Banging Wheels (8 page)

...beep... beep... beep... beep...

Wait — he collided with someone. He got an image of trying to pass someone, a memory bound together with the emotion of utter determination.

Whose was the other car, though? He played it back again in his mind, fishing for the clues amid his brain’s piecemeal offerings. It was a blue car. What were the blue cars? Oh yeah — his own team. Shit. That wasn’t good. Then the rest of it came back in a flurry — a woman with her helmet off in a pit garage, shaking her hair out. Oh yeah. Her. The beautiful enemy.

But if he was in the hospital, what had happened to her?

...beep... beep... beep... beep...

He sat up quickly. Too quickly — a stab in the chest area arrested him. He felt his chest with his hand — heavy bruising, or maybe broken. He was having to take shallow breaths in order to breathe at all.

He tried again, slower this time. Grimacing and holding his breath, he eased up into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. He was in a pristine room with a single bed. With another surge of pain, he pushed himself to a standing position, the floor cold and hard to his bare feet.

...beep... beep... beep... beep...

Sensing he was still tethered, he pulled the heart rate clip off his finger and gingerly began walking, his head banging. It felt like he was drunk. He emerged into a corridor of sorts, where he could hear activity but see none. He continued walking on, and took a gamble on the next door.

It was a linen cupboard. She probably wasn’t in there.

He pressed on, slowly but decisively, and tried the next one, opening it slowly. And there she was, the shock of blond hair unmistakable from the back. Flat out and dead to the world.

Jesus.

He drifted silently into the room.

...beep... beep... beep... beep...

She was alive, thank God. She looked a serene mess, beautiful but whacked out cold. Was this his fault? He watched her chest rise and fall. Here she was in front of him. This enemy and erstwhile lover. She was just another human being. She looked so, so vulnerable.

He brushed some errant strands away from her face, feeling powerless to help her. She murmured, and he pulled away, not wanting to wake her.

You stupid idiot. You could have killed her.

He padded back through the corridor to his own bed. He needed rest, but he couldn’t get it — his mind was too active. He replayed the accident again and again. He tried arguing against it, but in reality, he knew the truth. Dammit, why couldn’t he back out? Why was it all or nothing? Hey — maybe this was why he was a racing driver, and other people weren’t. But then other drivers wouldn’t have had the same accident. No — this was something specific to him.

He kept picturing her. Her beautiful features. That intriguing smile. That sexy mind of hers. Dammit. Seeing her racing so strong, and then seeing her in that bed, looking so fragile. No, these thoughts were not good. If you start feeling for your rivals, how can you compete against them?

But he cared for her. Inconvenient as that might be, it was clearly the truth.

Exhausted from the mental effort as much as the physical, he slumped back. His damaged body demanded rest of him, and he sank back into a restless doze.

Darkness.

Callie slowly opened her eyes to the blur of white.

...beep... beep... beep... beep...

She’d been drifting in and out of sleep since she got here. She felt weak, but nothing seemed to be broken. Her legs were fine. She was a big fan of her legs. For all the minor annoyances and dislikes of various other parts of her own body — her elbows and her ears in particular — she loved her legs. Sometimes, fresh after shaving them in the shower, she like to lie on her bed and look down on them, reveling in how sensuous they looked, even stroking them to soak up their softness. It always made her feel so feminine. But of course she also needed them to be in good shape if she was to drive.

But now they were just painful. She remembered every last bit of the accident. It seemed to happen in slow motion. Her fit in the car around the backside was quite snug — so she wasn’t too bad in that department — and the head restraint meant her neck was fine, if a little stiff. But her legs had seemed to take a real battering, banging against each other. Her knees in particular hurt.

She eased herself up in bed and pushed the sheets down to reveal big patches of blueish purple. She wondered about Drake next door. The nurse had told her that he was okay, but that was all. Patient confidentiality and all that. She felt the anger rising up in her. Stupid, stupid asshole. Three times now. She lay there seething for while at the injustice of it all.

But then, was it totally his fault this time? She wanted it to be, for the sake of her own indignation, but then she remembered how she felt going into the corner — utterly determined not to back down. If two people go into a corner like that with that same attitude, a collision is almost inevitable. But then she’d only gone in with that attitude because of what he’d done before. She thought back to the previous two incidents, and could no longer lie there in bed doing nothing about it.

She eased out from under the covers onto her feet and slid into the pair of disposable slippers by the bedside. Putting her weight on her feet, she felt pain through each one, and was a little wobbly as she limped out into the corridor. She had a sense of which way it was from the direction the nurse had looked when she’d asked about him.

She felt her anger growing as she headed down the hall. What a complete and utter jerk. More than a jerk, he was a threat to life. Why couldn’t he just behave normally? He probably just miscalculated in the rain, the son of a bitch — probably intended to put her out and go on to win the race himself. He’d no doubt come out of it perfectly fine — just a bruised thumb or something. Maybe even this whole thing was a big plan to try to put her out for the rest of the season.

She turned the handle of the first door, ready to explode at him and... it was a linen cupboard. Even Drake wasn’t so conniving that he’d be hiding in there. Although he’d no doubt wish he’d thought of it by the time she’d finished with him.

She moved to the next door, slowly turned the handle, and walked in.

And there he was, lying on the bed, flat out. He suddenly looked so defenseless. Yes, he was a jerk, and yes it was his fault they were both in there. But he was just another living, breathing human being. She tried to re-summon some anger, but it was tough with him lying there like that. She walked up closer to him, taking in that handsome, rugged face of his. She remembered the feeling of his stubble grazing against her cheek.

You stupid asshole
.

She reached out slowly, her hand inching towards his face, and dragged her fingers across his stubble. His eyes twitched, but stayed closed. She traced her fingers across his lips, manly yet yielding, and to her surprise — they slowly parted to accept one of those delicate fingers. More than that, he started to give it a gentle nibble.

She felt a rush of blood to her head, and not only there. She dragged her fingers free of his mouth, then traced them down the stubble of his throat and Adam’s apple. Ever so gently, she slipped them inside his cotton pajamas and onto his muscular chest, to an exhalation from him, her fingers sifting through his chest hair.

...beep... beep... beep... beep...

Down further she went, easing apart buttons before encountering a rough gauze. Bandages; he must have hurt his ribs. He let out a gasp of something that sounded like pain or maybe pleasure, or maybe an intangible mixture of the two.

Her fingers tip-toed across the bandages, finding bare flesh further south. Suddenly remembering where she was, she flashed a glance to the door. Still closed. Her fingers continued their journey. His eyes were closed, but his breathing was becoming heavier.

beep beep beep beep

She encountered the top of his pajama bottoms. A threshold. She should stop now. They were in a hospital for heaven’s sake. They’d just been in an accident!

“Don’t stop,” he murmured, eyes still closed.

Her fingers snuck inside the elastic, the back of them brushing against something big. She lifted them up off his abdomen, and wrapped them around his full, proud length. She gripped and squeezed it, biting her lip as she felt it further engorge to an eye-watering stiffness.

His eyes opened and he looked down at her plaintively, feverish with lust. She looked at him, then back at the part of him now emerging from his bedclothes, and gently drew the skin back to reveal his throbbing manliness in its full glistening glory, aching to be made use of.

I must be mad. We’re both in the hospital!

She clambered up onto the bed, having to suppress a screech of pain as she put her weight on her knees, then eased one leg over him, her gown falling partly open as she did so; a breast slipping out.

My god, she was so wet.

She reached a hand between her legs and felt him throbbing, animalistic, ready. Gently she eased herself down, her knees and legs complaining at the movements, but the pain dampened by sheer lust. She gave a deep sigh as his rock-hard erection parted her lips and slipped effortlessly inside her, filling her completely.

She slid right down onto his hilt, drawing a moan from him, feeling it fill her right up, rolling around, gripping it with her muscles, unable to help herself from grinding against him.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Slowly she started to ride him, gazing into his crazed eyes with unflinching passion of her own. Feeling his big hot self sliding inside her. Grinding herself against him, while he rhythmically pushed back.

Outside, she could hear a dull thud.

Wait, was that... footsteps?

Oh God, please don’t come in. It was far too late to stop. She was so far gone already. She felt dizzy from the lust and the breathing. If her legs hurt any more she couldn’t feel it. All she could feel were the circles of pleasure closing in on her, making everything feel blurry and faint.

Mary stopped in her tracks. Was that something she’d heard from that racing drivers room? Probably not. She smoothed out her nurse’s uniform and continued, then stopped some way down the corridor — if she didn’t check on him, and there was a problem, it would be her responsibility — her fault. She had a touch of the obsessive-compulsive about her, and she knew it — she could end up checking on people far too much just out of the fear of guilt that would engulf her if she didn’t and there was a problem. With a sigh at the mental tricks she played on herself, she carried on.

He seemed like a such a nice young man, but so silly. Why did people deliberately put themselves in a position of danger like that? There are problems enough in life without creating them for yourself. Same went for her, but even more so. She didn’t even know there were female racing drivers. Wouldn’t that be a problem if you had kids?