Pride After Her Fall

Lorelei almost choked on her mouthful of wine, a little stunned by his matter-of-factness. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘I’m not planning on careening off the track any time soon, Lorelei.’

‘No, but—’ She broke off helplessly, wondering if he actually knew how empty he had made his life sound. ‘What about your brother Jack?’ she prompted.

Nash said nothing, began cutting into his steak.

‘What about me?’ The moment the words passed her lips she couldn’t believe she’d been so gauche. ‘What I mean to say is, if anything happened to you I’d be heartbroken.’ She gave him a small smile to lighten the impact.

He reached for his iced water. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

Lorelei had the urge to rub the spot in her chest that had gone suddenly cold.

‘Something must have made you stop,’ she said, her voice a lot less confident.

He put down his glass. ‘My brother Jack is an alcoholic, like the old man. He let his business slide, lost his wife, gambled away his life. He thought he had nothing more to live for. Six years ago I walked into a hospital room in Sydney and I barely recognised him. I’d been racing professionally for eight years, and I’d been back once.’

Nash met her eyes. ‘His ex-wife told me I was to blame. Jack always wanted the career, but I was the one who got the talent. So I quit racing. I moved back to Sydney and I lived with him for a year. Got his business back on its feet, went every day to AA with him and made sure he was okay. I owed it to him. He got me to university. He’s my brother. And he hates me.’

‘But why?’

‘The talent and the luck. To my old man I was a meal ticket, and my brother was convinced I stole what should have been his. In my family nobody works. The joke is I’ve worked hard all my life to get where I am. That’s what I do. I work. I came back to Europe and I sold the design for Blue 11, and part of the reason I did it was because I wanted to show them it was more than luck, more than being able to hold a car on the road at speed.’

His expression was grim. ‘It should have been enough for me, but it wasn’t. I love to race. And now I don’t have to prove anything. To the old man, to Jack, even to myself. I don’t want to lose it a second time.’

Lorelei was quiet. Finally she said, ‘Hence the comeback?’

‘You picked up on that the other night at dinner?’

‘It was hard not to. I was at the table, Nash.’

He put his hands palm-down on the table, giving her a wry smile. ‘Have I ever told you, you do have a world-class ass, Ms St James?’

‘Several times,’ she replied dryly, dabbing at the tears in the corners of her eyes, then offering up her most beguiling smile. He deserved it after that. ‘I think you should take me home and I’ll show it to you.’

Nash pushed back his chair, raised his hand for the cheque.

* * *

Lorelei lay with her head on his chest, her mind full of the story he had told her. She knew it was selfish, but she couldn’t help wishing he wasn’t staging this comeback—because it was going to have repercussions on their fledgling relationship.

‘Why now, Nash? Why race now?’

His voice was heavy, relaxed. ‘Like I told you, I started out racing in spite of my father. Now I race for myself.’

‘But why now in particular?’ she pursued.

‘I don’t know.’ He yawned. ‘At the risk of sounding New Agey, I’ve been feeling a lack in my life and I know racing will fill that.’

‘What sort of lack?’

Nash chuckled. ‘Not the sort you’re imagining, Lorelei.’

A little frustrated, she lifted her chin. ‘You don’t know what I’m thinking.’

‘Yeah...’ his smile was lazy ‘...I do. I’m thirty-four. All anyone’s going to be asking over the coming months before I start winning any flags is whether it’s an early midlife crisis.’

‘You’re confident of winning?’

He gave her that very male look she was already familiar with. It was a redundant question. He was confident about everything, and he always won.

She sat up. ‘During the early months of my rehabilitation the thing that got me out of bed was the desire to get back in the saddle. It was only when I realised I couldn’t go back to competitive riding that I found the emptiness resided not in the fulfilment of a dream but in the absence of anything else in my life.’