I flush and offer him a thin, embarrassed smile. Then I slip out of the back of the garage and take off at a run.
Chapter 4
Harper’s garage is right next to Crosswire’s, so it only takes a minute to get to Travis’s changing room. I let myself in without knocking and find him sitting on the narrow couch with his phone in his hand and his feet thrown up on a chair. He’s dressed in his race suit, but he has it unzipped to the waist, revealing the fireproof shirt underneath.
He looks up at me and smiles. “Hey, you.”
“Hey,” I say tersely. “What’s up? You said it was important.”
“Come look at this,” he says, beckoning for me to sit down beside him.
I perch on the very edge of the couch as he turns his phone toward me. He taps play on a video he has loaded up.
“What are you doing, silly girl?” our dogsitter, Molly, asks. The camera is pointed at Morocco’s tail, which is thumping on the edge of our bed. “What did you do with all your toys?” Molly says.
I groan. “Are you serious?”
“What?”
I get to my feet. “FP3 starts in, like, ten minutes. I have to go.”
“It starts in twenty minutes,” Travis says. “Sit down.”
“Travis—”
“Sit.”
His tone doesn’t leave room for argument. I sit down again. Reluctantly.
“Now watch the video,” he says. “Properly.”
I make an aggrieved noise, but he ignores me, turning my chin to point my face at the screen.
“What are you doing, silly girl?” Molly asks again. “What did you do with all your toys?”
She moves the camera up from Morocco’s tail to her head, which is buried in a pile of her toys. There’s her favorite stuffy, a bright red lobster that Travis and I bought for her in St. John’s, and a donut-shaped toy from Matty, and about thirty others.
“Did you bring all your toys up onto the bed?” Molly asks. Morocco’s tail thumps loudly. “Do you wish your daddies would stay away so you could sleep in their bed with all your toys every night?”
Morocco thumps her tail some more, then she rolls over for a belly rub, and the video ends.
“Isn’t that cute?” Travis says.
I’m seriously going to kill him. “Very cute. Not, however, what I would qualify as ‘important.’”
He feigns a gasp. “Blasphemy.”
“Travis—”
“I saw your interviews,” he says.
I flush bright red. “Oh.”
“Mm.” He looks like he’s fighting a smile. “You’re really good at them.”
“I know, right,” I mutter.
He pokes my cheek. “It helps that you’ve got such a great smile. Really puts people at ease.”
