by Audra North
It didn’t help that now she really did want to sleep with Ty.
But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
Keep this under control.
What a difference between a man like Alex and one like Ty. The way he’d cheered her accomplishments in journalism, barely even knowing who she was, had been a breath of fresh air. It had made her feel proud and inspired about her job for the first time in months.
Of course, she’d probably be inspired if he so much as looked at her the way he’d been doing earlier today, with their knees touching and the big bed behind them and . . .
Jeez. She really needed to stop thinking about him like that.
By the time she’d driven the forty-five minutes back to her tiny suburban home—the only place where she could afford rent on her sad salary—she was exhausted.
She dragged herself into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, then fell into bed and dreamt of Ty’s hand in hers . . . his hand on her body . . . everywhere. Everywhere. And by the time she woke up the next morning, she was shaking with need. She hoped he wasn’t an early caller, because if he rang her up just then, she’d probably have an orgasm as soon as he said hello.
As it was, she lingered a few more minutes in bed, bringing herself to climax with her hand, shrieking Ty’s name when she came and feeling hotly embarrassed about it afterward, even though it wasn’t as though anyone had heard her.
Nothing like having intense sex fantasies about a guy you can never actually have sex with.
She headed in to the office, parking in the employee lot where the Gold Cup offices were located. Now that she was back at work, she was starting to get excited, wondering whether her article would get any traction.
Putting aside the exposé, what she had written about the race—about Ty—was good. She was even willing to say it was really good, even though she wouldn’t admit that to anyone else. It sounded too conceited.
But . . . huh. Wait a second.
What if she pulled in a decent number of hits on the story? That was another way to get revenue. The more hits, the better. It was how most places—reputable places—got advertisers and stayed in business.
Maybe, if her work did okay, then they wouldn’t need this shady investor or the exposé, and Alex would let her off the hook. Then she could take things with Ty wherever he wanted them to go . . .
The possibility buoyed her steps and had her walking cheerfully into the building.
But when she stepped out of the elevator and walked through the office doors, Alex immediately spotted her from his desk . . . and he didn’t look happy.
“Bellowes! Get in here!”
Oh no. Oh no. What had she done wrong? She knew her piece was different; she’d married stats with human interest and thrown in a few predictions of her own. But she’d thought she’d done it in a good way.
She hadn’t considered that it might be different enough to piss off Alex. Maybe even get her fired. Then this whole thing would have been for naught. Not that she knew for sure that she was going to get fired, but she’d never seen Alex look this angry . . .
She approached his office cautiously.
She didn’t even get to say a word before he stretched his lips in a grim line and pointed to the door. “Step inside and close the door behind you.”
Jesus. He was going to fire her. After all that?
She bit down on her lip to keep herself from whimpering and turned to shut the door, then turned back to him with a pleading look on her face. “Alex, I—”
He cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Do you have an idea what you’ve done?”
He didn’t bother to ask her to sit. She was too nervous to do it, anyway, but she should have known he was going to torture her before he fired her. “Is it about my story?”
“Damn straight it’s about your story!” He grabbed his laptop, which was open in front of him, and spun it around to face her.
All she saw was a graph. A line that started near the bottom, then shot up considerably, then shot up again, and again . . .
“Oh my God.” She stared at it, open-mouthed. She knew what this was. It was the hits on her piece. Good reporting got good hits. But this . . . she’d never seen anything like it. This wasn’t just good. This was . . .
“Is that for my piece?”
Alex nodded, grinning. But it wasn’t a pleasant grin. “It seems you’ve stumbled into success, Bellowes.”
Stumbled? As though the success of her work had nothing to do with the quality of the writing, and it was simply an accident that it had gotten so much attention? Was the fact that she had succeeded despite his hopes for her failure why he’d looked angry just now?
Probably. Asshole.
He snorted. “They’re calling it shit like ‘humorous’ and ‘real.’ Whatever the fuck that’s about. The actual stock car racing association is using it as a promo piece to get more people to come to the races and meet the drivers. You’ve got yourself a following. Even better for when we publish the stuff about Riggs. It’ll go viral for sure.”
She bristled. How was it possible for someone to say things that, when coming from someone else would probably be complimentary, but in this context Alex somehow managed to make them come out as an insult?
Even worse, it didn’t seem like he was going to give way on the exposé despite the wildly successful hit count.
She strove to keep her tone even. To look him in the eye. “Since this has done so well, do we really still need to write the piece about him? If we can pull in more advertisers, then the money won’t be necessary. I don’t understand why—”
He sneered. “Of course you don’t! Christ. You don’t belong in sports journalism. Only reason I hired you was because we needed to meet our quota for chicks. I should never have let you take this assignment.”
She blinked. Out of all the hideous crap that had just come spewing out his mouth, it was the last bit that she found the most confusing. She tried to repeat her question, to get him to explain what he was railing about. “But I wrote the piece that’s getting attention. The hits on it—”
“Oh! My one-hit wonder story is sooo great!” He mocked her in falsetto.
Jackass. But she wasn’t going to back down. He’d gotten nothing but good from her work. She was proud of what she’d written. It was good sports journalism. No, actually. It was good journalism, period. That many hits . . . she’d knocked it out of the park, just like she’d promised herself she would. She’d worked hard for this. She’d proven she had the potential to be a great sports writer. She was proud.
Why couldn’t he let her be proud?
“I’ll say it again, slowly this time.” His tone was ugly. Condescending.
God. Sometimes she really hated him.
“Shit like this single story”—he gestured to the screen—“will only take us so far. We need to cover it all. The races, the drivers, and the salacious scandalous bits that people love to hate. Here’s your chance to show me that you can keep up your little success, here.”
Asshole, asshole, asshole.
None of the other reporters ever got tasked with ridiculous things like this.
She opened her mouth to protest, but Alex jumped in.
“Besides, why should I let you report on anything if you’re too afraid to jump at a huge chance like this?”
Oh, no. No way. He wouldn’t take that away from her. He couldn’t. She knew what he was implying . . . that if she didn’t agree to continue doing this, she’d be out of a job. Apparently, in Alex’s mind, all roads except the most dirty, unpleasant one led to getting fired.
The anger and frustration threatened to choke her, it was so intense.
She had to clench her fists and her teeth to keep from making a scene. She studied him, but his jaw was set in that belligerent way that meant if she tried to argue with him, he would shut her out and send her to get him some coffee. Next week, she’d probably come in to find a new male intern sitting at her desk and a pink sli
p attached to a box full of her things.
Fucking Crawford. This wasn’t just her job. This was her future, and she was good at what she did. The numbers already proved it, and he still couldn’t see the truth.
She took a deep breath, trying to remain calm. “I have an idea.”
He scowled, but didn’t say anything. Hmm.
It gave her just enough encouragement to continue. “If I keep getting hits like this and go beyond one-hit-wonder status, then you bring in advertisers and get funding from them for the rest of the season . . . and I don’t do the exposé. But if there’s a drop of”—she thought for a bare second—“more than five percent in hits, then I’ll go ahead with it.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she could take them back.
Oh. Oh, God. I cannot believe I just put that on the table.
She may as well have quit, anyway, even if it meant being set back by a year. Maintaining hit rates like this would be challenging even if she was already a big name. No more than a five-percent drop from this already remarkable hit count? She’d have to hustle even harder to make sure her visibility didn’t falter.
And if there was any chance she might still have to write the exposé, she’d have to keep encouraging a relationship with Ty without letting it get out of control.
It sounded exhausting. Daunting, definitely. Intimidating . . . all the things that scared the hell out of her. But she’d meant what she’d said yesterday to Ty. She’d learned a long time ago that if she wanted something, she had to fight for it. She didn’t let anything stand in her way.
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.