Opposites Attract

to win.”
    Martin didn’t smile, but reached into his pocket. He held out a discreet, expensively printed business card. “Call me Monday,” he said simply, and walked away.
    Ty had a patron.
    The marriage wasn’t made in heaven. Over the next seven years there were bitter arguments, bursts of temper and dashes of love. Ty worked hard because he understood that work and discipline were the means to the end. He remained in school and studied only because his mother and Martin had a conspiracy against him. Unless he completed high school with decent grades, the patronage would be removed. As to the patronage itself, Ty accepted it only because his needs demanded it. But he was never comfortable with it. The lessons polished his craft. Good equipment tightened his game. He played on manicured grass, well-tended clay and wood, learning the idiosyncrasies of each surface.
    Every morning before school he practiced. Afternoons and weekends were dedicated to tennis. Summers, he worked part time in the pro shop at Martin’s club, then used the courts to hone his skill. By the time he was sixteen the club’s tennis pro could beat him only if Ty had an off day.
    His temper was accepted. It was a game of histrionics. Women found a certain appeal in his lawlessness. Ty learned of female pleasures young, and molded his talent there as carefully as he did his game.
    The only break in his routine came when he injured his hand coming to the defense of his sister. Ty considered the two-week enforced vacation worth it, as the boy Jess had been struggling with had a broken nose.
    He traveled to his first tournament unknown and unseeded. In a lengthy, gritty match heralded in the sports pages, he found his first professional victory. When he lost, Ty was rude, argumentative and brooding. When he won, he was precisely the same. The press tolerated him because he was young, brilliant and colorful. His rise from obscurity was appreciated in a world where champions were bred in the affluent, select atmosphere of country clubs.
    Before his nineteenth birthday Ty put a down payment on a three-bedroom house in a Chicago suburb. He moved his family out. When he was twenty he won his first Wimbledon title. The dream was realized, but his intensity never slackened.
    Now, walking along the dark streets of Rome, he thought of his roots. Asher made him think of them, perhaps because hers were so markedly different. There had been no back alleys or street gangs in her life. Her childhood had been sheltered, privileged and rich. With James Wolfe as a father, her introduction to tennis had come much earlier and much easier than Ty’s. At four she had a custom-made racket and had hit balls on her father’s private courts. Her mother had hired maids to scrub floors, not been hired out to scrub them.
    At times Ty wondered if it was that very difference that had attracted him to her. Then he would remember the way she felt in his arms. Backgrounds were blown to hell. Yet there was something about her reserve that had drawn him. That and the passion he had sensed lay beneath.
    The challenge. Yes, Ty admitted with a frown, he was a man who couldn’t resist a challenge. Something about the cool, distant Asher Wolfe had stirred his blood even when she had been little more than a child. He’d waited for her to grow up. And to thaw out, he reminded himself ruefully. Turning a corner without direction, Ty found himself approaching one of Rome’s many fountains. The water twinkled with light gaiety while he watched, wishing his blood were as cool.
    God, how he wanted her still. The need grated against pride, infuriating and arousing him. He would have taken her back that night even knowing she had been another man’s wife, shared another man’s bed. It would have been less difficult to have thought about her with many lovers than with one husband—that damn titled Englishman whose arms she had run to straight from his own.
Why?
The question pounded at him.
    How many times in those first few months had he relived their last few days together, looking for the key? Then he’d layered over the hurt and the fury. The wound had healed jaggedly then callused. Ty had gone on because he was a survivor. He’d survived poverty, and the streets, and the odds. With an unsteady laugh he raked a hand through his thick mop of hair. But had he really survived Asher?
    He knew he had taken more than one woman to bed because her hair was nearly the same shade, her