In the Fast Lane

by Audra North

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Kerri-Leigh Grady and Tahra Seplowin, without whom this book would not exist.

  And for A.B., always.

  Chapter One

  “Holy rotors!” Kerri slammed on the brakes and swerved, groaning with the effort it took to move a couple of tons of metal barreling down the racetrack at nearly two hundred miles an hour. The car shifted to the right, toward the wall. Shit. Not good. She threw all her weight against the wheel, trying to change course while Grady’s voice started screaming in her ear, “Ease up on the brake or you’re gonna spin out! Fucking sh—”

  She eased up, but it was too late. She couldn’t straighten out. The car started whirling, crossing over the lanes in horrible, grinding circles. Her arms burned, every molecule in her body now fighting to at least keep the wheels on the ground. How fast was the car moving now? One-twenty? One-thirty?

  The car did another full spin, barreling down the straightaway like a Tilt-A-Whirl gone off the rails. She fought the urge to throw up.

  There’s a man on the track. A man. On the fucking track.

  That’s what she’d swerved to avoid in the first place. She’d seen him step out onto the asphalt just as she’d come out of the curve, and she’d gotten spooked, bad. But now her car was out of control, and she prayed that he’d at least have the sense to get somewhere safe lest she end up hitting him anyway.

  Wouldn’t that just be a bitch.

  Damn it, her arms were killing her now. Her fingers were numb. And still she fought the wheel. Sweat beaded her brow, and she could hear her heavy breathing echoed back at her through the receiver in her ear.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the red flag had gone up. Shit.

  She pushed harder.

  The wheel started to turn.

  “Kerri, what the hell is going on? Kerri, are you there?” Grady’s voice was loud and breathy.

  Scared.

  Which only made her scared, too. And angry as all get-out. Having her excitable brother as crew chief might not have been the best choice at a time like this, but she’d hardly expected a man to jump in front of her car during practice.

  “I’m here, Grady. Now shut up. I’ve almost got it.”

  “Oh, shit, Kerri. Shit fuck damn. You’re so close to the wall. Don’t hit the wall. Mom would kill me. I’d kill myself. I can’t—”

  The line crackled loudly in her ear, then Kerri heard a grunt … a faint pop … and then …

  “Hey, sugar,” a strange voiced drawled into the earpiece. A strange, deep voice made out of honey and sex. “You’re doin’ just fine. Don’t listen to old Grady here. You’ve got everything under control.”

  That honey and sex voice stroked over her. Soothed her angry fear. She pumped the brakes a bit, finally wresting control over the wheel. The car stopped spinning, moving backward down the lane, but at least it was slowing.

  “That’s it. Atta girl. Take it nice and slow.”

  Oh, for God’s sake. Whoever had taken over the headphones had somehow turned their channel into a phone sex line. This guy would be as useless a crew chief as Grady.

  Though maybe she should hire him to—

  Focus, Hart! Focus! Kerri took a split second to assess the situation. She guessed that the car was now moving at a mere sixty miles an hour. Time to bring this show to a close.

  “We’ve cleared the track, sugar. You’re not gonna hit anything or anybody. Just push the brake all the way down, now. Push it in—”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up already!” She slammed on the brakes, skidding for a hundred feet or so, the jarring slide making her entire body vibrate down to her bones. It would be a miracle if she wasn’t sore all over tomorrow morning.

  Finally, the car came to a stop in a cloud of rubber smoke, and Kerri breathed a heavy sigh of relief. She flipped up the visor on her helmet and turned her head, shocked to realize how close to the wall she’d ended up—mere inches away from the Colt International sponsor sign.

  Jesus. She’d used some pretty choice words when she’d turned down the ridiculous offer they’d made last year to sponsor her—if she’d agreed to “sex up” her image. If she’d smashed into the concrete barrier and took their banner out—well, to call it ironic would have been much too generous. Satisfying, maybe, but also humiliating. The end of everything she’d worked for, definitely.

  Racing was an expensive sport. Not having a big sponsor like Colt added a whole extra level of pain when talking about replacing an entire car the day before a minor-league race. But she hadn’t crashed. She’d managed to control her car and not kill anyone.

  Kerri let out a long breath. She’d find another sponsor after she won tomorrow’s race—one that didn’t ask her to wear a push-up bra and lipstick just because she was the only woman driver in the pack.

  “Nice job, sugar.” The voice was back. “Don’t go anywhere just yet, though. They’re sending out the emergency crew.”

  “The emergency crew? But I’m fine. And you said they’d cleared the track. I want to get out of the car.”

  The stranger laughed. Kerri couldn’t help the shiver that went through her at the sound, so low and intimate in the tiny space of her helmet.

  “Oh, they’re not coming for you, sweet pea. Not yet, anyway. Look down the track.”

  She snapped her head back around and stared down the asphalt. The figure of a man—the one who had caused all of this in the first place—was sprinting across the lanes, unrolling a huge sheet of paper as he ran. The first word had already been revealed.

  WILL

  Dread coiled deep inside her belly as she watched more letters appear.

  YOU

  She squinted at the running man. Something about that loping gait looked familiar. Oh, God. That couldn’t be Earl. Could. Not. Be.

  MARY

  The dread rose up, strangling the sound of protest even before it could leave her throat.

  ME … KERRI?

  No. No no no. No, this could not be happening. As a woman, she’d already had to fight twice as hard just to gain a tiny foothold in this sport. She just knew how this was going to be played in the media, especially after the way they’d made it out to be her fault when she and Earl had broken up two months ago. The news outlets were going to pin this on her, too. It wouldn’t matter that they hadn’t been a couple in two months. Hell, for longer than that. She was going to take the blame.

  She always took the blame.

  Before Earl, she’d gone on dates with about a dozen different guys. Just first dates, trying to get to know whether the guy she was with was someone who could deal with the heavy travel and intense personalities that were part and parcel of racing life. But invariably when it came to her, the tabloids would hype up even the most innocent interactions between Kerri and any man who came within a fifty-foot radius.

  Add in a cozy dinner for two, and all of a sudden the media wanted to know whether she was serious or just stringing t
he poor guy along. It didn’t matter who the guy was or how many dates they’d actually been on or whether he was only after her for one thing. They always blamed her when it ended, calling out her aggressive racing strategy and somehow making it look like she was tearing through men both on and off the track.

  Of course, it didn’t help that she was unrepentant about how quickly she decided whether or not someone was right for her. In a business like racing, no one had time for games, and she didn’t suffer fools lightly.

  Sponsors already didn’t like that kind of brash, aggressive demeanor in a female driver. Especially fifteen stories involving fifteen different men … in a single year. It had made her look flighty and noncommittal on top of everything else. Not multimillion dollar material.

  She’d stuck with Earl a lot longer than she should have precisely because she was trying to shake that reputation. But now she was going to have to turn down his proposal and end up taking the flak for it, no doubt.

  There was no way a sponsor would back Hart Racing now.

  “Well, at least he spelled your name right.” The voice sounded like it was laughing.

  Confined in her car, adrenaline still pumping from navigating through a spinout caused by her harebrained ex-boyfriend, Kerri couldn’t keep herself from lashing out. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but this is my channel. My car. My team. Now sign off and get out of my head!”

  The line went silent.

  Good. She sagged in her seat, suddenly exhausted.

  The relief lasted only a couple of seconds, though.

  “You know…” Her ears prickled as he hummed the words in her ear. “My mom used to tell me that I should never argue with a lady, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to make an exception. Just this once.”

  You have got to be kidding me. Further down the track, a group of police officers was chasing Earl, who had dropped the banner and was waving his arms around like a wild man as he ran across the field.

  “I’m sorry you have to find out this way,” he said, and for a moment she believed him. He did sound sorry. “But this isn’t your channel, sugar. At least not anymore.”

  “Excuse me?” The man might have a great voice, but he was as nuts as Earl.

  “It’s not your car, either.” A long pause. Kerri wanted to rip the helmet off her head, but her hands wouldn’t cooperate. She could only stare, transfixed, as Earl was hauled away by the policemen as the devil continued whispering in her ear.

  “You can ask your brother about it later. In the meantime, let me be the first to welcome you … to Team Colt.”

  * * *

  Ranger ripped the headset off and threw it at Grady. “Get that back on and tell your sister to stay put!” He didn’t bother to wait for an answer, just strode to the ladder that hung down the side of the box, praying that Kerri would have enough sense to do what she was told this time. Not that he actually expected that particular prayer to be answered. Kerri Hart was famous in the racing world for two things: her sheer raw skill behind the wheel … and a temper that burned faster and hotter than a Top Fuel engine.

  He may have grown up in the heart of racing country, but he’d only officially been in the business for a day and he already knew that much about her. Who in hell would want to marry that—

  Wait a sec.

  He paused, one foot hanging over the edge of the stall roof. “Grady!”

  Grady whipped around and pulled the mic of the headset away from his mouth. “What is it, Colt?”

  “What’s your sister’s answer gonna be?”

  Fuck. Seeing that man—Kerri’s ex-boyfriend, from what he’d gleaned from the news he’d read—dart out on the track … watching that fast, heavy car whirl like a child’s toy over the asphalt … had brought Ranger’s accent back. Years of working on ridding himself of his slow-drawling, Tennessee backwoods accent kept his voice clipped and neutral even in the most intense boardroom discussions, but a drop of the wrong kind of adrenaline had him reverting.

  “About what?”

  Lord, deliver him from imbeciles. Ranger glared at Grady.

  “Oh, you mean that thing just now with Earl? No way would she marry him. In fact—” Grady cocked his head to one side, listening to whatever was coming through his headset. After a second, he nodded at Grady. “Kerri says she’d rather eat a flaming pile of—”

  Ranger didn’t bother to stick around to hear the end. Instead, he shot down the ladder into the pit, his Italian designer shoes scraping and clanging on the metal rungs as he descended.

  Fuck this Godforsaken assignment. Why Al had decided to do a deal like this still baffled him. On Colt’s corporate jet from Harrisburg to Talladega, Ranger had studied the Hart Racing portfolio that his assistant had put together, trying to understand what would drive a multibillionaire like Al Colt to throw a pitiful three million dollars and his most ruthless VP at a project like this.

  This deal was personal. Ranger Colt versus Al Colt.

  Nothing like being the boss’s son, even if Al had never done a damned thing to deserve to be called “Dad.” Hell, a man who abandoned his wife and infant son to poverty while he ran an empire didn’t deserve to be called human, much less “Dad.”

  Ranger’s feet hit the asphalt and he paused for a moment. Al’s voice echoed in his head, that rumbling baritone so much like his own. You want to move forward, you have to go back first. Get back to your roots. Making this project “a raging success” had been the condition that Al had given him for promotion to executive vice president, second in line to the top.

  It felt like a punishment.

  Besides—race cars? That was taking his “roots” a bit far. He and Mom had been too poor to care about much more than getting their next meal, much less a sport that took a whole lotta money to buy into.

  Fuck this stupid sport. Ranger strode to the edge of the pit. Not even a sport, just a bunch of fools going in circles, and now I have to deal with this bullshit.

  His job at Hart Racing—Team Colt, now—was to do what he always did with ailing organizations: evaluate the business problems, figure out what it would take to fix them, then either go ahead and shape it up or shut it down. Just from the cursory glance he’d given to Hart’s financials, Ranger knew that Colt could at least recoup its investment by selling off the assets. They might make a nominal profit, even.

  But that wouldn’t be the raging success that Al had requested. That kind of success required risk.

  Something Ranger excelled at.

  He took a deep breath. Walked forward.

  The entire crew was lined up along the low concrete barrier, looking across the track where the blue and green of the Hart Racing car was still sitting where Kerri had brought it to a screeching halt. A group of emergency first responders surrounded the car while Kerri stood next to it. Even from this distance, he could see her gesticulating wildly, making it look like she was throwing a tantrum.

  Shit. This was exactly why he’d told her to stay in the car. For all he knew, she could be out there singing hymns and saving puppies, but without any other information to go on, it definitely looked bad.

  “What the hell is going on out there?”

  Six pairs of eyes swung around to stare at him.

  Shit and goddamn.

  He’d only met these guys for the first time thirty minutes ago. Shouting within the first twenty-four hours of being introduced to a new team was not his usual m.o.

  But then again, neither was being late, and he’d managed to achieve that today, too. After meeting with Grady at the hotel last night, he’d gone to his room and stayed up even later than usual going over the Hart Racing portfolio. Today, he’d intended to arrive early enough to meet the crew and Kerri, but by the time he’d actually shown up and navigated his way to the stall, she was already out on the track.

  Fuck Al Colt. Old bastard ruined everything.

  Ranger’s murderous thoughts must have shown on his face, because the youngest mechanic—Danny—blurted
, “It looks worse than it is. The emergency crew is only a precaution. She’ll drive it in as soon as they give her the clear, we’ll check it over and make the adjustments she needs, and it’ll be like this never happened. It’s really not a big deal.”

  No big deal?

  Scratch what he’d thought before. He wasn’t the insane one. Everyone else here was.

  Ranger simply nodded, which Danny seemed to take as encouragement, because the mechanic pointed down pit road. The handful of other cars that had been on the track with Kerri during the practice session were waiting, some being worked on by crews. “A couple of these guys have had far worse happen to their cars. During practice time, qualifying, a race—it doesn’t matter. They drive it in, get it fixed, and get back out. Takes nerves of steel and a whole lotta hard-riding determination to be a race car driver.”

  Ranger didn’t miss the way Danny’s chest puffed with pride.

  Yeah. Or just a whole lotta plain ol’ stupidity.

  Goddamnit. Even the voice in his head had an accent now.

  He shook himself. Time to get focused and start treating this like any other project he took on. Put out the fires first, then tackle the cracks in the foundation. Given Kerri’s famous temper, he didn’t want her calling even more attention to herself by—well, he wasn’t sure what, but he was fairly certain it would only exacerbate the situation.

  She might get a lot of positive coverage because she was a woman, but she also got judged much more harshly for that same reason. Her famous temper usually landed her on the wrong side of public opinion, and news reports over the years made her out to be a fickle, cruel, hard-ass woman when it came to love. They’d done everything to ruin her reputation in anything related to romantic relationships, just short of outright calling her a slut.

  Maybe all the reports were true, maybe they weren’t. But what mattered was that sponsors seemed to believe them, and most companies didn’t like giving money to drivers with low public-approval ratings.

  And now she’d just announced on her public channel that she’d rather eat shit than marry this guy. The odds against her securing a big sponsorship had just gotten stacked a lot higher.