On Your Mark

by M. L. Buchman

  He told her how they stayed in touch despite the entire family’s mobile lifestyle. He’d get a call every time someone in the family had a run that hit DC and they’d get together for a meal. Just last June, everyone had runs that hit Roanoke, Virginia. He and Malcolm had gone over for a couple days and they’d made a reunion out of mini-golf, BBQ, and some tall cold ones.

  “Then the dogs,” Reese interrupted his memories.

  “Then the Army. Drove HETS—that’s Heavy Equipment Transport System.”

  “Don’t know those either.”

  “Big trucks. Seriously big,” he liked sitting with her as if they did this all the time.

  “You’re a trucker kind of guy,” Reese concluded and went silent as if the interview was now over.

  “Was. Now I’m a dog kind of guy.”

  “Makes you the black sheep of the family,” she nodded once to herself. She now had him well pigeonholed. He didn’t know if that was comforting or irritating.

  “Black dog—or brown-and-white in Malcolm’s case—but yeah. How about you?”

  How about her? Reese’s past was a complete train wreck compared to Jim’s ever-so-happy trucking family—all for one and one for all.

  The waitress’ delivery of their drinks bought Reese a few moments. The waitress guaranteed herself a nice tip by bringing out a water bowl for Malcolm.

  Sipping the sweet rum cocktail that tasted a lot like home bought her a few more moments.

  Like home.

  That was all gone. Charlotte. The Motor Speedway. Her family.

  “That was one dark thought,” Jim was seeing past her armor once again.

  She felt the automatic brush-off shrug ripple across her shoulders…and didn’t like it. What was it about herself that she couldn’t just talk to someone? She’d never known how to do that when she was a racer and she hadn’t become any better at it in the Secret Service. Always a loner, just a highly skilled one.

  For once, she was sitting next to someone who she wasn’t in competition with. He was a nice guy, a dog handler, and wasn’t after the same job she was.

  “Okay, fine!”

  “Fine?”

  “I meant that for myself. I drove NASCAR.”

  “Already figured that.” But he said it nicely.

  “Made it to second row starting position. My dad had the fastest qualifying time for the race, so it was hard to feel bad about not getting the lead on the start. We started our last race at the head of the field; Number One and Two in a field of forty-three.” She couldn’t look up at Jim, instead seeing the heat shimmering off the Motor Speedway. A one-and-a-half-mile oval, it was going to be fast with the warm track giving the tires good traction. Turn 4 was in the shade of the grandstands. It would be slicker just at the moment that they transitioned from blinding afternoon sun coming out of Turn 3, plunging into the relative darkness of the shadowed Turn 4.

  Every driver knew, and they were ready. That was where the accidents were going to be happening that day.

  “I watched—”

  Reese had never told anyone about this moment. Not the reporters, not the Secret Service interviewers.

  “We were still running one and two after fifty laps. I was a car-length back when Pop lapped someone, or tried to. They banged fenders. A nothing contact. Such a little bump. But it was just enough to break his front end loose going into Turn 4.”

  She’d been drafting so close that she could see his face as the car spun a one-eighty. For just an instant he was traveling backward into the turn at a hundred and eighty miles an hour—nose to nose with her car. NASCAR racers rode the ragged edge of aerodynamically stable when they were nose into the wind.

  “The wind caught the tail of his car. One moment he was right there in front of me,” Reese looked out into the bar but all she could see was the track. “The next, he was tossed twenty or thirty feet into the air, slamming into the high fence. Flipping and spinning like a toy even worse than Richard Petty’s historic crash.”

  A warm, strong arm across her shoulders was all that let her speak. All that let her breathe. She was caught up in the retelling and couldn’t find any way out of it other than through.

  “They have safety flaps in the roof that are supposed to break up the effect, but a weakened hinge broke and it didn’t break up the unwanted lift. I got away clean, ducking under the wreck while it killed my father.”

  She sat up abruptly and faced Jim.

  “I kept it cool. I ran safe and clean. Even when the pit boss came on the radio to tell me he hadn’t survived, I held my line and raced. Some idea that I was going to win it for Pop.”

  “Did you?” His voice was a close whisper of sympathy.

  She shook her head. “Blew an oil ring with ten laps to go. Engine tossed a rod and I was out. It happens.”

  Jim held her close. It felt so good to be able to turn into his shoulder and just be held.

  Thankfully she’d buried the worst thing from that day so deep it didn’t come out.

  “My baby brother, always a little wild, died in the Argentine desert during the Dakar Rally. Pop died on the Charlotte Motor Speedway—his home track. I decided that I wasn’t going to die there.”

  “What about your mom?”

  When she tried to knock back her entire drink, Jim slipped it out of her hand and set it back on the table next to his own. Didn’t matter. She drank so little that even half a drink had gone straight to her head, or why would she be telling a jerk of a stranger all that she was telling him?

  “She was the smart one of the family. She left when I was three. Pop said she married a schoolteacher in Oregon. Didn’t even call for the funeral.”

  Jim Fischer waited while alcohol, shame, and chagrin washed through her system like a bad fishtail. Waited while she stared at the tabletop as her heart threatened to throw a rod through her chest and end her. Finally she just stared at her fisted hands on the table.

  Something bumped against her thigh a couple times on the side away from Jim, then a weight settled there. She looked down in surprise to see Malcolm looking up at her with sympathetic doggie eyes. Reese rubbed his head and felt a tiny bit better.

  “He seems to like me.”

  “He has good taste in women.”

  Reese looked at him with surprise in her eyes.

  “Not me,” he held up his hands. “I have terrible taste in women. I always end up with the ‘just friends’ type.” Now why had he paid her a compliment? She’d been hard-edged and pushing him away all day. And here he was handing her some cheap line. Except it didn’t feel like a cheap line. She was an amazing woman, just not the type he ever landed.

  “Just friends,” she sounded thankful for the change of topic.

  “Sure. Not a one of them has ever knit me a sweater.”

  Reese just blinked at him.

  He took a bite of his sandwich, which had arrived at some point without his quite noticing. He looked down at the floor and saw that Malcolm had polished off his sliders before going to console Reese. He picked up the empty plate and slid it under his.

  Reese Carver. She’d seen some seriously harsh times. Alone in the world, no wonder she’d brushed him off. He’d be scared to death of getting close to anyone again—the loss must have been horrific. Well, he might not understand how hard she’d brushed him off, but at least it explained things a bit.

  He nudged her plate toward her. She nodded at it, but didn’t take a bite.

  “Ma always said that you could tell if a girl was serious if she knit you a sweater.”

  “I don’t knit,” Reese finally reached for her late dinner, keeping a hand on Malcolm’s head.

  “Ma either, but she swears it’s true.”

  “So, I guess we’re never going to be serious.”

  “Guess not.” He knew he was out of the running, but he did wonder if Malcolm was going to get lucky tonight. He knew from experience that sad doggie eyes earned him a portion of almost any woman’s dinner. Margarite had ha
d no willpower where Malcolm was concerned. Jim had to admit that even being a long-time dog person, Malcolm could almost get by his own guard with that act.

  Reese took a bite of her sandwich, then set it back on her plate without offering any to Malcolm.

  He heaved out a doggie sigh and looked across her lap at him for aid in his nefarious plans. Jim simply shook his head, which earned him another doggie sigh.

  He wasn’t sure where to take the conversation from here.

  He’d painted himself into a corner by bringing up relationships, which would be more likely with one of the people still streaming by on the sidewalk—despite the late hour—than with Reese Carver.

  She was clearly done with the topic of her life after her cathartic upheaval. No tears. Not her. Never her.

  “When did you learn to be so strong?”

  That earned him a bark of laughter sharp enough to startle Malcolm.

  “What?”

  Reese opened her mouth, closed it again, and turned back to her sandwich. Malcolm did eventually get the tail end of a crust with a little cheese on it, but far less than his normal take. Reese was made of sterner stuff than most.

  The crowd inside still wasn’t thinning. The waitress swept up their empty plates and set down a dessert menu. Neither of them was more than half through their drink, so she slipped off to thirstier clients. Nearing midnight, it really was the city that never slept. Most of his New York trips had been to one loading dock or another. The tourist center of Manhattan wasn’t a place he’d ever had to run an eighty-foot full-box rig, and riding shotgun with Reese all day had convinced him that he’d never want to try.

  Tomorrow was going to be a long hard day. By unspoken mutual consent, they both clambered to their feet and shrugged on their jackets. He paid the bill and they drove across town to the hotel near the UN. A location team from the New York office was already on patrol there and nothing remained except to check in and ride up in the elevator.

  At the door to her room, she stopped him before he could lead Malcolm to the next room down the hall.

  “You know that you’re pissing me off, Fischer?”

  “Kind of hard to miss that.”

  She shook her head and her long hair was lustrous beneath the soft lighting of the long corridor.

  He waited.

  “You’re making me think. I don’t like thinking.”

  “What do you like?”

  “Winning,” she didn’t hesitate a single moment. Then her voice went much softer. “That’s what I’ve always been good at anyway.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a bad thing.”

  “No… But it’s a pretty damn lonely thing. Pop was dead—and I raced. You say it’s strong, but you make me wonder if maybe I’ve turned hard. A stock car has to have a certain softness in the suspension or the tires break free of the track too easily. There has to be a give. You make me wonder if I have any give left in my suspension.”

  “So, what? You walked away from NASCAR three years ago and have focused solely on becoming the new Number One driver in the Secret Service?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing else.”

  “Damn, woman. You need to get a life.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  Jim looked up and down the hall. Past midnight, it had the silence of a hotel—a well sound-insulated, luxury one. It was just the three of them, the burgundy carpet, and the sconce lighting of the flowered wallpaper. He’d always been more of a Holiday Inn Express kind of guy when he couldn’t sleep in his rig.

  “Jim?” Reese voice was a soft suggestion, barely audible in the long hall.

  He looked at her, really looked at her. The sadness in her eyes would put Malcolm to shame—except with Reese he knew that it was neither a shame nor a genetic predisposition as it was with Malcolm. Today had taught him that it was completely against her nature to look that way.

  He had no resistance. There wasn’t even thought as he reached out and pulled her against him. He’d had the good fortune to have hugged plenty of women over the years, but holding Reese was the first time he’d ever hugged steel. Even as she leaned into him, her back was ramrod straight. When her arms came up around his shoulders, he could feel the impossible power of a woman who worked out for an hour every morning before starting her day—she wasn’t Pilates fit, she was United States Secret Service fit.

  Unable to help himself, he buried his face in her luxuriant fall of hair as they held each other.

  She didn’t ease into him, slowly relaxing until their bodies were melded together.

  Reese Carver broke in a single slide of lost traction. One moment the woman of steel. The next pressed so tightly against him that he wondered if he’d ever been really held by a woman before.

  It didn’t last but a moment, but she showed him a window to a whole new world he’d never imagined.

  Reese stepped into her room and turned on the light as the door snicked shut behind her. It was a small room, made to feel bigger with a large mirror above the dresser and mini fridge.

  She looked at herself and studied the woman there.

  Was that really her?

  Suits had defined her since she’d been a kid. Her father had given her a full-body racing suit just like his when she was eight and she’d worn it with pride. The kids at school had teased her, but she hadn’t cared, not really. Because it had her name above her left breast and Carver Family Racing across the back. By the time she’d donned her own Nomex racing suit and climbed into a car, it had fit like a second skin.

  Three years in the Secret Service had done the same. Open-collar button-down shirt, dark blue or gray suit, polished black rubber-soled shoes, current issue lapel pin identifying her as part of the Presidential Detail at a glance. She slipped out of her suit coat and revealed the nylon webbing of her shoulder holster to the mirror’s eye. That and the FN Five-seveN sidearm were a part of her as well.

  But for just a moment in the hallway, she’d been a woman in a man’s arms.

  Even after an entire day of putting up with her bullshit attitudes and weird silences, he’d still held her as if she wasn’t the disaster area that she knew herself to be. It was when he’d buried his face in her hair that it had undone her. She’d always thought of her hair as a shield—herself on one side and all of the bullies, assholes, and even the lovers carefully kept on the other.

  Jim had taken no advantage of her. He’d somehow seen that for even a single moment, she’d just needed to be held.

  The woman in the mirror looked back at her in confusion. If he’d grabbed her ass, or anywhere else, she’d have known what to do with him. A hot steamy kiss from an undeniably handsome guy pressed back against a hotel room door, that too was familiar.

  But to simply be held. As he’d done at the bar when she’d told him the story of her father. The first time she’d ever told anyone that story in full.

  And when they’d kissed, when she’d finally let him slip fully through the shield of her hair, it had been like pounding into Turn One.

  Coming off the downshift.

  Feeding the power toward Turn Two with the tires glued into the groove despite the g-force dragging her head sideways.

  Not there yet, but feeling the anticipation of the upshift and hammer-down launch onto the backstretch.

  Jim’s kiss had been like a blast of nitromethane in a top-fuel dragster, firing off nerve endings she didn’t even know she had. It was an adrenaline rush she hadn’t felt since…

  Her image scowled at her.

  …since running one and two with her pop at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

  Yet when she’d tried to pull him into her room and find that high-octane finish, he’d refused.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to, Reese,” he’d looked right at her so there was no way to doubt his sincerity. “Don’t know as I’ve ever wanted anything more. But as much as I’d enjoy tonight, I’m guessin’ that you wouldn’t be enjoying tomorrow morning much more
than a cottontail rabbit on a highway—pissed off and feeling run over.”

  The fact that he was probably right didn’t make her feel any better at the moment. Even as she tucked her sidearm under her pillow and undressed, she could still feel the suits that had defined her life.

  How strange that some blind spot of Jim Fischer’s didn’t see her armor at all.

  Chapter Four

  The day had been just as brutal as Jim had expected. That he’d spent half of the short night thinking about Reese asleep just next door hadn’t helped matters.

  Since when did he turn down a beautiful woman, no matter how much pain she was in? Since never. He’d learned that letting a woman have a good cry on his shoulder made him into a shining knight. And the sorry-for-doing-that make-up sex afterward was typically awesome.

  But Reese was made of different, sterner stuff. She was like the difference between his old Kenworth semi-tractor with its cozy sleeping compartment versus a HETS tractor that hauled Abrams main battle tanks through the heart of a war zone.

  He would’ve liked to start the day with something more friendly, but they’d barely had time for hello.

  Morning route briefing over donuts and hotel coffee—really good hotel coffee, but of little help after a short night.

  They’d had only a few minutes alone together on the drive to the Downtown Manhattan heliport but conversation had been about timing and logistics. Then he’d spotted Malcolm happily curled up in the First Lady’s seat. Thankfully, among the weapons, gas masks, and other paraphernalia, the vehicle was also stocked with Windex and paper towels. He shuffled into the back and spent the last part of the drive cleaning up dog hair.

  “Thanks, buddy.”

  Malcolm, who’d slept at the bar, in the hallway, and across his legs, offered him a lazy yawn that was hard to resist. He waved Malcolm out of the seat and onto the Suburban’s carpeted floor.

  “Not with the sad doggie eyes,” Jim told him. “You know that doesn’t work on me.”

  Malcolm sighed and moved to the floor. Jim began cleaning the back seat.