The Playboy and the Single Mum (Vintage Love Book 2) (9 page)

“A little. Things didn’t go so well last time I saw him. The phrases, ‘You never loved me’ and ‘I hate you’ were screamed a lot. Now to learn he has a heart problem … what if he sees me and collapses? Or worse, turns his back on me?”

“I’m sure he won’t. I’ve met him a few times and got the impression he’s lonely. He’ll be happy to have you and Max in his life.”

He pulled her a fraction closer and nibbled on her ear. “I’ve put in an appearance now. We can leave anytime.”

The slow song ended and was replaced by one with a faster tempo. At least the Russian band was better than the wine. She put a more respectable distance between her and Daniel, much to her body’s annoyance. “We can’t leave together. And we’re doing a terrible job of convincing people we aren’t a couple. We have to find some other woman for you to leave with.”

“
Pour l’amour de Dieu
, Lexy.”

Damn it, why’d he have to be so difficult? Did he think this was easy for her? He could afford to walk away from his Destin Designs contract and do whatever he pleased. Or whoever. She wasn’t so lucky. Pulling out of his arms, she found a spot in the corner of the ballroom from where she could see everyone. Eventually, Daniel joined her. She refused to look at his face.

“What about her? She’s beautiful.” Lexy pointed out a blond woman dressed in six square inches of fabric.

“She’s too skinny, and she’s got so much filler in her lips it would be like kissing a balloon. Plus, she’s dressed like a prostitute. I have standards, you know.” He almost huffed out his refusal.

Great, a picky playboy. Wasn’t that an oxymoron or something?

“Okay, what about the brunette talking to the guy with the really bad toupée?”

“Her face is so full of Botox, if a mosquito bit her it would die on contact. I prefer a more natural woman.”

Lexy scanned the room again. Natural was in short supply with this crowd. Dismissing the women who were obviously married or already hanging on the arm of some man left only about two dozen.

“Okay, her, the one in the elegant black dress, with dark hair, and blue eyes. She’s beautiful, not too skinny, as natural as you’re going to get in this group, and looks like she has a sense of humor.”

“Her boobs are fake. Look, they don’t even move when she laughs.”

“God, you’re choosy. I’m trying to get you a date, not find you a wife.”

Something flashed across his eyes but was gone before she could define it. “That’s not amusing.”

This isn’t fun for me, either.

“Fine. You want a naturally endowed, curvy woman, with wrinkles and style.” She scanned the party again. “Oh, I’ve got her. The woman who just walked in, so she won’t have seen us together. She’s good-looking, natural, her boobs look real, and she’s nicely dressed. My work here is done.” Lexy forced a note of enthusiasm in her voice. Picking out one’s replacement sucked even more than a Dyson.

“No.”

She turned to stare up at him. He had that look in his eyes again. “No? She meets every single one of your criteria. What’s wrong with her?”

He took her hand and kissed the back of it, holding her gaze. “She’s not you.”

When a man told you he didn’t want to be with any other woman in the room, you ran. Or melted. That was Lexy’s other option.

Thankfully he didn’t follow, and she made it to her suite without meeting anyone who knew her. And then her body punished her the rest of the night by replaying the sound of Daniel’s voice over and over again. Her first test and she’d failed. If she lost her job, would it be Daniel’s fault or hers?

The next morning she powered up her laptop and scanned the gossip sites, with one eye open for images from the night before. Had Daniel hooked up with some woman, or had he escaped without getting his photo taken? At the very end of the report on last night’s event was a small photo with the caption:
Has the playboy been played?
Daniel was staring with undisguised interest at the retreating figure of a woman in a chocolate brown dress. She enlarged the photo as much as she could, but it was impossible to tell that the woman was her. Unless you’d been at the party. Could she trust in the discretion of Daniel’s team? They were the only ones who knew who she was. For now.

Her phone buzzed with an incoming message:
Blonde last week. Brunette this week. Keep up the good work.

It wasn’t even five a.m. in London. Why was Mr. Petersen up so early? He must be really paranoid about this campaign. What if he decided to check up on her personally?

There was a soft knock on the hotel room door and she raced to answer it. Max was still asleep due to the time change.

“Daniel.” He was already dressed in his overalls, his green eyes distant when he glanced at her. He made no move to enter the room or even touch her.

“Here’s your paddock pass. You’ve got all access. I’m going to be on the track most of the day, but if you need to get in touch with me, my team will be able to get a message through. I’ll have the PR woman send you a list of all my scheduled appearances.” He handed her the lanyard with the plastic pass dangling at the bottom and turned to leave.

“Wait.”

He stopped but didn’t look back.

“I had to leave. There’s too much at stake to throw it all away on something with no future.”

“Well, I’m the one paying the price with sleepless nights. I broke my number one rule and got involved with a woman during the race season. I have to concentrate on my car now. I’ll see you around.”

And he was gone.

He thought they were involved? This was so complicated. Most girls went through these scenarios during their teens. Although she had a failed marriage behind her, she was still a novice in the relationship department. And what exactly did “involvement” with Daniel entail?

The questions plagued her all morning. After breakfast she and Genevieve took Max to a nearby children’s park. Genevieve was tense and nervous, looking around constantly for signs of danger. Max’s squeals of delight eventually drew a smile from his skittish nanny. Lexy, however, was thinking about what Daniel had said this morning, so much she nearly got knocked out by her son on the swings. Should she spend one night with him and get it over with? Or tell him to find someone else to conquer because they were colleagues and he had to respect that?

After lunch back in the suite, Genevieve picked up the access pass Daniel had left. “I’ll take Max to the hotel pool until it’s his nap time. You go to the track.”

“I’m not sure Daniel wants to see me.”

“The question is: what do you want?”

He had made her promise to do one thing each day for herself. She wanted to see him drive, and going to the track today when it was unlikely her father would be around yet meant she could absorb the atmosphere without worry. Lexy quickly changed into the animal print jumpsuit and kissed Max goodbye. Her son was so in love with Genevieve, he hardly noticed her leave. Damn, it would be bad enough that she was never going to be satisfied with her humdrum life when this was over. She felt alive for the first time in so long. She didn’t need her son devastated as well. Although she was pretty sure a three-year-old’s heartbreak could be cured with a new toy or a trip to the zoo.

Three of the other drivers’ wives were in the lobby and offered her a lift to the track. Within five minutes, despite the fact that they each spoke a different native language, they were laughing and giggling like best friends. “Tomorrow before qualifying, a bunch of us WAGs are going to get our hair done. The TV cameras love to spot us in the garages, and I swear my gray hairs multiply in HD,” Tara, one of the wives, said. If this woman had ever had a gray hair amongst her jet-black locks, Lexy’d eat one of Max’s toy cars. Evidently even beautiful women had their moments of insecurity.

“Sure, I’d love to come. But I’m not a wife or girlfriend. I’m working with Daniel.”

“Of course, sweetie. We believe you. Although I’ve never seen Daniel devour any of his other colleagues with his eyes the way he does you. And you were pretty cozy on the dance floor last night.” Mandy was married to Robert, Daniel’s teammate.

Heat engulfed Lexy’s face. “That was…” She wasn’t an accomplished enough liar to finish the sentence.

“Leave her alone, Mandy. When she watches the race on Sunday, she’ll know,” Louisa said.

“Know what?” Lexy had watched hundreds of F1 races in her life. What kind of epiphany did they expect her to have this time?

“If you’re in love with a man behind the wheel, you’ll feel every curve, every dip in the track, as though you were in the car yourself,” Mandy said.

“And you’ll hold your breath so much you may black out,” Louisa added.

“I have to put disgusting stuff on my nails so I don’t bite them.” Tara flashed her nails, bitten down to the quick. “It doesn’t always work.”

More tips for coping with the stress of watching the man you love hurtling around a race track at 300 kilometers an hour in a car with enough power to break orbit followed. She listened and nodded at the right moments without too much worry about needing their advice. She wasn’t in love with Daniel. Sure, she might be a bit more invested in the race results because she had a personal stake in the game now. If Daniel won the championship, his advertising value would go through the roof.

Shit. Am I becoming a crass advertising exec who sees people as a commodity?

Then she spotted Daniel and his ad revenue potential didn’t even register. One night. That’s all she wanted. They could go back to being colleagues after that.

He was with two other men and one woman, staring at a monitor covered in squiggly lines—telemetry from the car’s running that morning. They were focusing on one particular section of the data. Her father had once told her there were two types of drivers: Type one understood every nuance of the car and gave feedback as though he’d built it himself. Type two showed up when he was needed, got behind the wheel, and drove. Daniel was obviously a type one.

Her reflection must have showed in the monitor because he turned around mid-sentence.

“Hi,” she said. She was well read, spoke five languages, and that was the best she could do.

Daniel stared at her for a moment then glanced at his colleagues. The smile he gave her seemed forced. “Lexy, I’m glad you came.” He must be saving the frosty reception for when they were alone. He introduced her to the few in the garage who hadn’t been at the party the night before. “The car is handling great on all but one section of the track,” he explained. “I want to walk that area to see if I can figure out what’s different about that particular piece of tarmac.”

She glanced down at her heeled shoes. After a six-kilometer walk around the circuit in these shoes, walking barefoot across hot coals would be a welcome relief.

“Sure. Have you got a bottle of water for me? It’s getting hot.” Or maybe it was the way he was looking at her again.

“I don’t want to walk the whole track, just one section. I thought, seeing as how you missed your second driving lesson, you could drive me out there.”

“You want
me
to drive
you
on an F1 track?” The man was insane. The mystery of why he fancied her was solved.

“Not in Eva.” He stroked his hand along the side pod of his F1 car. God, now she was jealous of a hunk of carbon fiber.

“You named your car?”

“We spend a lot of quality time together. What I meant was we’d use a regular car to drive out to the turn in question. Then I’ll get out and walk.”

“Um, I guess. There won’t be other drivers walking the track, will there?” She could see the headlines now: “Unlicensed woman mows down half of Formula 1’s drivers.”

“No, most of them have left the track now.”

“All right, then. If you think it’s safe.”

“You’re with me. What could go wrong?” For one, he could smile at her like that and she’d drive straight into a wall.

“Why do you insist on tempting fate by saying these things?”

“I don’t believe in fate.”

Until meeting Daniel, she hadn’t either. But now it felt like her whole life had been leading up to this one experience.

He led her to a small compact car and handed her the keys. They were sitting so much closer than they had been in the Land Rover. She drew in a deep breath, filling her head with his scent. They’d be lucky to get to the end of the pit lane without crashing.

“Are you still angry with me about last night?” she asked before turning the key in the ignition.

“Anger is dangerous on the track. So I’ve come up with a plan. But you have to get me safely back to the garage before I’m going to tell you what it is.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I guess you’ll never know.” He winked then turned serious. “Now, first thing you need to do is find the bite point on the clutch. Keep the revs up a bit then slowly lift pressure from the clutch until you can feel the car start to rise. Then put the handbrake down and gently press the accelerator as you release the clutch.”

She did as he instructed. The car leapt forward and then stalled. She tried it again and again until finally they moved off in a somewhat smooth motion, albeit slowly. He kept up the calm instructions, guiding her hand on the gear lever as she shifted into second and then third. Halfway around the track he had her stop and try the start again. This time she moved off on the first attempt, although her gear change would have made a mechanic cry. Finally, they arrived at the piece of track Daniel wanted to walk.

She stopped the car and they both got out. He walked the curve twice, often kneeling down to touch the surface. Then he almost lay on the curb as he studied the camber, using a marble. “There, that’s the problem,” he announced after about half an hour.

“What? I don’t see anything.”

He showed her a minor inconsistency in the surface. It couldn’t be more than three millimeters’ difference, but evidently it was enough to throw off the downforce on his car. He spent another ten minutes checking out the tarmac before heading back to the car. She expected him to take the driver’s seat and get them back to the garages in record time. Instead he opened the passenger door and put on his seatbelt. She managed to pull away smoothly, and Daniel cheered as though she’d won a race.

“One more time around,” he said as they neared the pit lane entrance. “This time, try to go a little faster and see if you can get into fourth or fifth gear.”

They made two more laps of the track, going faster each time. By the time he called the lesson at an end and she successfully parked the car at the end of the pit lane, her heart rate was soaring and she felt she could take on the world. Daniel made her believe she could do anything. If only she’d met him five years ago.

“Thank you, Daniel. You don’t know how much this means to me.” She forced back the tears.

“Good. Then you’ll agree to my plan. We’re going to have dinner —just you and me. I know a place where we can talk without anyone overhearing. Best of all, no paparazzi.”

He wanted to talk? Wasn’t that supposed to be her line? “I’d like that. I’ll let Genevieve know. You have a car?” At his nod she continued, “I’ll meet you down in the parking garage then at seven.”

Daniel didn’t look thrilled at the meet location but agreed. “Bring a change of clothes.”

Did she want to be taken to a dinner that required two outfits?

***

Lexy took his breath away when she arrived in the parking garage. How did the woman become more beautiful each time he saw her? Must be her blossoming confidence. He sensed that she’d faked it before, pretending a bravado that she didn’t really feel. But now? Now it was genuine. She walked with purpose, her shoulders back, no longer holding her hands over her stomach and hunched forward as if trying to hide her figure. The black dress hugged her curves like an oil slick.
Dieu
, he’d better not crash and burn tonight. He couldn’t take many more sleepless nights, tossing and turning, wishing she were there with him. With the race two days away, he needed to concentrate. Instead, his mind was full of Lexy as she’d been in the library before Max had called.

It wasn’t the imminence of sex putting a huge smile on her face now, though. She doubled over in laughter and he caught a glimpse of a red lace bra. His body hardened.

“Oh, my God. I can’t believe you’re driving a Lada.” Lexy jumped into the passenger seat, not waiting for him to come around and open the door. Any other woman he’d taken for dinner would have refused to get in such an ugly car. Lexy clearly didn’t give a shit about money, or prestige, or appearances. What else did he have to offer her? Tonight wasn’t for dark thoughts, though. Tonight was for finding a way forward that they could both live with. At least for the next seven weeks.