The Chase (Fast Track #4)(29)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“Right when you apologize for calling me a thickheaded mule.”

They eyed each other warily. It almost sounded like Elec was itching to fight again.

“I really should go,” Kendall said, gesturing towards the door and looking monstrously uncomfortable. “I have to get back to my hotel and get some sleep. I have a four A.M. flight to LA out of Knoxville.”

“No, no, don’t go.” He almost added that everyone else was leaving, but his mother would have killed him for saying something so rude. He didn’t need to tick her off any more today than he already had. “I was planning to fire up the grill and cook some steaks.”

How desperate did he sound? He was offering to cook beef for the woman.

“Thanks, but I do need to go.” Kendall started for the door. “Good to see you, Mrs. Monroe. Elec. Eve.”

Evan followed her and stepped outside with her, shutting the door behind him. “Can I call you a cab or something? How are you getting to your hotel?”

“My driver is here. I’ll text him and find him. Thanks for the offer . . . another time.”

What did that mean exactly? The cab, dinner, sex . . . Evan had no clue. “I’ll see you in LA tomorrow. I have the next flight after you. I’ll be sliding in right when they need us at nine A.M.”

“Shouldn’t you go to bed then?”

“I need to eat. A lot. Then I’ll go to bed. Alone, unfortunately.” He gave her what he hoped was a charming smile. “Unless you change your mind?”

“Nice try.”

Then Kendall shocked the hell out of him by leaning forward and giving him a kiss. Not one on the cheek, like she had the other day, but full on the mouth. It wasn’t a lingering kiss, but it was no sisterly smooch either.

He barely had time to wrap his arms around her and kiss back when she was pulling away. Spinning on her heels, she called out, “See you tomorrow.”

Then she was gone.

Evan was confused. And horny. Until the breakup, it had never been this complicated with Kendall back in the day. They had dug each other and that was that. Now it felt like they were playing a game he didn’t know the rules to.

Which he didn’t like one damn bit.

When he stepped back into his coach, all voices stopped mid-sentence.

“What?” he asked his family as they all stared at him, expressions guilty. “What were you saying about me?”

“Are you dating Kendall?” his mother asked.

“No.” He shot Eve a glare. She had to have been the one to narc on him. “We’ve become friends again, that’s all.” They weren’t dating. You couldn’t call it that.

“After what happened before? Oh, Evan, she broke your heart.”

Evan sighed. “Mom, that was a million years ago. Does anyone want a steak or what? Because I need to eat before I get really cranky.”

“If you marry Kendall Holbrook you’ll never give me grandchildren. She’s just starting her career, she’s not going to want to stop and have babies.”

A throbbing started behind Evan’s eyes. “Mom. I am not going to marry Kendall Holbrook.”

He could barely keep Kendall in the same room with him.

He wasn’t going to marry anyone. That’s what he’d been saying for years and he meant it.

Because he hated to admit it, but if it wasn’t going to be Kendall, he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it.

CHAPTER NINE

KENDALL cracked open her fourth Red Bull and took a sip.

“Are you sure you want to drink another one of those?” Kendall’s personal assistant, Frankie Halliday, gave her a questioning look, eyebrows raised behind her cat-eye glasses.

Frankie was in her early fifties, was more stylish than Kendall could ever hope to be in six lifetimes, and had a steady stream of men through her life. She was efficient and breezy and had everything anyone could ever need in her expensive handbag, yet always produced a needed item with zero digging.

She was an excellent personal assistant, but at the moment, Kendall wanted Frankie, the cab, and the entire world to disappear around her. She desperately needed some sleep, but hadn’t been able to get any in her hotel room because an amorous couple next door had still been going strong when her alarm went off at 2 A.M. Then on the plane to LA she had gotten the aisle seat next to a man who had snored violently the entire flight. If she had to guess, she’d say she had slept a grand total of an hour, coming off of a race day.

Hence the Red Bull.

“If I don’t drink this, I’m going to take a facer in the middle of the commercial shoot. Or at the very least I’ll be standing there staring vacantly at the camera, no clue what my lines are.”

“Do you have your lines yet?”

“No. Again, the reason for the Red Bull.” She held the can up in salute as the cab pulled up to the production studio. “They said they would be easy and that there would be a teleprompter. But I don’t believe them.”

Kendall also didn’t believe that she was going to be able to make her feet stop jiggling up and down anytime soon.

“There is hair and makeup, I’m assuming?” Frankie reached into her bag and withdrew a lipstick, which she put on flawlessly without the use of a mirror.

“Why? Do I look that bad?”

“You don’t look good.”

If that was how the person she paid responded, Kendall shuddered to think what the average person would think of her appearance at the moment. “I’ve been awake for forty-eight hours. More than that. It’s not my fault. And this is Untamed deodorant. Maybe this is the look they’re going for.”

“What look is that? The three-day bender?”

“No. Wild and free . . . sort of tousled and fresh out of bed. Untamed.”

“Unclaimed is more like it.” Frankie paid the driver and opened her cab door.

“Hey. That was just rude.” Kendall put her hand to her chest. Her heart was racing a little faster than was strictly normal. “I don’t look that bad.”

Except when she walked in, the director introduced himself as Jonathan Anderson Catsgow and then turned and shouted, “Makeup!”

He smiled at Kendall. “We’ll just freshen you up a bit.”

“Thanks, I was driving yesterday—I came in eleventh place, by the way, which is pretty good—and then I had to fly here overnight and I didn’t get any sleep at all, but I do respond well to concealer if you want to dab a little of that under my eyes—”