The Come Again was literally empty a half hour before race time. Only Derek, who called himself the faithful barkeep, stood behind the bar for the just-in-case customers. Just in case they hadn’t gone to the race. Like Elle.
She nursed a hard apple cider and told herself that no matter what Jack had said, this was still the right decision for Elle and Harley. They couldn’t know, after such a short time, that this love was one they’d be willing to fight for and be scared to death for for the rest of their lives. If she was this upset and conflicted, this couldn’t be that kind of love no matter what she’d thought two days ago.
“Here you go.” Derek set a plate of wings in front of her. “On me. You look pretty down.”
“I’ve had better days.”
“You really aren’t going to go?”
“I don’t think so. We had a big disagreement about some car issues. I think there are some problems, and I don’t want to sit there and watch if the problems crop up.”
“I get that. It’s like being related to a cop. My dad was an officer in Omaha. We never got over worrying about him when he went to work.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Sure. He retired after twenty-five years and lives the life of Riley now. It is nice not to have to worry about him.”
A police officer. What if Harley had been a cop and not a race car driver? Would she cut and run simply because of that dangerous job? What if he suddenly decided he didn’t like her working around engine hoists or heavy transmissions because they could fall or snap a chain and kill her? What if he told his mother she couldn’t run anymore because she could fall again?
Replacing an engine and running a marathon weren’t the same as racing at a hundred miles per hour, but the concept of love was the same across the board.
It came down to love, not physics. One might be quantifiable and provable, but the other was more powerful than logic. Or it should be.
Jack had been right. And now Derek was right. If you loved someone you had a responsibility to prove that love every single day. Even if it killed you.
She snatched up her purse and laid a twenty on the table. “Derek! I changed my mind after all. Sorry to abandon you.”
He only grinned. “I figured you’d come to your senses. Have fun.”
The stands were filled to capacity, and the grounds looked completely different filled with trailers and cars and milling people. Elle showed her ticket and pushed into the stands wondering if there was any way to find Jack. Or even a seat.
Again the little, sympathetic guardian angel stepped in, and Chris found her first.
“Elle! Surprise! Mom said you weren’t coming.”
She gave him a tight hug. “I figured I should. Is your mom here? Could I maybe squeeze in with you two?”
“Yeah, sure. She’s right down there.”
When her friend saw she’d come, she stood and clasped Elle in one of the tightest hugs she’d ever had. It squeezed tears out of both their eyes.
“I’m so glad you came. They’re about to start. Look, there’s Harley. He qualified mid-field.
“You were right, Jack. I had to be here.”
The race start went from “Start your engines,” to lap four in a blur. The yellow Monte Carlo stayed bunched in the middle of the pack, and Elle liked it. It seemed a good, safe spot. But then he started to move up. Car by car, #74 overtook everyone but the leader.
“Second! He’s in second!” Chris bounced up and down like primary schooler.
Elle continued counting laps.
At ten her heart went wild with nerves. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Harley hung in at number two. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. His front bumper inched closer. Twenty-four, five, six. Elle relaxed slightly. Never had she prayed so hard to have herself proved wrong. Twenty-eight…
It happened on twenty nine. The Monte Carlo gave a frightening bang. The nose veered immediately right and smoke billowed from the hood.
“Oh, God!” Jack grabbed Elle’s arm and squeezed like a tourniquet. “Harley. Harley, no.”
He straightened the car, but it was clear he fought the g-forces dragging him around at now-uncontrolled speed. He headed into a turn. and the rear wheels steered straight while the front wheels grabbed and shot left. The next turn of his wheel sent him in the opposite direction toward the wall. In horrible dread Elle watched the car half climb the wall, struggle, and surge. Then everything was over. The Monte Carlo flipped sideways and rolled twice across the asphalt, landing on the driver’s side barely off the track on the infield.
Jack started to moan. Elle held down a surge of bile.
“He’ll be all right,” she promised. “The safety cage is meant for this accident exactly. Come on and we’ll meet him when he’s out.”
“They won’t let me on the track.” She wept into her hands, and Chris, ashen-faced, embraced her, too.
“You go, Elle,” Chris said. “You’re part of his crew. They’ll let you in.”
She ran.
Nobody emerged from the car. A siren wailed from behind the stands and panic threatened to choke her. She saw Maury and Virgil sprinting across the infield. Steve followed carrying a black medical bag. Orange-vested EMTs swarmed the car.
And then he appeared.
Harley. Flying like Usain Bolt from the opposite side of the infield.
Harley?
Elle’s gaze careened to the smashed car in confusion. Slowly, from a space between the crushed roof and the window barely big enough for a German shepherd to escape from, the driver oozed through like an earthworm. He stood, brushed himself off, and lifted his arms. The crowd erupted in relief.
Johnnie Markham.
“Elle!”
Harley reached her, and she threw herself into his arms. “You’re here. You’re safe. Oh, Harley, you didn’t drive!”
“I didn’t. It almost took me too long to understand why you went so far to prove I shouldn’t race. I was so late figuring it out that I never had time to tell anyone.”
“But I was wrong to want to keep you from listening to your heart,” she said. “So wrong.”
“Sweetheart, do you see the crumpled proof next to us? Clearly you were so right.” He squeezed her cheeks between his palms in a desperate vise grip and kissed her.
“I’m not talking about the car. I was wrong about you and me. I was arrogant and selfish. And when I didn’t get my way, I called it a lack of trust between us when it was actually my fear.”
“I was wrong, too. I don’t know how, but you saw the real me and listed all the flaws out loud. I have been running, doing rash things and calling them passion. I’ve been trying to prove to myself nothing can happen to me the way it did to Aston. I talked big and started to believe it. Thank God for you.”
“But you still could have raced anyway—.”
“Not after realizing you were right about Valentina and Virgil, too. They already have a financial stake in Markham. I thought they were my ticket, but I was theirs. I’m disposable. You were mollified just to keep you out of the way, but you wouldn’t stay in the corner. I heard a few private conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear. Because you called out her crew and therefore her decision-making, Valentina was ready to sabotage your career, too, if anything went wrong.”
“Hardly surprising, is it?”
He wrapped one arm around her and they turned to stare at the smoking crumple of #74’s body. The first tears formed in Elle’s eyes.
“She did talk to me,” Harley said. “You were right about even that.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That I have a woman who cares so much she was willing to fight dragon ladies for me. And I could see you sitting on the hood of that car the other night, waiting for me—wanting me. I knew you’d become then and there far more important to me than any race car. I’d chosen to want you, too. That’s what I still want, Elle. You. Not glory. When that finally got through, I stripped out of the fire suit and handed it to Johnniekins
there.”
“But #74. Harley. I’m so sorry.” Her heart broke a little more when a tow truck lumbered toward them. “She didn’t deserve this. You didn’t either.”
“Here’s the thing. Entitled rich kid is probably going to check out fine.” He nodded to the men giving Johnnie a grilling and checking all his moving parts. “I’m all right. You didn’t leave. That’s what matters to me. A car can be fixed. I didn’t want to break what we have.”
“You never did. I should have trusted that you were doing what you thought was best.”
“I—”
He was interrupted by Ed Michaels, the sheriff. “Harley! Man you scared the shit out of us, boy.”
“Sorry, Ed.”
“I’m here to ask if your mama can come down. She’s a regular basket case up there.”
“Oh, jeez, poor Mom. Yeah, of course.”
“Ed trotted off.
“I was sitting with her. She was doing fine,” Elle said. “Until she saw the smoke.”
“I have to do more to help her with this.” His eyes went suspiciously shiny. “How about you have a part in that, too?
“You know I will. Your mom’s actually pretty brave.”
“What if we were to make up for the trauma by, say, offering her a new daughter-in-law?”
Elle spun in his hold and grabbed a fistful of white undershirt materia. “What?”
“Come on, Elle Mitchell. Marry me! So it’s been zero to sixty in one month? We know this is it. Let’s ride it.”
She wanted to hesitate, savor the moment. She thought she should at least think about it for a second or two, but she knew the answer.
“First, wait. Harley, are you going to give up racing?”
“What? I hope I don’t have to. We’ll need to discuss that. I might have gotten stung here, but I love racing.”
“Thank goodness!”
He arched back with a look of surprise. “You’re okay with it?”
“I’ve always been okay with it. It wasn’t the racing I was trying to stop. Just this race.”
“Aww, baby, that’s a huge gift.” He kissed her quickly. “But there’ll be one big major change—we race together. We’re the team. No more Valentinas and we’ll tell her so. We’ll deal with breaking her contract later—not now while I’m pissed off at her for crashing my car. It’ll give you time to work on your I-told-you-so presentation.”
“’Karma is a bitch.’ I can’t wait to use that one on her. Okay, since that’s settled, let’s tell your mom.”
“So it’s a yes.” His excited eyes belied the casual way he asked the question.
“It’s a thousand times yes! She’s going to ask us when. When’s the date do you think?”
“Whoa, I said zero to sixty not zero to a hundred.”
She laughed and pressed in for a kiss. “I love you,” she said against his lips. “How about we discuss it tonight? You, me, a pile of blankets and some moderate speed in between zero and a hundred. I’d like some aspects of the negotiations to last a while.”
“At least seventy or eighty years.”
“That’s a long time on a garage floor, but okay.” She wiggled her brows. “We can come up for air now and then.”
“You are so weird.”
“You love weird, remember?”
“No, Elle, I love you. Weird is simply the icing on my wedding cake.”
“Is it wrong to be so happy in the middle of disaster?”
“I’m not seeing it that way. We’ll get to lose that awful pink and teal accent.”
His humor blasted away the last of her sadness. She took in the organized chaos around them with fresh eyes. The rest of Nolan Racing had disappeared with their driver without so much as a ‘sorry about your car.’ Maury had his head through the crushed car window. Steve was helping the tow truck driver. The only people paying them any mind were the dozen or so people accompanying Jack and the sheriff across the far end of the oval.
She stood on tiptoes
“Kiss me quick. The race will start up again soon and here comes your mother and all our well-meaning friends.”
He kissed her all right, with a hard, knee-softening, erotic promise. And then it softened, flowing into sweet exploration—foreplay for later. They kissed until they knew everyone approaching could see, and still they didn’t come up for air, until the chorus of hoots and catcalls told the whole world Harley and Elle were moving fast—toward the future.
The End
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Thank you so much for reading Going Zero to Sixty.
If you’d like to learn and read more about the characters from this story, check out my
Amazon Author Page for the following books:
Elle and her brother Dewey Mitchell appear in Good Guys Wear Black
Rio (Montoya) Pitts-Matherson appears in Beauty and the Brit
The Loon Feather Café and the cockatiels Lester and Cotton appear in all the
Love From Kennison Falls series books.
— Lizbeth Selvig
—
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Award-winning author Lizbeth Selvig writes heartwarming, sexy-sweet small town and contemporary western romance. Her strong, fun and funny characters don’t mind poking at societal norms even while they’re finding their ways home to family and love. Lizbeth turned to fiction writing after working as a newspaper journalist and magazine editor, and raising an equine veterinarian daughter (handy, since there are usually too many horses in her stories) and a talented musician son (also handy because she’s been known to write about rock stars). Lizbeth shares life in Minnesota, where her first book series is set, with her best friend (aka her husband, Jan), an under-ridden gray Arabian gelding named Jedi, two human grandchildren, and her four-legged grandkids of which there are over twenty, including a wallaby, three alpacas, a large goat, a mammoth-eared donkey, a miniature horse, a pig, and many dogs, cats and regular-sized horses (pics of all appear on her website www.lizbethselvig.com). In her spare time she loves to hike, quilt, read, and horseback ride. She also loves connecting with readers—so contact her any time!
ALSO BY LIZBETH SELVIG
The Seven Brides for Seven Cowboys Series:
The Bride Wore Denim
The Bride Wore Red Boots
The Bride Wore Starlight
Betting on Paradise
The Love From Kennison Falls Series:
The Rancher and the Rock Star
Rescued by a Stranger
Beauty and the Brit
Good Guys Wear Black
Short Fiction:
Bun Wars in the anthology Festivals of Love
What’s Up Dock? in the anthology Love in the Land of Lakes
Find Lizbeth:
Amazon Author Page
Website
Facebook
Sapphire Falls: Going Zero to Sixty (Kindle Worlds Novella) Page 14