“It’s not the time,” I said with a passive shrug. “After the race tomorrow, maybe.”
Abbe shook his head and reached to touch my arm. “Lucasaid it’s been upsetting you.”
I didn’t have time for it to upset me. I had either been riding the wave of the media frenzy and adoration forCiclatior sneaking time with Nix.
He was very distracting.
“Lucashouldn’t get involved,” I snapped. “No one can do this for me. I don’t want to ask. I want to beoffered.”
“That won’t happen,” he said and downed his drink in one swallow. “Criswould forget his own head if it didn’t have theCiclatilogo tattooed under his ear. He named his own daughter Everly after a vintage bike. Everything is the bikes for that man. I’m sorry,Livie, but you could have Nix canonised as a saint, and you would still be an afterthought. He only cares about the bikes.”
“Bike sales have increased by 12% in the last two weeks,” I told him. He could read between the lines that it was because ofLuca.
He grinned, knowing. “Indeed they have. But, in this business, you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
I sighed, throwing my head back. My landlord had sent through a new contract last week while I’d been in Nix’s kitchen, getting out a garlic bread from the oven. “Fine. I’ll ask. But you andLucaneed to not meddle.”
“No meddling,” he promised.
With a warning glance, I left him, guzzling the water as I went, furious at myself for getting to this point.
I’d been ‘gifted and talented’ in school, a reader, a do-gooder. My bedroom was covered in certificates. I’d always worked hard, to the point of burnout. Until people didn’t have the option but to recognise my hard work. I refused to be average.
Average was a repulsive word.
Though I feared that was exactly what I was.
So, if I no longer had the talent, I put in the effort. I worked night and day to do the best job I could. Eager to please,to be needed and relied upon.
Indispensable.
It’s how I’d becomeVinny’spublicist after only a couple of years in the field.
I probably could have asked for more. I didn’t have the nerve.
But now, maybe I did. Put me in front of journalists or clients and I could handle them and tell them what was what. Put me in front of bosses… well, Adam and I hadn’t ended well.
Yet, here I was, in the pit box, ready to cheekily ask.
Maybe Nix had rubbed off on me.
“Cris,” I said gently as he messed around with his headset, passing it to one of the technicians. “Cris, can I speak to you?”
“Go on,mamie,” he said but looked over at what they were doing. “Ask it.”
“Alone, maybe?”
His head jerked up with a frown. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing iswrong,” I said.
He took me by the elbow to the back corner, behind the partition. “Tell me what’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“Am I still on a temporary contract?” I asked, not caring for how desperate I sounded. “The lease on my flat needs to be renewed within the next month— I can either move out and put my stuff in storage or I can—”
He blinked and let out the lightest of laughs. “Livia, how are you asking that? Even Nix said he doesn’t know what he’d do without you.”
Fuck sake. I shouldn’t have told him. “He—he did? When?”
