by Lucy Ellis
In the end she sent a text to Simone. A million miles away in Paris.
Please come. I need you.
Then she closed her eyes and decided the tears that were building inside her really had no place right now. She would hold them until she was alone. And with that she realised for the first time in two years she was once more in complete control of her actions.
*
Nash was about to throw the keys for valet parking outside the hotel when suddenly he knew he wouldn’t be going inside. It had only taken a couple of phone calls on the way down to have information regarding the lien on Lorelei’s loan sent through, and in an hour the locks would be taken off her house. But somehow it wasn’t enough.
He reached into his pocket and palmed his cell, dialled the limo. ‘Where did you drop her, mate?’
He had a press conference. He had a training schedule ahead. He needed to let her go. Instead he leapt back in the car and gunned the engine.
He’d driven past, but never been inside the equestrian centre. There had never been a reason. He gave her name at the desk and the wide-eyed girl told him Lorelei should be in the arena and asked did he need an escort? She was free.
‘I’m sure I can find it,’ he replied with a slight smile, and followed the arrows.
What in the hell did he think he was doing? Better question: why had she come here? Straight here? Who was she meeting? He couldn’t fathom the growing jealousy in him.
The first thing that hit him was the odour of manure and horse. So far, so expected. He jogged lightly down the steps of the stadium seating, scanning as he went. There were horses being worked in the domed arena. He recognised Lorelei. She was unmistakable, leaping a bay gelding over barriers. It was a breathtaking sight. Her grace and ability was fully on show.
He sank down slowly onto one of the bench seats.
Presently she drew alongside another rider, and that was when he noticed something else. The young girl on the smaller horse had a prosthesis on both her right arm and leg. Lorelei was showing her how to guide her horse.
An arrow-backed middle-aged woman sitting nearby looked at him with interest. She was the only other person within earshot.
She leaned back. ‘Lorelei runs our programme here for disabled young people. She’s a superb trainer. If you’re interested I can set up an appointment, but I have to warn you she’s in demand. There’s a waiting list.’
Nash gave the woman a polite nod and settled back.
He didn’t know what he was feeling.
But, my God, she was magnificent.
She looked like a queen in the saddle.
He remembered what she had told him about her two years of rehabilitation. He’d just assumed she’d given up. When he knew better than most what made someone a gifted athlete was that drive. Why hadn’t he realised she would take that same drive and rechannel it?
It was what he had done.
The trappings of fame and success for him had become the bells and whistles people paid attention to. But he’d earned it with hard work and focus. Yet he’d completely discounted that when he’d looked at Lorelei. He’d just seen bells and whistles, a beautiful blonde bauble. Why?
Feelings shifted like tectonic plates in his chest. Why hadn’t he asked more questions? Why hadn’t he seen this in her? She wasn’t weak. She was strong. It made sense that she would pick herself up and start all over again. And she’d do the same with that bloody house of hers.
However she’d accumulated those debts, there would be a good reason.
And he intended to find out.
Nash wasn’t sure how long he sat and watched. He only knew when he emerged into the late afternoon he wanted to smash something. When he returned to his car his cell was throwing up a volley of messages.
The press conference.
He hit redial. ‘John, I’m on my way.’
He walked into a conclave of cameras and the relief of his Eagle teammates. He sat down, put his hands either side of the mike and said calmly, ‘Ladies, gentlemen—sorry to keep you waiting. I’m driving for Eagle next year.’
A volley of questions came at him. He took a few, then fielded the rest, scrolling through his phone.
He knew tomorrow there’d be copy on how Nash Blue had been so bored at his own press conference he’d seemed more interested in playing with his phone. At another time it would have amused him. But right now he didn’t care about the press, the public or even the Eagle reps, who seemed more than adequately able to handle this without him.
He got up and walked out into the empty carpeted corridor.
‘Mike,’ he said with deceptive casualness to his genius PA, ‘I’ve got a few leads I need chased up.’ He asked for all the pertinent information about Raymond St James’s trial and his creditors.
John Cullinan stepped into the hall. ‘Nash, man, are you in this or not?’
‘Yeah.’ Nash pocketed his cell. He’d done all he could for the moment. ‘I’m in.’
*
Sitting on the little red couch in a twin room at the Hotel de Paris, Lorelei shook her head over the paperwork the bank had given her.
‘So let me get this straight,’ said Simone, mixing coffee. ‘He’s opened up negotiations with the bank for you, covered your outstanding mortgage payments and is acting as guarantor for the next six months?’
‘Oui, it appears so.’
‘Is that legal?’
‘If I give the bank my signature.’
Simone stopped stirring. ‘If? If?’
‘I can’t accept this, Simone. Not now.’
‘You’re going to accept it, chère, if I have to tie you up and carry you down there myself. He must be feeling a cartload of guilt to be doing this.’
‘Non, it’s just Nash—the way he is.’ Generous. Always so generous with his time and his money…and his brother. He’d given up everything for a year for his brother. He’d given up his racing career for his brother.
He deserved to have another chance.
Lorelei found her breathing had become scratchy.
Like Simone. Who had flown down immediately from Paris, leaving her children with her husband and taking a leave of absence from her high-powered job. To make coffee, offer a kind shoulder and listen.
You did those things for the people you loved.
But he didn’t love her or he wouldn’t have let her go.
Simone came and set a mug down in front of her.
‘He’s racing tomorrow in Lyon. We could go. You could speak to him about this.’
Lorelei shook her head vigorously.
Simone gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘Do you know what I think, chère? This man loves you. He’s just having a few problems working out how to show it.’
‘Don’t, Simone. You have no idea how many times I heard all my stepmothers and their girlfriends talking like this. He’s this way because he’s a man. He’s this way because you make him like this. In the end he’s this way because it’s who he is. It’s who he wants to be. Nash wants to race cars, he wants to win and he puts work above everything.’
Lorelei released a huge sob of a breath.
‘All my life that’s how it’s been. Papa put his women ahead of me. Grandmaman put the charity ahead of me. I’m not mooning over a man who thinks oil and grease and speed outweigh my love.’
‘You’re in love with him.’ Simone sat down beside her.
‘That’s what you got out of my little speech?’
Simone shook her head with a smile. ‘Isn’t it all that matters in the end, cherie?’
*
Was it all that mattered?
Lorelei lay awake, staring out at the night.
Her father would say, Oui, but of course. L’amour is everything.
But Raymond had never really loved anybody in his life but himself, with a little corner of his heart reserved for her.
She deserved so much more. Everyone deserved to be loved wholeheartedly and for themselves. A sob made it
s way up through her body, leaving her shaken, but still she couldn’t cry.
She loved Nash, really loved him, but she felt battered. He had left her behind, he didn’t love her back, and here she was—so very, very dependent on him.
Except for one thing.
The villa.
He could have gifted it to her. The meaningless gesture of an excessively wealthy man. He hadn’t. He had chosen instead to take the pressure off her with the gift of time. Time to think. Time to make a decision about what she really wanted to do. It also enabled her to envisage a time when she could pay him back.
He knew her well enough to know it was the only gift she wouldn’t throw back in his face.
Lorelei rolled onto her back.
Mon Dieu, he hadn’t made her dependent. He had made her strong again.
In every way.
Lorelei bolted up in bed.
She flung open the other bedroom door and the little bedside light flickered on as Simone sat up groggily.
‘How long will it take me to drive to Lyon?’
‘Three hours, give or take.’ Simone yawned. ‘Why?’
Lorelei bit her lip. ‘I’m going to do what I should have done on that plane. Fight for him.’
Simone gave her a wavery smile. ‘Should I expect to see you on the news tomorrow night, throwing punches at track girls?’
It was a gentle reminder not to overreact.
Except what had Nash told her? Not to be sorry, never to be sorry.
‘It’s always a possibility.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IT WAS race day.
Nash continued to scan the documents emailed to his smartphone. Raymond St James had quite a list of creditors.
Lifting his eyes from the bright screen, for a moment all Nash could see was Lorelei, locked out of her beloved home, trying desperately to steer him away, to hide the truth of her situation, only admitting, when forced, ‘I have had some debts.’
Some debts.
‘Nash, man, you’re cutting it fine.’
He dumped the phone and dragged up the zipper on his fire-retardant suit, pulled the face mask on and reached for his helmet.
The sound of the crowd, the smell of gasoline fumes, the whir of his car being readied usually pushed up his adrenaline levels. But this afternoon he didn’t need any help with that.
His heart was pounding, he was sweating inside the hot suit, but he knew how to switch off and do his job.
He’d raced all over the globe for a decade.
He’d won; he’d lost. Mostly he’d won.
He usually knew the outcome before he got in the car. He studied the field, he knew his car and he applied logic and ability and allowed for that two per cent of unpredictability that lay in any race.
It was that two per cent that was on his mind—and it had nothing to do with the race.
*
As he ripped across the finish line outside Lyon the fact that he took little pleasure in the win didn’t detract from the roar of the crowd. Slinging himself out of the car, he embraced Alain Demarche and Antonio Abruzzi in turn. Shook hands with a couple of guys from the pit crew and mounted the podium.
He was stepping off amidst champagne and track girls when he saw her.
She was standing with Nicolette Delarosa. She was wearing blue jeans and a simple green shirt and her hair was a halo around her piquant face. But, most tellingly, a lanyard dangled around her neck.
He focused on the lanyard, knowing then that this wasn’t some fantasy apparition. She was real. Heart thumping, he moved away from the podium but the crowd had already swallowed her up.
He shouldered his way through and grabbed one of the security guards forming a phalanx around him.
‘There’ll be a ’55 Sunbeam Alpine in the VIP car park. Can you hold on to it until I get out?’
‘Sure thing.’
‘The woman who owns it will kick up a fuss. Make sure she’s treated with respect.’
‘Absolutely. Great race, man.’
‘Thanks.’
Let her be there. If she wasn’t he’d grab a car and drive every mile back to Monaco and fetch her.
He hadn’t wanted to race today. All he had wanted to do was go and fetch her back. But he had a job to do. A lot of people were relying on him—as always. You couldn’t escape responsibility for others. Lorelei had never tried. Her compassionate humanity humbled him.
She had hidden so much behind those charming mannerisms. What he had read as light-heartedness and frivolity were her coping mechanisms. He’d got it all wrong.
How in the hell had he got it so wrong?
In the bungalow the night he’d confronted her about hiding things she’d accused him of not knowing her at all, of not trying to know her.
She’d been right.
He hadn’t wanted to look at what was shouting in his face. He’d been so damned determined to keep to his single-minded plan to race that he’d been willing to sacrifice this extraordinary chance he’d been given to love and be loved to his own selfish need to prove himself. To prove his old man was wrong. He wasn’t weak, a snivelling kid who drove people away with his demands for love and attention, the innocent child who had reached instinctively for love and been denied it. So he’d learned to deride his own needs, and when Lorelei had come along, he hadn’t had a clue how to even begin loving her.
Yet he did. Her compassion and her humanity had torn into those barriers he’d raised, yet still he’d gone back for more.
It had always been there when they made love, from the very first night, and he’d seen it when she danced on the beach—the acceptance in her body of who she was.
Her acceptance of him.
Come be with me. Let me show you how to love me, how to love yourself.
He closed his eyes, took a deep, sustaining breath, and knew his life had just taken a sudden irrevocable turn. For the better.
*
He was in his civvies and to his surprise Lorelei was just sitting on the bonnet of her car. Not kicking, not scratching, not a thrown shoe in sight. She was chatting casually with three security guys, who stood around looking more interested in making an impression than doing their job.
The guys evaporated with polite nods as Nash approached. Lorelei leaned back, angling her body at him. The old playful pose dragged him back to the first time he’d met her, when she’d put on that little show and he’d lost his head over her.
‘I thought I dreamed you up,’ he said, his voice suddenly rather hoarse.
‘Are you in the habit of doing that?’
‘Lately? Yeah. All the time.’
She slid off the bonnet of the car and stood before him, suddenly not so sure of herself, her face solemn.
‘I’m not Jack,’ she said.
He went still.
‘And I’m grateful for the time with the villa, but I’m not your rescue package, Nash Blue.’
He bowed his head.
‘I know that, Lorelei,’ he said in a thickened voice. ‘I saw you at the equestrian centre. The day we got back I followed you.’
‘You followed me? I didn’t see you.’
‘You were training a young girl with a prosthesis. I had no idea.’ He stepped towards her, aching to take her in his arms. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Lorelei hesitated. ‘I don’t know. I could say it was because it didn’t come up, but the truth is…’ Her voice died away. She shook her head. ‘I’m not proud of it, but I wanted to hold something back from you because I sensed you were holding so much back from me.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Fair enough. But you have to know when I got the big picture everything I’d told myself about my feelings for you came crashing down. I didn’t want to love you, Lorelei, and so I told myself you could never be anything but another person I’d have to bail out.’
‘In the end you did,’ she said in a strangled voice.
‘No.’ He shook his head with a soft smile. ‘I gave myself time.’
‘You gave me time,’ she corrected.
His smile grew. ‘Oh, sweetheart, you’re no rescue package. I did it for both of us.’
Lorelei stood there for a timeless moment.
‘Then why couldn’t you love me?’
It was a plea from her heart.
‘God, Lorelei.’ It was wrenched from him. ‘I was afraid I’d love you too much.’
Time stood still.
‘I was a clingy kid,’ he said, almost tonelessly. ‘Dad had a stream of women in the early days, and whichever woman picked me up she’d be mum. But they’d always leave. Dad would drive them away with his drinking.’
Lorelei didn’t shift an inch, afraid if she did he would stop. She so desperately wanted to hear it all, even as her mind turned in horror from the picture he was painting.
‘The old man used to say they left because of me.’ He shook his head at her expression. ‘It’s bull, I know. But when you’re a kid you believe your dad.’
‘Nash—’ She reached up and stroked his face, unable not to touch him.
‘When I went back to Sydney and saw the shape Jack was in his ex-wife said the same thing. He’s this way because of you. And in a way she was right. I succeeded. I got the career, the money, the accolades. Jack couldn’t cope.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘I looked at you, Lorelei, and all I saw was a fragile girl who’d run up debts and was living like there was no tomorrow.’
‘C’est vrai,’ she said softly. It was true. She had been.
‘I knew you’d been through the wringer with that trial and all the nasty publicity, and I thought if I put you in the public eye it would be as if I’d turned a hunter’s spotlight on you. All the stuff about your father would come out. For all those reasons I couldn’t do it to you. I thought I’d break you. Just like I broke Jack.’
Lorelei shook her head.
‘Then I saw you at the equestrian centre and I knew I’d got it wrong.’