For a second this afternoon something intense had flared between them. Too intense. He didn’t do intense. Except in racing. The vulnerable look in her eyes had driven him from her arms and her warm, flushed body immediately after sex. He’d retreated to the bathroom to fill the big whirlpool tub for round three. And his cell phone had rung.
By the time he’d finished talking to his team manager, Toby had needed to distract himself with mind-numbing sex, but his sheets had been cold and Amelia long gone.
He scanned Jimmy’z. The club was packed. Before the crash, he’d have enjoyed losing himself in the music and dancing. But tonight the noise reverberated off the walls loud enough to make his eardrums vibrate the way a pounding rubber mallet does a dented fender. And he couldn’t dance without falling on his ass.
It had been two weeks since the crash and his balance wasn’t any better. Would it ever be?
He shut down that line of thinking. He hadn’t achieved this level of success with a negative attitude.
It took him fifteen minutes to locate Amelia on the crowded floor beneath the flashing multicolored lights. Watching her move to the insistent beat in her gauzy flapper-style dress gave him an instant hard-on.
All he wanted to do was forget her. Instead she kept sucking up more and more of his brain space. He’d had her. So why did he still want her? Why wouldn’t any other good lookin’ woman in the club do? But his radio was tuned to her station and he couldn’t change it. God knows he’d tried.
He cut through the crowd, taking a straight line toward his target. Guests in various states of inebriation gyrated around him. He’d been in places like this before, where you didn’t need a partner to get on the floor and dance. Women outnumbered the men, and a guy could find himself in the middle of an adolescent fantasy—surrounded by willing women who wanted to party. Not his scene. But he knew plenty who practiced the more-the-merrier method of recreation.
Amelia had her back to him and didn’t see him when he stopped behind her.
“This cat-and-mouse game is getting old, sugar.” He struggled to keep the anger out of his voice. Her ditching him again had pissed him off that much. If not for the concierge, Toby wouldn’t have known where to find her tonight.
She whirled around with a hand to her chest. She had on another one of those push-up bras that gave her the kind of cl**vage he wanted to bury his face in.
“Toby. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.”
The women she’d been dancing with opened their circle to include him, but Amelia planted herself between him and her companions. Hunger flickered in her eyes burning a trail over his black shirt and pants. She wanted him and she didn’t want to share. The knowledge made his pulse beat as hard and fast as the bass drum throbbing from the speakers. But then she blinked and the reserved nurse returned.
He’d be damned if he could untangle her mixed signals. She alternated between burning his brain and freezing his johnson.
Someone jolted him from behind, knocking him off balance. He struggled to regain his equilibrium. Amelia’s hands curled around his biceps and steadied him.
“Could we…?” She nodded toward a dark corner.
Screw that. He needed to get off this floor before he fell like a drunk and out of this noise before his head exploded. He headed toward the nearest exit and found himself in an enclosed and mostly deserted courtyard overlooking the Mediterranean. The doors closed behind them, muffling the racket inside.
Amelia released his arm, took a deep breath and then blew it out again before meeting his gaze. “Toby, I thought this…thing between us would work. But it won’t.”
His eyebrows lowered like a slamming garage door. Green flag. Red flag. What was her deal? “We’re good together, Amelia. Like it or not, I flip your toggle switch. And you sure as hell flip mine.”
“But I don’t think I can—”
Her protest lit the fire of anger and frustration that had been stewing since the phone call from Earl, his team manager.
“Don’t give me any crap about your mother. She may have a short fuse, but she at least cared enough to stick around. Mine didn’t. And if you’ve been trying to insult me by comparing me to your father, then you missed the mark. The man’s a hero. Mine was a drunken, out-of-work bully. Yours had a job ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the population doesn’t have the balls to do. He risked his life to save others. Mine—”
“You’re wrong. My father was an adrenaline junkie who thought of nothing but getting his next fix. He never thought about his safety, his family. Me.” Her eyes widened. She slapped her fingers over her mouth and then slowly lowered her hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from and I shouldn’t have said it.”
His anger deflated like a sliced tire. “Sounds like your mother’s not the only one who can’t forgive him for getting hurt.”
“I’m not angry with him. I’m not.” But she was. Toby understood. He’d been there before.
He stepped closer, close enough to catch a hint of her perfume on the cool night air. Close enough that the need to take her into his arms almost got the better of him. He settled for skimming his index finger down her stiff spine. She shivered. “It’s okay to be angry, Amelia.”
“No, it’s not. Anger isn’t productive or healthy. And it always leads to—” She shook her head and looked away.
“Am I gonna have to nail you to the bed again to get you to talk?”
Her gaze jerked to his and a shocked laugh burst from her lungs. “Leave it to you to make this about sex.”
“Then make it about something else. Finish what you started.”
“It’s complicated.”
Why did he care? He didn’t need to be drawn into the drama of Amelia’s life. He had enough drama in his own. Especially now. Maybe that was it—he wanted to think about someone else’s problems for a change. “I had a concussion, not a lobotomy. My brain still works. And I’m not going anywhere until you explain.”
She bit her bottom lip and then resignation settled over her face. “My mother and I have never been close, but before the accident my father and I were. I was his…princess, for lack of a better description.”
“And you became his servant.”
“It wasn’t like that. I wanted to help. And my mother—”
“Your mother…?” he prompted when she clammed up again.
“My mother suffered from a severe case of caregiver depression. Some days she couldn’t get out of bed, and when she did it was usually to lose her temper and shout obscenities at Dad. And he gave as good as he got. When they got going, they’d cause wounds they couldn’t fix.”
“Sounds like you had to become the adult in the family.” Something they had in common. “How did you manage school?”
“I just did. It was kind of a refuge, you know? And it wasn’t Mom’s fault that she fell apart or that she and I didn’t get along. I think she saw me as the reason none of her dreams came true. She was only seventeen when she accidentally became pregnant with me. She had to give up her plans for college and medical school. Her parents sent her to one of those homes for unwed mothers where they try to talk you into giving up your baby. She ran away to be with my father and refused to speak to her parents again.”
“How did you manage financially if neither of your parents could work?”
“Dad had disability insurance from the fire department and another policy with the bank that paid off the mortgage if he couldn’t work. It was enough for a while, but then he contracted pneumonia and spent a month in the hospital. The medical bills piled up. We couldn’t cover them. When I was sixteen, the hospital’s collection agency put a lien against our house.
“We were already dancing around social services intervening and putting me in foster care. I had to do something. I had never met my mother’s parents before, but I found them and begged for help. I didn’t know what else to do. They got Mom the psychiatric help she needed to get past the depression and helped with the bills. They paid for my education. Otherwise I never would have been able to afford college.”
Amelia was a fighter. Another thing they had in common. The last thing he needed was something else to like about her.
“And you think sleeping with me will land you in the same boat as your mother?”
She nodded. “I don’t want to get stuck with a guy who takes stupid chances. It turned her into a really ugly person.”
Well, that was honest. Unpleasant. But honest.
“One, you won’t get stuck with me. Two, I may not have a wife or kid depending on me, but Haynes Racing has four hundred employees who count on me to keep roofs over their heads and food in their family’s stomachs. I have no intention of letting them down. That’s why I don’t take stupid chances.
“I’m betting your father didn’t either. And it sounds like he did everything he could to look out for you financially in case something happened to him.
“Accidents happen, Amelia. Bad things happen to good people. Cheaters profit and innocent bystanders get hurt. Sometimes life sucks. The only thing you can control is the decisions you make.”
The words sank in a half beat after he said them, and he realized they didn’t only apply to Amelia. He’d been riddled with guilt over Vincent’s accident even though a NASCAR investigation had cleared him and his crew of any wrong-doing. Toby had done everything within his power to make his pit as safe as possible. Accidents happen. Innocent bystanders get hurt. Vincent didn’t blame him. Maybe it was time for Toby to quit blaming himself for Vincent’s injuries and move forward. The weight on his shoulders eased.
He refocused on the woman beside him. “I doubt your father went into that fire hoping to come out paralyzed. Most men I know would rather die than become dependent on the ones relying on them.”
He shoved his fists into his pockets and stared at the lights outlining the three jetties of Larvotto Beach below. “The last time most of my team saw me, I was unconscious and being airlifted from the infield. My team manager told me today that morale has hit rock-bottom at HRI. The team is falling apart and making stupid mistakes. Somebody’s gonna get hurt. And I can’t do a damned thing about it because I’m cornered here like a kid in timeout.”
He huffed out a heavy breath and tried to rein in his frustration. His exile wasn’t her fault, but his team was his responsibility. He had a job to do and he didn’t know how he could do it from here. “They need to know I’m okay.”
“You want to get back in your car,” she said quietly.
“Hell, yes.” He faced her and saw the worry pleating her forehead. She claimed she didn’t care, but not even the dim lighting in the courtyard could hide the concern plain as day on her expressive face. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Part of him liked it. Part of him wanted to run. “But I’m not ready. And, contrary to what you think, I don’t have a death wish. I won’t drive again until I’m cleared.”