Racing Into Your Heart

CHAPTER 3

The lounge door had not closed by itself.

Ethan Cole stood just inside it, one hand still on the handle, his grey eyes fixed on the photograph in her fingers.

For a second neither of them spoke.

"Where did you get that?" he asked.

His voice was different. Lower. Careful, like a man stepping onto thin ice.

"My locker." Lena held the picture against her chest. "Did you put it there?"

"No."

"You expect me to believe that?"

"I do not expect anything from you, Morgan." He crossed the room in three long strides. "Give it to me."

"No."

"Lena."

It was the first time he had ever said her first name. It sounded strange in his mouth, almost gentle. She hated how it made her stomach tighten.

"That is my father in this picture," she said. "Why do you care?"

A muscle jumped in his jaw. He looked at the photograph, then at her, and for one moment she thought he was going to tell her something real.

Then the mask slid back into place.

"I do not care. But if someone left it there for you, they wanted you to find it. Which means they are watching what you do with it." He stepped back. "Put it somewhere safe. Do not show anyone."

"Anyone like who?"

"Anyone."

He was at the door before she found her voice. "Ethan. What happened to my father?"

He stopped. His back was to her. His shoulders rose and fell once.

"Go home," he said quietly. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow you are going to need it."

Then he was gone.

The next morning, the sun rose over the Silverstone test track like a threat.

Lena stood in the garage in her new race suit, helmet in her hands, and tried to ignore the sixty engineers pretending not to stare at her. The car sat in front of her, sleek and black with a silver V along the nose. Valkyrie. It was the most beautiful machine she had ever seen.

"Baseline run," Nina said, adjusting her headset. "Ten laps, then a push lap. Ethan set the reference time yesterday. One minute, twenty seven point four."

"Is that good?"

"It is the fastest lap this track has ever seen."

"Then I will beat it."

Nina grinned. "I knew I was going to like you."

The engine fired. The sound hit her like a wave, a rising scream that rattled her ribs and sang in her blood. Lena pulled on her helmet, fastened the strap and rolled out of the pit lane.

The car felt like a living thing. Responsive. Hungry. Faster than anything she had ever driven, so fast that for the first lap she simply held on and learned its moods. By the third lap, she was dancing with it.

"Good pace," Nina said. "Four tenths off the reference. Ready for the push lap?"

"Ready."

She crossed the line with everything she had. The first sector disappeared in a blur. Purple on the timing screen. Then the second sector, the fast sweeping corners where the car seemed to hang in the air. Purple again. By the final sector, her hands were so steady they felt like stone.

She took the last corner a fraction later than any sane person would.

The lap time flashed on her dashboard.

1:27.2.

Silence on the radio.

Then Nina screamed so loudly that Lena had to pull the headphones away from her ears.

"Two tenths! Lena! Two tenths faster than Ethan!"

She laughed out loud inside her helmet, tears blurring her visor. "Say it again."

"You just broke the track record on your first day!"

When she climbed out of the car, the entire garage was clapping. Not all of them, though. At the back, leaning against a tool cabinet with his arms folded, stood Ethan, expressionless.

Beside him, Richard Cole beamed like a proud father. Next to Richard stood a woman Lena did not recognize. Tall, glossy black hair, olive skin, a white dress that looked impossible to wear in a garage.

The woman smiled at Lena. It did not reach her eyes.

"Isabella Laurent," Nina whispered. "Television. Also Ethan's ex. Be careful with that one."

By lunchtime, the photograph was on every sports website in the country.

It had been taken through the garage window. Ethan and Lena stood close, her chin raised and his head bent low, as if they were about to kiss. The headline read THE COLD WAR HEATS UP. Underneath, in smaller letters, SECRET ROMANCE AT VALKYRIE?

Lena's phone buzzed twenty times in a minute. Her cousin. Her old mechanic Gus. Journalists she had never spoken to in her life.

"That was an argument," she said to Nina in the corridor, shaking her phone. "He told me to go home and sleep."

"I know. But a argument looks the same as a kiss on a camera if you squint." Nina winced. "Isabella posted it first. The photographer is one of her friends."

Lena stopped walking. "She did this on purpose."

"Honey, everything she does is on purpose."

She found Ethan in the garage after the others had left. He was alone, sitting on an upturned crate, turning a wrench over in his hand and staring at nothing.

"Did you see it?" she asked.

"I did."

"Did you know she was going to do it?"

"Isabella?" He gave a short, humorless laugh. "Isabella has never done a single thing without knowing exactly how it would look."

"Then why is she doing this to me?"

"Not to you." He looked up. "To me. You are just standing in the way."

She crossed the floor until she stood in front of him. He did not rise. Sitting, he was almost eye level with her.

"I need you to stay away from me," she said. "In public. In private. I need people to see me as a driver, not as your latest headline."

"Then stop beating my lap times."

"That is not going to happen."

"I know." The corner of his mouth lifted. "That is the problem."

He stood slowly, and suddenly there was no space between them at all. She could feel the heat of his body and see the faint gold flecks in the grey of his eyes. His gaze dropped to her mouth for half a second before he dragged it back up.

Her pulse went wild.

"You have your father's hands," he said, so softly she almost missed it.

"What did you say?"

He seemed to realize his mistake. He stepped back and the spell snapped.

"Nothing. I said nothing."

"Ethan."

"I will beat you in Bahrain, Morgan."

"You can try."

"I always do."

He walked out. She stood there breathing hard, furious, shaken, confused. She had come here to prove him wrong. She had not come here to feel anything at all.

"Lena!"

Nina burst into the garage, laptop clutched to her chest, her face grey.

"What is wrong?"

"I was reviewing your telemetry from today." Nina's voice shook. "There is something you need to see. Now."

She set the laptop on the table and turned it around. A graph filled the screen, three jagged lines in red, blue and green.

"This is your brake pressure on the push lap. The blue line is what the car was supposed to do. The red line is what it actually did."

Lena stared at the gap between them. It was small, but it was there.

"Someone changed your brake mapping," Nina said. "Remotely. During your run."

"Who has access to that?"

Nina swallowed.

"Four people in the whole building."