Mating Game

Jovanka Houska

Description

Meet Ivana ('call me Vanny') Jones, a sexy, beautiful, warm-hearted professional chess-player. She has a problem: she's only attracted to guys who can beat her... so what's she to do when a chess amateur, the Russian billionaire Boris Bogolyubov, proposes marriage?Not only that, but as Vanny tries to achieve her lifelong dream of becoming a chess grandmaster, she develops a crush on Norwegian sex-god Sven while also falling for a stunning and adoring Frenchwoman. Meanwhile, Vanny's hoping a revolutionary new drug treatment will save her best friend Charlotte's life.Set in London, Monaco, Budapest, Helsinki, Odessa, New York... and Leicester, this sparkily written, passionate, emotional and entertaining novel will rock your boat... even if you've never shouted'Checkmate!'

Sujets

• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: The Conrad Press
• Date de parution: 03 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783019823
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Mating Game


The Mating Game Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2016
Tel: [phone] www.theconradpress.com [e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-78301-982-3
Copyright © Jovanka Houska & James Essinger, 2016
The moral right of Jovanka Houska & James Essinger to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Book cover design and typesetting by:Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.
Copyright material used 
An extract from Drink Down by Kevin Smith (1962 - 2010), musician and lyricist of The Fling.


The Mating Game
Jovanka Houska & James Essinger


I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art – and much more.
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) - he gave up art for chess. At one point his fascination with the game so demoralised his first wife that she glued all his pieces to the board
Hey, open up here comes original sin
Hey, open up here comes original sin
Hey, open up here comes original sin
It’s all-right, it’s all-right, it’s all-right, it’s all-right
It’s all-right, it’s all-right, it’s all-right
It’s all-right, it’s all-right, it’s all-right
No one’s got it all
No one’s got it all
No one’s got it all
‘Hero of the Story’ – Regina Spektor


The opening
The first dozen moves of the game, when each player starts to develop their strategy.
From Introduction to Chess by Ivana Jones (Checkmate Publications)


1
I suppose if you want to know when it really started, I’d need to begin with falling in love with chess when I was a lonely and rather chubby girl at the posh school, Abbey Hall in Devon, where my dad had sent me. But perhaps I ought to go back to the wintry afternoon in Hastings last year - on Thursday, December the twenty-ninth - when I met Sven, and Boris, in the space of a few hours. They’ve both ended up changing my life, though not as much as chess did.
Hastings is, of course, famous for its battle, which led to England being taken over by William the Conqueror in 1066. That December afternoon, my heart was about to be conquered, in a location as unpromising as the Horntye Park sports centre, where the Hastings International Chess Congress - the oldest chess tournament in the world - was being played. The tournament had started the previous day, four days after my birthday, which is on Christmas Eve, and no, it isn’t a great day for a birthday.
I’d managed to win my Round One game. My opponent that afternoon in Round Two, at two fifteen in the afternoon, was going to be a Norwegian player called Sven Olsen. I’d never heard of him before the previous evening, when the pairings went up on the internet and I discovered I was playing him today. Outside the sports centre, the weather was still cold following a big snowfall on Boxing Day. There’d been a bit of a thaw afterwards, but then the thermometer had shot below zero again. I got to the venue at, I suppose, about one o’clock in the afternoon. When I arrived, I spotted Miklos Steiner near the sports centre’s entrance.
You’ll perhaps have heard of Miklos, who’s the second highest-rated chess-player in the world. He was talking quietly, and in a distinctly sinister fashion, to Arpad Bognar, their heads close together. Arpad, like Miklos, is a Hungarian grandmaster, or GM, to use the abbreviation widespread in the chess world. They’d both achieved my most precious ambition, which was one day to become a chess grandmaster. This aim had become my dream ever since a quite possibly crazy moment, in my last year at university six years earlier, when I’d resolved to try to make chess my career. To win the GM title you need three official grandmaster-strength results in tournaments, or ‘grandmaster norms’, as they’re called. I was an international master (IM) already, but that was only a stepping-stone to being a grandmaster. There are fewer than forty female GMs in the whole world. I so much wanted to become one of them. I had only one norm so far.
I tiptoed past Miklos, hoping he hadn’t noticed me and wouldn’t. But just as I was about to push the sports centre’s heavy front door open, I heard his voice switch suddenly from Hungarian (I don’t know the language, but I supposed it was that) to English, with irritating mock-gaiety and with a very annoying stress on the second syllable of ‘hello’.
‘Hel lo , Ivana. I heard you von yesterday.’
He spoke as if my winning a game of chess was about as likely as the sun suddenly turning into an orange blancmange.
Wondering whether today in Hungary was Say Hello Contemptuously to Women You’ve Slept with and then Totally Ignored day, I turned and looked at Miklos.
‘Yes, I did,’ I replied, as levelly as I could.
‘Vell done. If you keep on vinning, perhaps soon we vill play each other again.’
I suppose he was thinking if ve play each other again I shall of course vin, and you’ll vant to sleep with me once more . His English, by the way, was close to perfect, apart from his always pronouncing the ‘w’ sound as a ‘v’.
I don’t want to go into great detail about what had happened between Miklos and me on a hot evening the previous September, at the European Championship in semi-tropical Odessa. I still had painful three-month-old memories of Miklos leading me into his bedroom, kicking the door shut, stripping quickly, then glancing at me.
‘You take off your clothes now, yes?’ he’d said. I’d looked back at him. ‘Is that it?’ I’d asked. ‘Is that your courtship technique?’ He’d just shrugged. I’d thought of walking out of there and returning to my own hotel room. But I didn’t. Why not? Because I was at the mercy of my silly quirk, which was that I found a man especially attractive if he could beat me at chess, which Miklos had, earlier that evening. Miklos had started sidling up to me on the bed. When he reached me he looked deeply into my eyes, then gently reached behind me and undid my hair-clasp. My hair, which is long, black and straight, fell down around my shoulders. He’d kissed me with a tenderness I hadn’t expected. Our kissing had soon become less tender, and more desperate.
Miklos hadn’t been in touch with me since then, not once. OK, I didn’t really want him to have been in touch, but I wanted him to have at least tried .
There outside the sports centre, that winter afternoon, as I was trying hard to think of something witty to say that would make clear to Miklos - without revealing any secrets to Arpad Bognar - that even if Miklos and I did play each other during the tournament and he beat me, there’d be no chance at all of a repeat of what had happened in Odessa, Vladimir Vladimirovich Vladimirov, aka The Three Vs, who as usual was dressed in black shoes, black trousers, a black pullover and a black leather cloak, appeared on the scene.
The Three Vs looked rather like the goodie terrorist in V for Vendetta , which, as anyone on the international chess circuit knew, was The Three Vs’ favourite movie. He didn’t have a Guy Fawkes mask, no, but his thick black eyebrows, severe mouth that never smiled, and his rather hooked Roman nose, added up to a moderately accurate likeness of the mask. The Three Vs was known for being the maddest member of the international chess tour, which, believe me, is saying a great deal.
Without giving any indication of being aware that Arpad or me were in the vicinity, Vladimir etc. (people refer to him as The Three Vs to save vocal cords and toner) started jabbering to Miklos in guttural Russian. At the same time, The Three Vs began hopping about on his left leg, though staying close to Miklos so Miklos could hear him. Miklos, who was dressed in a dark suit as usual, as if he was attending the prospective funeral of his opponent, seemed completely unfazed by The Three Vs’ hopping. I could only think that Miklos was as used to the loony as most of us in the rest of the professional chess world were. Arpad Bognar, who’d also spotted The Three Vs¸ backed off.
I didn’t know any of the Russian language in those days except for vodka, Gorky Park , Roman Abramovitch, the Russian names of the chess pieces, da (which means yes) and matrioshka , the Russian word for those Russian dolls that get smaller and smaller and slot into each other. I suspect this tells us something very significant about the Russian mind; I’m just not sure what.
I didn’t say another word to Miklos. Instead, I just walked off, still brooding on how arrogant Miklos was, and amazed that I’d been stupid enough to have gone to bed with him at all. The Three Vs was still hopping.
Feeling I absolutely needed to escape, I decided to head for the chess bookstall inside the sports centre to do a little browsing.
The bookstall at Hastings is at the back of the room where, during the hours of play, a grandmaster takes an audience through some of the top games underway. As play hadn’t started yet, the two dozen or so chairs in the room were all empty. I was standing in the doorway, about twenty feet from the bookstall.
A moment later I saw the most beautiful man I’d seen in my entire life.
There was a chess book in his hand. He was absorbed in the book, and was only half-facing me, but enough of him was on show for me to see t