Taz looked at the door leading into the hotel and calculated he could be inside in three seconds and back at the car in five, at Imola in fifteen minutes. He knew what he was doing there.
Here?
Not a bit.
But this was Millie, and because she was hurting, the heart he didn’t know he possessed ached a little too. Walking away was not an option so he’d have to man up. If he could dice death on a racetrack at three hundred miles per hour, he could do this too.
Maybe.
He rubbed the back of his neck and walked to stand between the coffee table and the couch. Closing her laptop, he pushed it to the side and shoved the table back, making room for his long legs. Sitting on the table he faced her, and up close he could see her road-map red eyes.
‘Talk to me, Millie.’
Millie unfolded her legs and rested her forearms on her knees. ‘We both know that you’d much rather be anywhere else but here, Taz,’ she said with all the charm of a snapping turtle.
She was looking to pick a fight, and he didn’t blame her. It was so much easier to be angry than vulnerable. ‘Why the tears, Millie?’ he quietly asked. ‘And I’m not moving until I get an answer.’
‘Ben…’
Ben? What about him? Her shoulders slumped, and her head dropped, and she played with the silver charm on her bracelet. The charm that Ben always tied to the shoelaces of his racing boot. The charm Ben had been wearing when he crashed at…
Taz swallowed his harsh curse. Ben had died at Imola. His car had spun out and he was dead before the medics could get to him.
But because he was selfish and self-absorbed, and incredibly busy and highly stressed, he’d forgotten. God, of course Millie would find it difficult to go back to the place where Ben died, to be able to pinpoint the spot where his life ended. Taz rubbed his hands over his face, embarrassed at his lack of awareness. Confused by his need to comfort and protect.
And maybe it was time for him to admit that the real reason he’d left the track, and his responsibilities, was because he needed to be with Millie and was desperate to connect with her. That he’d missed her, and not only in his bed. He’d missed her steadying influence, her wry humour and the way she kept his feet firmly on the ground.
But this wasn’t about him and what he needed from her. Faced with visiting the site where Ben had lost his life, the person she’d loved the most, Millie was in a world of hurt. And that was an acid-tipped knife in his soul.
She used the ball of her hand to blot away her tears. ‘I thought I’d be fine, but I couldn’t make myself go to the track today. I mean, I know I need to, it’s myjob. I also want to lay flowers where he died. But I couldn’t muster the courage today.’
He could throw himself into the tightest of corners at three hundred miles an hour and make split-second decisions that risked a car worth several fortunes and the livelihoods of two thousand employees across his racing and technology divisions. But when faced with Millie’s tear-streaked cheeks and eyes saturated with pain, Taz felt utterly out of his depth.
She lifted those shattered eyes to his. ‘I feel like such a coward, Taz.’ Her voice cracked, and he winced. Her raw honesty drilled into him, through him.
His hands itched to comfort her, to stroke her hair, to tuck the damp strands clinging to her face behind her ears. But he held back. There were different kinds of bravery, and Taz knew—deep in the darkest, most hidden part of himself—that hers eclipsed his. He could charm his way into any woman’s bed, play polo and golf at near-professional levels and speed-read a contract while dissecting a complicated financial statement.
But showing someone your wounds, revealing the bruises on your soul, took strength he didn’t possess. Facing the past, wrestling with its jagged edges instead of locking it away in an unreachable vault, took a fortitude he could only admire from a distance. When it came to emotions, he was broken. Stunted. Incapable of anything more profound than surface-level banter. They said you learned how to love from the environment you grew up in, and while he’d witnessed the love his father bestowed on Alex, there’d been none left over for him. He’d received so little affection and love, he had no concept of how the process worked. To understand meant acknowledging he was unloved, and for most of his life that was too hard to do. He’d fallen into the self-protecting habit of dismissing it as being inconsequential and unneeded. As a result, feelings terrified him, and this woman, with her tears and her unbearable vulnerability, utterly dismantled him.
He tried to form words—words to tell her she was remarkable, that her courage left him in awe—but they stuck in his throat. They were too big, too tangled, too dangerous. They wouldn’t come out. So he did the only thing he knew how to do: He retreated. He pulled back, slammed down his emotional shutters and wrapped himself in the cold, impenetrable roll cage that had always protected him. But because he needed to say something, anything, he retreated to where he felt comfortable. ‘You should focus on work,’ he said, wincing at his too-flat voice. ‘You’re great at what you do, and it’s a good place to…’ How to say this without revealing too much? ‘…lose yourself.’
She tipped her head, her eyes huge in her face. ‘Is that what you do, Tazio?’
He couldn’t admit that, couldn’t widen that crack in his psyche. Not even with her, the woman who’d burrowed deeper under his skin than anyone else. He had to keep some distance, stay emotionally safe. Keep those feelings controlled and contained. ‘We have so much to do, and little time to do it in. Let’s get back to work.’
When hurt flickered in her eyes, he knew she’d been expecting a hug, some affection, maybe even for him to tell her that he was happy to see her. But he couldn’t touch her, not now. If he did, his control would shatter and he’d expose how much he’d missed her, that he wanted her, would show her every inch of his emotional underbelly. Vulnerability was never acceptable.
Disappointment, stark and cutting, slashed through her eyes and across her face, a hot blade through butter.
They said he was an insensitive bastard. Cold. Unfeeling. Selfish. He hated labels and fought against being shoved into a box. But as he stood there, watching the light in her eyes dim, he knew the press, and the world, had him pegged.
CHAPTER TEN
IN THEDEROSSIconference room at the Imola track, her back to the track, Millie pushed her laptop away and tried to stretch away the stress of the long day. Yesterday and the day before had hurtled past in a blur of chaos—exactly what she’d come to expect from the build-up to race-day. Taz had been busier than normal, his days taken up with race business, his nights with sponsor dinners, and he’d slipped into the bed they shared after she was asleep and quietly left before she was awake.
When they were together on the track, he occasionally wrapped his arm around her waist, dropped a kiss in her hair. But because people were always around when he was being affectionate, she never knew if it was to promote their supposed romance or if he was being genuinely affectionate.
He’d been surprisingly understanding about her absence from the track the other day—she’d expected a harsh scolding because Taz De Rossi did not appreciate his people not doing their jobs to his exacting standards!—and his saying she was doing a great job as his PR person both warmed and floored her. Again, compliments about work performance from him were hard to earn and exceedingly rare.
