Banging Wheels (5 page)

But as she got older, nothing could absorb her like racing could. Well, maybe one other thing. What she’d been doing with her teammate — before she realized he was a teammate — that could hold her attention pretty well, too. She thought back to him making her melt with those ridiculously beautiful eyes, and later to the feeling of having him inside her, of him grinding against her. But what a jerk. There was no way there was going to be a repeat of that. No matter how much some part of her — some ridiculous, foolish, instinctive part of her — wanted it. Why couldn’t he just be one of the good guys? She found herself daydreaming about a Drake that wasn’t her teammate, and that was, well, just less of a jerk. What makes a guy behave like that? And worse, why did she have to be so attracted to him, despite it? That was what had drawn her in to her last boyfriend, and what a mess that had turned into.

The biggest problem with this was that he wasn’t the first jerk in her life. In fact, she’d had a string of them, to the point where she’d started to wonder whether it was some problem with her. Two boyfriends ago — two jerks ago, in fact — she’d dated a sales executive. She only found out after a tip off from a friend that he was offering his ‘sales package’ to at least three other women. She immediately set about returning all his things — via the second-floor window.

The think about jerks is... drum roll... they’re jerks. It was obvious, but somehow she far too often failed to see the connection until it was too late. If you meet a guy, and he’s a jerk, don’t be surprised when he then behaves like a jerk. He’s just being himself. Well, no more of that, thank you.

Once again they circulated, warming tires, getting ready for the off.

They crossed the line at full speed, but her mind was only half on what she was doing. Dammit, she’d let herself get distracted. And there he was, filling her mirrors. She instinctively darted to the right, to cover the inside of the approaching corner, but he was already upon her, and went even further right than she had. Sam Daniels swamped her on the other side, and for a brief moment they were three abreast on the straightaway. But she had the least momentum and was always going to lose out as they braked into the first corner. Drake took her on the inside, Daniels on the outside, and she suddenly found herself down in third.

Damn that man. She’d never admit it to him, but he’d just cost her the lead.

She finally settled into some kind of rhythm. Left, left, right, the short straight, the chicane... you could break a circuit up into individual segments, but it wasn’t about that — driving was more art than science. It was like playing the violin, something she briefly tried but gave up because of a lack of staying power. It was all about feel. You felt each corner intuitively; felt the vibrations of the road surface through your backside and the steering wheel; applied pressure to the pedals like the car was a living, breathing creature.

Driving quickly was a feeling, too, and when done properly that feeling was one of harmony. When she was driving quickly, it all just happened. She went into the zone. It all seemed so calm and effortless and serene. On her own on the test track she could lap as quickly as anyone she’d ever gone up against. She had an especially good feel for changing circuit conditions. The circuit was a living, breathing thing — the track surface, the air pressure, the humidity, the tires; they were all in a state of flux the whole time, and she could feel all of it. When those changes were at their most extreme — like when it rained, for example — that’s when her art was at its best.

When she was learning her craft, racing go-karts, she couldn’t afford to have tires for all conditions, so she’d just gotten used to having to use dry tires in the wet.

“The rain queen,” they used to call her, though they called her that when she cried, too, which she did on those rare occasions when she lost. Boy, did she hate losing. There was nothing she disliked more.

Where was she? Oh yes, lapping quickly. Very quickly. Then, abruptly, she was thrown out of her rhythm as she lost focus and had to practically stand on the brakes to avoid piling into the back of Daniels. She felt the harness dig into her and the front wheels lock up.

This was an entirely different feeling. The rhythm was gone, but now she was in the moment, living on her instinct. Now she became the Hutton, and she could smell the fear of her prey. Half a lap later, she came off the brakes early, threw it down the inside of the corner, and he instinctively opened the door to let her through. So, a soft touch then, this Daniels character. She spent the next two laps driving defensively — the moment you overtook someone was when they were at their most dangerous. She’d done it herself — the instinct was to lunge back, to recover what you’d lost. It was a visceral response.

But now having cemented the move, she focused back on chasing down the next prey — Drake. She got back into her rhythm again, feeling the circuit as a flowing whole rather than a collection of individual corners. As she reeled the laps in, so she reeled him in. Soon, his chassis was swooping about just ahead of her. She could see his style more clearly than she ever had done previously — it was smooth and calculated, a lot like him. He was fast because he made so few errors. He seemed to be able to do what she could not — stay focused. He was also calm despite the pressure she was applying, as though emotional management wasn’t a problem for him. Whereas for her, her emotions were a weapon, if at times one that was aimed at her own foot.

Back down in the junior leagues she’d lost her temper on occasion, and made some rash moves. She’d been the victim of some ill-tempered behavior, too — one time some kid deliberately skewered her from the side at a slow corner to get her back for some perceived on-track slight — but there was something cold and calculating about Drake’s move in the previous race that infuriated her. It hadn’t seemed like a hot-headed error of judgment, but more deliberate and scheming.

She had him now, though. Closer and closer she got until, with only five laps to go, she was right on his tail. But catching is quite easy in comparison with overtaking. Her problem now was that they were racing in near-identical cars — the only differences were in the way they’d set them up with their respective engineers. It would take a bold move to make it past.

She tried down the inside; he calmly closed the door, and she lost ground. It took her a full lap to close back up again. She tried around the outside of another corner. This time, he just held his line and she had to back right off. This time it took her two laps to catch up. She was running out of time.

Fortunately, she’d learned an awful lot of skills in her time in the lower divisions. Coming into a medium-speed left hander, 110 miles per hour, she flicked to the inside, drawing Drake across to defend, then immediately flicked the other way. Drake was left stranded and she was able to try going around the outside of him.

“Got you!” she yelled in her helmet.

But she wasn’t celebrating long. As she went into the corner, ahead of Drake but not quite past him, she felt contact at the rear of the car. You feel every tiny thing in a car like this. It’s an extension of yourself. He’d clipped her rear tire with his front wing — the piece of aerodynamics jutting out at the front of the car.

“Idiot!” she said out loud, hoping — praying — that he hadn’t damaged her rear tire.

She guided her car into the right-hander that followed, putting her faith in her equipment — but her rear tire had been punctured in the contact, and suddenly she found herself spinning off the track and into the gravel.

“IDIOT!” she yelled over the radio. “I don’t believe it! Did you see what he did?”

“Affirmative.”

She sat in the car, her rear tires — one now heavily deflated — spinning uselessly in the gravel. The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. It had to be deliberate — there was no other way. He was too good of a driver not to appreciate the outer limits of his own car. You have an instinctive feel for such things.

She extracted herself from the car, scrunched across the gravel and climbed over the track barrier, then started jogging back to the pits, her legs shaking so much with anger they felt like they would give way under her. How could he even conceive of doing such a thing? It was just plain cheating! That’s what it was, it was cheating!

“Where is he?”

Ozzie and Steve, the two engineers looked at each other, as if to say “Here’s trouble”.

“WHERE?”

“He’s on the podium.”

She started to stride that way, but Ozzie, her engineer grabbed her by the arm. “This is not a good idea.”

She wrested her arm free. “Why?”

“Rubbing is racing.”

“This is not stock-car racing! We need to protest!”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you? Report one of our own drivers?”

“But what he did was wrong!”

“Listen. It’s not right, but that’s racing. Suck it up. Move on. If you report your own team, you can kiss your future goodbye. No one will want you.”

She stood there, all folded arms and fixed mouth, looking at nothing in order to avoid eye contact, seething at the injustice.

“You need to raise your game. Learn from this. If you rock the boat, only one person is going to fall out — you.”

She marched off towards the podium, a little voice in her head — the one she always ignored — saying that this was a bad idea; that now would be a really good time to sit down and do some breathing exercises. As ever, she brushed off the internal advice and marched on.

It was certainly something Sam Daniels had never seen before. To the gathered crowds below — not as many as for a top tier event, but still numbering in the thousands — it must have made for a particularly striking sight. One minute, Drake, the new boy, was standing atop the stage pouring the Champagne into his mouth from a height. The next he was flying sideways off the top step, the fizzy stuff following closely behind, having been firmly barged off the top step by his co-driver.

Sam stood bemused as she verbally tore into him. He’d never seen anything like this before in his life and wasn’t sure what to make of it. Drake reminded him of a con artist he’d once met. Maybe he wasn’t a bad guy deep down, but he wasn’t Sam’s kind of person. Callie, meanwhile, was darned cute, but she seemed to be kind of hot-headed. Probably out of his league, too. Both of them were trouble. He’d been in this game too long to put his neck on the line for it. He’d realized a few years ago that he’d reached his level and it was too late to make the step up. Besides, he liked driving fast, but he didn’t much like the cut and thrust, and he wasn’t prepared to put his life on the line like the other drivers. You’ve got to know your limits. He’d do this for a few more years, focus on learning as much as he could about the sport, building friends and contacts, and then start his own team. But for now, he could do quite nicely out of this. Let them cancel each other out and maybe he’d take the title after all.

Wait a minute, here was Callie coming over to him now. He found himself backing away instinctively. Out of nowhere, and with Drake looking on, she grabbed him by the head and the next thing he knew, she was kissing him. It was such a shock to feel her full lips pressed against his. He stood there waving his arms about in shock, her face clamped to his. They weren’t kissing — he was being kissed — and it was over before he knew it.

“Well driven,” she said, before looking pointedly back to Drake and walking away again.

Sam could tell he was being used as some kind of pawn, but other than that, what the hell was going on? Drake scowled at him, his eyes smoldering.

Sam held his hands apart in expression of innocence, as if to say “What?"

This was going to be a long season.

CHAPTER FIVE

Drake was not a happy man. How dare Callie do that — storm the podium and steal his glory, and try to humiliate him at the same time? He’d kept his cool, of course, deliberately transmitting a scoffing ‘really?’ attitude, like he was above it all, and like it couldn’t touch him — all stuff he’d had to learn in his youth to deal with life at boarding school; but the truth was he’d felt it well and truly. Sam fucking Daniels. I mean, really? I mean, he was an okay looking guy. Well, mediocre; harmless. What was the point of being a racing driver if you were mediocre and harmless? You might as well go home.

He’d won, yet after that little display on the podium, he felt like he’d lost. It might not have meant anything to anyone watching from the outside — just like that was Sam Daniel’s girlfriend or something — but the image of them kissing was burned in his retinas. She’s done it to hurt him, and she’d succeeded. He knew he’d given next to nothing away. All those under-aged poker nights, betting away favors, had been excellent training for keeping his emotions from displaying. Never give your enemies anything. Not. A. Thing. At the same time, damn it, there was something so sexy and alluring about her. He didn’t like to admit it — this was the enemy after all — but he was hooked on her. He needed to beat her, and yet he also needed her, period. He couldn’t have both.