Heart of the Race by Calmes Mary

Author:Calmes, Mary [Calmes, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2013-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

THE cab stopped in front of my house, and when he got out, my whole body suffused with warmth as I stared at the man.

And just like that, it was official.

Even if we spent the rest of our lives on opposite ends of the earth, I still had no business dragging any poor, innocent man into the devastation that was the remains of my heart. I had given it to Varro when I was too young to know better, and there it would stay. Nothing to be done about it. Graham was right. I needed to be loved, but there was only one person I wanted that from, and I was looking at him.

“Hey,” Varro called over to me as he walked up to the white picket fence, opened the gate, and then closed it behind him, his eyes never leaving mine the whole time.

“Isn’t my house awesome?” I threw out just to be saying something.

“I like that you have a yard,” he smiled, stopping to look around. Even close to downtown, the homes, because the neighborhood was old, had decent-sized front yards. So where I was, on the porch, sat a good fifty feet back from the sidewalk and under the wide overhang from the roof. We didn’t get a lot of traffic on my street, which was nice. “Did you put the cobblestones in yourself?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Nice. You did a good job.”

“Well, the contractor did, right?”

“Sure.”

It was weird. It felt odd, stiff, static—we were having the most polite conversation ever. All at once I realized I had to return us to normalcy.

“So what the hell is going on with you and your head mechanic?” I volleyed playfully.

His smile was instant, firing his eyes, and I could tell he was thankful we were talking like we always did.

“What brought him all the way here to me?” I added.

“He doesn’t know I got a job offer yet,” he answered, closing in, garment bag in one hand, huge Louis Vuitton duffel in the other. “And he was worried about me racing again without you there.”

“I see. And when do you plan to tell him what’s really going on?”

“Any second now,” he said as he sat down close next to me on the top step, putting his two articles of luggage on the step below him.

We were silent, just the two of us sitting together.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said, rolling my head sideways to look at him. “Why didn’t you just tell him about it as soon as you got it?”

“Because for one, it means the job, if he wants it, will be a lot different than the one he has now. He wouldn’t work for me anymore; he’d work for my new employer.”

“And for two?”

“When I first mentioned it to him, he thought it was too dangerous.”

I snorted out a laugh. “You got a job offer scarier than what you do now?”

“Potentially,” he hedged.

“Jesus, doing what? Riding your bike through a mine field?”

“Test driving.”

“So close, then?”

He laughed softly.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

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