Her Secret Fling

The second half of the meeting consisted of brainstorming future stories and features. With the Pan-Pacific Swimming Championship trials coming up, there was a lot of discussion around who would qualify. Naturally, everyone turned to her for her opinion—everyone except Jake, that is.

He didn’t so much as glance at her as she discussed the form of the current crop of Australian swimmers, many of whom had been her teammates and competitors until recently.

“Hey, this is like having our own secret weapon,” Macca said. “I love that stuff about what happens in the change rooms before a race.”

“Yeah. We should definitely do something on that when the finals are closer. Sort of a diary-of-a-swimmer kind of thing,” Leonard said. “Really get inside their heads.”

“There’s plenty of stuff we could cover. Superstitions, lucky charms, that kind of thing,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah, great,” Leonard said.

Her confidence grew. Maybe this wasn’t going to be as daunting as she’d first thought. Sure, she was a fish out of water—literally—but everyone seemed nice and she understood sport and the sporting world and the commitment top athletes had to have to get anywhere. She had something to contribute.

Then she glanced at Jake and saw he was sitting back in his chair, doodling on his pad, clearly bored out of his mind. A small smile curved his mouth, as though he was enjoying a private joke.

It was the same whenever she spoke during the meeting—the same smile, the same doodling as though nothing she had to say could possibly be of any interest.

By the time she returned to her desk, she knew she hadn’t imagined his attitude during their introduction. Jake Stevens did not like her. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand why. They’d never met before. How could he possibly not like her when he didn’t even know her?

She’d barely settled in her chair when her cell phone beeped. She checked it and saw Uncle Charlie had sent her a message:

Good luck. Come out strong and you’ll win the race.

She smiled, touched that he’d remembered this was her first day. Of course, Uncle Charlie always remembered the important things.

She composed a return message. She’d bought him a cell phone a year ago so they could stay in touch when she was competing internationally, but he’d never been one hundred percent comfortable with the technology. She could imagine how long it had taken him to key in his short message.

The sound of masculine laughter made her lift her head. Jake was talking with Jonesy at the other man’s desk, a cup of coffee in hand. She watched as Jake dropped his head back and laughed loudly.

She returned her attention to the phone, but she could still see him out of the corner of her eye. He said something to Jonesy, slapped the other man on the shoulder, then headed to his own desk. Which meant he was about to walk past hers.

She kept her focus on her phone but was acutely conscious of his approach. When he stopped beside her, her belly tightened. Slowly she lifted her head.

He studied her desk, taking in the heavy reference books she’d brought in with her: a thesaurus, a book on grammar and the Macquarie Dictionary in two neat, chunky volumes. After a short silence, he met her eyes.

“You do know that A to K comes before L to Z, right?” he asked. He indicated the dictionaries and she saw she’d inadvertently set them next to each other in the wrong order. He leaned across and rearranged them, as though she might not be able to work it out for herself without his help.

“My hot tip for the day,” he said, then he moved off, arrogance in every line of his body.

She was blushing ferociously. Her third Jake Stevens–inspired blush for the day. She stared at his back until he reached his desk, unable to believe he’d taken a swipe at her so openly. What an asshole.

He thought she was a stupid jock. That was why he’d been so dismissive when he met her and why he hadn’t listened to a word she’d said in the meeting. He thought she was a dumb hunk of muscle with an instinct for swimming and nothing to offer on dry land. Certainly nothing to offer in a newsroom.

She knew his opinion shouldn’t matter. It probably wouldn’t, either, if it didn’t speak to her deepest fears about this new direction she’d chosen.

She’d finished high school, but only just. She read a lot, but she wasn’t exactly known for her e-mails and letters. For the bulk of her life, she’d measured her success in body lengths and split seconds, not in column inches and words. Even her parents had been astonished when she accepted this job. She could still remember the bemused looks her mother and father had exchanged when she’d told them. Her brother had laughed outright, thinking she was joking.

She picked up her phone again and stared at her uncle’s text:

Come out strong and you’ll win the race.

God, how she wished it was as easy as that.

She was filled with a sudden longing for the smell of chlorine and the humid warmth of the pool. She knew who she was there, what she was. On dry land, she was still very much a work in progress.

Who cares what he thinks? He doesn’t know you, he knows nothing about you. Screw him.

Poppy straightened in her chair. She reached out and deliberately put the L to Z back where it had been before Jake Stevens gave her his hot tip for the day.

She’d beaten some of the toughest athletes in the world. She’d conquered her own nerves and squeezed the ultimate performance from her body. She’d stood on a podium in front of hundreds of thousands of people and held a gold medal high.

One man’s opinion didn’t mean dick. She was smart, she was resourceful. She could do this job.

JAKE PULLED THE CORK from a bottle of South Australian shiraz and poured himself a glass. He took the bottle with him as he moved from the kitchen into the living room of his South Yarra apartment.

Vintage R.E.M. blasted from his stereo as he dropped onto the couch. His thoughts drifted over the day as he stared out the bay window to the river below. He frowned.

Poppy Birmingham.

He still couldn’t believe the stupid pride on Leonard’s face as he’d introduced her. As if she was his own private dancing bear. As if he expected Jake to break into applause because a woman who had never put pen to paper in her life had scored the kind of job it took dedicated journalists years to achieve.

He made a rude noise as he thought about the brand-new reference books she’d lined up on her desk. Not a wrinkle on the spine of any of them. What a joke.

He took another mouthful of wine as his gaze drifted to his own desk, tucked into the corner near the window.

He should really fire up his computer and try to get some words down.

He smiled a little grimly. Who was he kidding? He wasn’t going to do any writing tonight, just as he hadn’t done any real writing for the past few years. It wasn’t as though his publisher was breathing down his neck, after all. They’d stopped doing that about five years ago, two years after his first novel had made the bestseller lists, won literary prizes and turned him into a wunderkind of the Australian literary scene.

He’d missed so many deadlines since then, they’d stopped hassling him. Now the only time he was asked when his next book was due out was when he met people for the first time—mostly because they assumed he’d written second, third, fourth books that they simply hadn’t heard about. After all, what writer with any ambition to be a novelist wrote only one book and never completed another?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jake Stevens.

He offered a mock bow to his apartment and poured himself another glass of wine.

Like a needle in the groove of a record, his thoughts circled to Poppy Birmingham. He’d never interviewed her, but he’d interviewed plenty like her. He knew without asking that she’d discovered a love of swimming at an early age, been talent scouted by someone-or-other, then spent the next twenty years churning up various pools.

She’d sacrificed school, boyfriends, family, whatever, to be the best. She was disciplined. She was driven. Yada yada. She could probably crack walnuts with her superbly toned thighs and outrun, outswim and out-anything-else him that she chose to do.

She was a professional athlete—and she had no place on a newspaper. Call him old-fashioned, but that was how he felt.

He leaned back on the couch, legs straight in front of him, feet crossed at the ankle. His stereo stacker switched from REM to U2—the good angry old stuff, not the new soft and happy pop they’d been serving up the last decade.

He swirled the wine around in his glass, shaking his head as he remembered Poppy’s brown suit and how wrong she’d looked in it—like a kid playing dress up. No. Like a transvestite, a man shoehorning himself into women’s clothing.

Honesty immediately forced him to retract the thought. He might not approve of her hiring, but there was nothing remotely masculine about Poppy. She was tall, true, with swimmer’s shoulders. But she was a woman, no doubt about it. The breasts and hips curving her suit had been a dead giveaway there. And she had a woman’s face—small nose, big gray eyes, cheekbones. Her mouth was a trifle on the large size for true beauty, but her full lips more than made up for that. And even though she kept her blond hair cropped short, she didn’t look even remotely butch.

He took another mouthful of wine. Just because his new “colleague” was easy on the eyes didn’t make what Leonard had done any more acceptable. A smile curved his mouth as a thought occurred—if Poppy was anywhere near as inexperienced a writer as he imagined, Leonard was going to have his hands full knocking her columns into shape. It felt like a fitting punishment for a bad decision.