Chapter 10
Light barely broke the horizon when Mack walked into Body Work.
It smelled like a standard gym, disinfectant and stale socks, and even looked like a regular gym, but the exercises were uniquely designed to support race car drivers.
Most people assumed that driving a race car was physically undemanding, but staying in control of a seven-hundred-horsepower engine embedded in a carbon fiber frame required strength, focus, stamina, and extraordinary reaction time.
Mack wasn’t afraid of the workout, but she was unsettled by what she saw near the bank of cubbies at the back of the gym.
Or rather, who. Leo Raisman stood talking with two other drivers, both famous enough that any American race fan would recognize them, and they were all looking at her.
Mack smoothed a hand down her cutoff sweatshirt and snagged leggings and tried not to show her self-consciousness.
“Williams, you made it! Come meet the slowest guys on track.” Leo waved her over, way too chipper for five in the morning. Morning people were the worst.
The three men glanced from Mack to each other, and she braced for a barrage of either sexist bullshit or coded questions about her inexperience.
“Okay, I gotta ask,” Leo said, eyes sparkling. “Your dad is Wes Williams, right?”
Mack blinked in surprise. “The one and only.”
“Ho-lee shit!” Jericho hooted. “A damn legend!”
“Trust me, he knows it.” Mack rolled her eyes as she tightened her ponytail. A palpable energy filled the gym as more people rolled in. She recognized a JJR crew member and the logos of several other teams.
“I met him once in Charlotte,” Boomer said. “After he won the Outlaws Showdown. 2002, maybe? I was a kid and he was so cool. Tried to give me a beer.”
“Sounds like Wes. It was 2003, I think,” Mack said. “He hated that place. So hard to pass on the outside.”
Leo frowned thoughtfully. “Is he still racing?”
Mack hesitated, protective of Wes’s privacy. Someone as vibrant as her dad wanted to be remembered for winning races, not living in a La-Z-Boy. “He retired awhile back.”
“Well,” Jericho said, “nice to meet a fellow kid of a legend. Heavy is the head, and all that.”
Mack pointed at the giant Indy 500 winner’s ring on his hand. “Pretty sure you’re making out okay with your crown.”
“Okay, people!” Behind them, a Black woman with chiseled biceps clapped her hands. “This is not social hour. Get warmed up and then rotate stations. Go!” The trainer pointed to Mack and Leo. “Y’all team up. Start with treadmill sprints. Don’t cheat, Raisman.”
A row of treadmills lined the back wall, and they hopped onto adjoining machines.
Leo began to run at a sedate pace. “Bertie is by far the hardest trainer. So much running.” Mack grinned and pushed up her speed, and she had to admit she liked the admiration in Leo’s eyes. She pushed the speed up again.
Leo groaned but pushed his treadmill one increment higher.
Mack clicked her toggle even higher, expecting a pissing match from Leo, but he tipped his head back in laughter and raised his palms in surrender.
He’d pulled his hair back with a thin elastic headband and she could see the tender skin behind his ear.
“You’re a sadist,” Leo huffed. “Cracked my kneecap at Iowa two years ago and it’s never been the same.”
From two machines over Boomer called out, “Excuses, excuses! I broke a hand in Saint Pete and still beat you!”
Injuries were another part of their unusual job, but the way Leo slowly blew out his breath, the way he obviously bit back a retort, told Mack that Leo was frustrated with his injury.
“Broke my collarbone twice in one year and I’ve never done a plank since without it aching,” Mack said.
“Twice?” Leo grimaced. “Tough cookie, Rookie.”
Mack scoffed at his bad joke but couldn’t stop her smile as they finished their sprints.
A whistle blew and Leo hopped off the machine before the sound quit echoing.
He turned toward an inclined bench where Bertie waited for them.
A TV screen hung on the wall above the bench.
“When you come up from a crunch, tap the green light. Green only, even if other colors flash. We’re training the mind to react to visual cues while the core works to maintain body position.
” She smiled mischievously and pointed at Mack.
“You do burpees while Leo does this exercise. Gets the heart rate up. Switch for a total of three rounds.”
Leo dove in, completing an impressive number of crunches and dot taps before Mack took a turn.
She was grateful the pain of the burpees stole her attention away from the outline of Leo’s abs under his T-shirt.
They were perfect, straight out of a Men’s Health magazine.
She’d told Laurie she swiped right when she needed to, but with all the work to get ready for the dirt track season and the chaos of Shaw’s school activities, it had been way too long since Mack had let a man put his body on her own.
Clearly, she needed to redownload her hookup app if she was ogling her teammate at the gym.
I know better now, she’d told Laurie, and Mack said it over and over to herself as she completed her own crunches.
Jericho, Boomer, and Leo distracted her with their friendly ribbing, and they included her in their shit-giving like they’d been friends for longer than an hour as they cycled through upright erg pulls, round-the-world squats, and a particularly evil machine that strengthened the neck muscles.
Mack was a runner but not in racing shape, and halfway through the workout she kept up with Leo only from sheer willpower as he carried the bulk of the conversation.
He kept her entertained during the workout without interfering with her concentration.
When she hummed the chorus of John Mellencamp’s “Hurts So Good” during a round of lunges, Leo sang the next few bars of the song until everyone joined in.
By the time they stretched on the rubber floor, her muscles were full of lactic acid, screaming with use, and she could feel the blood pumping through them as she pulled off her soaked sweatshirt and wiped her dripping face.
She looked up to find Leo watching her.
Had she thought she was hot before? Because now she felt positively inflamed from the inside out.
Boomer snapped his fingers in front of Leo’s face, but Mack was the one who blushed. The look between the two men was mortifyingly obvious, one giving the other a pointed warning. Mack couldn’t look at Leo as he handed her a cold bottle of water.
“Bertie!” Jericho called, breaking the awkwardness. “Why do you hate us?”
Bertie stood, hands on her hips, looking like a goddess in red spandex and waist-length box braids.
“If you want to win, you have to work. When it’s one hundred degrees and you’re stuck in a car during the ninth caution flag of the day and you still have forty laps to go, you’ll thank me for your strength and endurance.
You’ll be tired, you’ll be sore, but you’ll finish the damn race.
Maybe one of you whiners will even win. Now get out of my face and go eat some protein. ”
Mack pushed out of the gym door soaked in sweat. Her muscles were sore and spent in a way that felt encouraging, and she’d genuinely enjoyed getting to know Boomer and Jericho. They exchanged numbers and she waved goodbye to the two IndyCar stars who were maybe her new friends.
But Leo . . . She’d thought her attraction was one-sided, a product of her too-long dry spell, but the way Leo looked at her made her wonder if he felt the same unavoidable attraction.
She needed to bring them back to professional ground, so she said, “I am so gassed. Probably feels ten times worse after the race?”
Leo rubbed a hand through his thick curls, pulling when he hit a snag.
Mack tried not to watch his long fingers against his glossy hair.
Behind him the sky was the pale blue of a perfect spring day.
“The dehydration is insane, no matter how much you drink. And exhaustion on a scale you’ve never experienced. ”
Mack arched a brow, wondering if Leo Raisman had ever dealt with a newborn who refused to sleep. She knew little about Leo’s personal life but she was pretty sure he wasn’t a parent . . . or if he was in a relationship . . . and why was she even wondering about that anyway?
“But,” Leo continued, one half of his mouth tipped up. “It’s also the best feeling ever, knowing you made it through all five hundred miles.”
“Even if you lose by half a car length?”
She’d said it as a tease, but his smile melted into a grimace. The Indy 500 had no podium because nothing other than winning mattered.
“Sorry,” she said as she leaned against the door of her car, tipping the dregs of her water bottle over her head to cool down before getting in the stuffy vehicle.
The AC quit sometime around her twenty-fifth birthday but she’d never had a good enough reason to fix it.
“That came out mean but I genuinely meant it as a question. It’s worth it, even if you lose? ”
Leo turned serious. “Indy is always worth it, Williams. Always.” He rubbed a palm over his scruffy cheek. “Ever had someone you couldn’t get over? Even if you know there’s only a one percent chance you’ll work it out?”
She refused to think of Kelley. How she’d seen more in their relationship than was really there.
To this day, she didn’t know if she’d loved him, but she had wanted him to stay, to choose her.
To want her the way she’d wanted to be loved.
Maybe she’d just loved the idea of being in love with him. She shook her head.
“Ah. Well, Indy is a lot like that. You know it will break your heart but you do it anyway because the chance that it will work out is worth any other pain.”
Leo turned and opened the door of a shiny blue F-150, and Mack wondered if he’d had his heart broken, and if it had happened recently.
He tossed his sweatshirt and water bottle on the seat, and the sweet smell of new leather upholstery drifted out of the car.
“Want to grab a coffee? Maybe some kind of breakfast? There’s a great spot not far from here that serves smoothies, too. ”
She’d eaten a protein bar and a banana every day for breakfast since Shaw was born. She wasn’t about to start drinking pureed sludge through a straw, and she told Leo as much. But now she understood how he’d gotten those abs. “Plus, I probably need to go home and work on sponsorships.”
“Any luck? I bet companies are crawling all over themselves to put you in an ad.”
Mack cut Leo a look. “Hardly. I know this is shocking, but no one wants to give money to a nobody. Especially not a girl nobody.”
She said it mockingly, but it was the sad truth. Motorsports sponsors weren’t willing to gamble on what they believed was an unproven product: a woman.
Leo returned her cutting glance. “You’re not nobody. You drove the damn wheels off the car at the test. You’ve made the podium at endurance races and you won at Eldora.” His voice almost sounded like it held a note of awe.
And why shouldn’t it? She had kicked ass at Eldora, and many other races.
Over the past two days, she’d felt that old self coming back to life, the one that drove too fast and made crass jokes and beat the boys at their own damn game.
She’d felt more alive during the test drive, and even in Bertie’s workout, than she had for a decade.
She swallowed a surge of shame. What kind of mother felt wholly alive away from her child?
“Plus, you . . .” Leo was looking up at the sky but waved a hand toward her, from head to toes.
She raised her brows, wanting to hear him say it out loud. “I’m what?”
He shifted uncomfortably, shaking his head, but his discomfort told her he felt the same pull, the line of gasoline that could easily ignite if either of them struck the match.
Ten damn years of Mack playing it quiet and safe, turning down anything that might look like trouble, but that one glance made her impulsively curious. Mack didn’t know if Leo Raisman was a risk, but she couldn’t get burned from a little investigation.
She pulled herself into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine. “So where are we going?”