Fearless by Eve Carter Page B

me. Helping Kenny at Rookies was a temporary gig. I knew that. Stupid! I could barely eat the antipasto salad on my plate. I picked at the slice of provolone, rolling and unrolling it with a slice of salami, but not eating it.
    Jesse held my gaze across the table, his blazing blue eyes making me feel like I was the only woman there. Maybe I only saw what I wanted to see. Maybe his career was more than I could offer him; maybe it fulfilled him in a way I couldn’t. Maybe I had been fooling myself but, for a few more minutes, I just wanted to sit in this dumb chair and believe that there could be a kind of magnetism between us, so alluring that it would solve everything.
    A strange mix of anxiety and anticipation shot its way to the surface, like an angry Pit-bull, lunging to the end of its chain. Struggling with toxic emotions, I forced them back to speak.
     “So, what are you going to do about training? I hope you don’t have to go back to New York for that.”
    Jesse watched me, taunted me with a slow smile, checking for my reaction as he stared into my eyes. His gaze flitted to my plate, to my nervous twitchings with my food, and he took my hand away from it, pulling it into his, entwining our fingers as one. I shivered, though it was warm at the beach. Hairs prickled and my awareness shifted to the warm caress of his hand, his strong fingers working mine, rubbing, stroking, and sliding in and out between mine. I took him in; his long strands of hair, perfectly sexy strands, fell in an untamed fashion into those sapphire eyes.
    They flickered to my lips and back to meet mine. He enveloped my hand in both of his and, leaning forward, drew them to his lips. I felt the fleshy softness of his mouth pressing on the back of my hand.
    “I like to hear that from you.”
    A delicious buzz hummed through my bloodstream, while his gaze caught me and tamed me, like a wild Mustang. It was amazing what merely looking at this man did to my body. He untangled his fingers and lowered my hand to the table, leaving it hot and wet, like me. I blinked, and stared at the palm of my hand for a second, the fire of his kiss still burning like a freshly blazed tattoo, before I shoved it under the table.
    “I can stay here for most of the training. There are plenty of facilities around L.A. I might have to do a longer stretch, at some point, at a training camp, once I join a team, but we’ll see.”
    I felt my chest expand. My insides bubbled with emotions. I could breathe. We hadn’t discussed how to handle the future, but it was a relief that we didn’t have to make serious decisions about our relationship for a while.
    I had a lot of pending issues with my family situation. After the birthday party fiasco, I felt like my life was in limbo, neither in Heaven nor Hell, just stuck, hanging in the middle in the vapors, wondering when and if my dad would cut me off financially.
     Kat advised me to give my dad a day to cool down. I told her I’d maybe give him a month. My hot tempered dad didn’t do ‘cool.’ Just a guess, but I don’t think father-daughter relationships were covered in law school.
    I patted myself on the back for making the progress I had: moving in with Kat, reinventing myself, just being in control of my own dreams in general. And then I met Jesse, the one man I was willing to trust with my heart, the first man who unnerved me with his good looks alone. Oh, he may have had a bad boy reputation, but he was sexier than sin and just when I was striking out on shaky trust legs, now he threw me for a loop with this talk of getting back into racing, which meant leaving me. Like the others. Like my mom. Like my dad. Was his passion for racing greater than his passion for me?
    Melting into my chair, I could hardly get a word out. One weak little syllable managed to squeak its way out, past my inner turmoil, barely above a whisper. “Oh.” I cleared my throat and tried to compose myself, as if none of it flustered me in the