch or fifty again.
“These next weeks are critical. Zina will be gunning for you in Paris. You’re going to face her down and you’re going to win,” Dom said.
“I’ll be ready.”
“Good. Now go. I’ll be out in a few. I’ve got to pull together the Classic rankings by this afternoon.”
A wave of nostalgia hit her. For the first time since she’d arrived at OBX, Penny wouldn’t be competing in the Classic, a tournament Dom arranged every year for the best up-and-coming young stars tennis had to offer.
Since it was his tournament, the player rankings were up to his sole discretion.
Penny had never not been ranked number one.
And she’d never not come out on top.
“It’s that time of year again, huh? Feels like yesterday I won my first one.”
“Yeah, well, three in a row was a good run, but looks like we’ll have to find a new champ this year.”
Penny was halfway to her practice court, one of the very few clay courts on campus, before she realized she hadn’t asked Dom who her new hitting partner was.
He’d said it was an old friend, but Dom had been in the tennis world for nearly thirty years.
That didn’t exactly narrow down the field.
Whoever it was, they were sure to be damn good.
Her coach would only let her train with the best.
She opened the gate and dropped her bag against the fence before tilting her head in confusion.
There was a man sprawled across the court, eyes closed, face to the sun, completely relaxed, except for his hands, which were firing through the air, drumming along with the music she could hear buzzing through his headphones even from the other side of the court.
“Excuse me,” Penny said sharply. “This court is reserved.”
The man didn’t move. He was tall and broad, making the large playing surface seem much smaller than it actually was.
“Excuse me,” she repeated when he didn’t so much as twitch in response, “this court is…” Frowning down at the court squatter, she immediately recognized him, especially since the last time she’d seen him he’d been in a similar state, totally relaxed, eyes closed—though he’d been wearing much less clothing.
Alex Russell, the best men’s player in the world—or at least he used to be—and the guy she’d been dreaming about, remembering, really, just this morning.
Seven years before, when he was only seventeen, Alex Russell was the first English man to win Wimbledon since 1936 and the youngest man ever to do it, breaking a record from 1985.
By age twenty he’d added French, US, and Australian Open trophies to his mantel, completing the career Grand Slam.
Then, in the handful of years since, his game had gone to hell.
Too much partying and not nearly enough training sent his ranking free-falling from number one in the world down into the mid-twenties, and only that high because of his insane natural talent.
He also held the distinction of being the only thing to distract Penny Harrison from tennis and the last person she ever wanted to see again.