High Octane

by Ashlinn Craven

  The woman gave her a jaded look but said, “All right,” and shoved into gear.

  Viv watched as Adam leaned out of his car to slide his ticket into the machine, and the barrier to the parking garage went up.

  “Okay, follow that Cadillac. The red one.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen this movie,” the taxi driver muttered.

  With the slow traffic, it wasn’t difficult to follow him into the center, and she began to calm down a little. She’d loved Montreal when she’d first come here with Ronan—it was like a rich blend of French Canada and Europe. Montreal didn’t bombard the senses with advertising and marketing, so the city served as a gentle introduction to North America for someone coming over from Europe.

  “Who’s in the car?” the taxi driver asked at the next red traffic lights. “Your ex-boyfriend or something?”

  Viv laughed. “No. Adam Fontaine.”

  “And who’s he?”

  “He’s a driver.”

  “Yeah, well, I can see that.”

  “No, I mean a Formula One driver.”

  “A Formula One driver? Stuck in this traffic, poor boy.”

  “Be glad we’re not on the freeway.”

  The cabbie laughed. “No match for me.”

  Two traffic lights later, his car slowed down and entered a parking garage in the Latin Quarter. Viv paid the driver and jumped out.

  “Good luck,” she said. “Hope you get your autograph.”

  “Me, too.”

  Viv followed him as he walked down Rue Saint-Denis, with its trendy shops, charming restaurants spilling onto the street, myriad bars and theatres. Pedestrians milled around attractive windows displaying secondhand LPs and new age clothing. There was a cool bike-jumping event happening in the street. Adam walked at a brisk pace through it all, and she had to concentrate to keep up.

  At one point, he stopped and glanced around. She ducked behind a woman walking a poodle.

  At the intersection of Sainte-Catherine and Saint-Denis, he turned down a parallel side alleyway. She followed at a distance of thirty feet or so. Halfway down, he disappeared. She searched all directions frantically, but he was nowhere to be seen. He must have gone into one of the buildings. She sped up to the position where he’d disappeared.

  She reached a doorway of a café called Le Chat Noir. Here? She stepped into the dimly lit café porch. Something grabbed her elbow from the shadows and pulled her to the left. She gave a yelp as she landed smack against something hard and unyielding. Adam Fontaine stared down at her, and, as usual, he didn’t look too happy.

  Chapter 13

  Adam knew she’d been following him ever since he’d pulled out of the hotel garage. Did she not know drivers were trained to see things in their peripheral vision that normal people didn’t? Did she not realize he was driving purposely slowly so her taxi wouldn’t lose him? And honest to God, she’d never make a paparazzi journalist the way she trailed people so conspicuously down a sidewalk.

  “Hey.” She tried to wrench her elbow from his grasp. “Let go.”

  “Explain.” He let her go.

  “Well, um, I … I followed you.” At least she had the grace to look abashed. A pink glow suffused her cheeks.

  “I see that. I suppose the question is why.”

  “I needed to talk to you.”

  “Well I need to talk to you, too, so it might as well be right here.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.” He stepped forward, and she shrank back against the wall. “What’s with the Fontaine Fans website? Who’s Liam McCloud?”

  Her arms folded, she adopted a defensive pose. “That’s my brother. I asked him to do it for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? You should be happy, Adam. It’s a fan site. You didn’t have a proper one as far as I could tell. There can’t be any harm in that, can there?”

  “I told you, I don’t need one.”

  “Did you?”

  “I’m telling you now. It’s a stupid waste of your time. And it’s creepy. I thought you were a serious journalist.”

  She straightened up. “I am a serious journalist. I just wanted to contextualize you. Humanize you—”

  “Humanize me? I didn’t realize I was a monster.”

  “Not a monster. A robot. A zombie. Going through the motions. Where’s the joy? Where’s the love for the sport?”

  He stepped away from her—he’d more than violated her personal space. He headed to the door, saw the pedestrians marching by with their shopping bags, trying to dodge the rain that had just started, and turned back to her.

  She winced as if in sympathy with him for something, and that bothered him most.

  “It’s important how people perceive you,” she said.

  “I don’t subscribe to that philosophy. I am who I am, not who you or they perceive me to be. Next question. Why do you need to talk to me?”

  “It’s very simple. The thing is, I need an interview with you. My job’s on the line. And yes, I followed you to ask you. Again. That’s how bad it is.”

  Adam took off his cap and wrung it in his hands, avoiding her doe-eyed look. It had been hard enough to refuse the last time.

  But she waited, her eyes never leaving his face—hope and determination written plain across her features, and yet something else underneath, too. What was it? It looked a little like fear … desperation?

  “Why is your job on the line?” he asked.

  “It’s Mack, my boss.” She gulped. “Says I’m no good as a journalist if I can’t get an interview with you.”

  “That’s insane.”

  Her eyes flashed in sudden anger. “Yeah, well, that’s the way it is over at the BBC, Adam. And pretty much anywhere else, too!” She heaved a few breaths.

  “You’re in distress.” He took a step closer and put his hands on her shoulders. She didn’t flinch. Her face was just inches below him now. What would those pink lips feel like if he were to grasp the back of her head and pull her toward him as he so wanted to? She’d probably knee him in the groin if he tried.

  “I’m not in distress,” she said, raising her gaze to meet his. Teardrops glazed her eyes until she blinked them away rapidly. His chest grew heavy, and something hard in his core melted. He squeezed her shoulders.

  “Explain this interview business,” he said. If he didn’t keep her talking, then something else might happen.

  She sighed. “My boss wants more coverage on you. And I haven’t got anything. We’ve truckloads of stuff on Reece—every day I wake up, he’s done something—or someone—new. Why can’t you be more scandalous? It would make my life easier.”

  “I don’t have the time for it.” He let go of her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry; I wasn’t serious about you creating scandal.” She looked up again, professional smile intact. “I think the world has enough of that. But I could reveal the real you, the mysterious driver that people know so little about. You’re the current leader, but they don’t have a feeling for who the guy is under the green helmet. More and more of them want to know.”

  “They want a persona. Make it up. There. You have my permission. Humanize me.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you’ll do anyway, to fill in the gaps, right? You journalists hate gaps. That’s what sent you talking to Villiers and talking to Bruce. That’s the game.”

  “It’s no game. It’s my job.”

  “You think the image that Reece projects out there is real?”

  “Well, yes. Somewhat.” She frowned. “Isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s bullshit. It’s a fake persona. The real personality comes out when he’s sitting behind that wheel, fighting for his life, trying to decide whether the next maneuver in the rain is worth the risk of crashing—of potentially dying—or not. He doesn’t care about anything else at that moment.”

  She shrugged.

  “And after it’s over, his sights are on the next race, the points table, the gaps he has to clo
se, the spurious advantage the latest change in his car might have over the next team’s car, the margin of possibility at the fringe of the guidelines, numbers, numbers and more numbers. Everything else—the show they put on for you—is fake, surface-level trivia only. Our differences are miniscule compared to our similarities, but some feel inclined to put on a bit of a show. It’s product marketing. Branding. You know this.”

  “Wow.” She looked skeptical. “So what’s your brand then?”

  “I didn’t get one.”

  “Ultimately it is up to you, but F1 as an organization will fight against a blank persona. They like drivers to be interactive with the fans—on Facebook, Twitter and even on their own blogs. It’s part of your job description, really. It will guarantee you more interviews, more—”

  “More interviews? Just what I need. Look, I have my sponsorships on driving merit. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Yes, but you also need to draw them in with your popularity and your personality. You know, the part that gets you into the best cars? You need branding to have a career; this has been true of the sport since the seventies. What are your PR people doing? Come on, Adam, why do you think kids get interested in this sport in the first place? It’s not just the cars—it’s you, the drivers. You’re heroes. I mean, why did you get into it?”

  Her challenge hung there as some people came clattering in the door of the café and lingered in the porch, perusing a menu on the wall. The older ladies looked at them in indignation, as if they were a couple making out in the dark, which, he supposed, they must look like, but at least they didn’t recognize him. Wrong demographic.

  One of them stood and snorted in distaste as if to say, “get a room.”

  Meanwhile, Vivienne’s eyes shone with the same amusement he was feeling.

  “Heroes, huh?” he muttered.

  The group of ladies bustled through the inner door to the café, shaking out their umbrellas. A warm blast of pastry smells filled the cold porch. He felt a pang of hunger. He remembered his baseball cap and tugged it back on. “Anyway, I keep away from PR types. I like my private life to be kept private.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” she said smoothly. “But I’m just saying there are more pleasant ways of achieving the same goal. By having more fans. By having people say nice things about you behind your back. There are countless ways people will cooperate with an international racing star if he seems to be a nice guy.”

  And there were countless ways a journalist could trip him up on live TV, asking questions about why exactly he left home at seventeen, what exactly happened to Eddie. Even an innocent question about his motivation to drive F1 could turn into a semi-therapy session. He’d seen this type of interview before with newbie drivers … where the slightest hesitation in front of the camera spoke volumes, egged on by the laughter of a live audience and the constant pressing by a journalist. You couldn’t undo interviews. Ever.

  What Vivienne with her optimistic world view failed to realize was that in the absence of a sparkling, witty personality to wow the crowds, the world would pin his identity on past events—on whatever he let slip about his focused, goal-driven life to date. His image would get worse, not better. Why give them the ammunition?

  “And you know what?” she continued, “If you do appear to be a nice guy, the press will back off. Because nice is less exciting than mysterious.”

  That caught his attention. Would they—back off? If he was ever going to find a journalist to help him come across as human, as nice, it was Vivienne. Could he—with her help—pull this off? She’d get her interview, and he’d get it out of the way. If ever there was a reason to give interview, it was this.

  “How about that interview?” she asked.

  “We could do it after the race Sunday.”

  Her face, which had been poised for further argument, relaxed into a sudden incredulous smile. It was almost worth it just to see that raw emotion. “How about before?”

  “Don’t push it, McCloud.”

  “Okay,” she said, still grinning. “After then. On camera.”

  “No cameras.”

  “There have to be cameras.”

  “Says who?”

  “Mack. My boss. Seriously Adam, it’s this, or I get the boot.”

  “This is emotional blackmail,” he grumbled. “Do I have to wear a suit?”

  “You can wear anything you want.” She gave him a saucy look.

  “All right, you got yourself a victim.”

  “Sounds great.” Viv’s hands trembled as she fished out her business card. “Here’s my number. Call me when you’re ready.”

  “Right.” Something in his periphery bothered him. People outside—the way they were looking in. He pulled the card from her grasp, but let his fingers linger on hers for a moment. So delicate. His thumb trailed over her knuckles, and he heard her breath catching. Her hazel eyes darkened. The upward tilt of her jaw and the tiny parting between her lips made him nauseous with desire. He leaned even closer to murmur in her ear. “Listen, the people coming in … they recognize me. I’m out of here.”

  She twisted around to see what he meant. “Adam,” she said, her voice deeper and sterner. “You’re staying right here. Remember, nice is less exciting than mysterious.”

  He tucked his hands into his jeans pockets. Damn it, he couldn’t say no to her.

  A chattering group of college-age Canadians stood by the entrance, dithering. A skinny, acne-infested, twenty-something guy came up him. “Are you Adam Fontaine?”

  “I am.”

  “Wow, I knew it!” He jostled his mates. “Hey, can I get your autograph? My brother’s a huge fan. He’s going to kill himself for not coming out with us!”

  Adam stole a look at Vivienne, who was grinning widely, ripping a page out of a notebook she’d produced from her bag and handing it along with a pen to him.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Peter.”

  Adam wrote down “Greetings Peter, from Adam Fontaine” and the date after it. “There.”

  The guy scrunched up his nose in disgust. “God, your writing’s so neat.”

  “Easy to forge if you need extras.”

  The guy looked puzzled and then laughed. “Good point. Hey, I can swap this for Metallica’s latest album. Thank you.” The youths clattered through the café door.

  “A bientôt,” Adam called after them before handing her the pen.

  “Metallica’s latest,” she said.

  “Could be worse.” Adam folded his arms so he wouldn’t reach out and touch her again. Underneath the friendliness, she was giving off that definite I'm-a-professional-reporter-don’t-mess-with-me vibe again.

  “See? You’ve already made a difference in a young rocker’s life.”

  “Or Metallica has sold one fewer albums.”

  “Mmm, that too.”

  He wanted to get her back to flirty Vivienne, to that fun and somewhat vulnerable creature she’d been a few moments ago. “So, Vivienne, do you need a lift back or do you prefer a car chase? I’ll give you a head start.”

  She grinned. “I’ll hold you to the car chase, but for now I’d love a lift back, yes.”

  Good, more time alone with her without any microphones.

  • • •

  It was Viv’s second time in a car with him and the third time in an enclosed space. Every move he made registered keenly with her; the way he twisted his head toward her when he thought she wasn’t looking made her want to hold him in her arms and ask what was going through that handsome head of his.

  “Why’d you come into town anyway?” she asked as he pulled up to a traffic light.

  “I needed to pick up something … a ticket.”

  “Ticket? Like for a show?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Metallica playing tonight?”

  “Not exactly. It’s a ballet.”

  “Ballet? No way!” She could hear her voice had risen an octave. “Which one?”

  “
Carmina Burana—they’re innovative.”

  “Wow. Of course, Les Grands Ballets.”

  “Not what you were expecting?”

  “God, no, but I’m … wow, that’s great. You actually like ballet then?”

  “I actually do,” he said. “I find it … relaxing.”

  “Relaxing?” She laughed. “That’s the last thing I’d call it. I used to do ballet, you know.”

  “I guessed.”

  “Oh you did, did you? How?”

  “Posture, your bearing. I’ve even seen you standing with your feet turned out. I guess you did it for many years.”

  “Yes.” She wrung her hands. Yes, she had done it for many years, eleven years to be precise. What else was he guessing correctly about her? “Are you serious about the feet? I don’t do that, do I?”

  “Well, I only saw it once.” He looked over. “It may have been my imagination.”

  “Why were you looking at my feet anyway?”

  “I like looking at every part of you.”

  Her body grew warm at his audacity and his deadpan tone. She fumbled for a comeback, but none was forthcoming. Her throat had constricted anyway, making swallowing hard, let alone talking.

  “When did you stop?” he asked quietly.

  “At sixteen.”

  “Why?”

  “You know, I’m not even sure. I devoted so much of my life to it until then, it’s not even funny. At the end of the day it’s a hyper-competitive sport and often harmful. Not unlike racing, I suppose. I just … gave it all up. I had to shake myself up and go for A-levels to scrape into university, or else I’d have ended up drifting even more than I am now.”

  “That must’ve been hard. Did you have someone to help you, to push you?”

  “No. My parents were always easygoing. Then Dad died when I was fifteen. Surprise heart attack—he was only fifty. As long as I behaved and was polite to people, Mum pretty much didn’t demand much else of me. That was my way of rebelling—trying to be something.”

  “Well, I don’t see you as someone who’s drifting,” he said, after a pause. “You were made for TV, and you’re good at sussing people out. Too good, sometimes.”

  There was a silence. For someone who was supposed to be robotic, his attention to her was more stirring than anyone’s, making her feel warm and fluffy and not at all like the hardened journalist she was striving to be. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said in a small voice.