Chapter Eighteen
A vibration erupted from the nightstand beside Lukas.
He didn’t react at all.
He didn’t blink. Didn’t move a muscle to answer the insistent phone.
He just lay there in his bed. Staring. Katherine had been right.
The morning sunshine streaming through the glass caught the crystal snowflake.
Light refracted across his bedroom in slow walking prismatic rainbows. It was beautiful. He hated it.
Still, he looked at the snowflake.
His phone stopped ringing.
Katherine had been calling constantly. Had been texting and leaving voicemails begging him to talk to her but he had nothing to say. How did he put into words the swirling betrayal. How did he express to her that he trusted her even though he shouldn’t have. That he had fallen in love with her.
His phone started ringing again.
Lukas tossed off the covers and got out of bed, noticing when he did that the name on the phone wasn’t Katherine’s, but Dominic’s.
He snatched the phone up and answered quickly as he went down to his kitchen.
‘Took you long enough to answer,’ Dominic complained.
‘Sorry, Dom, I thought you were—’
‘Katherine.’
‘Yes,’ Lukas said. Mechanically, he put on a pot of coffee and walked the length of the floor as he waited. Moving from room to room.
‘You saw the article,’ Dominic said in a resigned tone.
‘Yesterday. Why are you only calling me now? Shouldn’t you have warned me about this?
’ Lukas’s hard tone surprised himself. He wasn’t angry at Dominic; he was angry at Katherine.
Or was he? Lukas would have walked away from Katherine after Lapland if Dominic and Erin hadn’t conspired with Aero to force him into dating her.
You didn’t want to walk away though, did you?
‘I thought it would be best to give you two time to work it out. I knew Katherine wouldn’t blindside you.’
‘You knew that, did you? Like you knew what she had written?’ Lukas stepped into the decorated lounge. A smiling angel looking down at him. Laughing at his foolishness. Yesterday he’d wanted signs of Katherine all over his home. Today it was hell. ‘How badly has that article affected us?’
‘Brock Racing has already informed me they will be going with another driver, but they won’t make the announcement immediately. They don’t want their statement to be overshadowed or seem reactionary. I haven’t heard from the other team yet.’
‘Funny how this was supposed to help all of us and yet only Aero has benefitted.’
Lukas sat heavily on the couch, phone to his ear, head hanging.
Something hard pressed into his thigh. Reaching between the cushions he sat on, he pulled out a gold ring.
Katherine’s ring. The ring that glinted on her finger when he made love to her on the boat.
When he had seen her that very first day.
‘It’s not over, Lukas.’ But Lukas wasn’t listening. ‘Just give me some—’
He hung up on Dominic, tossing the phone aside as he inspected the piece of jewellery. His heart cracked wide open. And when he looked around, his home had never seemed so full of life and yet so empty, the ghost of happiness haunting every room. Haunting him. He missed Katherine.
He got off the couch and threw the ring across the room with a shout. It hit the glass wall with a loud clang then clattered to the floor somewhere unseen.
‘Fuck!’ he yelled. In pain. In frustration.
In anger at her and himself. He didn’t want to miss her.
She’d hurt him. Made him believe that he didn’t have to be alone anymore.
Made him believe that he had found someone who understood him.
He’d been starting to think that she loved him and he’d been willing to be patient with her.
To let her come to the realisation on her own.
To let her decide if she wanted to take a chance on him, because now he realised that he’d been willing to do the same.
For a smart man he was very stupid.
He should never have let down his guard with a journalist.
He walked across the room and retrieved the ring, which had rolled under some furniture. It was a simple, antique fede ring. A ring for friendship. Well, the media certainly wasn’t his friend. Katherine’s article was proof of that.
But would she have written those things if she had known you?
There was no way to know.
He wasn’t aware of any other driver who’d had a journalist force their way into their life like this, just to get more information.
More clout. But he’d also never embraced the media like the other drivers had.
A decision he could now see made him more enigmatic and fed people’s desperate desire to know more, made photographers and journalists more hungry for a picture or a story.
As long as he was a driver, nothing would change. Maybe he would have to—maybe he needed to give a bit of himself to the public to satisfy them in order to have the privacy he craved. He didn’t know if he could change that much.
Lukas dropped the ring into his pyjama pants pocket and walked out shirtless onto the high terrace. The cold took his breath away, but it was nice to have the physical discomfort. At least it lessened the urgency of his emotional upheaval.
He looked out at the streets of Monaco. In a few months he could be racing along them. The thought didn’t fill him with happiness.
Is driving what you’re really passionate about?
He loved racing but, no, driving wasn’t making him happy anymore.
He had more days filled with frustration and anxiety than exhilaration.
He wanted to win championships. He was going to make no difference in a back-marker team.
The only reason he wanted to stay on the grid was to make his family’s sacrifices worth something.
So that he wasn’t just the selfish ass who robbed his parents of a good life together.
But was that enough of a reason to keep racing? Was that a healthy reason?
He examined all the decisions he had made recently.
This obsession with driving had made him ignore his principles.
He’d agreed to pretend to date someone. He hadn’t dated in three years and then only did so to deceive the world.
Regardless of what Katherine had done to him or what he felt for her, he’d used her.
This wasn’t the man he was.
He was honest. He had integrity. He couldn’t let this quest for a drive change him.
But he didn’t have to drive to remain in the sport.
You have so much knowledge…such an understanding of the car and the craft that even from a technical aspect you could make a difference.
Lukas leaned his elbows on the glass balustrade, the cold wind ruffling his hair. It hurt to think about Katherine, but a sense of peace settled on him as he thought about the team principal position that he hadn’t yet turned down.
Katherine had been right about so much that night at dinner.
And about one thing in that heinous article: He did have a wealth of knowledge.
He could develop a team. He would have the power to make a difference.
To influence decisions. To ensure that the right talent was in the seat without screwing over entire careers.
He could make the team what he wanted it to be.
He could take all that interest in his name, in him and make it work for the team.
For him. There would be a lot of media attention as a team principal but nowhere near as bad as being the star of the team.
It was a massive responsibility but without the lens of desperation of wanting to remain a racer, he realised that maybe leading a team was exactly where he should be.
He went back inside and retrieved his phone from the couch, then dialled a number he never thought he would actually use.
‘It’s Lukas J?ger. I’m accepting your offer of team principal.’