Her hand flies to her mouth, a whole bunch of horrified Spanish being muttered behind it.
“And what did you think I was Billy for anyhow? He’s blond,” I snap, “and…tall.”
Her eyes dart to my dark hair, then over my shorter, brawny body she spent all night kissing and touching, and she’s getting it. But she isn’t happy about it.
She shoves at my chest, cursing me out in Spanish before she switches to English. “¡Dios Mío! Is that why you were at the award party? For your brother?”
“Are you—Why were you there?” I burst out. “Party crasher?”
She looks just as offended as I feel. Especially considering the amount of orgasms I recall her having. And that’s not even counting all the ones I was too drunk to remember.
“I’m a model. For Blue Gator.” She smooths her hair until it’s all sleek and sharp, and okay, now that she said it, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her on the paddock holding an umbrella in one of those little outfits before. “Do you even race moto?”
“Do I even—oh, I see how it is.” I scoff as I get out of the bed, my dick totally depressed and all but useless. “For your information, I do race. MotoPro, baby. And I’m the best damn bull rider in the state of Tennessee.”
As long as we’re not counting the Cornucopia Exhibition. And everyone just loves to talk about last year’s Cornucopia Exhibition. The one where “I” got eight seconds on Smashbox.
Worst day of my whole fucking life.
“Where?”
Awesome. As soon as I find my feet, I nearly lose my lunch from the world swirling and tilting in circles. I place a steadying hand on the nightstand littered with condom wrappers—thank God—and empty little liquor bottles. Oh no. That’s gonna be on the bill.
It takes me a good thirty seconds before I can straighten myself and start looking for my clothes. Not that I can seem to find them: the room’s a freaking wreck. I don’t even want to know what that lamp’s gonna cost. But I’m definitely sure to hear about it.
I swear, this is what I get for trying to be a good brother. I should’ve known better than to spend all night celebrating Billy being crowned Moto Grand Prix World Champion. Again.
I came in sixth. And sixth isn’t nothing when you’re racing motorcycles against the fastest people on the planet, on the toughest race tracks they can throw at us. But no one ever seems to care about where I finished. Should be used to it by now—that’s what happens when you’re born to be second best.
“Well…” Sexy-Sa-Something now sounds more curious than regretful, and is still sitting wrapped like a present on the mattress hanging crooked off the box spring. Guess that explains why my lower back is killing me. “Who do you race for?”
I set right an upturned desk chair and find my hat, setting it on my head and starting to feel a little more human. I always think better under my black Stetson. “Dabria. I ride for Dabria Corse.” Where the hell are my pants? My red duffel bag is empty and my stuff’s scattered, but there’s gotta be some underwear somewhere. Shit, not that I remembered to wash any.
Commando it is. Once I find my Wranglers.
“Dabria? Are you Lorelai Hargrove’s teammate?” Of course, that name she knows. Then, in an announcer voice, she adds, “The First Woman of Moto.”
I swallow a burp that tastes like tequila and something a little dirtier, and I should probably wash my hands. Soon. “Yeah. I’m her teammate. Or was. She’s moving to Women’s Moto. For MMW.”
Sexy snuggles her bedsheet as I pick through the tangled bedspread on the floor, pure gossipy joy on her face. “Are she and Massimo Vitolo really together now? After all those years of fighting? I knew their rivalry was all a publicity scam.”
“Yeah, they’re together now, but it wasn’t a scam,” I answer automatically, and I need to shut up. My mouth’s been known to be a little big sometimes, and it’s safer to stay quiet. Not that I’ve quite learned how to do that. “And Billy’s probably about to be married, so pass that through the…grapevine.” I barely edit out the word groupie in time.
She gasps, looking oddly offended. “He cheats on his girlfriend?”
“No!”
God, if that gets back to Taryn…
I stop my clothes search and wrench myself vertical, and God, my lower back is really killing me. I hope I didn’t hurt myself; it’s gonna make my bull ride on Saturday even more risky.
I turn toward Sexy, my hands desperately indicating to myself. “You slept with me, Mason. Not Billy. Remember?”
She slumps on the bed we all but broke, suddenly disappointed again. “Oh, right.”
Geez. And so much for finding my pants. Actually, you know what—
I let out a sharp whistle that catches her off guard, Sexy popping up straight on the bed as her eyes go big and her hands go slack. I smile innocently. Then I grab the sheet she’s clutching and rip it away from her, sending her tumbling back into the pillows with a squeal and a giggle. God, what an ass she’s got. Still, I wrap the sheet around my waist, like a good boy.
This was a mistake. I think? Rules seem kinda fuzzy on mistaken identity.
The muffled theme from Star Trek starts interspersing the steady sound of giggles and not getting dressed, and I follow the sound of Captain Kirk’s voice encouraging me to go where no man has gone before. Even though the nightstand says I was all up in that last night.
A pile of pillows turns out to be the culprit hiding a green sequined dress and a mound of my wrinkled black tux, and I dig out my cell phone. When I check the screen, a wide smile cracks across my face: the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen in any hemisphere (apart from the one in my bed) is smiling at me in an expert selfie, a little camera icon asking if I want to accept the video call.
Um, fuck yeah I want to accept this call. Guess my good behavior is finally paying off.
“I uh, I gotta take this. It’s my…manager.”
Sexy-Sa-Something waves a sleek tan limb at me, can’t really tell whether it’s an arm or leg. Don’t stay to find out. I dart past the crooked mattress and leap over the shattered lamp, the bedsheet clutched in my fist around my hips and trailing behind me as I hit the hallway. The door barely swings shut behind me before I swipe my thumb across the phone screen, and I didn’t miss her, did I?
My pulse jumps triple the speed as the screen pixelates and then catches up, my eyes gorging on the blue sky and Chiara Freaking Martes beaming at me in a purple knit scarf with her layers of brown hair cascading around her face like she’s in an Italian shampoo commercial.
Goddamn, she’s so pretty. How did Massimo ever leave her for Lorelai?
“Well hi,” I drawl as smoothly as I can, country boy charm turned all the way up high. But my voice doesn’t work right and it comes out sounding a lot more like I’m speaking Klingon instead of English.
“Congratulations!” Chiara cheers. “Sixth place, Mason. That is fantastic!”
Did she just—?
I fall back against my hotel room door, naked under a see-through bedsheet and still half-hard from another woman’s hand. But I’m so touched that for a second, I think I might cry.
Chiara called me to say congratulations? She knows what place I finished?
No one ever cares where I place—if they even remember that I race at all.
Then the wind blows where Chiara’s at, catching a lock of hair across her nude lipstick, and there’s no half about my hardness anymore. This bedsheet was a bad idea.
I know it for sure when a door opens across the hall, an older couple coming out of their room and stopping dead in their tracks at the sight of me. The husband flares red the more he absorbs my bare body and black Stetson and white bedsheet, and I scramble to bunch the sheet better over my erection while still holding the phone, but it’s too late. He huffs out something in a different language that doesn’t exactly sound approving
, ushering his wife back into the hotel room and slamming the door. Whoops.
I look back to my phone screen to find Chiara quietly laughing like she must’ve heard that. “Yeah… I’m sorry to ask this, but can you hold on?” I wait until she nods, then I stick my phone between my teeth and address my situation.
This is so embarrassing. I’ve spent years drooling over Chiara Martes from afar in the Moto Grand Prix paddock, but she was always off limits. Massimo “No Mercy” Vitolo has warned me to stay away from her before. Except I don’t see why he gets a say—Chiara’s best friend or not—so I don’t really care to ask for his permission, or for his blessing.
I’m not my righteous big brother, and I’ve never been known for making the best decisions. I’m known for making the wrong ones.
I finally get myself situated enough to look back at my phone, and nearly get in trouble all over again. Chiara reaches up to tuck her chestnut hair behind her ear, another naughty lock daring to caress her cheek, and I love the wind, just, so much.
“Did I call at a bad time?” Chiara asks in her fancy Italian accent, and she sounds so sincere that it melts me on the spot.
I swallow thickly to make sure my voice works right this time. “Nah, not at all. I’m real glad you called.” At least now if I die on my Saturday bull ride, I’ll get to take this with me to the grave. But I’m not planning on dying; I’m planning on winning.
All that grace of hers slips into a mischievous smirk, and when she looks pointedly toward my bare chest, a blush darkens her high cheekbones that could satisfy my ego for the rest of my days. “Good. You raced so wonderful yesterday. So fast, and so fearless. I thought Lorelai was going to hit you in that turn, or push you out, but nope!” Chiara’s whole gorgeous face lights up, the sharp angles of her jaw tilting up with triumph. “You were never afraid.”
“I uh…” I was scared shitless, truthfully. “Thank you, for saying that.”
“Of course.”
Chiara takes a sexy sip from her espresso cup, tilting her head at me when she’s done and waiting since it’s my turn to say something. Except I still can’t believe she’s on my phone right now! Luckily, she takes care of moving along our stalled conversation.
“I would like to see you.”
Yeah, she really takes care of it, all right. Blood pumps heavily from my chest to my lap, growing thicker as she bites her bottom lip.
“Before you leave Europe to go home to America,” she adds.
Italy isn’t exactly on my way home to Memphis from racing in Spain—not that I really care. “That right?”
“Yes,” she says, no bashfulness or beating around the bush about it. “Lorelai says you are nice, and you are a very successful racer, so someone at Dabria must think you are trustworthy. And you asked for me to call you, so here I am.” She shrugs with a bright smile, and I’m sunk.
She’s hot as fuck, and I seriously did not expect her to be this sweet. Especially to me. She doesn’t even know me, and I didn’t know a woman as pretty as her could be this sweet. I mean, the country girls I grew up around are almost always pretty, but they’re also usually kinda mean. I think it’s because all their fathers are assholes.
“I think we should have a date,” she says. “I will cook. You can come to my apartment in Ravenna. Unless that is a problem?”
“No problem.” I mean it too. Come hell or high water, I’ll be there.
“Perfect. I will text you the address.” She blows me a kiss through the screen that’s terribly cruel, and I’m absolutely gonna have to do something about this situation she’s got me in before Frank or anyone finds me. “Congratulations again, Mason. Ciao!”
I smile like a lovesick dope. “Bye.”
I wait until she disconnects the video call, struggling to keep my feet on this earth as I weigh out my options:
Be a good boy and go home to Memphis, win the rodeo like my father wants. Or…
Sneak off to Italy and go see Chiara.
Yeah, it isn’t really a choice.
I turn toward my room, trying to keep my feet on the ground, but my palm hasn’t even hit the handle yet when the door next to me opens, my brother coming out into the hallway.
Damn it.
He’s just gonna love this.
I tighten my jaw, holding onto the last of my dignity. And my bedsheet.
“Oh-ho-ho-ho.” Billy lets out a low chuckle, coming fully out into the hallway. All tall and perfect, perpetually sober, and freshly showered. There isn’t a single wrinkle in his pearl-snap shirt or his pressed Wranglers, and I wonder if he was ironing them in his black Stetson, Ariat boots, and his underwear no more than two minutes ago.
“You sound like the Santa Claus from hell.” My head starts to pound all over again under his abuse of Old Spice cologne.
He gleefully eyes my bare chest and bed-sheet sarong with the blue eyes we share from our jerk father. Right before he takes a long-armed swipe at my hat.
I reach up out of instinct and almost drop my bedsheet in the process, my big brother cracking up laughing as I scramble to hang onto the last bits covering me. “Stop, dick! We’re not twelve no more.”
I barely get myself decent again before Taryn comes out of their room looking like an advertisement for How Ex-Beauty Queens Should Travel: a layered cardigan over a flowy tank top, yoga pants, and her long blonde hair tied up in a shiny ponytail. No one ever expects her to be such a damn shark on the Superbike circuit, too. But Taryn is not to be trifled with.
Billy instantly takes the duffel bag hooked on her shoulder, threading it over his.
“Okay, we have to be at the—oh good Lord, Mason.” Taryn waves her airplane tickets and passport at me like my nudity is contagious. “Really?”
“Hey, I did y’all a favor.” I hook my thumb toward my hotel room door. “This girl was trying to sleep with Billy, and I ran interference.”
My brother’s pale face loses what’s left of its color. He whips toward Taryn. “Honey, I was with you the whole night—”
“Shut up, I know you were.” Then she zeroes in on me. All her country girl meanness out in force. “You”—and it’s a sharp as fuck you—“have got to stop doing that. We all know this isn’t the first time this has happened, and I expect better of you, Mason.”
Boom.
The shame sours my already flipping stomach, and I open my mouth to say something back to her. But I only catch my brother’s palm across the back of my head. “Shut up. Don’t talk to Taryn that way.”
“I didn’t say nothing!”
“Yeah, but I know how you think.”
I take a step toward the finger he’s pointing in my face, and get a blast of cool air across my nether regions. “Shit!” I whirl to look at what happened, and the end of the damn sheet is caught in the door. The rest is all over the hallway floor, now lying around my ankles.
“Mason!” Taryn hisses, my brother groaning as I scramble to pick up the bedsheet and re-tie it around my waist.
“What?” I can’t help it. I smirk at her and throw in a wink for good measure. “I told you when we all met that I was bigger.”
Taryn puts a stilling hand on Billy’s growling chest as our manager, Frank, comes half-jogging down the hall, checking his watch. “Oh good, y’all are—Mason, what the hell?”
“Oh don’t worry, Frank,” Taryn offers with a spiteful snort. “He’s been busy saving mine and Billy’s relationship.”
Frank looks more confused than usual. Probably because Billy and Taryn have been obsessed with each other since the first time he saw her barrel race, and she told his bull-riding ass to get lost. That was almost two years ago, now—longest relationship I’ve ever had was three weeks in high school that turned out to be two-and-a-half weeks too many.
“Well, save it for the plane,” Frank says. “We gotta go.”
“Aren�
��t we waiting for Lorelai?” Taryn asks.
He shakes his head. “She and Massimo are staying in Valencia for a few days before going back to Italy. It’s just us.”
Well, isn’t that going to be helpful? “I’m, um, I’m gonna catch the next flight.” I try my best not to notice the reaction on Billy’s face. Not that it’s easy to ignore when someone’s eyebrows shoot that high.
It’s Taryn who says all patronizing, “Mason, it’s real nice that you met someone, but you can get laid at home. Now let’s go.”
“Goddammit, that isn’t what’s going on.” Even though I’m kinda hoping it is. “I just…there’s something I gotta go do, and I’ll be home in a couple of days.”
Because Chiara Martes called me. And off to Italy I will gladly go.
I dare anyone try and stop me.
Acknowledgments
The first time I attended a MotoGP race was in April 2014. My husband came by tickets through his work, and I had no idea just how much my life would change after that day. I’ve always been a car girl. I swoon for loud engines, I’ve been known to drive a little too fast, and I frequently joke that I met my husband through his Mustang. He rode a motorcycle before we were together, and I think he knew introducing motorcycle racing into our lives was going to be a thing. Whether he knew how much of a thing, I have no idea.
When we left the racetrack that hot April day, we were sunburned and exhilarated, our camera full of pictures of the world’s best racers, endless photos of our son pretending to rev a parked Ducati, and on the verge of a brand-new book idea. “What if you wrote a romance with a motorcycle racer heroine?” my husband said.
Through our early brainstorm sessions, he named her Lorelai—a nod to one of our favorite TV characters. His mechanical and technical knowledge of all things bikes and racing was invaluable through drafting and research. But it was everything else he did for this book and series that makes it his. All the contests he watched me enter and how many times he picked me up when I fell short. The queries I read to him before I pressed Send. The encouragement he gave when I had none and all the dinners he cooked and laundry he washed while I was busy writing and rewriting again and again. How amazing a father he is every day and all the sacrifices he has made to ensure I follow my dreams.
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