“No, I mean, like all kissy-face and stuff.” Cody grimaced.
Raleigh checked to make sure Mia wasn’t coming out. “We were kissy-face once. A long time ago. Did you see the burn scars on her face and hands?”
Cody nodded. “I didn’t say nothing, though.”
“Good.” Raleigh scrubbed his hair. “You know the accident I was in that did this?” He lifted his shirt to show his scar.
“While you were racing and you weren’t supposed to?”
“Yeah. Well, she was with me. She was hurt bad.”
Cody’s expression grew sober. “You didn’t tell me that part.”
“ ’Cause it’s painful to talk about. She went through a lot because of me.”
“She doesn’t seem mad at you.”
“She’s taught me a lot about forgiveness.”
Mia came out with bottles of water for everyone, a smile on her pretty face. Raleigh couldn’t figure out why she was so forgiving. In fact, she was being downright kind to him. More than kind, he thought, as their fingers brushed when he took the bottle from her, and affectionate. He wasn’t sure he could handle much more without breaking, and that would be bad for both of them.
Once they had the gutters replaced, with one frog being slightly manhandled before its escape into the protected sea oats, it was nearly lunchtime.
Forty minutes later, they sat out on the deck eating pizza—a getting-a-house-ready-to-sell staple, according to Cody. Which he’d probably made up, since he’d lived in the same trailer his whole life. The kid sent Mia into gales of laughter as he made lips with his pepperonis and talked like Donald Duck, a spot-on imitation. Raleigh laughed, too, but he was watching Mia. The left side of her mouth pulled a little tighter because of the scarring, but her crooked smile somehow made her even more beautiful. He loved the way she laughed, always had. As though each laugh were precious. Now he understood why.
Her gaze slid to him, catching him. Something electric zinged between them, strong enough that his fingers curled in response. Her hand came up to her collarbone, and he wondered if she’d felt it, too.
Cody cleared his throat. He probably realized he’d lost their attention. “Miss Mia. I heard you were in an accident because of racing. I’m glad you’re all right now.” He winced. “I hope that was all right to say.”
She gave him a soft smile. “It’s fine. I’m a big proponent of speaking the truth and being open.” She flicked a glance at Raleigh. “You can probably tell that I was burned pretty badly.”
Cody’s shake of his head was a little too vigorous. “Hardly at all.”
“I put on a lot of makeup, and I wear clothes that cover most of the scarring. Your brother saved my life. I bet he didn’t tell you that part.”
Cody’s narrowed eyes pinned him with an accusatory look. “Noooo.”
Mia leaned forward, her arms on the table. “Raleigh will downplay it, but he reached into the flames that were all around me, with a broken shoulder yet, to pull me out of the car. That’s how his hands were burned.”
All Raleigh could think of was how she’d kissed his hands, so freaking tenderly that he’d almost lost it. And how much he’d wanted to kiss her scars, the mottled flesh that bound them forever.
“Whoa,” Cody intoned. “I’m not sure I could reach into a fire.”
“You would,” Raleigh assured him. “If someone you cared about was engulfed, you’d do whatever you could to pull them out. Even if it’s a stranger. Something comes over you, and you just do what needs to be done. People do it all the time.”
“Like firefighters,” Cody said, a big, goofy grin on his face. “If I don’t become a mechanic like you, I want to be a fireman. Then it’d be my job to reach into flames. To run into them, too.”
“Yep. You’re brave enough to do that. I considered becoming a firefighter while I was in jail. Get away from cars altogether, have an honorable profession. But my conviction would have to be factored in, and considering the firefighter who’d been at the scene had been promoted to a captain, I nixed it.”
“But that’s all right. You’re meant to work on cars. That’s what you love, and it’s honorable, too. Don’t look so skeptical. An honest, good mechanic is hard to find.” Mia tossed her crusts into the empty box. “What’s the jerk who caused the crash doing nowadays?”
“Cassidy,” Raleigh said his name, a bitter pill in his mouth. “He’s a cop now, believe it or not.”
“And a big fat bumhole,” Cody added.
“But wouldn’t a conviction hamper his ability to work in law enforcement?”
“He was sentenced as a juvenile, since he was only seventeen at the time of the crash. It’s not on his permanent record.”
“That’s not fair,” she said. “You have a record, and he doesn’t.”
A lot about the crash was unfair, but Raleigh wasn’t going to go into the hardships. Losing his car. Having his license revoked for a year. Paying a five-hundred-dollar fine. Still, it could have been worse. Mia had survived. Thrived. That was all that mattered.
“Life sucks sometimes,” Cody said with a solemn nod, his shadowed eyes meeting Raleigh’s. “And so do some people.” Their dark secret simmered like an ember, but Raleigh broke eye contact before Mia could pick up anything. He sure as hell didn’t want to get into that.
“Yeah, it does” was all he could say. “But it was most unfair to Mia.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to bring the conversation down into the dumps,” she said. “Do the kids still race around here?”
“Our crash scared them straight, but this generation only knows about it as an urban legend. I’ve heard rumors that there are races on the same strip of abandoned highway we raced on, but not on a regular basis. I occasionally have some kid bring in his four-cylinder and ask what I can do to make it race-worthy. Then I break the urban-legend thing and tell him what happened. How people die when they race illegally. And I send him home.”
Cody grinned. “Sometimes me and Raleigh go there and drive fast when no one else is around.”
“Well, not too fast.” Raleigh watched Mia’s face at that bit of news. Would she be shocked that he dared still drive fast? But no, it wasn’t shock or derision. It was…hunger. The same that he’d seen all those years ago when he told her about the thrill of racing.
“Wanna go for a ride?” Cody asked while Raleigh was still considering the wisdom of offering.
“She probably wouldn’t feel comfortable,” Raleigh said, though he might have meant himself. “Bad memories and all.”
“But you’re not racing against another car,” she said, that fire growing. “Just going fast.”
“Let’s go!” Cody jumped up and pounded his feet on the boards. “We haven’t gone in a while. And we need a break, anyway.”
Raleigh gestured toward the table. “We just took a break.”
But Cody was pulling Mia to her feet, and she was laughing at his enthusiasm. “Can we, Raleigh? Can we, can we?” he asked, his hand still wrapped around Mia’s.
Raleigh met her gaze. “You sure?”
She nodded. “Yes.” She laced her fingers through Cody’s, but her eyes were still on Raleigh. “Do you know, that summer was the first time I’d ever gone fast? And I haven’t gone fast since then. I haven’t felt that thrill, that wild sense of freedom.” Her eyes sparkled. “I want to feel that again.”
Was she still talking about driving in a car? “All right, let’s go fast.”
Cody whooped and raced off to find his sneakers. They closed up the house and headed to the ‘Cuda. Raleigh felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu with her sitting in the passenger seat, running her fingers along the interior lines of the car as she took it in. “She’s a beauty.”
Good thing Cody was there, or he might have leaned over and kissed her. He’d done that every time he’d gotten in on the driver’s side, letting the momentum carry him into her space, where he couldn’t resist capturing her mouth. It was almost like remembering sc
enes from a movie, actors who only looked like them.
“This is the first muscle car I’ve owned since the crash. Well, for the first year I was out, I had a bike.”
“Motorcycle?”
“No, bicycle. Then a motorcycle. Then I bought a cheap car that wouldn’t even think about going fast. But one of my clients brought this car in for some work, and, man, I fell in love with her.” He ran his fingers along the top of the leather wheel. “Turned out he needed to sell her, so we did some bartering. I’ve been doing work on her when I can eke out the time.”
She took in the updated interior. “It looks perfect.”
“There are things you can’t see. I’ve had her for sale, trying to raise money for a down payment on the garage, but no serious takers so far.”
“That would be sad to sell it. Her. And now you won’t have to.” Then she gave him a puzzled look. “You rode a bicycle? From your trailer?”
He shrugged. “Didn’t have a license for a year. Part of the conviction.” Okay, he hadn’t meant to bring that up. But he wouldn’t talk about—
“You must have had to leave by five in the morning to ride that far,” she said. “And on roads without bike lanes. In the rain and cold weather. Raleigh—”
“This is supposed to be a fun ride. Let’s not dwell on that.” Her sympathy, considering the price she’d paid. He couldn’t even comprehend it.
Instead of finishing her sentence, she stroked his arm. He felt that soft touch throughout his body. Compassion, understanding.
He fingered the key Pax had given him, a gleaming temptation every time he pulled out his key ring. Dumb to even coil it onto the ring in the first place, but there it was. He wrestled his phone from his pocket and called Pax. “Anyone out at the track right now?”
“Just me and three-eighths of a mile of fresh asphalt waiting for someone to lay down some rubber.” Pax let that settle, pushing Raleigh to continue.
“I’m thinking of taking you up on that offer.”
“Tuning?”
He glanced at Mia, who was clearly intrigued. “Just driving fast. Reliving old times.”
“Come on down,” he drawled.
“The kid’s with us. That okay?”
“Sure, just put a helmet on him. Us? Who’s ‘us’?”
“Mia.”
“Ohhhh. Sweet.”
Yeah. Sweet. “See you in a few.” Raleigh paused. “Thanks.”
“Dude, I have ulterior motives. Get you hooked into racing again.”
“You sound like a drug dealer.”
“Racing, best drug ever.” He hung up, sneaky son of a bitch that he was.
Raleigh looked at his two passengers, who were waiting for an explanation. “We’re going out to the track.” Cody whooped, while Mia was still in the dark. “Pax is reopening the old speedway on the edge of town.”
“Old speedway?”
“It closed before I was old enough to drive, sat moldering all these years. Pax has been racing in the smaller circuits whenever he can get the time off. He’s been pipe- dreaming about reopening the track here for years, and now he’s actually in the process of doing it. A guy in town who used to race is going in with him, and he has some sponsors.”
“Seems like a contradiction, being a cop and a race-car driver,” Mia said.
“Pax is the contradiction in his family.”
Mia faced him, wrapping her fingers over the edge of the seat. “I remember he always called himself the black sheep of the family, like he was proud of it.”
“That’s because the position of Number One Son, as he calls it, is already taken. It’s tough, being the second son. Blake, the firstborn, is his father’s pride and joy, ’cause he did everything his daddy told him to. Be a football star. Get all A’s. Be class president. Hell, he even looks just like his dad. Doesn’t leave any room for Pax, you know? So he blazed his own trail, fishing, hanging out with lowlife…that’d be me.”
“You’re not lowlife.”
“According to Pax’s dad, I am. It didn’t help that we were always getting into trouble. He refused to believe that his son would do anything wrong, so it must be the older, unsupervised West kid instigating. Even when Pax confessed that it was his idea to take a beached sailboat for a joyride or go off hunting overnight without telling anyone.” He gave Mia his most guileless look. “Or, say, take his dad’s patrol car for a spin around the block.”
“You didn’t!”
He nodded solemnly. “We did.”
The sheriff, though, seemed to have a special kind of hatred for Raleigh, and he suspected it had something to do with his father. Hank had taken to hanging out at the Sullivans’ place, supposedly “checking on his son.” On several occasions, he’d ended up lounging by the pool with Pax, Raleigh, and Pax’s mother. Wearing Pax’s dad’s swimming trunks. And, possibly, when the two were alone, not wearing them.
Just another way Hank had screwed up Raleigh’s life.
“So Pax becoming a cop was his way of trying to finally attain his father’s approval?” Mia asked. “Doesn’t sound like the rebel I remember.”
“It was more like a deal with the Devil. Remember when I said Pax stuck around to help after the crash. Most of the kids scrammed, scared they’d be busted. Pax did get busted. His dad was only a cop then, but he managed to pull strings so Pax didn’t lose his ride and have to serve time in juvie for racing. In return, Pax had to promise to join the police force upon graduation to show that he was ‘straightening up.’ He claims he likes it, but I don’t believe him. I think racing is his way of keeping hold of who he really is. And he’s good, too.” At least, that’s what Raleigh heard from Pax, as well as from the race results he checked out.
“And you don’t race, too?” she asked. “You used to love it.”
Raleigh trained his gaze ahead. “I stay far away from it all. Pax has been trying to get me to come with him to the races, and recently out to the track, thinking I’ll be drawn in. I know he probably thinks I suck as a friend, but I’ve been tuning it all out.” He tightened his fingers over the top of the wheel. “Racing has too many bad memories.”
She pressed her cheek against the back of the seat. “Then let’s make some new ones.”
Again, he wondered if she was actually talking about driving. He was afraid to go there, too. “With helmets.”
“Helmets?” Cody whined. “I don’t wanna wear a helmet.”
Raleigh met his frown in the rearview mirror. “Like a real race-car driver.”
“Okay, the helmet’s cool.”
“And required if you’re in the car.”
“Awright, I guess.”
They sank into a comfortable silence. Mia did one of those arm waves out the open window, closing her eyes and completely absorbing the moment as they drove. Raleigh had to force himself to pay attention to the road.
“ ‘Chambliss Speedway, opening early fall.’ “Mia read the sign as they turned into the entrance to the track.
He saw the tall lights first, and then the buildings came into view. This place would be alive with activity soon. Because of Pax’s determination. A swell of pride and happiness overtook him for his friend. If Pax could make his dream come true, so could Raleigh.
He stopped at the gate and unlocked the industrial padlock with the ten-pound chain looped around the gates. Signs warned against trespassing or vandalism. A camera aimed at the gates from a tall pole. He pushed the gate open enough for the car to pass through.
“It’s like a fortress,” Mia said when he got back in.
“As soon as Pax finalized the lease, he installed the fence and the security system. Though the track had been blocked for racing with concrete barriers, the kids still came out here to party. And vandalize. They tore up the bleachers pretty bad. Plus, there are grown-ups who think the track will bring in the wrong sort of people. Some of them painted nasty messages on the buildings.”
Mia was trying to peer past the gate. “That’s awful.”
<
br /> He relocked the gate once they’d cleared the opening and took in what he could see of the track as he drove past the ticket booth. Freshly laid turf filled in the center. Now the barriers lined the perimeter of the asphalt track as they’d been designed to do. He passed the concession building and the tower and came through the racer’s entrance to the track. Excitement curled through him as the breeze lifted his hair. This was the real thing, with rules and a setup that made it safe. Well, as safe as racing could be, anyway.
Pax’s truck was parked off to the side of the bent bleachers, and the man himself was climbing up the back like a monkey. His dog, Harley, was trying to meet him at the top by way of the steps. Pax waved at them, then leaned under the top row and tugged on the metal bar. The whole thing started to sway.
As Raleigh was imagining it toppling over and crushing Pax, Cody pounded on the back of his seat and about gave him a heart attack.
“It’s a real track, Raleigh!” the kid said. “An honest-to-goodness racetrack!”
Raleigh hid his amused chuckle. “Sure is.”
“Why haven’t we come here before now?”
“Too busy.” Too afraid.
Pax waved as he jumped to the ground, then gestured for them to meet him at a metal building on the other side of the track. Raleigh drove around the back stretch of the track, and Pax raced his dog across the asphalt.
Harley won.
Mia watched man and beast reach the building. “Aw, cute dog.”
The black-and-white dog looked their way, ears perked. He darted over, his tail whipping through the air and what Raleigh swore was a smile on his face.
“His name is Harley Cuddlebug Slobberbuckets,” Cody announced as Raleigh came to a stop.
Harley barked at his name and sat patiently as everyone exited the car. Pax had taught him not to jump on cars or people.
Mia knelt down and scratched his head. “What a nice dog you are, Mr…. what did you call him?”
Pax had sauntered over. “Harley Cuddlebug Slobberbuckets. Harley, because when he was a stray pup he ran out in front of a Harley and got hit. I ran him to the emergency vet…and ended up keeping him. My sister named him Cuddlebug because he’s a snuggler, and—”
Falling Fast (Falling Fast #1) Page 11