Page 89 of Fast & Reckless
“What about the sponsors?” Paul looked to Simone.
Simone pressed her palms to the conference table. “I think I’ve put out the fires with Rally Fuel and Archer Autoparts. They’re not too spooked. I’ve got conference calls with Compendium Banking, Marchand Timepieces, and Helix thisafternoon. I’ll see what I can do to smooth this over.” Her eyes flicked up to Will’s and then away again. “Velocity is another matter.”
Will stifled a groan. He already knew the bad news from Velocity. They were having an emergency meeting in New York this afternoon to discuss shutting down the new line and possibly dropping their sponsorship altogether. Personally, he didn’t give a shit if his name was never slapped on a single pair of trainers. But now that his initial fury had subsided, he had to acknowledge that the loss would be a serious financial blow to Lennox. Mira wasn’t wrong about that part.
“Are they pulling the plug?” Connor asked.
“That remains to be seen. It’s a major deal, lucrative for everyone involved, so they won’t want to jettison it unless they determine Will to be too much of a liability.”
“Up until yesterday, they couldn’t get enough of me.”
“And then you pummeled a fellow driver and crashed your car into a wall,” Simone said. “You came into this season with a reputation”—Will started to protest but Simone spoke over him—“earned or not. And I know you’ve walked the straight and narrow all season, but it doesn’t take much to stir up old talk. On many fronts.”
A moment of tense silence stretched out as Simone’s meaning sank in. Mira. They were talking about Mira and what that bastard Brody had done to her years ago. Except that’s not how it was playing out in the press. Violet had shown him some of the articles right before the meeting and they made him sick. She was being portrayed as some sort of racing groupie, a siren luring unsuspecting drivers to their doom. They implied that she’d flirted with Brody, her ex-lover, until Will, her current lover, was out of control with jealousy. Not one of them brought up the fact that Brody had been thirty to her sixteenwhen they’d been involved, or that he’d been engaged and lied to her about it. However, as he’d learned personally, facts didn’t matter much when the media had its own story to tell.
She’d been dragged through the mud once before, and she clearly had no intention of being dragged through it again, not even for him. Seeing what was being said about her already, he wasn’t even sure he blamed her. Who was he to force her to stay and face it all over again? Maybe she was right. She needed to get away from this mess and stay away. Not forhisown good, but forhers.
“Okay,” he said, slapping his good hand on the table. “I get it. I fucked up. Tell me what to do to fix it. Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
“It’s not that easy, Will,” Simone said. “We don’t want to get involved in a mudslinging press war with Deloux.”
“So we let them just say what they want about me with no pushback?”
“No, we counter, carefully, strategically. I’ll be looking for an outlet for a sit-down interview, someone who’ll be favorable to you. We’ll be cautious and discreet about what you say and how you say it. Too many details could come across as unpleasant or lurid.”
He could read between the lines. There was a way to play this and come out clean. He could throw Mira under the bus, just like Brody had, let the press think he’d been lured into trouble by an untrustworthy woman. But despite the easy out it presented, no one in the room wanted that, especially him. He’d never turn on her, even though she’d just dumped him. Brody might have hung her out to dry, but he’d never do that to her.Never.
“Okay, find me an interview, tell me what to say, and I’ll do it. I’ll be perfect.”
“Good.” The word was positive but Simone’s expression was still grim. “Until we come up with a strategy, your instructions are to lie low. Don’t give anyone any reason to talk about you. No one even catches sight of you buying a coffee. Understood?”
The warning wasn’t necessary. Maybe in the past he’d have coped with a setback by going on the mother of all benders, but those days were done. Now all he wanted to do was fix this. “Done.”
“We might even send you back to London until you’re cleared to race again, just to avoid the scrutiny of the track press.” Simone eyed Will across the table. “Is that a problem?”
Running back to London like he had something to hide felt all wrong. Leaving Mira behind to weather everything without him also felt wrong. But she’d already walked away from him, hadn’t she? All he’d ever wanted to do was protect her. But when he’d tried to do that his way, he’d set off the chain reaction of disasters that had led them all here. So maybe he needed to try it her way. Maybe the right thing to do was to let her go. For her sake. For everyone’s. He felt sick just imagining it, but he was just going to have to get used to that, because she was already gone, wasn’t she?
Simone stared him down, waiting for an answer.
He didn’t have much choice. He’d started this. Now he had a responsibility to every person in the room—hell, to the hundreds of Lennox employees there and back in England—to do whatever he could to fix it. So he was leaving.
39
Mira’s first instinct was to go back to LA. She knew Violet was right and the drama surrounding her would only get worse, even if she stayed away from Will. But she’d already caused her father enough grief. There was no way she could leave him stranded without an assistant in the middle of the season on top of it.
Her eyes burned and her head felt fuzzy. After she’d left Will the night before, she’d gone back to her hotel room, locked the door, and crumpled into a heap on the floor, sobbing until she didn’t have any tears left. Now all she wanted to do was hide out in the dark and cry some more. But like it or not, she had a job to do, so she was at the track to do it. If she just kept her head down and worked her ass off, this would pass. It had worked for her once before. It had to work again. Maybe if she stayed busy enough, she wouldn’t break down and find Will and beg him to forgive her for what she’d done.
He wasn’t in Monza anymore, anyway. Violet told her this morning that they’d packed him off on a plane to London to wait out his injury and the media firestorm. Gone. He was gone. The ache was relentless, this terrible feeling of wrongness, likeshe was moving through a twisted dream instead of reality. Perhaps Will had been the dream, and this ugliness was what she was left with again, now that she’d woken up.
Walking over to hospitality, she kept her eyes on her notepad, pretending to be engrossed in her work. If people were staring or whispering, she didn’t see them. She didn’t want to. Safely through the crowds, she slipped inside and made her way to the back, where guest services had an office.
“Hi, Dom. I know it’s last minute, but we’ve got the head of Marchand Timepieces and his wife flying in for the race. Can you help me out with some VIP passes?”
Dom, the guest services assistant, leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Well, if it isn’t Mira. Where have you been hiding?”
Guess she’d been too naive, hoping that the people she worked with would be sensitive enough not to mention any rumors they might have heard. “Busy day,” she said with a bright, forced smile. “Is it going to be a problem? The passes?”
Dom eyed her for another moment, then turned to his computer and typed in a few things. When he’d finished, he slid two VIP passes on lanyards across the counter to her. She moved to take them, but he held on to them.
