Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 308

Chapter 300. Tennis Lessons.

SEDONA

I started them on a Saturday morning in early spring, the three of them lined up on the court at Dante’s facility with varying degrees of readiness.

Nick stood straight, racket in hand, expression serious.

He had asked me the week before to teach him properly. Not just for fun. Actually properly. The way I’d been taught, real technique, real expectations. I said yes. He nodded like we’d signed a contract.

Drew stood beside him with his notebook already open, which I’d told him he could bring as long as it didn’t become a reason to stop hitting balls and start writing instead. He’d agreed to this condition with the careful precision of someone who intended to honour it exactly as stated and no further.

Lake stood at the end with his racket over his shoulder like someone who had arrived at the court already believing themselves competent and was simply waiting for the lesson to confirm this.

“Okay, we’re starting with the grip.”

“I already know the grip,” Lake said.

“Show me,” I said.

He showed me. It was almost correct; the thumb placement was slightly off, the kind of thing that wouldn’t matter for five minutes and would matter enormously for five years.

“Close,” I said. “Here.” I adjusted it.

He looked at his hand. Then at me. Then, back at his hand, with the expression he used when he was deciding whether to argue with new information or accept it.

He accepted it.

“That does feel more stable,” he said, with the magnanimous tone of someone granting a concession.

“It’s correct,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Which is what I said.”

I let this go and moved on to Nick.

Nick absorbed everything I showed him with the specific intensity he brought to things that mattered to him. He watched my demonstration of the forehand grip carefully, positioned his own hand, checked it against what he’d seen, adjusted, checked again.

“Like that?” he asked.

“Exactly like that,” I said.

He practiced the grip without a ball for the full time I’d suggested, not rushing forward to the hitting part the way most beginners wanted to, just doing the foundational work because I’d told him the foundational work mattered. “You’re going to be good at this. I want to be.”

Not casually. With the specific weight of someone who had decided this was important for a reason they hadn’t fully said out loud.

I understood the reason without him saying it. It was the same reason I’d kept playing through every difficult thing at sixteen, at seventeen, because there was something in having a skill that was genuinely yours, something nobody could take away from you, regardless of what happened in the rest of your life.

I showed him the forehand again, slowly, and he watched with his whole face.

Drew asked the best questions.

“When you say keep the elbow up,” he said, during the serving demonstration, “do you mean up from the baseline position or up from the natural drop point? Because those are two different reference points. I want to make sure I’m measuring from the right one.”

I looked at him. “From the natural drop point,” I said. “The elbow should come up from wherever it naturally falls, not from some external reference.”

“That makes more sense,” Drew said, making a note. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

Dante was watching from the side bench. He was smiling in the specific way he smiled when Drew did something that was entirely Drew. He’d stopped being surprised by it. He hadn’t stopped appreciating it.

Lake, it turned out, had a natural instinct for the ball that none of us had fully anticipated.

This was both gratifying and, in its own way, somewhat challenging to manage.

He hit his first forehand, real contact, solid, the specific sound of a well-struck ball, and

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