Page 115 of Tipping Point

She was in yesterday’s clothes and her hair, it was an absolute bramble of curls, wild and lush.

I gave her the hair tie back. It had been hers all along, I guess.

I had told her it was her choice to make. Like it had been my mothers. My mother had chosen to leave.

Camille had chosen to stay.

She had chosen to stay while I took on another two years of racing, a dangerous sport, one that ruined lives forever, and she chose to do it unafraid.

She shields her eyes from the sun when I step outside, looks up at me.

Every time we sit here, we remember our first night here, and I have to fight a raging erection. She flew over last week. The racing season is over and she’s joining me on winter break.

Which means I get to make love to her on every surface in this goddamn house.

I adjust my jeans and she laughs, swings her legs down, and waves me towards the empty seat. She snatches her phone off the table.

“Listen to this.” She scrolls to the correct article and starts reading out loud.

“Rheese Knox, driver for Ainsworth-Sinclair based in the UK, has expressed his enthusiasm at the prospect of Finnegan Brennan signing on for two more years of driving with Delta Victor.” She grins up at me. “When asked about it he said, and I quote directly, ‘Finn gave me a challenge this year, but had to fall out because of an injury. I’m tired of the speculation. I look forward to beating him next year, so that everyone can see once and for all that I am the better driver, whether or not he has his mojo back.’”

“Now that sounds like a fun challenge for next year.” I smile at her.

She laughs, a merry sound that spills over the garden.

It takes the very air from my lungs. This thing we have, it feels so fragile. And yet, it’s the foundation that I am building my life on.

An actual life.

“Dinner tonight in town?” I ask as I take the seat opposite her.

She shakes her head. “I have a meeting with Rupert. We’re trying to schedule as much of the filming for next year as we can. Velocity is giving us a behind the scenes look at what happens at their headquarters over the winter break, and Bianchi might actually follow suit.”

I grin at her.

“You going to do some espionage while you’re at it?”

I’m joking, because actually when my agent announced our relationship there was a severe backlash from the other teams. She gets an inside look that was unparalleled in the industry, and everyone was freaking out that she’d be leaking secrets to Delta Victor. We had to sign NDAs as thick as telephone books before they even remotely started calming down.

WebFlix Max also hadn’t been impressed.

It helped that we started sleeping together mid-way through last season, a published fact that she balked at when it was released. She still wasn’t used to being on the news.

But since she hadn’t spilled their secrets throughout the year, at least she had built a foundation of trust amongst the other teams.

“Hey.” I smile at her. “Ollie’s wife is in labour.”

“No way!”

“Yeah.” I grin. “Thought you’d like to know that.”

She grins back at me.

“So, how about dinner tomorrow night?”

She laughs, shakes her head. “Amy lands tomorrow. She’s over for a week. I’m thinking I should invite Jay, too. See if there’s anything there.”

I groan. I like Amy. And I like Jay. I just also like it when Camille walks naked through the house and lets me tip her back on the carpet in front of the fireplace…

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