The Chase (5 page)

He was heading from buzzed to full-on drunk.

He wanted to go home.

Shifting on his stool, he pushed his drink away and tried to focus on what Tuesday was saying.

“So then I did one of those simulation drives and I have to say I get the thrill you experience when you go around the track. Speed is sexy.”

What was sexy was what had just walked in the door. Evan’s foot slipped off the rung of the bar stool as he spotted Kendall standing in the doorway, scanning the room.

It had been a long time since he’d seen her in anything other than a sponsor’s golf shirt or a racing suit.

She looked better than he remembered, jeans hugging her in all the right places, a V-neck sweater displaying a fair amount of cleavage. Her hair was loose and flowing down her shoulders, over the white coat she was wearing. As she scanned the room, her fingers played with a necklace dangling above her breasts.

The scary thing was Evan was just as attracted to her as he’d been all those years ago, and maybe it was the liquor, but he had a weird sort of longing taking up residence in his chest, like indigestion, uncomfortable and hopefully temporary.

It was a day that just got stranger and stranger, and he turned to the bartender. “Can I have a water please?” It was time to kill the buzz and go home before the day went from suckfest to total irreversible disaster.

If his brain had been moving a little quicker, he would have ducked out of the bar before Kendall laid eyes on him.

But it was already too late for that. Kendall had spotted them and was heading towards them. “Okay, awkward alert,” he told Tuesday in a low voice. “Kendall just showed up and she’s seen us. It’s too late to make a run for it.”

“Why would we make a run for it? I’m the one who invited her.”

Evan stared at her. “You invited your friend to join you on your date with her ex-boyfriend? That’s fucked up.”

“You and Kendall clearly need to talk and clear the air. You’re both dragging around ten-year-old baggage and that’s just stupid.” She gave a cheerful wave to Kendall.

Evan wanted to crawl under the bar. Right after he strangled Tuesday Jones. It was one thing to make two-minute small talk with Kendall, it was another to be set up to talk about their past.

“This is none of your business,” he told Tuesday, completely irritated. “And I’m not going to—”

“Hey,” Kendall said, coming up to stand in front of their respective bar stools.

Her arms instantly went across her chest.

Good to know she wasn’t feeling this little Oprah moment either. Though she had shown up. Evan wondered what that meant. “Hey,” he said, sure his smile looked more like a psychotic grimace.

“Okay, I’m heading out. Be civil and you’ll be surprised how much better you feel tomorrow.” Tuesday threw down some money, scooped up her purse, cheek kissed Kendall, and breezed towards the door.

“Your friend is nuts,” Evan told Kendall, taking the water the bartender handed him.

“What’s nuts is that I actually listened to her and came down here.” Kendall plunked herself down on Tuesday’s abandoned stool. “Though she did threaten me.”

“With what?” Evan felt a little more at ease knowing Kendall wasn’t any more on board with this than he was.

“She always uses her blog as a threat. But this time she threatened to bring you to my apartment if I didn’t show up.”

“How would she have managed that? I’m not really that maneuverable.”

A hint of a smile crossed Kendall’s lips. “But you are a man, and probably not one to turn down sex. I think her devious plan was to let you think you were going to her apartment.”

Evan’s eyebrows shot up. “She is nuts. God, I pity the man who finds himself in her clutches.” He sipped his water. “And I would not have had sex with her. I’m not that easy.”

Kendall snorted. “Sure.”

He felt defensive and more than a little offended. “I’m not some man whore. I don’t just sleep with anyone.” Though he was remembering a particular campsite incident a few months back with Nikki Strickland’s maid of honor and felt a twinge of something that he was not going to call shame.

“I think you’re protesting a little too much.”

He would not rise to the bait, he would not . . .

“I’m a born again virgin,” he told her. “I haven’t had sex in years.”

That would show her.

There was a pause, then she started laughing. “So who are all those women you’ve been prancing around with over the years? Your abstinence counselors?”

It occurred to Evan that she wouldn’t have known who he’d been with if she hadn’t been paying attention to him. “You noticed, huh? Jealous?”

“Of what? Silicone? Hardly.”

“But you’ve clearly noticed them. That says jealousy to me.” Which felt mighty good, he had to admit.

“How could I not notice them? They all have breasts the size of Rhode Island. It’s a little hard to miss that crossing the stage at drivers’ intro.”

“I never took a woman across the stage at drivers’ intro. That’s for wives and fiancées and serious girlfriends.” He wasn’t sure why it was important to clarify that, but it was.

“And you’re allergic to those apparently.”

That felt a little below the belt. Evan scrutinized Kendall, noting the high color in her cheeks. She was nervous and agitated being with him. Ten years was a long time to wonder and he was feeling a little tired of it.

“Why do you think that is exactly, huh, Kendall?”

“I have no idea. You’re shallow?”

He had thought about confessing, thought about telling her that he had planned to propose marriage to her, that her sudden cold shoulder had had more impact on him in the last ten years than he’d like to admit. But that snarky comment stopped him.

“Exactly,” he told her, scooting his water closer in reach on its cocktail napkin. “How did you guess?”

Kendall sighed. “I’m sorry, that was bitchy.” She fingered her necklace again and gestured for the bartender’s attention. “I think I need a beer.”

“Look, just tell Tuesday we talked and we’ll call it good. There really isn’t any point in digging into the past. We had some good times and then we didn’t. No big deal.” Evan worked pretty damn hard to inject total nonchalance into his voice.

And he was not sneaking shots at Kendall’s cleavage. Much.

But Kendall suddenly blurted out, “How could you laugh at me?”

He had to admit, the rum had his engines cranking over slowly, but he had no clue what she was talking about. “Huh? I’ve never laughed at you. I was just teasing you today, honestly, I wasn’t trying to be a pig.” Because he suffered from the need to get the last word, he couldn’t stop himself from tacking onto his apology, “And you brought up girl parts first.”

She waved her hand impatiently, then ordered a beer from the bartender, which is what he should have done. Screw what other people thought. If he’d stuck with beer, he wouldn’t have felt like his head was floating in Jell-O.

“I don’t mean today.” Kendall turned and stared at him intently. “Do you remember that last night we were together? How you snuck into my room and spent the night?”

“Yeah, of course I remember. It was a good night. We made love then just lay there talking about the future.” A future he had assumed included her.

“I told you I wanted to be a driver in the Cup series and you laughed at me.”

Evan frowned at her. “No, I didn’t. I admit you caught me off guard. I mean, I knew you liked racing midget cars and that you saw it as a hobby, but you’d never talked about driving pro. It startled me.”

“Why, because a girl can’t drive?”

“No,” he said slowly, wondering where this was going. “I knew you could drive. I went to a bunch of your races, remember? What surprised me was it seemed like an ambition that came out of nowhere. I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Kendall frowned, her forehead wrinkling. She took a long swallow of her beer, opened her mouth to speak then shut it again.

“What?” he asked her.

“Did you think it was a stupid goal? That I was setting myself up to fail?”

Shifting on his chair, he turned so he could see her fully, his legs entrapping hers. “No. I was young and confident, both in me, and in you. I went home and fantasized about you and me finishing one-two in the series. I knew you could do it. I even made plans for you to hit the track in one of my dad’s cars later that week.”

“You did what?” Kendall’s eyes were as big as saucers.

“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 fucking 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 fucking
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.