Banging Wheels (15 page)

Then it hit him. Travis had made her do an extra lap so she’d be down on fuel. Of all the dirty tricks. But hell, it wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t done anything wrong. In fact, it was nothing to do with him. This was his race and he deserved it. And not only that, there were only two and a half laps to go. He was nearly home.

But some part of him knew this was wrong. He was desperate to justify it to himself, and that was never a good sign. The truth was this had everything to do with him. He didn’t know why, but he suspected — that agent of his must have had a hand in this, the mustache-twirling so-and-so. Then the thought occurred to him that Callie would think he had a hand in it.

Damn it. What to do?

He got on the radio. “Can you patch me through to Ozzie?”

Callie was heartbroken. She’d wanted so much to defend against Drake — to make a race of it. But realistically, it was a waste of fuel. She had to do everything she could to finish the race and hope that he made a mistake or had problems of his own, unlikely as that was. Was this Drake’s doing? Had he changed his mind again after all that? Or was he just playing her the entire time? The thought made her tense up with anger.

The radio crackled into life. It was Ozzie. “Callie, I just spoke to Drake.”

Silence.

“He didn’t know anything about it.”

So, they’d both been stiffed. Not that it helped dissipate her feelings. Drake might not have had a hand in this, but she’d still been robbed of her rightful victory.

Once again she had to steady her emotions — there was time for all this after the race. For now, all she could do was fight on, even if the cause looked hopeless, minimizing her fuel consumption by lifting and coasting and shifting gears earlier. But as the laps counted down, it was clear that she was going to fall short.

Halfway around the final lap, the fuel gauge dropped to a terminal reading: 0.0 laps.

Somewhere ahead of her, Drake would be taking the win. If it was possible to slump in her tightly-fitting seat, she would have done so. She felt utterly betrayed and cheated by Travis — it had to be him, ultimately — but more than anything else, she felt totally drained. The engine started choking, and she swerved from side to side, trying to encourage the last splashes of fuel into the engine. But it was hopeless, and she knew it.

Then, out of nowhere, a car appeared ahead of her. A blue car. Drake! She was going pretty slowly at this point, so he must have been going really slowly. Did he have a problem? Had he broken down? There didn’t look to be anything wrong with his car. He dropped back even further, until they were driving side-by-side.

He nodded to her, and she nodded to him. Her engine was spluttered, starved of fuel, while his had the rich growl of one in perfect health. It could only mean one thing...

Oh my God — he’d come back for her.

“Go!” she yelled, her words trapped uselessly inside her helmet. Daniels must be seconds away from overtaking them both. “Go!” She stabbed her finger in the air, but to no avail. He didn’t go. Instead, he tapped the mouth area of his visor with his hand and then swept his hand outwards in her direction. Damn it — he was blowing her a kiss.

With just a quarter of the lap to go, the game was up. Her engine spluttered into silence and the car began to coast. She steered the vehicle — now a dead weight — off the track and onto the big apron of asphalt at the chicane, in front of a grandstand of spectators. Drake’s perfectly healthy-sounding car pulled off too and parked up alongside, and he killed the engine.

A yellow blur flashed past as another car nipped through the chicane and headed off towards the finish line, which was a mere half-mile away. It was Daniels. He was going to be the new world champion.

She pushed herself up out of the cockpit and dropped onto the asphalt, then pulled her helmet off, throwing out that long blond hair of hers, matted with sweat. She felt drained with disappointment, but at least there was a small consolation. A not-so-small consolation, in fact — and he was walking towards her, his hands held out plaintively, his face an open book.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” he said.

“You came back for me.” Her face lit up with a smile that spread as the realization of what he’d sacrificed hit home.

“About time I stuck around, huh?”

For a moment they just stood there motionless, looking at each other, the rest of the world blurring out. Then they launched themselves into each other, their lips colliding at high-speed, hands clutching at each other, hair being pulled and tossed. Finally, they settled down into a long, drawn-out smooch, her arms around his neck; his around her waist.

She was only drawn back to reality by the huge cheer that rose up from the crowd.

“Yeah,” said Drake, “we know. Get a room.”

As they stood there, Serge came past, flashing them a wave as he did so, and they responded in kind. It was the end of a long, hard season — longer and harder than she might ever have imagined at the start — and now it was over, and what would be would be.

They walked back along the side of the track hand in hand to the finish line.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Darkness.

Callie half-opened her eyes. She was naked and tangled up in a wreck of sheets. Where the hell was she? Ah yes — in a double bed with the familiar smell of a now very familiar man. She waved her arms about expecting another body, but met with no obstacles, no flesh. Just her in an empty hotel room.

Then the bathroom door opened.

In walked Drake, his toned muscular body moist from a shower, a towel around his waist hiding his modesty. Not that he had anything to be modest about.

“Hello gorgeous,” he said, the towel seeming to be on the very edge of falling away to the floor.

They just admired each other for a moment, before Drake broke the silence once more. “You know, you’re one hell of a driver. Not as good as me, obviously, but still...”

“Thanks, and I’d rate you second in the whole, wide... room.” Callie might have been a touch drowsy, but she was still quick with a riposte.

“Seriously, though, you’re the champion as far as I’m concerned. You had me beat.”

“Maybe, but you’d have been champion too if you hadn’t come back.” She looked him up and down again. “Now get your ass over here, champ.”

Drake peeled the covers back to reveal Callie’s sinuous curves. She found herself involuntarily biting her lip. He began kissing her neck, then slowly working his way down, around the curve of her breast, sucking on her nipple, and looking up at her with those baby blue eyes of his, before heading downwards in a series of slow lingering kisses, before his lips were grazed by the remnants of her own shaving exploits further south.

She felt him drag his tongue across the point where her lips met, and she shuddered with the pleasure of anticipation, begging for him to part them and explore further.

“If I’m champion,” he said, sucking gently on her, “Then how come you’re going to come first?”

“We’ll see...” she broke off to gasp, “...about that.”

It took all the strength she could muster, but she began to ease her way around on the bed, until his already rock-hard erection was in reach. Her hands were still aching from wrestling with a steering wheel, but not so much that she couldn’t grip it hard, watching as a sugary bead formed and trickled down. It was hard to focus, though, given the sensations she was herself feeling.

He had a head start on her, and the waves of pleasure were already beginning to crash over her, but if there was one thing she’d learned, it was that you had to keep your head and never give up. With more time she’d have had more finesse, but she had to get straight to it if she was going to win this race. She leaned forwards, taking him into her mouth with gusto, feeling his whole body quiver as she got to work, and tasting his sticky fluid in her mouth, which made her shudder in return. Who needed cars when you could race like this? But maybe she was too late; she had to stop momentarily as he began sucking gently on the focus of her pleasure, then sucking on her in her entirety, like she were a ripe peach.

She regained her senses and got back to it, her tongue working its magic, and her hand joining in to great groans of pleasure from the man above her. In response, he joined in with his own fingers — and she felt a great surge of her own as she felt herself filling up with first one finger, then a second.

She nearly lost control at this point, but she’d gotten too far too give in now. This was a race to the end. She could feel how wet she was — a mixture of saliva and her own wetness — and it was the same around her own mouth. She could feel the finishing line come into sight, giving her a sense of urgency — it had to be now or never. As she felt the circles of pleasure closing in on her, taking her to the edge, making it almost impossible to continue, she found the strength for one last push, her hand and her mouth working in unison.

Just when she thought she could give no more, she felt a quivering from him and a great call of delight, and as the pleasure overwhelmed her and took her to another place of her own, she felt his hot, sticky juices squirting deliciously onto her neck and chest.

The she lay — they both lay — exhausted. Presently, he did the gallant thing and joined her the other way around, her hair getting caught up in his stubble as he cuddled up to her.

“I think,” he said, finally able to speak, “that was a dead heat.”

She giggled exhaustedly. “It was certainly a champagne moment!”

They just lay there for a while, snuggled together, their drying sweat forming a bond.

“I don’t know where this is going,” he said, “but now I’ve got you, I don’t want to let you go.”

“Me neither.” She nuzzled into his neck.

“Do you think we can make a go of this?”

She realized she hadn’t given any thought to what came next. Everything had been so up in the air that it seemed futile to think too far ahead, and she’d never been much of a planner anyway. She’d focused everything on winning the championship, hoping that she’d then move up to the next tier and then-

Her phone rang.

“Leave it.”

But something told her it might be important, so she scrambled to the edge of the bed and hung half off, scrabbling around in the mixture of satin knickers and rugged jeans.

“Hello?” She realized she was holding it upside down, and turned it around.

“How ya goin’?” It was Ozzie.

“Oh you know — surviving.”

Drake slid over and gave her thigh a playful nibble while looking up at her. She grinned and waved away his deliberate distractions. Not now!

“Well, I’m not doing too badly myself. I just got a call from a brand new racing team in the top tier. An old racing buddy of mine formed it, and he came to me and told me they were looking for a chief engineer.”

“Oh, erm, congratulations!”

She was pleased for Ozzie , of course, but it was a remainder of her own situation. She was out of a job — the contract officially ended at the end of the last race — and with little chance of another one given the nature of the sport, and the influence of that mustachioed agent. Even if the team owners were able to overlook the fact they somehow both blew the championship, none of the team would want to touch them for political reasons — they didn’t want to miss out on his future talent.

“So the thing is, they’re looking for staff of all kinds, and, well... they asked me if I could recommend any drivers. He’s not into all that bullshit with agents and playing the game.”

Was this going where she thought it was going? “Go on...”

“So I said ‘Well Callie’s a pile of shit, but Drake’s really good’!”

The sigh and the shake of the head was probably obvious to Ozzie, even down a phone line.

“Nah, of course not. I said you were a perfect fit. Actually, I said the two of you were both good enough. Professionally speaking, I’d say it’s hard to separate you. Actually, I think we’d need a crowbar to do it given the way you were going at each other after that last race.”

Callie blushed. She wasn’t normally so given to public displays of affection, and that was about as public as it got.