Speed Dating (8 page)

“H
OW DO YOU
feel?” Dylan glanced her way with the smile that made her stomach wobble.

“Shocked.” She craned her head over her shoulder and saw the bus for the airport arrive. The bus that she ought to be on. For a second she contemplated begging Dylan to drive her to the airport, then she stopped herself. No. Maybe jumping into Dylan’s car was a little wacky, but she’d made her decision. She could slink home with her tail between her legs and spend her “stress leave” miserable, or she could do something wild, crazy and completely exciting. Right or wrong, she was giving wild and crazy a try.

“I hope I have something appropriate to wear to a car race,” she said. “I’ve never been to one before.”

“Honey, if you want one man’s opinion, your underwear is a lot nicer than those clothes I saw in the suitcase. They’re all the color of dirt.”

“Earth tones,” she corrected. “I once had my colors done. I’m a fall. We’re supposed to wear the colors of autumn—greens and browns and rusts,” she explained.

His glance suggested that he hadn’t been reminded of colorful autumn foliage when he’d looked inside her suitcase. The trouble was, she was never sure when a
color was a verifiable fall-foliage tone and when it was a summer orange or a winter red. That’s how she’d ended up with so many safe browns and beiges. How did she think she could handle a race car driver? She was a woman who couldn’t even imagine a Color Me Beautiful clothing palate.

A mile or so passed and she saw that they were on a highway. She had no idea where they were bound. “I think I should explain that I’m not normally an impulsive person.”

He glanced over and at the speed they were going, she really wished he wouldn’t. He should keep both eyes on the road. And both hands on the steering wheel. “I think you have hidden depths. Last night you were definitely impulsive.”

“Yes. I suppose I was.” A flicker of pride glowed inside her. “I’m not sure why I did that. It’s so out of character.” That made it twice in two days she’d done something completely unlike herself.

“Why did you let that little pissant treat you that way?”

“Marvin?” She thought about Dylan’s question. “I’m not very good at standing up for myself.” She sighed. “In fact, I’m terrible.” She nibbled her lip and looked out the window thinking about how often she’d berated herself for the problem and yet been unable to act any differently the next time she was asked to do something that wasn’t her job, or had someone break in while she was talking, or refuse to listen to her ideas.

“Maybe all you need is some practice.”

“I signed up for assertiveness training last winter, but it didn’t help.”

Dylan glanced over at her with a disturbing twinkle lurking in his eyes. “What happened? Did you fail?”

She bit her lip some more, wishing she hadn’t been drawn into the subject in the first place. “I didn’t go.”

The twinkle in his eyes deepened. He wasn’t stupid. “You were unavoidably called out of town?”

“No.”

“Sick with the flu?”

“No.”

“Trapped in an elevator?”

“Very funny. The truth is I was too scared to go.”

“You know what I find interesting?”

She shook her head.

“You were assertive as all get-out at the wedding. Look how you handled Ashlee and her daddy. Maybe it’s only with your own crowd that you act like a wimp.”

She blinked. “I guess you’re right.” Then she shrugged. “I was playing a part, and since I’d given you my word that I’d act like…someone you’d be crazy about, I felt I had to present myself as much different than my normal self.”

He chuckled. “Bit of a self-esteem problem there, have you?”

Oh, why couldn’t she just shut up?

D
YLAN PULLED AROUND
a Camry with a Sunday driver at the wheel and his companion flinched. He stared at her. He wasn’t one to brag, but he raced cars for a living. He had a couple of championship trophies on his mantle. If his streak of bad luck would only change, he might have a shot at the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup this year. Did she really think he couldn’t handle a dry
highway in the middle of a sunny May day with barely any traffic?

A few more miles went by and he managed to make her flinch several more times. It was starting to take the tedium out of the journey to watch her brake foot get a workout.

“Where are we going?” she asked him after they’d cleared Charlotte city limits and were heading south.

“The Speedway.”

“Oh.”

He glanced at her. “You ever watched a race?”

“Live, you mean?” She turned her face to his. “No.”

“How about on TV?”

“Well, actually, no.”

“You’re going to be through that first-time list of yours by next week the way we’re going.” He thought of Kendall’s upcoming reaction to her first race and wished he could sit beside her to see it.

“There’s a lot of traffic.”

“Welcome to race week.”

“It takes a whole week? I thought the races only ran on Sundays.”

“They do, but we go pretty much from Thursday to Sunday, forty weeks a year, what with testing and qualifying heading into the big race.”

Her eyes were round as she took in the crowds they passed.

“Oh.” She was silent for a while and he wondered how it all struck her. The motor homes and the beaten-up pickups, the families and the loners, the hard-core fans and the locals out for their one or two races a year.

“Hey, there’s you!” she suddenly cried. Sure enough,
there was a flag with his picture and number on it. When they got closer and started passing the packed parking lots, she gasped. “Is that a margarita maker on the back of that truck?”

“Probably. Tailgate parties are legendary.” The motor coach parks were packed, as usual, during race week. Some of the rigs were more expensive than the average house; others were old campers that had seen better days. Some fans brought along barbecues and planter pots and made a family vacation of it; others brought nothing but beer.

He got a real kick out of introducing a novice like Kendall to the sport he loved. He drove through to the infield where he knew his motor home would be parked. Now that he was here, he would stay on-site until the race was over. If he needed to get around, he’d take a golf cart. The high security gates were up and a guard was on duty.

“This is a secure area. Mostly drivers and their families stay here. We do get some race fans who pay a bunch of money for a spot in the infield. We need to get you a pass so you can come and go.”

“Wow,” she said, looking around her with interest.

His adrenaline started pumping as it always did when he entered the Speedway. He loved this place. He loved everything about it. The steeply tiered bleachers, the track itself, the buzz in the air.

He got close to the garages before he was recognized. “Hey, Dy! Hold up,” a middle-aged male voice yelled, loud enough to wake the dead.

The cry soon became a repeated echo like a pneumatic drill. He tucked Kendall’s hand in the crook of
his left arm, told her not to let go and took out the pen he always carried in his breast pocket. Pictures, hats, scraps of paper, magazines, napkins—whatever was shoved his way he signed, keeping a smile on his face and talking to the fans as he went.

“Is that your girlfriend?” a boy about ten or eleven yelled.

His eyes met Kendall’s and he shrugged. What can you do?

“She sure is, so you make room so she can breathe.” Another one of his hats came over his shoulder, he signed it. “Five yards,” he told Kendall in a low voice. Then they were at the garage and the guards were politely but firmly stopping the fans.

“Good luck, man,” somebody shouted.

“Thanks,” he said, giving a final wave and a grin caught by approximately two dozen cameras from the disposable kind to the semiprofessional film kind to the ubiquitous digital camera that would be beaming his and Kendall’s pictures, along with the news that she was his girlfriend, to blogs and fan sites within minutes.

But that was part of the game and he tried to be a good sport, since those fans made the whole NASCAR thing possible.

“You okay?” he asked Kendall. She appeared shell-shocked.

“I know one in four Americans is a NASCAR fan, but you don’t realize how many people that really is until they’re stepping on your toes and shoving T-shirts at you to sign. Whew!”

He laughed. “Racing merchandise is big business.”

He took her to his garage and introduced her to his
team, some of whom she’d met last night. If they were surprised to see her looking a lot more formal today, nobody said anything about it.

Jack Horsham, his marketing guy, was standing with Mike Nugent and glanced Dylan’s way as he approached with Kendall at his side. “Finding your own women now, Dy?”

“The funny guy here is Jack Horsham,” he said to Kendall, pulling her forward within the circle of his arm.

“Pleasure to meet you, Kendall.”

“Hello,” she said, and shook hands.

“She’s going to be hanging out with me for a bit. I need you to find her a place to stay for a couple nights.” He felt the tension in Kendall’s body ease suddenly. What? Did she think…? Of course, she was still in shock that she’d blown off her paid ride home and jumped in his car without a Venn diagram of his plans, their itinerary and definitely some idea of the sleeping arrangements. Poor Kendall. For such a regimented, odds-calculating woman, this impulsive spree must about be killing her. He should feel bad, but he thought a little impulsive action would be good for her. He was, in fact, doing her a favor, just like she was doing him a favor by continuing to create a great big buffer between him and Ashlee. Hopefully, by the time Kendall went back to Portland, Ash would have made her marriage work, or found a new astrologer.

“We put a new engine in, Dy. She should be good.”

He nodded and, telling Kendall to look around, soon had his head under the hood.

B
Y THE TIME
they were getting ready to head out to the track, Kendall had met everyone and toured the hauler,
being shown every lug nut in the pull-out fitted cabinets and every bag of junk food in the tiny kitchen. There was something about her air of serious interest that had the crew telling her a lot more than most visitors. He figured she’d learned about everything but the actual car, so he called her over for a look.

“There’s no door,” was the first thing she said when she approached the car, garishly painted with every one of his sponsors’ logos. The main color was midnight blue, with a lot of red and orange. He thought he must look like a parakeet being shot out of a canon as he careened around the track.

“No headlights, either,” he said, pointing to where they were painted on.

“And no windshield wipers,” Mike added helpfully. His crew chief, who’d taken a shine to Kendall, showed her the layers of see-through vinyl that would be peeled off during pit stops. “Faster than wiping the windshield, and every fraction of a second counts during a pit stop.”

“Really? How long does a pit stop take?” she asked, fingering the colored tab that peeled off the screen cover.

“We try to keep in the twelve-second range. Anything more than thirteen is unacceptable.”

“Thirteen seconds?” She had that keen, focused look on her face that she seemed to get whenever talk turned to numbers. Dylan leaned back and watched as Mike went through the entire pit-stop routine.

“We film the crew so we can optimize efficiency.”

“I can understand why. In the end, every second counts.”

Mike nodded approvingly. “Dylan might tell you
different, but most races are won or lost on the pit stops.” He scowled, and glared around the entire garage. “And lately, we’ve been losing too many.”

Jack had been in the corner making calls. Dylan knew he’d given him a tough task to find a place for Kendall to stay over the race with so little notice. He also knew Jack would find something. The guy was amazing. Sure enough, by the time Kendall’s eyes were beginning to glaze over from information overload, Jack walked up, looking pleased with himself.

“I’ve got her one of the condos.” He pointed to the block of suites that overlooked the track. While some were available for rent, they were almost impossible to come by during race week.

“Nice work.”

“Thanks. It’s a corporate suite. They hosted a cocktail party there last night and the company president was going to stay over but he had to get back to Pittsburgh at the last minute, so it’s free. Do you want me to take Kendall over?”

He thought she might feel more comfortable with him so he said, “It’s okay. I’ll do it.”

“Keys are at the front desk. They’re expecting you.”

K
ENDALL WONDERED
if she was going to wake up anytime soon.

It was Saturday night. She ought to be at home in Portland on one of her infrequent dates with Marvin or more likely watching a DVD while she ironed five blouses for the upcoming workweek.

Instead, she found herself in a golf cart being driven to a condo overlooking a racetrack by a NASCAR
driver who was telling anyone who would listen that she was his new girlfriend.