The Price of Success (13 page)

Nevertheless, when Sasha’s breath caught for a second time he turned to her, his heart pounding so loudly in his ears he couldn’t hear anything else.

‘You should be watching the screen, not me.’

Her husky murmur thrummed along his nerve-endings and made a beeline for his groin.

‘I was never much of a spectator. I prefer to be a participant.’

Dios!
He was hard—so hard it was a toss-up as to whether the feeling was pain or pleasure. The logical thing to do was to get up, walk away.

Yet he couldn’t move. Couldn’t look away from this woman his body ached for but his mind knew he couldn’t have.

Her eyes found his. ‘Marco …’

Again it was a husky entreaty.

His fingers brushed her cheek. ‘Why can’t I get you out of my head? I took a beautiful woman to dinner but I can barely remember what she looked like now. I ate but hardly tasted the food. All I could think about was you.’

‘Do you want me to apologise?’

‘Would you mean it?’

Her pink tongue darted out, licked, darted back in. He groaned in pain.

‘Probably not. But I may have an explanation for you.’

A few feet away the TV belted out the closing sequence of the show. Neither of them paid any attention. His forefinger traced her soft skin to the corner of her mouth, the need to taste her again a raging fever flaming through his veins. ‘I’m listening.’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe you share a trait with your brother after all. Deny you something and you want it more?’

Marco didn’t need to think about it to answer. ‘No. The difference between Rafael and me is that he wouldn’t have hesitated to take—consequences be damned. He sees something he wants and he takes it.’

‘Whereas you agonise about it endlessly, then deny yourself anyway? It’s almost as if you’re testing yourself—putting yourself through some sort of punishment.’

Her eyes darkened when he froze. She moved her head and
her lips came closer to his finger. Marco couldn’t speak, needing every single ounce of self-control to keep his shock from showing. He
deserved
to put himself through punishment for what he’d done. He’d lost the most precious thing in life—a child—because he’d taken his eye off the ball.

‘Maybe you should learn to bend a little … take what is being offered? What is being offered freely.’

An arrow of pain shot through the haze of desire engulfing him. He gave a single shake of his head and inhaled. ‘I stopped believing in
free
a long time ago, Sasha. There are always consequences. The piper always expects payment.’

‘I don’t believe that. Laughter is free. Love is free. It’s hate that eats you up inside. Bitterness that twists feelings if you let them. And, no, I’m not waxing philosophical. I’ve experienced it.’

‘Really?’ he mocked, dropping his hand. When his senses screeched in protest he merely willed the feeling away. ‘To whom did you make your promise?’ he asked, the need to know as forceful as the need raging through his veins.

Wariness darkened her eyes. Then her shoulders rolled. ‘My father.’

‘What did you promise him?’

‘That I’d win the Drivers’ Championship for him.’

‘Out of some misguided sense of duty, no doubt?’ he derided.

Anger blazed through her eyes. ‘Not duty.
Love
. And it’s about as misguided as your bullheaded need to coddle Rafael.’

‘There’s a difference between responsibility and your illusionary love,’ he rebutted, irate at this turn of the conversation.

‘I suffer no illusions. My father loved me as unconditionally as I loved him.’

Tensing, he sat back in the seat. ‘Then you were lucky. Not everyone is imbued with unconditional love for his or her child. Some even use their unborn children as bartering tools.’

Her breath caught. ‘Did you …? Are you saying that from experience?’

A cold drench of reality washed over him at how close he’d come to revealing everything.

Surging to his feet, he stared into her face. ‘I was merely making a point. As much as I want you, Sasha, I’ll never take you. The consequences would be too great.’

T
HE
consequences would be too great
.

Sasha tried to block out the words as she adjusted the traction control on her steering wheel. The tremor in her fingers increased and she clenched her fists tighter around the wheel.

Shears, Marina Bay, Raffles Boulevard. Watch out for Turn Ten speed bump—Padang, pit lane exit, look after the tyres …

Her heart hammered, excitement and adrenaline shooting through her as she went through the rigorous ritual of visualising every corner of the race. At her third attempt, fear rose to mingle with her emotions.

She’d secured pole position for the first time in her racing career, but despite the team’s euphoria afterwards she’d sensed a subtle waning of their excitement as speculation as to whether she could do the job trickled in. Sasha had seen it in their faces, heard it in Luke’s voice this morning when he’d grilled her over race strategy for the millionth time. Even Tom had weighed in.

Consequences … responsibility … last chance …

Sweat trickled down her neck and she hastily sipped at her water tube. She couldn’t afford dehydration. Couldn’t afford to lose focus. In fact she couldn’t afford to do anything less than win.

Beyond the bright lights of the circuit that turned night into day at the Singapore Grand Prix thousands of fans would be watching.

As would Marco.

He hadn’t spoken to her since that night on his sofa in London,
but he’d attended every race since the season had resumed and Sasha knew he was somewhere above her, in the exclusive VIP suite of the team’s motor home, hosting the Prime Minister, royalty and a never-ending stream of celebrities.

Some time during the sleepless night, when she’d been looking down at the race track from her hotel room, she’d wondered whether he’d even bother to grace the pit with his presence if she made it onto that final elusive step on the podium. Or whether he would be too preoccupied with entertaining his latest flame—the blonde daughter of an Italian textile magnate who never seemed far from his side nowadays.

She tried desperately to block him from her mind. Taking pole position today—a dream she’d held for longer than she could remember—should be making her ecstatic. She was one step further towards removing the dark stain of her father’s shame from people’s minds. To finally removing herself from Derek’s malingering shadow.

Yet all she could think about was Marco and their conversation in London
.

She clenched her teeth in frustration and breathed in deeply.

Luke’s voice piped through her helmet, disrupting her thoughts.

‘Adjust your clutch—’

She flicked the switch before he’d finished speaking. The sheer force of her will to win was a force field around her. Finally she found the zen she desperately craved.

Focusing, she followed the red lights as they lit up one by one. Adrenaline rushed faster, followed a second later by the drag of the powerful car as she pointed it towards the first corner.

She made it by the skin of her teeth, narrowly missing the front wing of the number two driver. Her stomach churned through lap after gruelling lap, even after she’d established a healthy distance between her and the car behind.

What seemed like an eternity later, after a frenzied race, including an unscheduled pitstop that had raised the hairs on her arms, she heard the frenzied shouts of her race engineer in her ear.

‘You won! Sasha, you won the Singapore Grand Prix!’

Tears prickled her eyes even as her fist pumped through the air. Her father’s face floated through her mind and a sense of peace settled momentarily over her. It was broken a second later by the sound of the crowd’s deafening roar.

Exiting the car, Sasha squinted through the bright flashes of the paparazzi, desperate to see familiar hazel eyes through the sea of faces screaming her name.

No Marco.

A stab of disappointment hollowed out her stomach. With a sense of detachment, she accepted the congratulations of her fellow drivers and blinked back tears through the British national anthem.

Dad would be proud
, she reminded herself fiercely.
He
was all that mattered. Plastering a smile on her face, she accepted her trophy from the Prime Minister.

This was what she wanted. What she’d fought for. The team—
her
team—were cheering wildly. Yet Sasha felt numb inside.

Fighting the alarming emptiness, she picked up the obligatory champagne magnum, letting the spray loose over her fellow podium winners. Brusquely she told herself to live in the moment, to enjoy the dream-come-true experience of winning her first race.

Camera flashes blinded her as she stepped off the podium. When it cleared Tom stood in front of her, a huge grin on his face.

‘I
knew
you could do it! Prepare yourself, Sasha. Your world’s about to rock!’

The obligatory press conference for the top three winning drivers took half an hour. When she emerged, Tom grabbed her arm and steered her towards the bank of reporters waiting behind the barriers.

‘Tom, I don’t really want—’

‘You’ve just won your first race.
“I don’t really want”
shouldn’t feature in your vocabulary. The world’s your oyster.’

But I don’t want the world
, she screamed silently.
I want Marco. I want not to feel alone on a night like this
.

Feeling the stupid tears build again, Sasha rapidly blinked them back as a microphone was thrust in her face.

‘How does it feel to be the first woman to win the Singapore Grand Prix?’

From deep inside she summoned a smile. ‘Just as brilliant as the first man felt when he won, I expect.’

Beside her she heard Tom’s sharp intake of breath.

Behave, Sasha
.

‘Are you still involved with Rafael de Cervantes?’ asked an odious reporter she recognised from a Brazilian sports channel.

‘Rafael and I were never involved. We’re just friends.’

‘So now he’s in a coma there’s nothing to stop you from switching
friendships
to his brother, no?’

Tom stepped forward. ‘Listen, mate—’

Sasha stopped him. ‘No. It’s fine.’ She faced the reporter. ‘Marco de Cervantes is a world-class engineer and a visionary in his field. His incredible race car design is the reason we won the race today. It would be an honour for me to call him my friend.’ She tagged on another smile and watched the reporter’s face droop with disappointment.

Tom nodded at a British female reporter. ‘Next question.’

‘As the winner of the race, you’ll be the guest of honour at the rock concert. What will you be wearing?’

Mild shock went through her at the question, followed swiftly by a deepening sense of hollowness. The X1 Premier Rock Concert had become a fixture on every A-List celebrity’s calendar. No doubt Marco would be there with his latest girlfriend.

‘It doesn’t matter what I’ll be wearing because I’m not going to the concert.’

Sasha dashed into the foyer of her six-star hotel, grateful when the two burly doormen blocked the chasing paparazzi. She heaved in a sigh of relief when she shut her suite door behind her.

The ever-widening chasm of emptiness she couldn’t shake threatened to overwhelm her. Quickly she stripped off her clothes and showered.

The knock came as she was towelling herself dry. For a second she considered not answering it.

A sense of
déjà vu
hit her as she opened the door to another perfectly coiffed stylist, carting another rack of clothes.

‘I think you’ve got the wrong suite.’

The diminutive Asian woman in a pink suit simply bowed, smiled and let herself in. Her assistant sailed in behind her, clutching a large and stunningly beautiful bouquet of purple lilies and cream roses.

‘For you.’ She thrust the flowers and a long oblong box into Sasha’s hand.

Stifling a need to scream, Sasha calmly shut the door and opened the box. On a red velvet cushion lay the most exquisite diamond necklace she’d ever seen. With shaking fingers, she plucked the card from the tiny peg.

Sasha stared at Marco’s bold scrawl in disbelief. When she looked up, the women smiled and started pulling clothes off the hangers.

‘No—wait!’

‘No wait. Twenty minutes.’

‘But … where am I going?’ she asked.

The stylist shrugged, picked up a green-sequinned dress barely larger than a handkerchief, and advanced towards her. Sasha stepped back as the tiny woman waved her hand in front of her.

‘Off.’

With a sense of damning inevitability … and more than a little thrill of excitement … she let herself be pulled forward. ‘Okay, but definitely not the green.’

The stylist nodded, trilled out an order in Mandarin, and advanced again with another dress.

Twenty minutes later Sasha stepped from the cool, air-conditioned car onto another red carpet. This time, without
Marco, she was even more self-conscious than before. On a warm, sultry Singapore night, the cream silk dress she’d chosen felt more exposing than it had in the safety of her hotel room. At first glance she’d refused to wear the bohemian mini-dress because … well, because it had no back. But then the stylist had fastened the draping material across her lower back and Sasha had felt … sexy—like a woman for the first time in her life.

Her hair was fastened with gold lamé rope, her nails polished and glittering. The look was completed with four-inch gold stilettos she’d never dreamt she’d be able to walk in, but she found it surprisingly easy.

Romano appeared at her side, his presence a reminder that somewhere beyond the wild flashes of the paparazzi’s cameras Marco was waiting for her.

All the way from her hotel she’d felt the emptiness receding, but had been too scared to acknowledge that Marco had anything to do with it. Now she couldn’t stop a smile from forming on her face as the loud boom of fireworks signalled the start of the rock concert.

The VIP lounge teemed with rock stars and pop princesses. She tried to make small talk as she surreptitiously searched the crowd for Marco. Someone thrust a glass of champagne in her hand.

Half an hour later, when a Columbian platinum-selling songstress with snake hips asked who her designer was, Sasha started to answer, then stopped as an ice-cold thought struck her. Was Marco even here? Had she foolishly misinterpreted his note and dressed up only to be stood up?

The depths of her hurt stunned her into silence.

She barely felt any remorse as the pop star flounced off in a huff. Blindly she turned for the exit, humiliation scouring through her.

‘Sasha? You’re heading for the stage, right?’ Tom grabbed her arm and stopped her.

‘The … the stage?’

‘Your favourite band is about to perform. Marco had me fly them out here just for you.’

‘He
what
?’ A different kind of
stun
stopped her heart.

‘Come on—you don’t want them to start without you.’

A thousand questions raced through her brain, but she didn’t have time to voice a single one before she was propelled onto the stage and into the arms of the band’s lead singer.

Torn between awe at sharing the stage with her favourite band, and happiness that she hadn’t misinterpreted Marco’s note after all, Sasha knew the next ten minutes were the most surreal of her life. Even seeing herself super-sized on half a dozen giant screens didn’t freak her out as much as she’d imagined.

She exited the stage to the crowd’s deafening roar. Tom beamed as he helped her down the stairs.

‘Have you seen Marco?’ Sasha attributed her breathlessness to her onstage excitement—not her yearning to see Marco de Cervantes.

Tom’s smile slipped and his gaze dropped. ‘Um, he was around a moment ago …’

She told herself not to read anything into Tom’s answer. ‘Where is he?’

‘Sasha …’ He sighed and pointed towards the roped-off area manned by three burly bodyguards.

At first she didn’t see him, her sight still fuzzy from the bright stage lights.

When she finally focused, when she finally saw what her mind refused to compute, Sasha was convinced her heart had been ripped from her chest.

Each step she took out of the concert grounds felt like a walk towards the opening mouth of a yawning chasm. But Sasha forced herself to keep going, to smile, to acknowledge the accolades and respect she finally had from her team.

Even though inside she was numb and frozen.

The knock came less than ten minutes later.

Marco leaned against the lintel. The buttons of his shirt were
still
undone; his hair was unkempt. As if hands—
female hands
—had run through it several times. He stood there, arrogantly imposing, larger than life.

She hated him more than she could coherently express. And yet the sight of him kicked her heart into her throat.

‘What do you want?’ she blurted past the pain in her throat.

His gaze, intense and unnerving, left her face to take in the bikini she’d changed into. ‘Why did you leave the concert?’

‘Why aren’t you back there, being pawed by your Italian sexpot?’

‘You left because you saw me with Flavia?’

‘You know what they say—two’s company, three’s a flash mob. Now, if you’ll excuse me …’ She grabbed her kaftan from the bed and the box containing the diamond necklace.

‘Here—take this back. I don’t want it.’

‘It’s yours. Every member of the team receives a gift for the team’s win. This is yours.’

Her mouth dropped open. ‘You’re kidding me?’

‘I’m not. Where are you going?’

She stared at the box, not sure how to refuse the gift now. ‘For a swim—not that it’s any of your business.’

‘A swim? At this hour?’

‘Singapore is the longest race on the calendar. It’s even longer when you’re leading and trying to defend your position. If I don’t warm up and do my stretching exercises my muscles will seize up. That’s what I’d planned to do before … Whatever—will you please get out of my way?’