“He’s fine,” he said.
Aunt Delilah clapped her hands. “Let’s go outside.”
“I’ll be out in a moment,” he said.
After they’d gone, he sighed, nuzzling the bulldog and whispering in his ear. “Thank you, Boudica, us men have to stick together.”
As Clarke looked out the window of the plane, watching Montana disappear behind the clouds, he felt none of that elation he had anticipated feeling when leaving the state.
Had he been played?
The moment she’d handed him a rifle, he caught that superior look on Ceci’s face.
In her mind, she’d already won.
I was played all right.
But the challenge of going up against a cocky Ceci Rivers had been too damn hard to resist.
He still couldn’t figure out exactly when and how he’d agreed to the bet in the first place. But that aunt of hers was difficult to argue with.
Ceci Rivers once again was going to get what she wanted, and they were actually going to do this crazy thing.
It wasn’t altogether bad, he thought, as he pictured her in that catsuit and wondered what she would wear on their first fake date.
He remembered holding her wrist, gazing at that mark and tattoo at the masquerade party. He hadn’t imagined the quickening of her pulse as he ran his thumb across it. But he was the Man in the Iron Mask then.
“It’s to remind myself I was born.”
How could a birthmark and tattoo do that? He wondered if it had something to do with what her aunt had told him. The meaning of her name? Her father? Her mother?
To have your mother die giving birth to you—that had to have a profound impact on a person.
He gazed out the window and tried to turn the clouds into a giraffe, a tree, even a racecar like he used to as a child. But all he could see were those blonde curls. If he shut his eyes, he could almost feel them caress his cheeks, like they had when she’d brought him out of the darkness with that kiss when he’d lain unconscious on the men’s room floor of the Royal Horseguards Hotel.
Did she ever think about it?
He wished he wouldn’t. He shouldn’t.
She wasn’t just any girl. She was Ceci Rivers. Team principal for Blue Jet Lightning. The brains behind Anker’s championship win last season.
That was the point, wasn’t it? That’s why Roxanne was so keen on this fake dating idea. Because of the stir it would cause. The stir it had already caused.
But what about the paddock? What would the owners say about them dating when they were on competing teams? What would Anker say? Maybe nothing. Maybe everyone in the F1 world would know that it was fake. Of course they would. They would see there was nothing real between them. It was too illogical, unreasonable, and unbelievable to think anything else. Leo Clarke and Ceci Rivers? The whole thing was preposterous.
Let Roxanne concern herself with that. He would not expend one ounce of energy on it. His focus had to be on racing—and racing alone.
The first race was in Austin, Texas. So that was where this fiasco would begin. Ceci would decide where they would go and what they would do. She’d insisted on that.
He swallowed. Those dreams were going to make this even more difficult.
He’d had to sleep another night in Montana before he could fly out. And once again he’d dreamt of Ceci Rivers. She was still wearing that fucking catsuit but in this one, she was sauntering along a snowy track, kicking a kart toward him and demanding he pull it. When he hesitated, she cracked that whip.
The black leather snapping like the electricity snapping through his veins. That mild brush of the cattail at the end of the whip against his flesh, so mild he couldn’t tell whether it was the tip of the leather tickling his cheek or only the rush of air its movement through space caused. That sly smile as he began to drag the kart. And that flick of the wrist, that crack and flash like lightning when the whip came down dangerously close to his flesh whenever there was a moment’s hesitation on his part.
All that in and of itself would have been disturbing enough.
But what was really disturbing was that he liked it.
