Not So Snow White (3 page)

Tess smiled briefly, picturing it. "How true. So then, who is this amazing paragon of virtue with an unfortunate bent for self-torture?" There was a short pause, but Tess could feel the tension crackling through the phone lines. Her smile dipped. "Bobby? You're not in some kind of trouble are you?" Because that would shock her almost more than her father doing something illicit.

Bobby was the golden child of the Hamilton clan. Wade had
the smarts and the Hamilton drive and determination, but he was kind of an ass about it. Tess was brilliant on the court, but off the court, well, her faults had been well documented. On several continents. Leaving the youngest Hamilton to claim the cherished center-of-attention spot. Which he'd always done quite effortlessly. It was hard to hold it against him, though. He was charming, good-looking, smart, and accomplished, not to mention always quick with a smile or a selfless gesture. If he wasn't so damn adorable and sincere, he'd be disgusting.

At twenty-five he had a college degree from Stanford, a top-fifty ranking in the ATP, a gorgeous British girlfriend, and several major endorsement deals—which was almost unheard of for a doubles player. It was the dimples. She was convinced. It didn't hurt that he never yelled at referees or tournament directors. And never got his picture splashed all over the tabloids for being where he wasn't supposed to be, with someone he definitely wasn't supposed to be with.

There came a nervous chuckle on the other end that sounded nothing like her happy-go-lucky brother.

"For God's sake, tell me already!"

"Andrea and I are getting married," he blurted out in a rush. "I proposed last night and she said yes."

Her first reaction was to laugh. "You know, you said that like it comes as some great shock to you! Of course she said yes, you dolt." Andrea was gorgeous, talented, and quite successful in her own right—and she'd have been a fool to pass up her baby brother. Bobby Hamilton was a total catch. Just ask any female on the planet. "But I can't believe you popped the question right before Wimbledon. You've got Queen's Club, then two slams back-to-back,
and
she's getting ready to launch her new line after the Open, in the fall, right? When are you guys gonna have time to—"

"That's the other reason I'm calling," he broke in. "We don't
want a long engagement. And since everyone we both know will be in London for the tournament, we figured—"

"You're getting married now?"

"After Queen's, before Wimbledon, yeah."

"As in, before
this coming
Wimbledon? The one next month?" Tess struggled to assimilate it all. "Now I understand your shock that she accepted your ridiculous proposal. I can't believe Andrea is agreeing to this. You have told her your crazy idea, right? Because men can be really stupid, but I always had higher hopes for you, B.S."

Bobby groaned at the reviled nickname. "It's all fine, really.''

"She's a fashion designer and you're rushing her to the altar? Are you kidding me? It's not all fine, trust me."

"She designs sportswear," Bobby said, as if that made a difference.

"The woman's whole life revolves around clothes," Tess pointed out. "And you want her to toss together a wedding in less than a month." She snorted. "Honestly. Men."

"It was her idea!"

That stopped her. "Really?"

"Yeah, really."

"Well, hold on to this one, because that's blind love right there."

"Har har," he said now. "So you gonna lay off me and hop a plane over here or what?''

"Gee, with an invite like that, I can hardly say no," she said dryly. "What did Dad and Wade say? Are they going to be able to juggle their schedules to get over there in time?"

"I'm not sure. I, uh, I called you first, T."

And she'd given him a hard time. Tess's heart melted. Bobby might make her crazy with his easy perfection, but there was a reason everybody loved him. He was so damn earnest. He'd never have to worry about his postretirement lifestyle. With or
without his investment portfolio, people naturally gravitated toward Bobby Hamilton. Well, they gravitated toward his sister, too. But with Bobby, it was for all the good reasons. "Thank you," she said more quietly. "I, uh
…"

"God, I can't stand it when you're speechless. It scares me," he teased, clearly happy with himself for doing it to her anyway. "Just say you'll be there."

"Of course I will." Even if she had to hock something to pay for airfare. Which she very well might. "Wait a minute," she said, alarm and dread suddenly swamping her. "I don't have to
actually be in this thing, do I?
"

"Now you sound like Wade. Can't be bothered to put out a little effort when there isn't anything in it for you. And since when haven't you liked putting out?"

"Oh, you want me not to be speechless, you keep making comments like that. I'll ring Andrea right up and tell her all about your little run-in with my friend Bambi Sutherland the summer of your freshman year. I'm sure I still have my yearbook around here somewhere where she wrote on your picture, and I quote—"

"Okay, okay, you win."

She grinned. "Don't I always? You should know better by now."

"Yeah, yeah."

"And I wasn't balking at being in the wedding, in a general way. Surely Andrea of all people would pick out something not entirely horrific for her bridesm
aids to wear. It's just that…
well, you know how it is with me. Something bad will happen. And in London of all places. The tabs over there look for reasons to trash me. They hate me."

"They love you. You sell papers. Hell, you've put half the paparazzi's children through college by now."

She snorted. "Yeah, well, that kind of dysfunctional love I do not need. And neither do you on your wedding day."

"Not to worry. We'
r
e not having all the hoopla. Andrea has no family to speak of, just close friends and professional contacts. It will probably be a civil ceremony, small, no attendants and all that stuff. We just want the people we love and care about to share the moment with us. So say you'll be there and shut up already."

"You shut up already."

"You."

"You." She smiled, hearing her mother's "Come on, you
two!"
echo clearly through her mind. "Of course I'll be there."

"And you'll call Dad and Wade an
d tell them, get them to come?
"

"Bobby!"

"You're the best. I knew I could count on you, Love you!"

And then he was gone.

Tess sighed and clicked off, but she was smiling as she shook her head. It would be so much easier if she could just get mad at the guy. She didn't relish being the one to tell the rest of the family about the sudden wedding. Not that Dad or Wade would be upset about the engagement. They'd known it was probably heading that way, as she had. The abbreviated time frame, on the other hand, would be an issue. Both her father and big brother lived by their BlackBerry schedulers. This would disrupt the routine. Where Wade and her father were concerned, rule number one was never disrupt the routine!

Ah well. She grinned as she flipped her phone back open. She might have learned that lesson at an early age, but that didn't mean she'd ever paid any particular attention to it. Hell, if she wasn't around to rattle the esteemed senator's carefully maintained cage every once in a while, who would? Her little
rebellions with
her
father used to exasperate her mom to no end. But privately, Tess was pretty sure her mother thought it was a good thing that life didn't always go by Dad's schedule.

She snapped the phone shut a second later as another thought occurred to her. She sank down on the arm of her Harry Braxton davenport. She always thought of the piece that way. Not that she'd had a clue who Harry Braxton was—or that davenport was a fancy name for couch—but the stylist who'd done her house assured her in no uncertain terms that he was the second coming of modern retro furniture design. All she knew was that it was comfortable and didn't stain.

At the moment, howeve
r
, she wasn't thinking about furniture durability, she was more concerned with her own. London. Wimbledon. Everybody who was anybody in the industry would be there.

On the one hand she wanted to be pretty much anywhere else on earth than around the very people who, when they found out she was broke and unemployable, would quite enjoy seeing her taken down a peg or six. But on the other hand, those very people were also her only viable source pool when it came to reversing said bank account and job status. Unlike her brother, she didn't have a degree to fall back on. Tennis—and being a tennis celebrity—was all she knew. And to be honest, all she really wanted to know.

The trick was going to be figuring out how to make the rounds, schmooze
…
and at the same time not let the media or, more important, her family find out about the predicament she'd gotten herself into. Then there was that other sticky little issue. She was going to have to maintain a certain lifestyle while in town. You had to be money to make money. Or something like that, anyway. Nobody wanted to latch on to a star that was descending, as Alden and all the reps before him had made
so abundantly clear. She'd have to hit the town and the party circuit with stilettos blazing, and somehow—discreetly—find someone who was still willing to sign her to a deal. Any kind of deal. She'd hawk just about anything at this point.

All she had to do now was figure out how to finance her little plan.

Chapter 2

G
abrielle Fontaine's eyebrows shot up. "You want me to go where?"

Max Fontaine watched his younger sister flounce across their hotel room and flop onto the couch with the kind of drama only a sixteen-year-old girl could evoke. He struggled to keep his tone even. "Think of it as a vacation."

"I don't
need
a vacation. I need a coach, dammit."

"Don't swear."

She merely rolled her eyes at him, then huffed as she crossed her arms across her chest.

"And I think we need to take a short break before we recruit someone new."

She looked at him as if he'd sprouted another head. He wished. Two brains would come in handy when dealing with a recalcitrant, bullheaded, thinks-she-knows-every-damn-thing teenager. Especially when said teenager knew exactly what buttons to push.

"I know you're still disappointed that I didn't go further in Paris," she told him, "but give me a break. I drew Serena in the first round, so are you kidding me? My first grand slam and I get Wonder Woman on Day One. All that hard work to qualify and then, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, I'm gone."

Max shot her a w
arning look. "You know damn—darn
well that I'm not disappointed in you. Not everyone plays their first match of their first grand slam on a stadium court in front of sixteen thousand screaming fans. And you pushed her to three sets, Gaby, something even the top-ten players haven't been able to do since sometime during the middle of last year. Everybody's talking about it."

"Then I came here and made it exactly one round further in Birmingham. Oh yeah, everybody's talking. And what they're saying is that the junior-circuit phenom isn't so phenomenal when playing against the big girls. Some of whom are barely a year or two olde
r
than me."

"And have already been playing on tour for a year or more."

"And whose fault is it I haven't been on tour for the past year?" she groused, even though she knew that was a dead-end argument.

Max didn't even go there. Gaby had known for a long time that he had no intentions of putting her on tour before she finished school. Even then he thought that was too young. He'd have liked to see her play through college, earn a degree. But he'd known that was unlikely. She had such a fire in her, a burning passion to play, and she was just too damn good. To top it off, she'd worked just as hard off the courts, finishing her tutoring and getting her GED early, leaving him little choice but to cut her loose this year and let her try her hand on the pro circuit. And even now she was still in a hurry.

"Cut yourself some slack, Gabrielle. You're doing exactly what we hoped you'd do."

"We meaning you and stupid Sven. You might not care, but I wanted to go further in Paris. And I ce
r
tainly expected to this week. I know I can do it. I just need a coach who understands me." She glared at him, all accusation and daring him to say otherwise.

Like he was the one who threw temper tantrums on and off the court. Like he was the one who had to make every little damn thing some huge melodramatic event. As a junior, the only reason he could get the top coaches to agree to work with her was because, as an athlete, she had a ridiculous amount of natural talent. He tried to blame it on hormones, or some othe
r
mysterious becoming-a-woman estrogen thing. But it didn't really matter why. What mattered was that he find some way to deal with it. To deal with her.

With more patience than he thought he still possessed, he took a steadying breath and crossed the room, taking a seat next to her. "Come on, Gaby," he said calmly, focusing all of his attention on her.

She kept her gaze averted, but he just waited. He knew a few buttons, too. Finally she shifted her steely, unrepentant gaze to him. It was a small capitulation, but a telling one for anybody who knew her. And no one knew Gabrielle Fontaine better than her big brother.

"You convinced me you were ready to move up, but—"

"I am," she said with absolute certainty. "You and I both know it."

He did know it. She'd obliterated the juniors to the point where there was nowhere else for her to go but pro. Truth be told, he was the one who hadn't been ready. He'd held her back as long as he could, keeping her as protected as possible from the big bad world of the women's tour. Not that competing on the junior level was a walk in the park. She'd been an international attention-getter for some time now, but on a much smaller scale.

Only the tennis world really paid attention to the junior phenoms. Now she was on the main stage, with the whole world watching. An enormous amount of pressure had been brought to bear on her as the next great hope for the American women's game.

He'd prepared her for that as much as he could, and carefully selected the initial events she would play in, keeping them well paced and her overall schedule light for her first year. Professional tennis was a sport populated by teenagers, so she was far from alone out there, but he'd seen too many burn out or end their careers early due to injury from overextending themselves and putting too much of a strain on their still growing bodies. On top of that, they had the international media paying attention now since her debut in Paris. It didn't hurt that she was beautiful, flamboyant, and confident bordering on cocky. Okay, maybe not bordering. She was making quite the splash already and it scared the hell out of him in ways he hadn't been prepared for.

He'd been almost relieved when she'd lost early this week. London media was the worst and he was thankful she was out of the spotlight for now. She'd been given a wild card into Wimbledon, her second grand slam of the year, starting in a few weeks. They could both use the break,

He'd been more worried about the tour pressures than the media attention, but her very confidence in herself insulated her somewhat. Gaby was so sure of her abilities that t
he pressures and international-
scale expectations didn't seem to faze her. It seemed normal to her for people to expect great things of her, since she expected them from herself, as well. She only seemed to get bent out of shape with her assumptions about
his
expectations of her.

As brother, mentor, manager, guidance counselor, and most important, the only family she had left in the world, he worried
constantly about whether he was making the right choices for her. Especially lately when her temperament careened from typical teenager, to t
yrant, to woman-wise-beyond-her-
years. Often in a breathtakingly short time span.

Now more than ever he wished Gaby had a female influence in her life, someone to maybe soften her up a little. Even a female coach would be welcome, but Gaby had gone through the few they'd tried like water through a sieve. Male coaches had slightly better luck, but didn't last much longer. And while they'd had varying degrees of success in molding her game, none of them had forged any inroads into molding her temperament. That job, apparently, was destined to remain his and his alone. Lucky him.

"I just don't see why I'm being punished with this stupid spa thing," Gaby insisted, drawing him from his thoughts.

"You know," he gently chided, "most people wouldn't view a few weeks stay at a place called Glass Slipper as punishment."

Gaby snorted. "Glass Slipper. I'm no princess."

"You're telling me," Max muttered before he could catch himself.

But rather than flip out, Gaby laughed, though it was totally sardon
ic in tone. The going-on-thirty-
year-old surfaced once more. He wished he was better at predicting that, but he knew it was a fairly hopeless expectation.

"Exactly," she said airily. "So why try to pretend otherwise? No amount of time spent at some posh spa is going to magically transform me into the lovely, obedient young lady you so yearn for me to be."

"That's not true."

She leveled an amused smile at him. "Which? About
it taking more than two weeks
? Or you yearning for me to find my inner good girl?"

"Both, actually," he said, momentarily surprising her. He immediately capitalized on gaining the rare edge. "I don't want them to change you, I want them to help you." He held up a hand to stall her, surprised when she respected it. "And I don't want you turned into something you're not, no matter what you think." He leaned forward and took her hands, squeezing them together between his own. "You've been amazing these past couple of months. Most girls your age couldn't handle a tenth of what you have. I couldn't be more proud of you and how you've handled the tour so far."

Instead of being touched by his sincere proclamation, she snorted and tugged her hands free. The tyrant had returned. "Don't bullshit me, Max. Just tell me the real reason you want to dump me in this stupid, godforsaken 'life spa' for two weeks. Vacation plans of your own? Haven't been laid in a while? Because I have no problem with that. Really. You work too hard, you have no life. In case you haven't noticed, I can take perfectly good care of myself. I don't need baby-sitting." She flicked her hand at him. "So go on and have your little fling. You have my blessing."

Max clenched his jaw. "First of all, enough with the swearing already. And you know perfectly well that I'd never just take off and—"

Gaby barked a laugh. "Exactly!" She slapped her hands on her thighs and shoved to a stand. "God, Max, you're so uptight you don't even know how repressed you are."

"I'm not repressed!" he spluttered as he shot off the couch after her, wondering once again just where and when he'd lost control of this conversation.

"When was the last time you got laid? Hell, when was the last time you even went on a date? And I mean with a woman who wasn't tour personnel, a marketing rep, or a sponsor? In other words, not a business dinner? Honestly, I have more fun than you, and I have no social life."

Max stood there, hands on his hips, fully prepared to deliver a perfectly worded, stinging retort guaranteed to shut down this particular subject. Only nothing came to mind. Mostly because there was a hint of a chance that she actually had a point. But he'd let her pummel him physically if necessary before he'd give her that kind of power.

"If you don't have plans for the next few weeks, maybe you should make some," she went on, goaded by his uncharacteristic silence. "Go pick someone up. Everyone thinks you're kind of a hottie. For an old guy, anyway. Though if they saw you in those ratty old sweats you insist on—"

"They're my fraternity sweats, and I'd hardly wear them out on—wait a minute, I'm a
what
? What did you just say?" Max raked his hands through his hair, completely lost now. "Who says that about me?"

Gaby sighed in teenaged disgust. "You are so hopeless. Of course, that you're so totally oblivious to it is part of what gets them, you know? I mean, I know it's because you're too anal about every last detail of my every living and breathing moment. But to them it comes off like this cute, endearing sort of earnestness."

"Them? Who the hell is 'them'?"

"Don't swear," she said, smiling broadly, vastly amused at his complete consternation. "I could give you a list. But do me one favor, okay? You're thirty, so no hitting on anyone under, like, twenty-five. It would be so embarrassing." She lowered her gaze. "For both of us."

"I'm not going to
h
it on anybody," he insisted, his mind still racing along this surprising, if unbelievable, new path.

She crossed the sitting room that connected their two bedrooms. "You know, the more I think about it, the more I think you should. Date, I mean. Might do us both some good. Give me a little room to breathe, and loosen up that tight-assed,
overprotective tendency of yours, all in one shot." With a grin and a wiggle of her fingers, she disappeared into her room. Once again, having the last word.

He couldn't help it. She'd left him with his mouth hanging open. What was it the Brits called it? Gobsmacked? Didn't he have enough to deal with? She was just being ridiculous, but even if it were true, it was more than he was prepared to deal with.

God, life had been so much easier before she grew breasts and started realizing boys were good for more than beating on the tennis court.

With a confused sigh, Max walked to her still open bedroom door. He leaned on the frame and watched as she flopped across the bed, magazine in one hand, while booting up her laptop with the other. If he didn't know better, he'd think she was just a typical teenager with nothing more on her mind than boys and the latest fashion tips. If only.

He let the room fall silent, save for the cl
icking sound as she typed on her
keyboard. Perhaps it was time he admitted that cajoling and psychology were never going to work with her. She'd always been too sharp to fall for that. Maybe it was time to try something completely new.
Desperate times called for desperate measures,
he thought, then plunged ahead with plan B. Okay, so it was more like plan X, version 7.0, but who was keeping track?

Instead of thinking of her as a naive sixteen-year-old—which she obviously wasn't—maybe he'd have more success if he appealed to the older-than-her-years side of her. What the hell did he have to lose? "You've grown up fast, Gaby. You're light-years past most girls your age. I know that and respect it. But if you think about it, I know you'd agree that it's been an insulated life, too, in a lot of ways. Playing tennis full-time, learning from tutors, constantly traveling. And now things are changing even faster. You're going to face things on tour I can't prepare you for."