Pride After Her Fall

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.