Opposites Attract

“Shall I order up something to drink? Some coffee?”
    “No.” He sat as she suggested and looked at his daughter. She was thinner, he noted. And nervous, as nervous as he was himself. Since Ty’s phone call, he’d done little but think of her. “Asher,” he began, then sighed. “Please sit down.” He waited until she settled across from him. “I want to tell you I’m proud of the way you’ve played this season.”
    His voice was stiff, but she expected little else. “Thank you.”
    “I’m most proud of the last match you played.”
    Asher gave him a small smile. How typical that it was tennis he spoke of first. “I lost.”
    “You played,” he countered. “Right down to the last point, you played. I wonder how many people who watched knew that you were ill.”
    “I wasn’t ill,” Asher corrected him automatically. “If I came on court—”
    “Then you were fit,” he finished, before he shook his head. “I drummed that into you well, didn’t I?”
    “A matter of pride and sportsmanship,” she said quietly, giving him back the words he had given her again and again during her training.
    Jim lapsed into silence, frowning at the elegant hands that lay folded in her lap. She’d always been his princess, he thought, his beautiful, golden princess. He’d wanted to give her the world, and he’d wanted her to deserve it.
    “I didn’t intend to come here to see you.”
    If the statement hurt, she gave no sign. “What changed your mind?”
    “A couple of things, most particularly, your last match.”
    Rising, Asher walked to the window. “So, I had to lose to have you speak to me again.” The words came easily, as did the light trace of bitterness. Though love had remained constant, she found no need to give him unvarnished adulation any longer. “All those years I needed you so badly, I waited, hoping you’d forgive me.”
    “It was a hard thing to forgive, Asher.”
    He rose, too, realizing his daughter had grown stronger. He wasn’t sure how to approach the woman she had become.
    “It was a hard thing to accept,” she countered in the calm voice he remembered. “That my father looked at me as athlete first and child second.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “Isn’t it?” Turning, she fixed him with a level stare. “You turned your back on me because I gave up my career. Not once when I was suffering did you hold out a hand to me. I had no one to go to but you, and because you said no, I had no one at all.”
    “I tried to deal with it. I tried to accept your decision to marry that man, though you knew how I felt about him.” The unexpected guilt angered him and chilled his voice. “I tried to understand how you could give up what you were to play at being something else.”
    “I had no choice,” she began furiously.
    “No choice?” His derision was sharp as a blade. “You made your own decision, Asher—your career for a title—just as you made it about the child. My grandchild.”
    “Please.” She lifted both hands to her temples as she turned away. “Please don’t. Have you any idea how much and how often I’ve paid for that moment of carelessness?”
    “Carelessness?”
Stunned into disbelief, Jim stared at the back of her head. “You call the conception of a child carelessness?”
    “No,
no!
” Her voice trembled as it rose. “The loss. If I hadn’t let myself get upset, if I had looked where I was going, I never would have fallen. I never would have lost Ty’s child.”
    “What!” As the pain slammed into his stomach, Jim sank into the chair. “Fallen? Ty’s child?
Ty’s?
” He ran a hand over his eyes as he tried to sort it out. Suddenly he felt old and frail and frightened. “Asher, are you telling me you miscarried Ty’s child?”
    “Yes.” Wearily she turned back to face him. “I wrote you, I told you.”
    “If you wrote, I never received the letter.” Shaken, Jim held out a hand, waiting until she grasped it. “Asher, Eric told me you aborted his child.” For an instant, the words, their meaning, failed to penetrate. Her look was blank and vulnerable enough to make him feel every year of his age. “A calculated abortion of your husband’s child,” he said deliberately. When she swayed he gripped her other hand. “He told me you’d done so without his knowledge or permission. He seemed devastated. I believed him, Asher.” As she went limp, he drew her down to her knees in front of him. “I believed him.”
    “Oh, God.” Her