“Your face isn’t in it,” he said and put his phone away. “I put a filter on so you can’t quite make out how pale you are, just your tiny little wrist and your rings.”
“And what if the person we set you up with doesn’t—”
“What, wear rings? Drive?”
I shrugged, keeping my attention on the road. “Well, yeah.”
“I like those classy little rings you have.” He peered down at the picture. “God, you have such a small wrist, I bet mythumb and pinky finger meet around it.” He reached over to test it out despite my verbal protest. “You’re tiny.”
That wasn’t true. My thighs were larger than most and disproportionate to the rest of my body. Even if I was shorter than average, I wasn’t tiny.
“Small and shouty,” he mused. “Livid and little. Aha! Little lividLivie.”
I groaned and he talked me through the next roundabout as my nerves got the better of me.
“Lucawill know,” I mumbled as we got back on the straight. “He knows I’m driving with you.”
“And? Doesn’t mean anything. Maybe I have a little crush on you.”
My hand held the wheel tighter, trying to focus on the road and not his flirting. “Nix…”
“Doesn’t matter anyway. He doesn’t follow me. I don’t follow him.”
“What!” I screeched, holding the wheel tighter. “Rectify that right now. Right this second,Armas.”
“Okay,” he grumbled and went tapping on his phone. “Happy now?”
“Ecstatic,” I deadpanned.
He carried on scrolling and then I felt his gaze on me again. “Damn, Livid. Let’s go to the pool.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Seeing as I’m in the spirit of following people, I decided to look at your profile, too.”
There was no way he was actually interested in me. Especially if he found good girls boring.
“Wow, you’ve got some followers,” he said, scrolling slowly, then stopping, pinching a finger and thumb to zoomin. “Nearly as many as me.”
“Hardly.”
“You’re a littlefashionista, aren’t you?” he said, before double-tapping dramatically to like one of the posts.
“Remember what I said earlier? Sweet-talking me won’t get you what you want. I still have a job to do.”
“Ugh,” he groaned, head back on the headrest. “That job being to ruin my life.”
“To progress your career,” I argued.
“To progressyourcareer.”
Chapter 7
Lucashook out his arms and legs and nodded at me. “Ready.”
I counted down silently with my fingers. When my hand was a fist, I clicked live stream.
“Hi, everyone,” he started, oozing an easy confidence in his hotel room. “Bet you weren’t expecting to see me on this live stream. Not on theCiclatiaccount, anyway. But, well, you’ve probably guessed it. Until my cousin is back up and running next year, I’ll be taking his bike for the season. I’m honoured to be riding in his saddle for the time being and cheering him on, as always, to get better. See you on the track on Saturday!”
