Page 46 of Kiss & Collide
Carefully, she slid out from under his arm, trying not to wake him.
Once she’d made it out of bed without waking him, she quietly snatched her clothes off the floor, retrieved her bag from where she’d left it by the door, and escaped into the bathroom.
One glance in the mirror brought the whole night back to her in vivid detail.
Last night … dinner, talking, walking through Paris, standing on the bloody Pont des Arts looking at the river … Had they just gone on a fuckingdate?
Hurriedly she pulled her clothes back on, splashed water on her face, and put her hair back in a ponytail. Then she grabbed her phone to check the time. The last thing they needed was to miss their flight to Milan. It was early still. Time enough for her to escape back to her room and shower off last night. If she stood under the hot water long enough, maybe it would wash her memories away, too.
Then she noticed a new message. It was from Cam.
Talked to Madison. She’s on board. What does Chase think?
Her heart was pounding and her head felt thick, like a hangover although she’d barely drunk anything last night. She could still feel him all over her, touching her, holding her, kissing her.
Her hands were trembling as she typed out a reply to Cam.
Chase is on board, too. I’ll call to work out the details.
Then, as quietly as possible, so she wouldn’t wake him, she slipped out of Chase’s room and fled.
19Villa Reale, Monza, Italy
One of the biggest sponsors of the sport, Weatherfront Cloud Computing, was throwing a blowout party after Monza at the Villa Reale, an eighteenth-century Italian villa. Chase squeezed between clusters of party guests, holding his beer over his head to keep from spilling it. It felt like everybody who was anybody in the sport was currently stuffed into this ballroom.
“Rabia!” He finally found her in the corner with Leon and Violet and immediately caught her up in a bear hug. “You are my fuckinghero!”
“Put me down, you idiot,” she groused good-naturedly. “All I did was write a computer program. Well, I oversaw the writing of the program.”
“Yeah, well, that program got me up to thirteenth place today.Thirteenth!We’re practically fucking midfield.”
Rabia had started making changes the second Oscar Davies had loaded his stuff into his car and driven away from the Pinnacle factory. And while there wasn’t much she could do with the car itself—a car designed by Oscar—she was hard at work exploring every possible way they might maximize its performance.
The first thing she’d done was install software that could test every possible combination of suspension settings on the car, running thousands of simulated laps to find the best ones. Then she put the reserve drivers to work, trying out the promising ones in the simulator so she could pick the best starting point for Friday. It was something most of the other teams had been doing for a while, but Oscar had never wanted to devote the time and money to upgrading the system.
This weekend was the first time the car had started out much closer to its optimal setup, and the results were undeniable.
It was still not—and would never be—awinningcar, but now it felt like it could be acompetitivecar.
Chase signaled to a passing waiter carrying a tray of full champagne flutes. The first he passed to Rabia. “If this is what you can do with just a couple of weeks, I can’t wait to see what you do next season.”
He passed a glass to Leon and, last, to Violet. She avoided meeting his gaze as she took the glass, the same way she’d been avoiding him since Paris. He suspected spending the night with him had freaked her out. He hadn’t even been all that surprised to wake up that morning and find her gone. Pretty on-brand for her.
He’d figured that if he pursued her, she’d shut down even more, so he’d given her some space. She’d been texting and emailing about PR stuff and getting this weird Madison Mitchell thing going, but that was the extent of their connection since then. But she’d had a week to shake off her Paris weirdness, and he wasn’t going to let her keep avoiding him.
“To Rabia,” he said, raising his glass.
“To Rabia!” Leon said.
Violet was on edge, but she still toasted Rabia, giving a tight-lipped smile. When Chase touched his glass to hers, hetried to catch her eye, but she studiously glanced away, the Violet-is-uncomfortable move he knew so well.
“Everything okay?” Leon asked, glancing between him and her.
“I’m fine,” Violet said, clipped and tight.
“Me, too,” Chase replied. “I’m also totally fine. Been fine since I got back from Paris.”
She finally looked at him, scowling with displeasure. “Chase.”
