23. Twenty-Three
The text I hadn't shown Fin sat in my pocket the whole drive up.
One of Dmitri's spotters had made Renzo coming out of a shop on the west side that morning.
It was the third sighting in a week, every one of them closer to the middle of my city.
I'd sent back one word, watch, and brought my man to a racetrack anyway.
K's people were circling. I wanted one good night before whatever came next.
Fin watched the car pull away. "We're staying out here all night?"
"I have a room upstairs."
"Of course ye do."
I worked the lock on the bay door. The big rolling door came up on its rails and I hit the lights one bank at a time.
The bay was a big concrete box with four lifts in it and a workbench down the back wall and four cars under sheets, and Fin walked in behind me with his hands in his coat pockets and didn't say a word.
I went to the third sheet from the door.
"How many cars do ye have?" Fin asked, walking down the line.
"A couple." I walked up to the Viper and pulled the sheet off.
She sat low, matte black with a spoiler on the back the size of a coffee table and a splitter on the nose that scraped on every fucking speed bump.
Some guy in Detroit named Carl had welded the cage in by hand two summers back and called her a real one and meant it.
She was sleek, sexy, and fast and didn't have a scratch on her.
Fin whistled. "She's a nice one."
He went around the front slowly, the good hand coming up to the fender and stopping half an inch shy.
"Viper ACR Extreme," I said, walking around her with my hands in my pockets. "Meanest fucking car they ever built. Six forty-five horses, stick shift, no computers between your foot and the back wheels. You drive her wrong, she'll kill you. You drive her right, she'll do anything you want."
"Very Aleksi coded, she is." He crouched at the rear wing. "Tell me about her."
I crouched next to him.
"Wing's for downforce. Holds her to the road in the corners.
That little fucker at the front splits the air, pushes it over her instead of under, keeps her from lifting.
" I ran my hand along the underside of the wing because I couldn't help myself.
"Every piece of her is doing something. There's nothing on this car that's there for looks, and yet she's a sexy piece of work if ever there was one. "
"Ye do love a sexy fixer upper, it seems."
I looked over at him and wondered if he was trying to bait me on purpose into saying the thing we'd been dancing around for days. It didn't matter. I couldn't take the bait either way. Instead, I stood up and tossed him the keys. "Go on. Let's take her for a spin."
"I'm no racecar driver, Aleksi."
"Can you drive stick?"
"Course I can."
"Then you'll figure her out. Get in the car."
"Aleksi—"
"Fin." I held his eyes. "Get in the fucking car."
He got in the fucking car.
I went round to the passenger side and folded myself in.
I'd never sat in the passenger seat of the Viper.
Carl had sat in it once at delivery, two years back, for about ninety seconds while I drove her off the trailer, and that was the only ass that had ever been in this seat besides mine.
The bucket sat me low and the harness points came up over my shoulders.
Fin had both hands on the wheel and was looking at the dash bright eyed and confused.
"Where's the…" He gestured.
"Ignition's the red button. The red one."
"Aye, no, I see it. It just seems like a button that ought to launch a missile, not start a car." He pressed it.
She woke up with a low growl. The V10 came alive with a sound that made my insides warm and my dick twitch. Fin flinched and I laughed at him.
"Christ on the cross."
"Clutch is heavy," I warned. "Don't ride it. Either you're on it or you're off it."
"Aleksi, ye're making me nervous."
"Good. Be nervous. She doesn't like cocky."
He gave me a worried look. "Have ye met me? Cocky is my middle name."
He worked the clutch in and out a few times, feeling for the bite, and his face went through about four expressions in three seconds, the last of which was the one I'd been waiting for — the small mean smile that meant Fin had decided he was going to do something I was going to regret.
"Fin."
"Aye."
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Whatever you're about to do."
"I'm just going to drive her, Aleksi. Like ye said."
He let the parking brake off and hit the gas.
She didn't like it.
The Viper had been built to be respected on the way out of stillness, eased into power, taught who was in charge before you asked her for anything.
Fin asked her for everything in the first three seconds.
He dumped the clutch hard enough she barked, the rear tires scrabbled on the concrete, and we shot out of the bay door into the dark of the paddock with my back pinned to the bucket and my hand braced on the dash.
"Fin—"
"Aye?"
"What did I just say about cocky?"
"Cannae hear ye over the engine."
"Fin!"
"Christ, would ye look at her go—"
He shifted into second like he knew what he was doing.
The Viper settled into her stride out across the paddock at a speed that had no business happening in a paddock.
The high beams threw the access road yellow ahead of us.
The asphalt was wet from the earlier rain, and Fin didn't seem to give a single shit.
"Fin. Brake! There's a turn—"
He braked late enough I felt the harness points dig into my shoulders, and then he spun the wheel and moved his feet like he was a goddamn stunt driver.
He kicked the back end out.
The Viper went sideways under us. The rear tires lit up, the rev counter spiked, and the rear of the car came round in a slow ugly arc with the front end pointed somewhere off into the grass before Fin caught her, corrected, caught her again, and dragged her straight on the throttle out the other side of the corner.
The whole thing took maybe three seconds.
I watched it happen with my hand on the dash and my mouth open.
The smell of burning rubber filled the cab and when I glanced into the rearview, two black lines smoked into the asphalt behind us in a curve that wasn't ever going to come out.
"Jesus Christ, Fin! Do you have any fucking idea how much these tires cost?"
The little shit was laughing. He pulled the car off onto the verge between the paddock and the track, and let her idle and turned to me with his whole face lit up like a kid who'd just gotten away with something.
I wanted to throttle him almost as much as I wanted to throw him over the hood and fuck him until I felt like I'd gotten the four grand back the tires had cost.
"Where in the fuck did you learn to do that?"
"Back home," he said with a big stupid grin. "The highlands are full of mountain switchbacks and hairpin curves. Me and the lads would take the junkers from a mate's da's garage and run them until they broke down. Then we'd sit around and smoke until his da showed up with the wrecker."
I stared at him a minute and wondered what else about Fin's past I still didn't know.
There was so much, a whole lifetime of memories that had come before me.
I wanted to know them all. I wanted him to tell me everything, give up every little secret, even the ones he didn't know he was keeping. They were mine as much as he was.
That'd take a lifetime, I realized, watching him laugh at me.
And some, small, soft part of me was totally on board with still discovering small secrets about Finlay Gallagher when we were both old and gray.
"Get out of the car," I growled.
"What?"
"Fin if you don't get the fuck out of this car and up to the suite in the next five minutes, I will bend you over the hood and fuck you in the fucking garage."
He looked at me and didn't move.
"Fin," I warned. "Don't test me."
He let the moment stretch out long enough that I knew exactly what he was about to do.
He opened the driver's door and got out of the car slowly and walked the length of the Viper with his good hand trailing along the roofline.
He stopped at the front. Then he turned around and leaned back against the hood face up to the darkening steel gray sky, the wind in his hair.
Fucking hell. I needed to be inside him now.
I reached over and turned the car off. Then I threw open my door and stepped out, pausing to adjust my jacket.
He watched me, breathing hard already, as I stalked closer.
"You want to play games?" I shrugged off my jacket and laid it over the hood, which would still be too hot to touch. "You want to spend my money, drive my cars, and push my buttons all fucking day? And you expect me to do nothing about it?"
"Aye," he said, that defiant spark in his eyes. "What're you gonna do, big man?"
My hand shot out and closed around his throat. He lifted his chin to make sure I got a good grip. His pulse raced under my fingers. "I think you need to be taught a lesson, Finlay. I think you need to learn to respect a man's property."
He smirked at me. "Yer expectin' a lot from a man who's also yer property."
My cock went from hard to painfully hard and throbbing. I released his throat and spun him around before shoving him face first into the coat I'd laid out on the hood.
"If that's so," I said, working my belt, "then you need to learn some fucking respect."
He went down onto his forearms on the jacket like he'd been waiting his whole life for it.
I yanked his belt open and took his pants down to his thighs in one rough pull. They went around his knees in a heap.
"Aleksi."
"That's enough out of you." I dug the packet of lube out of my back pocket and tore it open with my teeth.
I slicked two fingers and worked them into him without warning. Fin hissed at first but the sound quickly eased into a pleasured groan. His head fell forward and his knees went loose, and then his body went pliant around my fingers in just the right way.