Free The Secret Agent by Francine Mathews Page B

That’s why you train so hard—it’s the voodoo that keeps you alive. Suzanne was lucky. She kicked back—eased up on her training—par-tied too hard—and did a back flip over a course barrier. She got off with a blown knee. Could have been a broken neck.”
    “She claimed you drove her beyond her limits. That your coaching was relentless.”
    “Relentless? I didn’t know Suzanne understood words of three syllables. But I wasn’t her coach. She paid somebody else for that.”
    “So why sue
you,
Max?”
    He set down the bottle and stared at her, his expression remote. “I think her dreams died hard. Somebody had to pay, and Suzanne figured she’d paid enough. Her career was shot. She’d lost her chance to medal, she’d lost the endorsements—she needed to clutch at something. Apparently it wasn’t me.”
    Though you looked, in all those photos clipped from a hundred magazines, like a match made in Hollywood …
    “A frivolous suit,” she mused. “Impossible to prove. But instead of fighting it, you settled out of court. Pity?”
    Max handed her the wineglass. “Failure is so goddamn tedious. I gave Suzanne half a million to go away. Do you want to see my shop?”
    It was connected to the house’s lower floor by a short passage, beyond an exercise room and a hot tub with doors that opened into the night. The workspace was spartan. A drafting table with color ads of ski gear clipped to its upper edge; a promotional poster or two tacked to the walls; a computer and a few chairs. But every square surface of the open area beyond was lined with prototypes of skis, red and black and strident yellow. Boots were scattered around the floor in various stages of assembly and the tools of the ski tuner’s trade reared up like the medieval rack: vises, benches, warming pans for wax. Brushes. Spray cans. Flat-bladed knives. Buffers and drills.
    “I hadn’t realized this was so hands-on,” she remarked.
    “I test everything I make.”
    “But you don’t
make
it, surely? You draw it. On that drafting table. The skis themselves are made in …”
    “Lyons.” He was watching her, checking off the facts she’d found in his dossier. “They send everything back for quality control and technical refining.”
    He crossed the room and chose some skis from the horde against the wall. “Here’s the pair I thought might suit you. The Volant T3 Vertex. They’re designed specifically for women and their marketing slogan is:
Weaker sex, my ass.
That suits, right?”
    The skis were the color and sheen of stainless steel. A Bauhaus concept of a blade. The DeLorean of the slopes. “You didn’t design these,” she said.
    “I don’t design for women,” he replied. “I can’t test the skis properly. Women have a totally different strength-to-weightratio. Your center of gravity is lower. You turn differently, carry your weight differently, bend differently than men. I can simulate that on the computer, of course, but not on the slope.”
    “I like my skis,” she protested.
    “Because you paid for them. You’re skiing Vökls right now—and don’t get me wrong, they’re
great
if you’re a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound guy. You handle them well, considering. But I’d like to see you on these.”
    She ran her eye down the surface. “Teflon?”
    “Over a foam core.”
    “They’re too short.”
    “They’re perfect. I’m taking you into the steeps tomorrow.
Off-piste
terrain. Anything longer, you’ll be sliding down the Alps on your backside.”
    “You’d make sure of that, wouldn’t you?” She spoke with a trace of amusement. “If only to have the satisfaction of being
right.
You need to ski faster, live harder, think quicker—”
    “Dominate,” he agreed evenly, taking a step toward her. “It’s my driving force. I dominate the people around me just like I dominate the mountain. Or so Suzanne always said. I pushed and pushed until she broke. And I feel not the slightest regret, Stefani. I always knew