Page 61 of Out of Control

My mind stutters over how to respond, but fears anything I might say would ruin the moment, the softness to a man who’s rarely soft.

“Good night, Ollie,” I whisper.

He leans over and brushes his lips to mine. “Good night, Bellissima.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Rossi

I drive the coast.

It’s late and the moon is out, but there will be no going back to my place where pieces of Sofia are everywhere and she’s not.

I don’t know what the fuck this is, but it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt or experienced before. And that’s not a slight to Blair.

But maybe . . . just maybe, I can comprehend the pull Blair felt toward Lachlan last year. That draw. That certainty between them. That all-consuming something that would drive you to lie, to hide, to do whatever it takes so that feeling doesn’t fucking stop. That Lachlan would risk his new contract—the one I have now that I took out from under him without him even putting up a fight—simply so he could be with her.

It made no sense to me then. Racing and keeping your ride were what you did at all costs. But now? Now there’s more sense to that madness. More reason to why you’d do something so counterintuitive to all you’ve worked for.

And it’s the weirdest fucking feeling.

What I’ve known of love has been skewed.

My parents loved me enough to push me. To not want me to live their life. To feel obligated to support them because they drove me to want more. But once they didn’t have to live the life they didn’t want for me, once I paid off all their debts and set them up comfortably, I don’t see them any more or any less. It’s not like they’ve chosen to come to races.

Blair loved me as best as I let her. That’s no fault of hers.

Then there’s racing. That relationship is a contemptuous bitch where I love what I do and sometimes it loves me back. But it seems that it too, wants something in return. It wants the show, the façade, the risk-taker people expect.

And now Sofia. What the fuck is this? The feeling. The borderline obsession. The need.

I scrub a hand over my jaw and exhale.

I’ve lived a life disregarding the things I’ve loved.

A life with one goal.

It’s jarring when the entire fabric you’ve built your world around seems to no longer hold its weight. Nor do you think you want it to.

So I drive.

The hills of Monaco.

Over to Nice.

To the twisty roads beyond.

And I try to undo these feelings. I try to rationalize, to justify, to eradicate them—play them off as just good fucking sex . . . but it’s so much more than that.

Sofia’s so much more than that.

She’s lived a life in Cruz’s shadow.

But I see her there.

I can’t see anything else.

The question is . . . do I really want to?