Crossing the Line (Hard Driving) (6 page)

There was a chance here for her to shape this whole thing the way she wanted it. She’d work her ass off to make sure she came out on top, and do her best not to hurt Ty in the process. A crush on a hot race car driver could not become more important than the career she’d been working toward the past four years.

A really intense, consuming crush . . .

Fuck. She was so fucked. But it was too late to back out now, because Alex laughed, cruel and small, and sneered, “That might be the only good idea you’ve ever had. Deal
.
”

Oh my God.
Alex had agreed. Cori sucked in a breath.

It was an opportunity she would have
killed
for just two weeks earlier. She should have squealed with excitement just now. But instead, she felt sort of . . . deflated.

Sometimes, she really hated this world. There had to be something more than this to make up for the shittiness of the whole thing.

Alex had a stake in her working there. She was his “quota for chicks,” after all, not to mention the immediate problem of being short one reporter if she quit. And that was even without the problem of continued funding.

She wasn’t quite done yet. She wasn’t going down without a fight, damn it.

Here goes nothing.
She took a deep breath. “Not so fast. I have some conditions.”

He scoffed. “
You
have conditions? You’re the one who laid out the deal in the first place, which I agreed to. You’re not in a position—” But something in her look must have finally registered with his usually single-minded dickishness, because he stopped, pursing his lips into a thin line. “What are they?”

“At the end of the season, you give me a promotion. Title and money. And before next season starts, you renew my travel budget through advertisers and
non-conditional
funding.” No more investors who demand exposés as though they could be dispensed through some scandal-sheet vending machine.

It felt like an eternity passed as the seconds on the clock ticked by, Alex glaring at her through narrowed eyes.

Finally, he nodded, once, and reached out a hand.

Damn.

An image of Ty’s face, those dark eyes, had flashed in her mind, and she hesitated.

But she shook it off as quickly as it came, thrust her hand into Alex’s for the shake, then turned and headed out through the door as gracefully as she could manage.

Blake was practically bouncing up and down as he waited for her in their shared cubicle. The place where she’d logged dozens of
his
interviews.

Not anymore, buddy.

Despite everything else, she couldn’t help feeling smug at that. Because the thing was, even though Blake was nice enough, he’d never stood up for her or pushed Alex to give her assignments. Blake had
felt
bad, but what the hell good did his feelings do when he wasn’t willing to back them up with actions?

“Did you see the hit count on your piece?” Blake asked the second she dropped into her chair.

She shrugged. “I saw the graph, but I didn’t get a good look at the numbers. But Alex, uh, alluded to it being pretty high.”
And right after that, I signed up for a few more weeks of being a terrible person.

Blake laughed and pointed to his laptop. “Well, you can check out the deets for yourself. You set
records
, Cori.”

She rolled closer and peered at the graph.
Whoa.
He wasn’t kidding. The first hour or so was a fairly steady climb, nothing exceptional. But then . . . suddenly, there was a huge spike, and it just kept going up by leaps and bounds.

Seeing that . . . it mollified her somewhat. She
had
made the right decision. Maybe it involved a little deception, but it was minor in the scheme of things. It was worth it. It
would
be worth it. She wasn’t going to let anything stand in her way.

* * *

Ty read Cori’s article six times. He’d even printed out a copy. Folded it up and put it in his pocket next to that scrap of paper she’d written her phone number on.

Last night, he’d set the paper on his nightstand before he’d tumbled into bed, wiped out from a long day of talking to reporters about things he was trying so hard to avoid talking to reporters about.

Ty had talked more to Dad after Media Day was over. Apparently, there were no records of the confession of cheating by Bobby’s former crew chief, who had since passed away, nor of the fine that his old team had paid. Apart from that, the other driver’s crew chief had agreed not to say anything in exchange for the board of directors destroying all correspondence on the incident and pretending it never happened. At the time, no one had wanted the scandal to make the news, since the sport had been suffering from steadily declining revenue from dwindling spectator sales.

Even the driver Dad had won against agreed not to push the issue in exchange for the cash prize from the championship win, plus a concession fee. Everyone had walked away happy, it seemed.

But that didn’t mean it couldn’t resurface if someone pushed for more details on Gilroy’s comments.

Ty could see the toll it was taking on Bobby. He’d tried again to convince Dad to get it off his chest, to just confess what had happened. It would clear his conscience
and
Riggs Racing’s name, and they could move on.

But Dad had refused, and Ty didn’t fight him on it.

It had been an exhausting few days. That was, except for those ten minutes during Media Day with Cori. That hadn’t felt the same at all. That had felt like the most special thing that had ever happened to him. Hell. He’d almost
kissed
her before she left. If Frank hadn’t interrupted, he probably would have. He might have tumbled her backward, onto that ridiculously placed bed, rucked that sexy-professional skirt up around her waist, and dry humped her through her panties.

The idea of getting chafed through his trousers with a woman he barely knew shouldn’t have been an arousing thought. And yet . . .
fuck, yeah
.

But it wasn’t just that he wanted to rub up against her and send her on her way. He’d found himself in the Riggs Racing private jet last night on the flight back home to Charlotte, wishing that he’d taken a commercial flight just so that he might have a chance of running into her in the airport. And then this morning, he’d woken alone in the big bed in his townhouse, seen that piece of paper, and wished she was there with him. Not in a morning-after-a-one-night-stand kind of way. But just . . . there.

It had been too early to call her, so he’d done the next best thing: went to the
Gold Cup Sports
site, looking for her bio so that he could at least temporarily content himself with a photo. But he didn’t even get that far. Instead, he’d stopped on the home page, at the headline story with her byline beneath it, and read the entire thing with so much excitement that he was practically vibrating with it.

She’d called him captivating and sharp. She’d said he was a leader on and off the track. She’d said . . . well, all manner of really nice things. She’d mentioned the rumors, but it had been a single, throwaway sentence. Nothing, really, compared to the rest of the piece.

After he’d read it a second time, he’d flipped through a few of the major sports sites, looking for coverage of this past weekend’s opening race and Media Day. Every one of those goddamn articles had opened with some form of
Based on
Riggs’s reaction with a right hook,
Gilroy’s accusations might have root in the truth . . .

But not Alex’s article. She’d called him a
leader
, not a cheater. It made him ache. It had made him want to finish their conversation, to tell her all those things off the record about where he wanted to go next—that he wanted to bring his brand of leadership off the track as well as on it. He was ready to blaze new trails, just like she had gone off and done her own thing even though the road had been so neatly laid out before her.

It made him want to be the leader she’d called him. He couldn’t wait for this mess to blow over so he could get back to working on that dream. But in the meantime, fixating on that article had made him late for work, which didn’t help. This early in the season meant a grueling pace of nearly constant racing, thoughts about racing, discussions about racing . . . all racing, all the time. But this year, there was the added insanity of so many layers of deceit.

He shook his head at himself. Those kinds of thoughts would get him nowhere. He had work to do and was already running behind. He showered quickly, then stuck the article printout in the back pocket of his jeans, sliding it next to her phone number, and headed out to the garage with the hope that he’d get a few free minutes during the morning to call her.

But no such luck. The second he walked into the garage, Dad met him at the door with a somber look and pulled him into the main office.

“What’s going on?” Ty tried to keep his voice as calm as possible. The face Dad was showing to him behind the closed office door looked a lot like panic. It wasn’t good for Bobby’s health to be under so much stress, despite the improvements he’d made over the last year after recovering from the lymphoma diagnosis and treatment.

“The board of directors is talking about launching an investigation.” Dad kept his voice pitched low, but Ty could still hear the fear in it. It made him want to rush out the door, find Gilroy again, and this time pummel the smarmy shit into the ground.

Dad sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Len apparently wanted to wait until after Media Day before talking to me about it. He called this morning to let me know that if it doesn’t get contained fast, they’ll have to respond to the public. They don’t want there to be a doubt.” His voice was full of worry.

Len Guthrie was the president of the racing association and a good guy. Ty imagined that he wasn’t happy about having to make a call like that, either.

“Does Len know about what happened when you were with Youngtown?”

Dad shook his head. “I don’t think so. Only three people on the board back then knew, and two of them passed already. The only people left who know are me, Almeida, and Matyzck. Even Calhoun is gone.”

Rick Matyzck was the crew chief who’d taken the bribe to throw the race for his driver, Hank Calhoun. Calhoun had suffered his third heart attack a couple of years ago and hadn’t made it. Almeida had been on the board for decades, retiring only recently and moving down to Florida.

“But that was Youngtown. Are you afraid an investigation of
Riggs Racing
will actually find anything?”

For a second, Ty didn’t breathe. What if Gilroy had been on to something? What if there really was cheating going on that Ty didn’t know about but had somehow gotten mixed up in simply by association?

Dad shook his head. “Not here. Riggs Racing has
never
cheated.”

Ty relaxed.

But then Dad shrugged. “But racing is a small business. I don’t believe that all of the people involved were true to their word and took this secret to their grave. Hell. I already told you years ago. Maybe it hasn’t gotten out only because no one saw fit to bring it up before, or maybe only two other people know, or whatever . . . but once you go around interviewing people about something specific, linked to a team—a name like Riggs—others might start remembering from when I was with Youngtown. Even if it’s just the smallest detail they hadn’t thought about in decades . . .”

He trailed off, but Ty didn’t need him to finish. He knew something like that would be the end of Riggs Racing. No sponsor would want to touch them. And for the crew and drivers who worked for the team, there’d always be the cloud of suspicion following them.

It wasn’t just a career killer. This had the power to ruin lives.

“What can I do?” Ty curled his hands into fists, trying to keep them from reaching out and grabbing the closest object at hand and smashing it to bits, just to have somewhere, some way to channel all this frustration.

“Nothing.” Bobby lifted a hand, then dropped it, as if “nothing” meant that he already saw them as defeated.

Goddammit. Not still!

Ty wished he could shake some sense into his dad. What had happened to the guy who’d built a multimillion-dollar team from the ground up? Who swept every race one year and went on to win the championship two years in a row after that? The fight against his lymphoma seemed to have taken the fight out of him in every other way, it seemed. And Ty didn’t have the heart to push his father under those circumstances.

So all he did was give a tight nod in acknowledgment.

Coward.

He wasn’t sure, though, whether he was talking about his father . . . or himself.

Dad cleared his throat. “Mike Belgrave called, too.”

Ty’s gaze snapped back to Bobby’s.

“He told me they put your program on hold. He said they’d already discussed it with you before the race. Why didn’t you tell me?” Dad’s voice was starting to climb in volume and Ty frowned.

He willed himself to keep an even, calm tone. “There’s nothing you could have done. It doesn’t matter anymore. Neither of us can change it. It’s my fault, anyway. I accept that responsibility. If I’d kept my temper I’d still be moving forward with that, and this whole cheating business would never have gotten so big.”

If only I could turn back time . . .

If only Dad would come clean . . .

If only . . .

He forced himself to focus, then reached out and squeezed Dad’s shoulder, trying to diffuse a little of the tension. “Forget about it. It’s done. What do we do now?”

Bobby’s jaw was set as he looked at Ty. “It’s business as usual. They’ll do the song and dance about looking into things, but as long as we do our normal thing, it shouldn’t come to that.”

It took him a moment to get a grip on his anger and control his temper, but finally Ty nodded in agreement. “Okay. Fine. Business as usual.”

But he didn’t agree. Not one bit. What he wanted to do was fight. Not just Gilroy, though he’d welcome a second chance to beat that guy’s ass, but everyone. Every dishonest cretin who was hurting his family and his team and everything he held dear.