The Chase (Fast Track #4)(9)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“Yeah. I figured you’d want to get behind the wheel of a stock car, and my dad was cool with it. I thought maybe someone would see you burning up the track and take an interest in your career.”

There was a moment of silence, then Kendall clapped her hand over her mouth in horror, a mumbled “Oh, dear God” coming out from behind her fingers.

“Why did you break up with me?” he asked, unnerved by the conversation and her reaction. “I called you a hundred times and you never answered. What the hell happened?”

“Because you laughed at me. Because I thought you were patronizing me and wouldn’t support my dreams.”

Evan needed a second to pick his f**king chin up off the bar. “Are you serious? That was the reason?”

Kendall winced as Evan gave her a stricken look of horror. “It seems maybe I was wrong,” she said, her heart pounding and her stomach clenched in nausea. “I don’t know, it seemed totally logical to me at the time. I mean, I was hurt, really hurt. Devastated by the thought that you were calling me a moron.”

“I didn’t laugh at you!”

“Yes, you did!” She could regret and apologize for her overreaction, but she had not imagined that startled guffaw he’d given her. Which he said had been just that—startled.

“This is insane.” Evan ran his fingers through his hair. “Why didn’t you just talk to me about it? We could have worked this out in a five-minute conversation.”

“I don’t know. I was eighteen. And totally defensive because you know my dad got me into racing. I was his substitute son, the only tomboy out of three daughters, so he pushed me into all of that. Then when I said I could drive pro, he basically told me that was nuts.” Kendall reached for her drink. God, this was an appalling confession of her clear daddy issues. “I thought you were doing the same thing, betraying me the same way.”

“I wasn’t.” Still looking like he’d been smacked a half dozen times, Evan reached for his drink, paused halfway to his mouth, then put it back down and picked up his water instead. “I stood there on your front porch and begged you to come out and talk to me.”

She remembered. She remembered the pain, the raw, brutal agony of wondering if she were doing the right thing, but feeling so hurt, so devastated, so duped. “And I stood in the house crying, thinking that the boy I had given my heart to didn’t respect me or believe in me.”

“You . . . you gave your heart to me?”

“Duh.” Kendall sucked half of her beer down. “I told you I loved you. You owned my heart.”

“I told you I loved you, too,” he said defensively. “I cried, Kendall. Okay? I f**king cried when you wouldn’t talk to me.”

There was something about the way he said it, like he wanted credit for the extra visual of his emotion, that made her press her lips together to keep a giggle from slipping out. This was a strange and almost farcical conversation.

Fortunately, Evan realized she was about to laugh, and his mouth split into a grin. “God, that sounded overdramatic. Listen to us. We’re as big of drama queens now as we were at eighteen.”

Letting her laughter out, she nodded. “Seriously. Maybe if we had both laid off the drama and just talked, we wouldn’t have hurt each other.”

“You more so than me.” He grinned. “You set the drama in motion.”

Kendall nudged his leg with her foot, smiling back. “Fine. You’re right. I was putting my issues with my dad onto you and that was stupid. I should have listened to you, should have taken your calls, should have given you a chance to explain. I’m sorry.” She really was. For the whole damn debacle.

God, it was like a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders. Ten years of imagined betrayal gone, just like that, with ten minutes of communication. It was insane.

“And I’m sorry if I didn’t have the right words to let you know I was proud of you. That I supported you.”

“Thank you.” Kendall let out a sigh of relief. Her shoulders even physically relaxed down a few inches. Tuesday had been right, this talk needed to happen.

Turned in his stool, Evan’s legs were on either side of hers, and she suddenly became aware of how close he was sitting to her. How the denim of his jeans was scraping along hers, his upper body leaning towards her. He was as attractive to her now as he had been at nineteen, and he’d been leaner then with youth. Now he was all hard-packed muscle, and Kendall swallowed hard. It had been difficult enough to pretend she wasn’t attracted to him when she had thought he was a raging jerk, but now, well, getting into the Cup series had been easier than denying her feelings now.

She was so attracted to him.

“Wow,” he said. “This is funny and horrible all at the same time, isn’t it? I mean, we really tore each other up and for what?”

“Stupid,” she agreed.

“So what do we do now?” he asked. The corner of his mouth tilted up. “I’m used to hating you for breaking my heart. I think I need to do some mental recalculating.”

“Me, too.”

Was it her imagination or was he looking at her differently? Not with a “gee, glad we worked this out” kind of look. It was something a little more curious than that, like he was studying her face, her lips, her chest.

Maybe she was doing the same thing, for all she knew. Maybe it was just a normal reevaluating, changing the lens through which you viewed someone after you realized you’d been wrong, but personally hers felt a lot more like plain old lust. Which was a stupid response and one she needed to squash immediately if not sooner.

“So that’s it? We’re just good now? Friends?” Evan asked, his expression a little bemused.

“Being friends would be nice.” And so would having him take her hard up against a wall.

Yikes. Where had that thought come from? Kendall crossed her legs in between his. Tuesday was right. She needed to get out more.

“Okay, so fill me in on the last ten years. What have you been up to?”

That question was easy. “Umm, let’s see. Driving with single-minded determination. That’s about it.”

“No quickie Vegas weddings? No trips around the world? No moment where you walked away from it all and decided you wanted to be like a pastry chef or something?”

“No, no, and no. I wanted to be a driver.”

“And now you are.”

“And now I am.”