The Rookie (Racing On The Edge #7) (4 page)

I sent her a text and then put my phone back in my bag to my right.

My eyes flickered to Easton, his elbows propped up on the table in front of him, a laptop next to him and Kyle pointing at the screen.

Closing my eyes, I looked out the window at the passing clouds.

My phone vibrated once more with Lexi telling me to come by their motor coach when we got there.

I laughed at her response. She was always up for food. So was Brody. He was tall and lanky but well built. No idea how he stayed that way with the way he could pack away the food. Lexi was great for Brody. She kept him a little more manageable. I think if it wasn’t for her, he’d have the same addictions her younger brother Cole had.

I have to say Brody was pretty good for Lexi too. We’d both had our fair share of losers when it came to the guys we had chosen in the past.

My first kiss was with a guy named Liam when I was fourteen. Surprisingly he wasn’t a racer. I think he was a baseball player or something like that. Maybe football. It never worked out between us for one obvious reason. My dad scared him off.

After that I stuck to racers. I had my eyes on some who barely knew I was alive so I went for the ones who paid attention to me.

Lost my virginity at a party to a guy named Ricky Hagen just after I turned sixteen. He stopped talking to me before he even came. Literally. Selfish bastard.

Then there was Brian Tyler. Biggest. Fucking. Mistake. I got into heaps of trouble with that one…dropped out of school, got tattoos, a few tickets, and then made the mistake of moving in with him. Even while living with Brian, I always had my eyes on Rager Sweet, a driver my dad hired right out of high school. Technically speaking, I cheated on Brian with Rager so Brian took his aggression out on my face and I took mine out on his race car with a torch. Yeah, that relationship ended rather abruptly and Brian is lucky to be alive with the men in my life hell bent on protecting the youngest “princess” in the Riley clan at the time.

After Brian I was ready to give up on men and started contemplating becoming a lesbian. Only problem with that life altering decision…was I liked dick and all things about the male specimen.

I was hanging out with my brothers at the track, never able to have the one guy I wanted, trying like hell to stay out of trouble when Dad was injured in Knoxville. That left me spending more and more time with Easton while my family and my dad were recovering from the devastation at Knoxville. After Easton’s win in Texas, we kissed and it went from there. I was seventeen when he proposed under the moon after a win at Richmond. I told him I needed to think about it, gave him a maybe, and then said yes at lunch the next day.

He was very different from anyone I’d been with before. He had an aura of sincerity about him. He was such an easy guy to love. And I fell hard for this racer who treated me like I was the center of his universe.

So it begs to ask, how did we go from that to this? Or now that I think about it, how did
I get like this
is what I should be asking?

I’m pretty sure that I know when it began to turn to shit. I do. It was when Easton decided to go for three championships in one year. If I was completely honest, it started his sophomore season when he finished second in the championship running for Cup and Tate suggested he try it. They agreed that if he was going to do it, they would fund the truck and Nationwide car for one season. I could tell my dad was a bit hesitant to agree, but he did.

Both Tate and my dad saw promise in Easton but they didn’t realize the pressure of what being a rookie in that number nine seat had done to him.

Not only was he trying to fill the shoes of one of the greatest, if not the greatest icons in NASCAR, but he was trying to make his own name. I understood that. No one has ever won all three championships in one year. And to accomplish that in the same car as racing legend Jameson Riley drove would be nothing short of epic.

Though I understood, it wasn’t easy watching him react to the stress of everything. He was constantly distracted by the obligations that agreeing to this challenge entailed. His attention was always distracted, he had no time for himself and if he did, he was filling it with seat time to better himself.

His mood swings were the toughest. I was actually fairly moody myself, shocker, I know, but with Easton, it was like watching a firecracker as the fuse was burning down. You saw it, and you waited for the crack once the spark was gone. You even prepared for it, covered your ears knowing damn well the result would be deafening. But once that spark was lit, there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it. Not one damn thing.

At times, I wondered how much more he could take, or how much more I could take. I was feeling this pressure just as much as he was. How could I not? Yet my feelings weren’t factored into the equation of “us”…this was about Easton and Easton alone. That’s how I knew what we had before was not even remotely close as what we had now.

Every day something different was going on and if it wasn’t racing, it was the drama of it. With fame came publicity and the public eye examining our life. Then the girls started. Couldn’t go anywhere without them being all over him even with me right there, didn’t matter. Those pit lizards were in full effect at all times of the day and night. Even though I trusted Easton, I knew what these skanks were capable of and a man under pressure can only take so much…so, yeah, this was a constant worry of mine as well.

Given the strain, he had to have a way to escape and his method of escape was with Brody, his best friend. Mine was Lexi, my cousin and Brody’s girlfriend.

I’m not sure what I would have done had I not had Lexi to confide in. She understood me and she understood this lifestyle and, let’s face it, I needed someone who knew what I was going through because she lived it too. When Easton and I got married, he’d already been racing full time with Cup. I knew what this lifestyle was and what came with it. What I didn’t expect was my reactions to its affect on our relationship

Growing up, I loved traveling, who wouldn’t? My parents used to tell me that I cried when they left me at home and constantly begged to be on the road with them.

Somewhere along the way that changed.

The catalyst for my change of heart was that all my family, aside from my husband and cousin, were off racing dirt and I wasn’t a part of the dirt racing crew along with them.

I missed them. I rarely saw my nephews and my niece Gray, who was one of the funniest kids I’ve ever seen, even funnier than her dad and my brother, Casten. And being funnier than Casten when he was a kid is a feat in itself!

Easton didn’t get why my family was so close. He was an only child and the fact that he raced Cup literally meant nothing to his parents. They didn’t think racing was a career. It was a hobby to them.

I think because of that Easton pushed people away but valued the title of a relationship. I was his wife. Because of that he expected I would never leave him and would support him no matter where his racing career took him.

There’s a line though. Your spouse isn’t there to bear the brunt of all of your frustrations. Easton didn’t know where the line was these days though. I heard everything, even the shit about my dad. That’s one of the lines that you didn’t cross with me.

I understood my dad wasn’t the easiest to get along with. He and Tate had the same mentality and ran Riley-Harris Racing that way. Any time you get that many drivers together, there’s conflicts and you have one who finishes well and others who don’t. It is what it is and racers need to accept that. There’s only one winner in a race and that winner can’t always be the one who won the week before.

Easton usually did well but when he didn’t, dad wanted to know why. What went wrong? He asked all the teams that when they had an off week but Easton took offense to it. This added to that pressure that he felt and burned down a little more of that firecracker fuse that was always sizzling just under Easton’s surface. It was merely a matter of time before that pop was heard like the shot heard ‘round the world…the only question was who was going to be in the path of the explosion when that happened.

When we got the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, Easton was pulled five different directions immediately. Congratulating him on the win, wanting autographs and catching up with friends. Easily engaged in conversation, he was one of the nicest, most sincere guys you’ll ever meet. In turn, he could never walk through the garage area or the pits without being stopped to talk. My dad was very different at a track and rarely spoke to anyone.

Sure he was standoffish but it was a product of a lifestyle he lived for twenty years and his sanity required him to know where the line was drawn and never step across it. He had been broken. He had been burned by the media and industry too many times.

Easton hadn’t started to crack yet. He would though. They all do.

This time it took us nearly an hour to get from the heli-pad to the motor coach waiting for us.

“What?” he asked when he saw how frustrated I was. I wondered if he even saw me at times like this. Did he notice I was even with him? That I was waiting with him, trampled by fans, pushed aside for it all?

“Nothing.” My eyes were on my phone when I spoke, texting Lexi to go to dinner, knowing Easton had a press conference and then a team meeting. I wasn’t waiting this time, it’d be hours.

He shrugged, not caring enough to apologize which annoyed me. He was never present even when he was. Jessie, Easton’s manager came inside and went over his schedule for the weekend.

Turning around, I headed for the door with my purse in hand. He didn’t even ask where I was going, his left hand obsessively running through his thick brown hair. “What time to I have to be in Birmingham tomorrow morning?”

When I opened the door, Lexi was waiting for me. She looked past me to see Easton at the table with Jessie. “He’s not coming?”

“Nope.” I didn’t even bother asking if he wanted to go. I knew the answer. He didn’t have time. I’m sure Jessie would make sure he ate or one of the boys would be cooking back at the hauler. His needs would be taken care of…mine, well, not so much.