Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game Read Free

felt a migraine coming on.

    “You get anything?”
    His friend tried to sound hopeful. But he already knew the answer.
    None of them had gotten the two-hundred-thousand-dollar picture.
    Eve Blackwell had outsmarted them all.

T WO
    IN THE MATERNITY UNIT AT NEW YORK’S MOUNT SINAI Medical Center, Nurse Gaynor Matthews watched the handsome, middle-aged father take his newborn child in his arms for the first time.
    He was gazing at the baby girl, oblivious to everything around him. Nurse Matthews thought: He’s thinking how beautiful she is.
    Nurse Matthews was pleasantly plump, with a round, open face and a ready smile that accentuated the twin fans of lines around her eyes. A midwife for more than a decade, she’d seen this moment played out thousands of times—hundreds of them in this very room—but she never tired of it. Besotted dads, their eyes lighting up with love, the purest love they would ever know. Moments like these made midwifery worthwhile. Worth the grinding hours. Worth the crappy pay. Worth the patronizing male obstetricians who thought of themselves as gods just because they had a medical degree and a penis.
    Worth the rare moments of tragedy.
    The father gently caressed his baby’s cheek. He was a beautiful man, Nurse Matthews decided. Tall, dark, broad-shouldered, a classic jock. Just the way she liked them.
    She blushed. What on earth was she doing? She had no right to think such things. Not at a time like this.
    The father thought: Jesus Christ. She’s so like her mother.

    It was true. The little girl’s skin was the same delicate, translucent peach as the girl he’d fallen in love with all those years ago. Her big, inquisitive eyes were the same pale gray, like dawn mist rolling off the ocean. Even her dimpled chin was her mother in miniature. For a split second, the father’s heart leaped at the sight of her, an involuntary smile playing around his lips.
    His daughter. Their daughter. So tiny. So perfect.
    Then he looked down at the blood on his hands.
    And screamed.
     
    Alex had been so excited that morning when Peter drove her to the hospital.
    “Can you believe that in a few short hours she’ll be here?”
    She was still in her pajamas, her long blond hair tangled after a fitful night’s sleep, but he didn’t think she’d ever looked more luminous. She wore a grin wider than the Lincoln Tunnel, and if she was nervous, she didn’t show it.
    “We’re finally going to meet her!”
    “Or him.” He reached over to the passenger seat and squeezed his wife’s hand.
    “Uh-uh. No way. It’s a girl. I know it.”
    She’d woken up around six with fairly mild contractions and insisted on waiting another two hours before she would let him drive her to Mount Sinai. Two hours in which Peter Templeton had walked up and down the stairs of their West Village brownstone sixteen times, made four unwanted cups of coffee, burned three slices of toast and yelled at his son, Robert, for not being ready for school on time, before being reminded by the housekeeper that it was in fact mid-July, and school had been out for the last five weeks.
    Even at the hospital Peter flapped around uselessly like a mother hen.
    “Can I get you anything? A hot towel?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Water?”
    “No thanks.”
    “Crushed ice cubes?”
    “Peter…”
    “What about that meditation music you’re always playing? That’s calming, right? I could run to the car and get the tape?”

    Alex laughed. She was astonishingly calm.
    “I think you need it more than I do. Honestly, darling, you must try to relax. I’m having a baby. Women do this every day. I’ll be fine.”
    I’ll be fine.
    The first problems began about an hour later. The midwife frowned at one of the monitors. Its green line had begun rising in sudden, jagged leaps.
    “Stand back please, Dr. Templeton.”
    Peter searched the woman’s face for clues, like a nervous airline passenger watching the flight attendant during turbulence…if she