CHAPTER TWENTY
Locke
I was not going to throw up.
That’s what I kept telling myself as I watched the green flag go up and saw Emma surge ahead.
I hadn’t felt this nervous since I was a teenager, navigating the hallways and trying to avoid the bullies. My palms were sweating. My face was overheating, despite the air conditioning being pumped into the room. Meanwhile, the thirty VIPs in our private suite surrounding me went on, sitting in their seats behind the glass, sipping champagne and dining on filet mignon and lobster. They casually glanced at the race, chatting and laughing as if the whole world didn’t revolve around what was going on below us.
Me? I nearly had my nose pressed against the glass and couldn’t take my eyes off her car, not even for a second.
God forbid she was in a wreck. I’d be in pieces.
“She’s killing it,” Ron Brady said to me, breaking through the shell I’d built around myself. I turned to him. He was the lucky reporter who’d won a ticket to hang with the other VIPs in the suite with us.
I nodded and took a swig of my Coors Light. “Er. I know.” My voice broke like a teenager’s.
I looked at him. He seemed surprised, like I might as well have been the CEO of UnHinged.
Calm, I reminded myself. To show I wasn’t worried, I grabbed a handful of nuts. Not exactly health food, but after the bacon, I’d gotten braver. I started popping them into my mouth. “Of course. Our girl’s going places,” I said with blasé confidence.
“You have a comment for the press?” he asked.
I nodded. “Like I said. Our girl’s going places,” I repeated since I couldn’t bring myself to come up with eloquence right now. “We’re thrilled to be working with Emma James this season. Great things are ahead for her.”
And I managed to tear my eyes away from the oval for an impressive thirty seconds, until Ron was out of the picture, heading toward the buffet.
Then, I went right back to the action.
And couldn’t believe what I was seeing. She’d gone around Kahne. A minute ago, he’d been in front of her, and now, he was choking on her exhaust. How the hell did she manage that? I couldn’t relax. Couldn’t make the mistake of looking away like that again. This wasn’t a five hundred, but they still had a long way to go, and anything could happen. Everything hinged on split seconds in this sport. One blink and the whole world could fall to shit.
She passed another car. Every time she did, I clenched my fist, pumping it.
Wow, she was fucking phenomenal. Half of me was bursting with pride. Half of me was bursting with nerves. I’d climbed Everest and done ultramarathons, but this was, by far, the most intense experience of my life. And I wasn’t even in the damn car.
“You okay, Pudge?”
I didn’t turn. I had a few nuts in my palm, warm from my holding them for the past five minutes. I fed them into my mouth and crunched on them as I watched the race like an obsessive fan. “Yep.”
“She’s doing great,” Laura said breezily, sitting on one of the stools beside me that lined up right in front of the glass. “You think—”
“Shit, yellow flag,” I broke in. “She’s going to be—”
“She’s fine. She’s on the other side of the oval. That’s… who is that? Busch, I think. The leader.”
I nodded. “Okay. Okay. We’re good.” I took a deep breath to calm myself. “Damn. Why’d we get into this again? This is stressful.”
I fixed on my headset to see where her mind was. Her father was trying to get her in for a pit stop. She was arguing that she didn’t want to, but then she gave in. She was a daddy’s girl, obviously. I watched her sail safely into pit road.
Meanwhile, Laura stood beside me, nudging me. I’d forgotten she was there. “Hello?”
I pulled off the headset. “What?”
She eyed me with concern. “How are you doing?”
I shrugged, watching the caution car loop around, the cars easily circling behind it as the wreckage from Busch’s car was cleared. “Fine.”
“And here I thought you had no interest in NASCAR,” she said, leaning against the table, still eyeing me suspiciously.
“I have concern for our investments, like any businessman would.”
She crossed her arms over her business suit. “Admit it,” she whispered, leaning in. “This has gone beyond that.”
“No, it hasn’t.”
“You told me you weren’t fucking her before,” she said, her eyes flashing in the glass, where the green flag had just come out. “Are you now?”
I pressed my lips together.
From her expression, she took that as a yes. She frowned. “Don’t think it isn’t obvious how you feel about her.”
I nodded. I supposed it was obvious. I was good at pushing myself out of the realm of where I could feel things because once I started feeling, I had a fucking terrible poker face. And no question, I felt for Emma. In a big way, a way I never had. “Okay.”
“Is it serious?”
I didn’t speak for a long time. I watched Emma, fearless, swerve around another car. People in the VIP box were starting to take notice. They were cheering her on now. I nodded. “Yeah.”
She blinked, surprised. I didn’t think she ever expected me to acknowledge it. “Yeah?”
The room broke out in applause, and someone behind me whooped. “Your girl just smoked Ryan Blaney,” one of the VIPs called to me. “Like he was standing still.”
My eyes went to the oval. Sure enough, she’d gotten around him, and was now gaining ground on the next car.
“As serious as it can be,” I admitted. I took a swig of my beer. “I think I’m falling in love with her.”
Her eyes widened. “Really? Are you sure you’re thinking clearly?”
I snorted. “What do you mean? I don’t fly off the handle all the time, do I?”
“No. But this sport is about adrenaline. It’s easy to let it cloud your judgment.”
“My judgment’s not clouded.”
“Are you sure? Because Emma is a corporate asset. What if the press finds out? You think this is a good move? Not even just for the company, but for Emma, personally.”
I broke my gaze from the oval and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“Remember what happened at the press conference? And that little stir up on the beach? There was all this speculation about her, as a woman. It’s different for women. Men, they can go and fuck any woman they want, and it’s no big deal. Hell, it’s celebrated. But women? Emma? They were all over her, at the press conference, on the message boards, everywhere. There are already accusations that because she’s a pretty piece of ass, she fucked her way onto the oval. If they find out you and she are together… it’s only going to get worse.”
I inhaled sharply.
“You really want her to get crucified any more than they’re already crucifying her?”
I shook my head. No, I wanted them to leave her alone. But that wasn’t possible.
Shit. As always, Laura, my voice of reason, was right. I looked at her, then back at the track, where Emma had just passed another car. I pulled on the headset, partly to hear what was going on, and partly to drown out Laura’s reason.
Sixteenth place. She was fucking in sixteenth place and coming up close on fifteenth.
I kicked back the stool and stood up, placing my palms on the glass.
Go, Emma. Go.