The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 316

I was scanning the crowd when I caught sight of someone near the far edge of the pit area. Tall, dark hair, broad shoulders. Something about the way he stood made my stomach do a small, stupid flip that was all too familiar.

Callum?

I squinted. The distance was too much to make out his features. Before I could get a proper look, someone moved in front of him, and when they walked away, he was gone.

I knew it wasn’t him, anyway. Callum didn’t even know about this race, and there was no reason for him to be here. I hated that I was always seeing him in places he wasn’t, like he still had a hold on my mind despite all of the effort I’d made to push him out.

The coordinator called us to the grid a few minutes later. Zane saluted me from the sidelines, grinning. I pretended to scratch my face with my middle finger and walked away, climbing into the car.

The car felt different on the actual track than it had on the empty side roads we’d been practicing on. The grip was better, the sight lines cleaner. I ran my hands around the wheel once, twice, just to feel it, and took a slow breath.

The other drivers pulled up beside and around me, engines idling. I kept my eyes forward.

The gunshot went off.

I got off the line with a head start, remembering all of Zane’s lectures. I’d had a bad habit early in our practice sessions of hesitating by half a second at the start, and Zane had drilled that out of me until the response was automatic. Gas on the gunshot, no thinking.

By the first curve, I was in third place. The two drivers ahead of me were fast, but I wasn’t worried. Zane had told me early on that impatience was the thing that knocked most new drivers out; they pushed too hard too early and made mistakes. So I kept my pace, stayed off their bumpers, and watched.

On the fifth lap, I came into that turn carrying more speed than I had any previous lap, committed to it, trusted the grip, and came out of it with a gap I hadn’t had before. The straightaway opened up ahead of me. I pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

I crossed the line first.

For a second, as I rolled to a stop, I just sat there with my hands still on the wheel, not really processing that I’d just won. Then it hit me, all at once, and I let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a yell and slapped my hands against the wheel.

Flinging the door open, I climbed out of the car to find Zane already moving through the crowd toward me, quite literally shoving people out of his way. The coordinator was behind him with a small trophy. It was small, one of those cheap mass-produced things, but it was mine, and I was so happy I felt tears in my eyes.

I took it, and Zane grabbed me around the waist and lifted me completely off the ground, spinning me as I held the trophy up above us. The crowd’s roar drowned out the sound of the engines, and in the distance, I saw a dark head of hair climb out of the car that had come in second place.