1. Champion
Chapter One
CHAMPION
A drunk tourist hit my arm, knocking my coffee out of my hand.
It hit the ground hard, splashing my loafers and the bottom of my dark denim jeans.
Just as well. I was trying to cut back, but this was my one, precious remaining addiction.
I needed my one morning cup of black. It kept me from killing Jezebel.
I bared my teeth at the idiot in what probably looked like a smile.
She laughed at me, blank eyes glazed with too many substances to have any idea who she’d just run into.
“Watch yourself,” I said, grabbing her shoulders and pointing her in the direction of the elevators.
She tripped off barefoot, having lost her shoes at some point. Living in Las Vegas had gotten old a long time ago, and it wasn’t just the tourists.
I didn’t have time to get another cup. I could make time, but if I left Jezebel Whiskey and Trixie ‘Dragon’ O’Hara alone together, they’d hatch a mad scheme and I’d have no way to talk them down from it.
They were dangerous females, and somehow I had to wrangle them, keep them from getting themselves killed and killing everyone else.
Not that Trix would ever really murder anyone, but Jezebel…
I stalked out of the Providence Hotel, past the pillars and the fountain, to the parking garage.
It wasn’t built like most hotels where you had to go through a maze of casinos to reach your car.
It was also the cleanest Hotel in Las Vegas, with the best coffee place, and they had it waiting for you to pick up when you got to the lobby, which is why I put up with the tourists.
My new TRX was waiting for me in my reserved parking space, but it wasn’t alone. Horse was walking around the back, bent sideways to check out my exhaust.
“Back off, she bites,” I said, clicking my key fob so it turned on with a roar of its engine.
Horse leapt away, eyeing the beast before he turned to give me a raised brow that absolutely drove Trixie to distraction.
She wasn’t here, so the cocky smirk faded to a look of mild interest. “You didn’t win last season.
Are you trying to compensate for that with something so ostentatious, or is it something else? ”
“Ostentatious? I’ve seen your private jet. Now that’s compensation. I suppose you have to get something like that if you can’t ride a dragon.”
His eyes went hard and cold for a second before he shrugged and came around the side, fingers trailing over the black lacquer.
“That last preliminary race, I thought your team wouldn’t recover from the jump out of Dead Man’s Pike.
She was hitting what, seventy-five, eighty?
Far be it for me to tell you how to run your team, but?—”
I slammed a hand on Horse’s shoulder, shutting his mouth and bruising him.
“Running a team doesn’t mean telling Trix how to run her track.
The more concerned I am, the faster she goes.
Jezebel isn’t any better. I mean, I’m not complaining, can’t since that stunt won the race, but the heartburn is no joke.
If only Trix’d find a nice, overprotective man who could keep her suicidal tendencies in check.
” I gripped his shoulder tighter. “If only there were someone willing to step up, to be the alpha male the dragon wouldn’t devour, and give her a curfew. ”
He grunted but he didn’t push me off. He wasn’t nearly as macho as he pretended to be for the cameras. Of course, Trix didn’t know that. “There’s no shortage of males interested in tucking Trix into bed at night. She respects you, Nix. If you told her that you were worried about her safety?—”
I released him and headed around the truck. “She’d act even more reckless. The thing is that it is an act. She runs the terrain more than anyone else. She knows it like the back of her hand. She knows her beasties, and she knows what she can do.”
“There’s nothing she can’t do.” He grumbled like it was a bad thing.
He had a bad thing for her. He had for as long as I’d been working with her.
It was weird the way he acted around her, like the world’s biggest cock, which drove her crazy enough to beat his racer’s vehicle with a two-by-four after a race last season.
He drove her crazy intentionally, but that wasn’t how you got a woman. Not that anyone got Trix.
My phone buzzed, Duke’s of Hazzard’s theme. “Speak of the Dragon,” I sighed, and took the call.
“They closed it!” Trixie’s growl was scary. “Wrapped your whole compound like it’s Christmas, lights and everything.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, getting in and nodding at Horse before slamming the door. It wasn’t easy to slam that sweetheart. She was smooth as silk.
“Your compound. I’m standing across the street. They’ve set up a perimeter blockade, like for gas leaks or something. If anyone touches my babies, I’m going to—” She hung up.
Horse was still standing there, but he had his phone out and was frowning at it. I took off, tires squealing as my heart pounded.
The last Three-Hundred had been scary even for me, with someone shooting a rocket at Trixie’s truck and Pinkie of all people taking over at the end.
She’d learned to drive from Nitro, the most insane street driver I’d ever met, so, yeah, heartburn.
Some authorities without clear department info had come down hard on regulations, getting Bulldog’s team banned.
It didn’t matter. Teams popped up as fast as they faded away, only a few able to keep up with Horse.
Not me. I was the Champion, or I was before that wreck, and I’d be there again as long as I was in the game.
It took me two weeks to get my compound up and running again, two weeks of Trixie seething and Jezebel threatening the city.
That wasn’t the kind of stress I’d signed up for.
The worst thing was the way all the problems vanished like a mirage in the desert, like someone had put in a call on my behalf, likely the same person who had strung up my business in the first place.
She was toying with me. Ever since the last Three-Hundred, when Haversham’s mercenaries joined the table-top brawl, and my mother’s House of Beast joined in, making it possible to survive to fight another day, I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop.
She didn’t help for no reason, but this game of hers was a new kind of torture.
Two months later, I was dealing with another call from the Las Vegas precinct of safety about the lights on my compound, because when you’re a fighter and a cross-country driver, throw in some camels and a mountain lion for madness sake, you’re worried about the motion sensor lights on the driveway.
“You need me to come down there and fill out a form? Can you add the next five forms to it at the same time? No? Oh, sure. No problem.” I hung up and tossed my phone on the desk. Jezebel was sitting on said desk and caught my phone in her gaudy nails, blood red with silver studs.
“If you don’t want to be harassed next season, you need to take care of this now.” She smiled bright, her mega-watt smile that did nothing to hide the crazy shark in her eyes.
“Did you need something?” I asked.
Her patience was running as thin as mine, but she didn’t have to face my mother to take care of it. It wasn’t what the Crocodile could do to me that made me hesitate, but what I might do to her. I didn’t hurt women, but that woman needed to hurt until she had some kind of humanity.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why as a matter of fact, I do. I need a job, and the payoff for the investment I’ve made in your little old company, so you have to put aside that ego of yours, and deal with whoever you’ve pissed off.”
I ran a hand through my hair. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Truly, I had no idea why my mother would choose now to interfere with my business, first to save, then to throttle.
She rolled her eyes and recrossed her legs in their tight denim.
“Honey, if you’re going to sell a lie, you’ve got to feel it.
It’s a woman. You pissed her off. Fix it or I’ll fix you.
” She made a snipping motion with her hand, winked at me with her long false lashes, and then hopped off the desk.
“I’m going to China to deal with those investors who didn’t get any of the footage of the brawls you haven’t been able to star in, sugar.
I’ll be gone one month. That’s as long as you’ve got to clear up the tape for next season.
I have the funds for my retirement ranch in this company.
You sink it, I’ll sink you. Ciao.” She walked out, leaving me with nothing to do but accept Jezebel’s delicate suggestion.
It wasn’t the threat, but the reminder. She’d invested in my company with loyalty I had to respect, like I respected her knife skills.
I called Daniel, because I didn’t technically have my mother’s number except for the emergency one I’d never use.
He picked up after a dozen rings. “Nix. It took you long enough.”
I scowled at the pile of notices on my desk. “I really hate her.”
“You called to say that? I’ll let her know.”
“What does she want?”
“Oh, I think she’ll want to tell you directly, face to face, and besides which, I wouldn’t want to miss out on the show. I’ll bring popcorn.”
I rubbed the back of my neck and considered how I could possibly survive a meeting with my mother without turning into a raging berserker.
She’d been carefully picking at my self-control for the last few months leaving me with a very short fuse.
Still, I’d matured in the decade since I’d last seen her.
I was responsible for more than myself, and she was slowly but surely suffocating my business to death.
“I’ll be on the next plane.”
“A chopper is on its way. The jet’s already waiting along with a nice cold beer.”
“As if there’s enough alcohol in the world.”