Chapter 33
Max
One of my old team principals once told me that throughout his life he recalled certain moments where he felt his life changing. Not necessarily big moments that one would think, like a wedding day or the day his first child was born. Those were a given, he’d said.
But small moments, like the first time he went on a picnic date with the woman who would become his wife.
Or the day he decided to stay in the house and watch a car race with his dad instead of going out to play with friends.
It was that first race that got him hooked on motorsports, an industry and trajectory that would alter the course of not only his career but his life.
Those words he spoke to me filter through my mind as I stand before Annalise, stripped down to her soaked red lace panties and bra, in my bedroom. She takes my breath away.
Tonight isn’t one of those flashpoint moments like my team principal had mentioned. Tonight is when I finally acknowledge when that moment was. More than seven years ago, the night after that accident.
The night she yelled at me to get out of the hospital and never speak to her brother again.
The night she made me come face to face with my deepest insecurities as a racer, as a man. The evening she made me want to be a better person for the first time.
I sink to my knees before her, like a supplicant because for more time than I’ve ever realized, it’s Annalise, my princess, that has made me want to be a man worthy of her.
“Max,” she whispers my name as I hold her by her hips. I lower my head, kissing directly over her belly button and dipping my tongue inside.
Her body shudders, her hands coming up to tightly grip my shoulders, holding onto me to prevent herself from falling. I squeeze her hips and hold her firmly in place while kissing along the seam of her panties. My lips smirk when she groans and then growls my name, voice full of impatience.
“What’s wrong, princess?” I lick along the seam on her thighs until my mouth comes to the triangle at the center of her body. I press a kiss to her mound.
She cups a hand under my chin, turning my head up to meet her fiery eyes. “You're torturing me.”
My dick jumps in my briefs, a rush of sizzling energy coursing through my body.
“I don’t like waiting,” she says.
Grinning, I hook my thumbs in her panties. In a matter of seconds, her panties disappear from her body, and her leg is thrown over my shoulder. I eat her pussy like a man famished. Which I am.
It’s been exactly seven days and thirteen and a half hours since I’ve had Annalise’s taste on my mouth. I’ve counted every hour while simultaneously preparing for this weekend’s race and calculating the next time I could have her to myself.
All of the hours were torture but worth it to have her leg over my shoulder, her sweet taste on my tongue, and the sound of her purring spilling from her throat. It doesn’t take long for her first release to occur under the ministrations of my rapacious mouth.
Keeping my hands on her, I rise to my feet before lifting her to wrap her legs around my waist. As soon as she’s in the arms, Annalise circles her arms around my shoulders and ducks her head to taste her essence on my lips. Her hair spills like a curtain around us as I walk us to my bed.
We tumble into it, a mess of arms and legs, teasing, touching, feeling one another but never feeling like it’s enough. Not until I’m completely undressed, sheathed in a condom and easing inside of her does the tight fist of tension and need inside of my chest begin to ease.
We both moan into one another’s mouths, spilling our thankfulness for this moment into each other.
A spike of pain arcs its way through me.
Annalise has dug her fingernails into my back muscles with the same fervor that I rut into her perfect, perfect body.
Every time I surge forward her hips are there, rising to meet me.
Our lovemaking turns from slow and adoring to wild, verging on the edge of wicked in minutes.
Pillows become dislodged and fall from the bed, the sheets ruffle and somehow get pushed completely off of one side, and I don’t know which of us initiates it but I end up on my back with Annalise hovering above me, her hips beating out a perfect rhythm in time with my cock.
We’re sweaty, panting, and stealing kisses that devolve into bites along the column of Annalise’s neck.
“You’re so fucking perfect,” I tell her, not recognizing my voice. “My perfect princess.”
She moans in response to that, and I lift my hips, meeting the downward motion of her hips. Her scream is the melody my body has been searching for. I cup her breasts, squeezing her tight buds while she comes all over my dick.
“Fuck,” I curse when her muscles strangle my cock, milking me.
I come at the same time, unable to hold out. Everything I’ve been trying to hold in for too long comes spilling out just like the come pouring into the condom.
“I love you,” I say, voice strained and restricted from all of the sensations flowing through me. “Fucking love you so much.”
She pants, her orgasm still running its course.
I don’t need her to say it back. As long as she doesn’t run from it. An impossibility considering how tightly I’m holding onto her hips.
Even when I flip our bodies, pinning her beneath me, I don’t loosen my grip. Not until we both come down from the highs of our orgasms do I think to lift up onto my elbows to relieve some of my weight off of her, but I keep her under me.
“I love you,” I tell her, kissing her face and finally feeling free of the weight it took to hold that in for the past few weeks since I realized this warm, lightness inside of the pit of my stomach whenever I think about her (which is constant) is love.
A deeper love than I’ve felt in any previous relationship.
She sighs, turning her lips up to meet mine again.
That’s all the answer I need for now.
* * *
“Tonight’s performance was so damn good,” Annalise says, curling her naked body into mine.
I nestle her closer, my arm around her waist while her head rests on my chest.
“Thank you,” I answer.
She slaps my stomach with her free arm. “How did you hear about it?”
When she angles her head to look up at me, I lean in to kiss the tip of her nose.
“My mate from school, Seamus, is actually a member of the cast. He played Demetrius.”
“No way.” She lifts her head, looking genuinely surprised. “He was really good. The entire cast was. And cute.”
She wiggles her eyebrow and laughs when I tickle her stomach.
“I’m the only one you get to call cute.”
I bite her earlobe when she rolls her eyes at that.
“Was this your first time seeing this performance?”
I nod. “Not one for plays or Shakespeare.” I pause, reconsidering. “I wasn’t until a certain princess walked into my life.”
The side of her lips curl up into the cutest fucking smile. I run my thumb along her bottom lip.
“Thank you for taking me to see it.”
“Thank you.”
Her forehead wrinkles.
“For being my motivation to win this weekend.”
She waves me off as if I’ve just told a lie.
“You don’t believe me?”
“My ‘yes’ to staying with you after the race mattered that much?” she asks, as if it’s out of the realm of possibilities.
“You,” I take her hand into mine, kissing her knuckles, “are the reason my season is going the way it is.”
“You and your car are the reasons your season is going so well.”
My chest fills with pride from her comment, but I shake my head.
“Amato built a hell of a car this year, as they do almost every year,” I reply. “But not everyone can drive a rocket like Amato puts out. And the driver I was last season, or any of my previous seasons in Formula 1, can’t hold a candle to who I am today as a racer.”
It’s been a constant since the Monaco Grand Prix.
Max, what’s gotten into you this season?
Max, can you tell us what influence Drake has had over your driving?
Max, do you think your success this season is your father’s ghost smiling down on you?
That was the question that’d ticked me off the most. I instantly walked away from the sports journalist who’d asked it.
“My father used to tell me I was always outwardly motivated. I used to think it was a bad thing until this season.” I meet her searching gaze. “You’re the reason I’m going to win the Driver’s Championship, Annalise.”
Her eyelids lower.
When I cup her chin, making her look at me again, her eyes are unreadable. I ignore the stabbing sensation in my heart.
“Does that upset you?”
She leans up, cups my face, and brushes her lips against mine. “No. It fills my heart with a pride and happiness I never thought I could feel for someone I’m not related to.”
She pulls back, staring me in the eyes as if imploring me to understand what she’s not saying just as much as what she is saying.
I kiss the inside of her palm.
Annalise lays her head against my chest again, and the stabbing pain decreases, almost completely disappearing. But not quite.
“I wasn’t diagnosed until I was almost twenty-one. With OCD,” she clarifies, although I already guessed what she meant. A pained laugh pierces the air. “I thought it was normal to wake up every night and go from room to room, checking to make sure each of my siblings were still breathing.”
I adjust our bodies so that we’re better able to look at one another, but I still hold her to my body, refusing to lose the closeness of skin-to-skin contact.
“Why would you do that?” I ask even though I understood it was likely derived from an obsession she hadn’t understood at that age. From the book I’ve been reading on OCD, it often presents in early childhood but isn’t diagnosed until years later.
“I convinced myself,” she hesitates. “My brain convinced me that they would die in their sleep. I’d overheard a conversation between my mom and dad when Chloe was barely one.
They were talking about sudden infant death syndrome.
Someone they knew had a baby that died recently from it.
After that, my mind contorted it into an inevitable reality.