Chapter 6
SIX
Brielle closed Callum’s bedroom door behind her and slung her gigantic duffle bag on the bed. After tonight’s events at the bar, he insisted, for safety’s sake, that she stay at his house indefinitely.
She hadn’t spoken to him the whole ride here, but she could tell by the way he occasionally rubbed his temples that a headache was coming on.
It served him right. He deserved it for lying to her.
Or at least omitting the truth. And if she wasn’t allowed to know his true identity, what else was he hiding from her?
She pawed through the rumpled pile of clothes bulging through the bag’s open zipper, not feeling the need to unpack. That would imply she was staying, something she wasn’t sure she wanted him to assume.
She needed something to sleep in. Finding a t-shirt in one of the drawers, she pulled it out and slipped it over her head. The musky scent that was signature Callum filled her nostrils. The jerk. She climbed in bed before pulling the comforter over her face.
After a moment she rolled to her side and looked out the window at the ocean.
In the moonlight, she could make out the outline of Callum at the top of the lanai stairs, the orange glow of a cigarette dangling at his side.
A disgusting habit for sure, but he hadn’t done it in front of her since she had called him on it before.
Maybe he did respect her after all. At least enough not to do it in her presence.
She rolled back over, her hair snagging on her earring.
Carefully she removed them both and being too lazy to stash them anywhere else, she opened the nightstand drawer beside her.
When she looked inside there was a thick grey book that looked a lot like a photo album.
Callum’s initials written in calligraphy were prominent in the middle but faded under a thick layer of dust.
She pulled it out and thumbed through the pages until a photo on the inside cover caught her eye. A black and white shot of a shirtless Callum in tight jeans standing next to a race car. Under his arm he sported a helmet with the number thirty-seven emblazoned across it.
She smiled, impressed by his six-pack and the way the front of his jeans held him in all the right places.
She flipped to the middle. A smiling Callum with random others.
A decade old Sports Illustrated cover caught her eye.
Him sitting on the hood of a race car in a tight, white tank-top with two blonde women in string bikinis sitting on his lap.
The headline read “Winning Streak: NASCAR’S Favorite Playboy.
” She smiled as she studied his face. His smile could melt icebergs.
It was no wonder everyone appeared to love him.
The next page made her breath stop. The photographs were too vivid and gruesome to take in. It was the mangled carcass of a race car ravaged by impact and fire. The headline read, “The Streak Snuffed Out. Survival Not Expected.”
A separate photo showed Callum bloodied and unconscious, being carried by a herd of medics to an ambulance. She drew back and covered her mouth. The images were disturbing. She could only imagine the real thing.
Countless accounts of his condition and his treatments followed. Surgeries. Skin grafts. Some stories even went as far as to eulogize him, as if he were already dead. But the final pages of the album told the story of his survival and why he was rendered “NASCAR’s Living Legend.”
She looked back out the glass at Callum, still looking out at the ocean. Clearly he fought his own recovery demons. She knew exactly how he felt. But her instincts told her there was more to him holding back. Something bigger. Something she had to find out.
Callum took a long drag of his cigarette as he gazed out at the water. The moon was high, casting grey shadows on the whitecaps. Many nights he would stand at the top of the steps watching the waves roll in. The scene always calmed him, except tonight; it left him agitated.
He glanced at his watch. One a.m. If he weren’t occupied with a mission, who knew where he would be right now.
Out carousing, probably. Half in the bag.
Hell, maybe all the way in the bag, and later with a soft, warm body underneath him.
It was a lifestyle he had adopted during his NASCAR days.
He was smart enough now to know it was a coping mechanism.
The accident seemed like a lifetime ago. At times, it was hard to even reconcile the man he was today with the twenty-one year old from twelve years earlier. Young, rich, and ready to party. Invincible, which probably was what drew Big Frank to him in the first place.
Frank had assured him throwing the Daytona would guarantee him more spoils than he could imagine. But when he awoke three weeks later, his broken body wrapped like a mummy, he realized he made a deal with the devil.
Recovery was worse than death itself and there were many times when he wished he’d never pulled through. But as wrong as it sounded, his dream of revenge gave him a will to live and a goal to set his sights on.
Payback Big Frank Riley.
So here he was. An FBI bigshot on the verge of completing a mission a decade in the making. His goal was right there. But all he kept thinking about was the woman asleep alone in his bed.
“What are you doing out here?”
Startled, Callum turned toward her voice.
“I’m sorry.” Brielle held up her hand. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I know how you hate that.”
She stepped into the moonlight, and God damn she looked like an angel. The oversized t-shirt, his, hit her knees, but it was so thin she might as well have been naked. Her golden hair lifted in the ocean breeze, and Callum just stared, completely transfixed.
“What’s up?” he asked, when he found his voice. “Did you come out here to yell at me some more?”
She nodded toward his cigarette. “You’re smoking.”
He lifted up the beer can next to the ashtray. “I’m drinking, too, if that interests you at all.” He settled himself in a patio table chair and motioned for her to take the other. She didn’t. “Don’t tell me the smoke bothered you from the bedroom.”
“Of course not. I was just wondering why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you smoke.”
He sensed the impatience in her voice. Like the question was only a means to get to another. “I don’t know,” he said. “I used to be a lot worse before.”
“You mean before the accident?”
When she came toward him he realized she was holding the scrapbook of his past. She took the seat beside him and gently placed it on the table next to him. “I hope you don’t think I was snooping because I wasn’t.”
Taking one last drag, he stubbed out his cigarette in the nearby ashtray.
“Come on, Callum. I want to know.”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She shrugged. “How did you get the name Streak?”
He looked heavenward hating how well he still remembered everything. “I don’t know. After I won a few races, a magazine used it in a headline and it stuck.”
“Why did you crash?”
The million-dollar question. He picked his beer up from the table and stared out at the water. “I don’t know what happened.” That was true. ”Maybe the accelerator got stuck?”
But a malfunction like that wasn’t something that happened unless someone had planned it that way.
“The articles say you almost died right there on the track.”
He looked at her and smiled. “You’ve done your research.”
“You look pretty good to me for a crash victim.”
“The miracles of medicine,” he said lightly, holding his arms out wide. “And amazingly enough, it wasn’t the gashes and burns that had lasting effects. My head went through the windshield. I still have shards of metal all over my body.”
“Wow,” Brielle said, making a face. “It’s amazing you’re still functioning.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Well, you seem better now. Why not go back?”
“I had a pretty bad concussion,” he told her. “My manager and sponsors were convinced it put a damper on my killer instinct, so they dropped me.”
“That’s why the headaches.”
He nodded, feeling one still lingering in his temples.
“They come out of nowhere and I suppose that’s a safety concern, too, when you’re driving a race car.
I’ve kept them a pretty secret. Other than Leslie, I can’t think of anyone who knows about them.
They’re getting less frequent. Less strong.
They used to be so bad I couldn’t open my eyes. Or stand up, the pain was that sharp.”
Her gaze dropped to her lap. “So now you’re a criminology expert, huh?”
“Yeah.” He stood up from the chair and stretched. “It just seemed like something to do. My life was pretty empty. My thought was an education might fill it up.”
“How did you meet my father?”
He took his time to craft his answer, measuring the crack in her voice when she asked the question. “I guess it was a while ago, back at the Beaver. Leslie introduced me.” He brought the beer can to his mouth and let it linger there.
“You’re good friends, huh?”
“Sure,” he said simply. “What about you? You like him?”
“I suppose I have to. I’m his daughter right? I don’t have much of a choice.” She tucked her knees to her chest and pulled her t-shirt over them. “I guess I just resigned myself long ago to the fact that the only love in my life would be tennis. In my dreams I’d love a husband and six kids…”
“Six kids?” Callum chuckled. “You must really miss Geoffrey when he’s on the road then.”
Her smile faded. She brushed her hair from her face and gazed at him. “What about you? You ever want to get married? Or are you happy just being the ex-NASCAR Fuckboy.”
Slowly his vision blurred, little dots dancing around him. A sharp pain spread from the base of his skull around the sides of his head. He dropped his face in his hands and pressed hard on the temples with his fingers.
She sat up. “Callum, are you okay?”
He couldn’t answer, the pain sucking the breath from his chest. A soft moan of pain escaped his lips as he pushed harder, his fingers cramping from the pressure. He switched to his thumbs and squeezed his eyes shut, praying like hell the throbbing would stop.
And then…
He jerked when he felt her touch him. She stood right in front of him, her fingertips cool against his temples, gentle but sure as she guided his hands in slow, soothing circles. The tension in his jaw eased almost immediately, his body giving in before his pride could argue.
Lightly, with a feathered touch, she traced her fingers down the sides of his face, across his cheekbones, then back into his hairline. When she pressed there, firm and exact, his breath slipped out in a quiet, involuntary exhale.
It was ridiculous how fast she found the ache, how easily she softened it, like she herself was the cure for everything that ailed him.
“How does that feel?” she asked, her voice as gentle as the ocean breeze.
He couldn’t answer. He was too enthralled by her closeness. He could smell her, her candy-sweet scent mixing with sharp salty air. He slid his hands up her long sleek legs pressing his forehead against her belly. “Don’t stop,” he breathed.
“Can I get you your pills?” she asked, her hands kneading his scalp.
“No, just this.” He stroked the back of her thighs, maybe at first to brace himself from the pain. But as she held his head, his body relaxed. His senses reset. He felt the smoothness of her skin, like the petals of a budding flower, the solid softness of her athlete’s body against his.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
He opened his eyes only as much as he could stand and looked up at her. She hovered close, her long blonde hair brushing his cheek. Her breath was warm, meeting his skin in soft, sweet puffs.
There was something dangerous in her eyes. Tempting. Lethal. Like she could ruin him without even meaning to.
He couldn’t help himself.
Callum lifted his hands, still unsteady, and ran the pads of his fingers over her cheeks.
Then he kissed her. Soft at first, testing the reality of it, then deeper when he couldn’t help himself.
The second her lips parted under his, it was over.
He searched her with his tongue, driven by the quiet moan that escaped from somewhere deep inside her.
“You taste incredible,” he whispered against her mouth, his voice rough even to his own ears.
His hands slipped beneath her shirt, heat flooding through him as he traced the panty line inside her leg.
The thin cotton was damp with her arousal and knowing how turned on she was only excited him more.
He stroked her gently, teasing her inside the fabric.
She leaned into it, moving herself with his touch.
“Callum,” she whispered, small and wrecked, almost a whimper as her body sagged against his.
God damn, he felt it too. Need, desire. Whatever it was she’d conjured within him was growing too powerful to control.
The blinding pain in his head had twisted into something just as sharp.
A carnal need for her. For this. The one woman he should’ve hated.
The one he should’ve kept far away from.
In one fluid motion, he lifted her shirt over her head. Her breasts were full and heavy with beautiful light brown nipples so hard, strands of her hair caught against them. He brought his mouth to one and her body answered instantly, arching, trembling, breathing his name like a prayer.
When he was sure her legs would give out, he pulled her onto his lap in a straddle. He pressed the truth of what he wanted against her. Surprise, awareness, heat. Permission. He saw it all in her eyes when they locked onto his. Dark and searching. There was no doubt.
And then…
A thud. A crash. Something inside the house shifted. A sound that didn’t belong. Callum went still. He pulled back, every muscle tightening as instinct took over. His hand dropped discreetly, feeling for the gun at his hip.
“What’s wrong?” she panted.
“Quiet.” He scooped up her shirt and threw it at her. “Get dressed and stay behind me.”
Again, he heard noise. This time footsteps. He pulled Brielle behind him as he inched his way to the doors, his aching eyes searching the darkness.
“Callum, what’s happening?” she whispered.
“I don’t know, but I want you to go into the bedroom and stay there. Got it?”
“But…”
“Go!”
He waited until she was out of sight to pull the gun from his holster. Carefully, he made his way through the house, stopping when he saw movement swimming in the shadows near the foyer closet.
He crept closer to the silhouette, a dark figure whose back was turned as he rifled through a duffle bag on the floor.
“Freeze,” Callum yelled, but the figure drew a fist instead. Callum ducked just in time and knocked the guy in the back of the head. The intruder tumbled to the floor in a jagged heap, a pool of crimson forming underneath him.