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Leilah: Monsters, the lot of you. He was fine. I think he enjoyed it.
Liv: Duh.
Leilah: ???
Liv: He enjoyed it because he was with you.
Chelsea: Ryan looooves you.
Marielle: It’s so obvious.
Leilah’s heart squeezed, tighter than before.
Leilah: You’re wrong.
Liv: No, girl, you’re clueless.
Leilah: NO. YOU’RE WRONG!
She gripped the phone and stared down at it, fighting back the sob that clawed at her throat. She wanted to tell them. She needed to talk to them about the kiss—the amazing, knee-weakening kiss—and the horrible aftermath. But not like this. Not in a text.
Bubbles blinked as her friends tried to compose responses to her outburst, so she hurriedly typed out an excuse:
Leilah: Sorry. Gotta run. Let’s have a girls’ night soon, and I’ll tell you all exactly how dramatically wrong you are. Kay?
The idea was met with a flurry of thumbs-up emojis.
Chelsea: Can’t wait. It’s my turn to host. I’ll look at Jake’s calendar and see when I can kick him out of the cabin then send dates around. Until then, everybody be good.
Elle: But not too good.
Leilah smiled and pocketed the phone, secured the ankle straps on her shoes, then stood and pulled her shoulders back. She descended the stairs with her chin lifted and all the dignity she could muster. Fifteen more minutes, she promised herself. She could handle fifteen more minutes with Ryan Hayes. She’d drop his sorry ass off at Potomac’s campus, then come back here and put Serena through her paces on the skid pad.
She knew from firsthand experience that she couldn’t ruminate about anything, especially not some man, when she was balancing a car on the edge of the traction circle. The skid pad required exquisite finesse and unwavering focus; give the car a touch too much gas or be a fraction of a second too slow on the wheel, and the wet, slippery surface would spin the vehicle. Precision mattered. And nothing clarified a woman’s priorities like a perfectly held drift around the slick circle of polished concrete.
* * *
Ryan changedout of the fire suit, which he folded neatly and placed alongside the helmet on a stainless steel workbench in Leilah’s spotless garage. Then he filled a cup from the water cooler near the door. He drank the ice-cold liquid in one long gulp.
Out of activities to distract him from his boneheaded mistake, he paced around the garage until Leilah emerged from her apartment. Her heels rang out as they struck the metal steps, and he turned to watch her descend the stairs with all the grace and gravity of Venus rising from the sea like a Botticelli painting.
He scoffed at his own florid imagination.Get a grip.It’s Leilah Khan, not the Roman goddess of love and beauty.Although,he immediately countered his own argument,Leilah’s beauty is beyond dispute.
She gave him a searching look as she reached the garage floor. “You okay, Hayes? You look dazed.”
He shook his head. “Yeah, sure. I guess I’m still reeling from the ride.”
“That’s what has you reeling?”
She asked the question in a measured tone as she walked past him to pluck a set of keys from the board near her office door. Unsure how to respond, he didn’t. She eyed him over her shoulder.
“Come on, then. Let’s get you back to your very important legal work.”
She headed through the open garage bay and raised the hood of the Ferrari. Then she popped the locks on the yellow Porsche parked at the edge of the parking pad and gestured for him to join her.
“What about the race car? You just leave it there?” he asked when he reached the Porsche.
“My team will go over it and put it away,” she told him. “I thought you were in a hurry.”
