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“That’s right…we had. Are you sticking to your story?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I guess not. I read an article about you.”
“Which one?”
She’d actually read seven articles on him and two on his father.
“A couple. I Googled you and then read the articles on the Internet.”
“You Googled me?”
“Yup. You had lots of links.”
He shook his head. “What’d you find out?”
“Stuff you already know,” she said, embarrassed that she’d told him that. Annie had planned to keep her snooping into his past a secret, although it hadn’t felt like snooping. She’d just wanted to know everything she could about him. She’d needed to know more about the man she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about.
And Annie liked what she’d found in those articles. The man she’d read about was exactly like the man she’d met.
“Do you still think I’m arrogant?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Why do you care about that?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “I think I want to impress you.”
She thought about that for a minute. Who wouldn’t be impressed by him? “Well, at the risk of giving you a swelled head…you should know that you’re very impressive on paper.”
He leaned closer to her, his face inches from hers. “Only on paper?”
She shivered a little as she felt the warmth of his breath against her cheek.
“Maybe.”
“What can I do to change your answer?”
“I’m not sure. If you try too hard, I’ll see through your actions. And then you’ll just be arrogant again.”
“I’m going to have to work harder to improve my image.”
She glanced around Tucker’s garage area as his team moved the car around, getting it ready for the test laps. Their movements were a familiar dance to her. They pushed the car out of the garage and then maneuvered it around to push it back in, nose facing out.
“You can do that later. I have to get back to work,” she said.
In a few minutes the crews would start testing the engines and she needed to get back to Dave’s garage to take some more photos.
Jared took her elbow and led her out of the garage into the alleyway between the bays and the haulers. There were many people in the area.
“Will you have lunch with me in my owner’s suite?”
She didn’t even have to think about it, she responded immediately. “Yes.”
DAVE SAW HIS SISTER talking to Jared MacNeil and told himself it was none of his damned business who she dated.
“Get your head in the game,” Vinnie said, coming up behind him.
He and Vinnie had been together almost from the start of Dave’s racing career. He respected his crew chief and together they were damn near unstoppable when they were at the top. “It is in the game.”
“I’m not going to argue with you, but glaring at MacNeil isn’t what you need to be doing right now.”
“What do you know about the guy?”
“Same stuff everyone else does?his team is small but pretty powerful. They win a lot of races with only two drivers.”
“I meant personally.”
“Not much,” Vinnie said.
Dave put his helmet on and got in his car to drive his test laps. When he came in he checked his speed against the other drivers and saw that Aldridge was faster than he was after the first few laps.
“The balance feels a little off, Vinnie.”
“Where?”
“The left rear feels like it’s sticking to the track,” Dave said.
The team made the adjustments to the car. Balance was handled by adding or removing chunks of lead within the frame rails to redistribute weight in the four corners.
When Dave’s car was ready again he backed out of the garage just as Aldridge drove past his bay. The other driver gave him a snarky thumbs-up.
Dave knew it wasn’t exactly charitable but he wanted a piece of Aldridge. He wanted to beat Aldridge so badly he could taste it. That upstart had pushed his buttons from the very beginning. Always nipping at his heels and trying to…Dave didn’t know.
Dave pulled down his driver’s netting and saw Annie moving around his car, snapping photos. He didn’t like the fact that she was dating someone from Tucker’s team, much less the team owner. In the back of his mind was the thought that if he won this weekend maybe she’d lose interest in MacNeil.
“Go get some speed, Dave,” Vinnie said though the headphones.
Dave knew he had to let the thing with Tucker go, but he’d never been able to. There were several drivers that he sparred with on the track, but off-track they were buds.
