Chapter Four
I’d been wrong in assuming his face couldn’t possibly live up to his thighs, because Marcus was extraordinarily, dazzlingly handsome close up.
I was suddenly finding it very hard to think straight with him glaring at me, his mouth mere inches away from mine, all pouty lips and thick, dark hair that you immediately wanted to run your hands through and a beard that made him look older than the thirty-one years I knew he was from my research. Shame he was such a massive arse.
‘Stalking you?’ I tried to joke.
‘If you’re not a crazed fan, why the hell have you got a picture of me on your laptop?’ he demanded to know, using the same icy tone I’d heard him adopt when complaining to the umpire about the sun being in his eyes/noisy crowds/slippery surfaces/a shot he insisted had been incorrectly called.
Glancing quickly at my screen, I cringed when I realised I’d zoomed in on a photo of him mid-serve.
It didn’t look great that I was doing research so last minute, although, in my defence, Amanda had only hired me a few days before and since I knew absolutely nothing about tennis, I had my work cut out for me. I flipped my laptop closed.
‘It’s research,’ I told him, stashing it under the seat in front for take-off.
‘Research for . . . ?’
I met his eye, aiming to give off an air of self-assuredness and integrity.
Who did this guy think he was? I’d never even heard of him before Zoe turned up on my doorstep dangling a best-job-ever-shaped carrot in front of my face, and now here he was talking down at me like he was Ryan bloody Gosling.
Although I liked to imagine that Ryan would be ten times politer.
‘I’m Ava Whitfield. The journalist writing the article on you for Luxe magazine.’
‘What article?’
I swallowed. Fuck. This guy was a nightmare. My dreams of winning a Pulitzer Prize for this piece were fast fading in front of my eyes.
‘Luxe magazine? The UK’s biggest-selling women’s glossy? You agreed to an exclusive feature on your life and career, and I’m the one doing it.’
Marcus scoffed. ‘I agreed to no such thing. Because, as you’d know if you’d done your research sooner, I don’t do press.’
I took a deep, steadying breath, wondering if it would help to have my meditation app playing in one ear.
‘Which is why I’m delighted I’m going to be the exception to your rule,’ I said, attempting – and failing – to deliver a coquettish smile.
‘There are no exceptions. Ever.’
Aaaaaargh!
‘I’ve literally been emailing your agent, Dean, back and forth!
’ I said, exasperation finally setting in.
‘I’m meeting you both later. At your hotel in Monte Carlo!
’ I said, feeling ever so slightly desperate.
This was the worst start to an interview I’d hands down ever had.
Most people at least pretended to want to talk to me.
‘Listen, Ada—’
‘It’s Ava.’
‘Whatever. I don’t care what Dean told you.
I don’t do interviews, so instead of flying all the way to Nice for something that I assure you is never going to happen, maybe you should get off the plane now, while there’s still time,’ he said, shuffling his body away from me and purposely facing the other way.
‘Bit late for that,’ I murmured, as the plane began taxiing along the runway.
Fucking hell. The British public had got him all kinds of right.
Which didn’t help with the impending feeling of doom that this massive opportunity was about to slip right through my fingers.
I had to salvage the interview and persuade him to do it.
As the plane took off and carved its way through the clouds, giving us jaw-dropping views of London in all its glory, I swivelled in my seat to face him, attempting to give off gentle, encouraging vibes.
‘Marcus?’
‘What?’ he said, seemingly mesmerised by the back of the chair in front of him.
‘Can I reassure you that it’s going to be an in-depth piece covering all aspects of your life? Dean’s arranged for me to come along to four major tournaments this spring and summer so that I – and Luxe’s hundreds of thousands of readers – can get to know who you really are and what makes you tick.’
He crossed his arms, sighing to himself.
‘With a name like Luxe, I’m assuming it’s going to be some sort of superficial nonsense about my abs, or my diet, or my workout routine, or what traits I look for in a woman?’ he said, still stubbornly looking straight ahead.
He did appear to have great abs, but that was not what I was going to be leading with.
‘Actually, Luxe specialises in thought-provoking articles on a diverse range of topics,’ I insisted.
‘Our readers don’t want to know what you ate for breakfast. They want to know what goes through your mind when you walk out on to the court.
How you feel when you win, or when you lose.
How you keep your focus in a five-set match.
What it would mean to you to win a Grand Slam. ’
‘I’ve already won a Grand Slam,’ he said coldly.
‘Another Grand Slam, then,’ I said, kicking myself, because I knew about the Australian Open, I just hadn’t realised that’s what it actually was. ‘They want to know where you came from. Where you want to go next.’
He finally looked at me. This was progress. If he’d liked something I’d said, I very quickly needed to work out what so that I could say more of it.
‘I can’t have somebody following me around 24/7, Ava, it would be far too distracting.’
He wasn’t saying a flat-out no, was he? He’d listened to what I’d said and he’d thought about it, however briefly. Keep calm, I told myself. You’ve almost got him.
‘I promise you I’ll be extremely discreet,’ I reassured him, mimicking the dulcet tones of my favourite meditation guide. ‘You won’t even notice I’m there.’
‘Somehow I doubt that,’ he said, his eyes boring into me for a second.
Irritatingly, my cheeks flushed involuntarily.
I reminded myself that Marcus Taylor was not flirting with me, he was playing me.
He probably thought that if he turned on the charm – or his misguided version of it, anyway – I’d be flustered enough to admit defeat and call the interview off.
No chance – it would take more than good looks to dazzle me.
‘A piece like this could completely change the public’s opinion of you,’ I said, wanting to seal the deal. ‘Why not let them get to know the real Marcus Taylor? The likeable side we don’t always get to see?’
He laughed, an annoyingly warm, rich sound that, by rights, somebody as insufferable as him shouldn’t be capable of producing.
‘Ava. Do you really think I care whether people like me or not?’
For some reason I liked it when he said my name, which was ridiculous. It was literally two syllables long – anyone could remember that.
‘Doesn’t everyone?’ I countered.
‘I really don’t. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’
He promptly produced a silk eye mask from his bag, slipped it on and placed massive black Beats headphones over his ears. I would not be deterred. The flight was two hours long, which meant that I still had a very small window of time to change his mind. Perhaps he’d be less defensive after a nap?
I tried to hold it in, but having downed three glasses of champagne over the last few hours, I was always going to need the loo mid-flight.
Marcus hadn’t moved for the last twenty-five minutes, so I’d sneakily carried on with my research, trying to find an angle, something I could use to convince him that appearing in Luxe would be as beneficial for him as it would be for me.
I didn’t have much to go on: he was born near Manchester, in a mid-sized town without so much as a municipal tennis court; he’d won a scholarship to some tennis academy in Spain and had travelled all over the world since turning pro at the age of eighteen.
There were a couple of pics of him with his mum in the early days, an attractive, tired-looking woman with dyed blonde hair and pretty brown eyes like Marcus’s, but she was strangely absent in the shots I could find from the last eight or nine years.
He was currently ranked twelfth in the world, having reached the quarter-finals of both the US Open and Queen’s last year, and was the British number one.
As he’d been quick to pull me up on, he had indeed won a Grand Slam once – but that had been eight years ago.
Apparently, he’d come out of nowhere to win it, got the British press and public all excited and then had failed to live up to the hype, getting knocked out of Wimbledon in the second round that same year.
I wondered what had gone wrong – why another big win had eluded him, whether he wanted to be world number one, whether his Australian Open win was a fluke and whether deep down he knew it was.
Other than the tournaments I’d heard of, there were lots of other less prestigious events all over the world that Marcus seemed to travel to, and I was struggling to get my head around what they all meant – if there was a way to write my profile on Marcus without totally immersing myself in the game of tennis itself, I was damn well going to find it.
Closing my laptop, I undid my seat belt and shuffled about in my seat a bit, hoping to alert Marcus to the fact I needed to get up.
He didn’t stir. Aaargh, how was I going to sneak past without waking him?
Then I thought: tough. Everyone gets woken up on flights, you can’t expect undisturbed sleep when you’re sharing a metal cylinder with three hundred other people, can you?
‘Excuse me,’ I said, standing up, surprised to note that there was actually room to do that in Business.
Absolutely no movement.
I cleared my throat.
‘Marcus, sorry, can I get past?’ I said, upping the volume a bit.
He stirred, pushing his eye mask over his forehead. It took him a second or two to focus, his eyes eventually landing on mine.
‘Really?’ he said.