The Chase (15 page)

“I will. I say on Friday at qualifying me and Elec make a big show of joking around and hanging out. Then we’ll do some interviews where he’ll apologize for calling me immature.”

Evan had to admit that was the one label that got under his skin and stuck there. Was he immature? He thought he was mostly just impulsive, emotional. Just because he tended to explode, because he felt things so deeply, and desperately avoided entanglements that might hurt him didn’t make him immature. Did it?

“Right when you apologize for calling me a thickheaded mule.”

They eyed each other warily. It almost sounded like Elec was itching to fight again.

“I really should go,” Kendall said, gesturing towards the door and looking monstrously uncomfortable. “I have to get back to my hotel and get some sleep. I have a four A.M. flight to LA out of Knoxville.”

“No, no, don’t go.” He almost added that everyone else was leaving, but his mother would have killed him for saying something so rude. He didn’t need to tick her off any more today than he already had. “I was planning to fire up the grill and cook some steaks.”

How desperate did he sound? He was offering to cook beef for the woman.

“Thanks, but I do need to go.” Kendall started for the door. “Good to see you, Mrs. Monroe. Elec. Eve.”

Evan followed her and stepped outside with her, shutting the door behind him. “Can I call you a cab or something? How are you getting to your hotel?”

“My driver is here. I’ll text him and find him. Thanks for the offer . . . another time.”

What did that mean exactly? The cab, dinner, sex . . . Evan had no clue. “I’ll see you in LA tomorrow. I have the next flight after you. I’ll be sliding in right when they need us at nine A.M.”

“Shouldn’t you go to bed then?”

“I need to eat. A lot. Then I’ll go to bed. Alone, unfortunately.” He gave her what he hoped was a charming smile. “Unless you change your mind?”

“Nice try.”

Then Kendall shocked the hell out of him by leaning forward and giving him a kiss. Not one on the cheek, like she had the other day, but full on the mouth. It wasn’t a lingering kiss, but it was no sisterly smooch either.

He barely had time to wrap his arms around her and kiss back when she was pulling away. Spinning on her heels, she called out, “See you tomorrow.”

Then she was gone.

Evan was confused. And horny. Until the breakup, it had never been this complicated with Kendall back in the day. They had dug each other and that was that. Now it felt like they were playing a game he didn’t know the rules to.

Which he didn’t like one damn bit.

When he stepped back into his coach, all voices stopped mid-sentence.

“What?” he asked his family as they all stared at him, expressions guilty. “What were you saying about me?”

“Are you dating Kendall?” his mother asked.

“No.” He shot Eve a glare. She had to have been the one to narc on him. “We’ve become friends again, that’s all.” They weren’t dating. You couldn’t call it that.

“After what happened before? Oh, Evan, she broke your heart.”

Evan sighed. “Mom, that was a million years ago. Does anyone want a steak or what? Because I need to eat before I get really cranky.”

“If you marry Kendall Holbrook you’ll never give me grandchildren. She’s just starting her career, she’s not going to want to stop and have babies.”

A throbbing started behind Evan’s eyes. “Mom. I am not going to marry Kendall Holbrook.”

He could barely keep Kendall in the same room with him.

He wasn’t going to marry anyone. That’s what he’d been saying for years and he meant it.

Because he hated to admit it, but if it wasn’t going to be Kendall, he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it.

KENDALL
cracked open her fourth Red Bull and took a sip.

“Are you sure you want to drink another one of those?” Kendall’s personal assistant, Frankie Halliday, gave her a questioning look, eyebrows raised behind her cat-eye glasses.

Frankie was in her early fifties, was more stylish than Kendall could ever hope to be in six lifetimes, and had a steady stream of men through her life. She was efficient and breezy and had everything anyone could ever need in her expensive handbag, yet always produced a needed item with zero digging.

She was an excellent personal assistant, but at the moment, Kendall wanted Frankie, the cab, and the entire world to disappear around her. She desperately needed some sleep, but hadn’t been able to get any in her hotel room because an amorous couple next door had still been going strong when her alarm went off at 2 A.M. Then on the plane to LA she had gotten the aisle seat next to a man who had snored violently the entire flight. If she had to guess, she’d say she had slept a grand total of an hour, coming off of a race day.

Hence the Red Bull.

“If I don’t drink this, I’m going to take a facer in the middle of the commercial shoot. Or at the very least I’ll be standing there staring vacantly at the camera, no clue what my lines are.”

“Do you have your lines yet?”

“No. Again, the reason for the Red Bull.” She held the can up in salute as the cab pulled up to the production studio. “They said they would be easy and that there would be a teleprompter. But I don’t believe them.”

Kendall also didn’t believe that she was going to be able to make her feet stop jiggling up and down anytime soon.

“There is hair and makeup, I’m assuming?” Frankie reached into her bag and withdrew a lipstick, which she put on flawlessly without the use of a mirror.

“Why? Do I look that bad?”

“You don’t look good.”

If that was how the person she paid responded, Kendall shuddered to think what the average person would think of her appearance at the moment. “I’ve been awake for forty-eight hours. More than that. It’s not my fault. And this is Untamed deodorant. Maybe this is the look they’re going for.”

“What look is that? The three-day bender?”

“No. Wild and free . . . sort of tousled and fresh out of bed. Untamed.”

“Unclaimed is more like it.” Frankie paid the driver and opened her cab door.

“Hey. That was just rude.” Kendall put her hand to her chest. Her heart was racing a little faster than was strictly normal. “I don’t look that bad.”

Except when she walked in, the director introduced himself as Jonathan Anderson Catsgow and then turned and shouted, “Makeup!”

He smiled at Kendall. “We’ll just freshen you up a bit.”

“Thanks, I was driving yesterday—I came in eleventh place, by the way, which is pretty good—and then I had to fly here overnight and I didn’t get any sleep at all, but I do respond well to concealer if you want to dab a little of that under my eyes—”

Jonathan cut her off. “We got it, hon. No worries.”

A man with aggressively spiked hair and a lip ring stepped up and frowned at Kendall. “Oh, Lord. Okay, no problem, I can do this.”

That was reassuring. Even a trained makeup artist was doubting he could make her look anything less than grotesque.

“Remember the look I want.”

“Got it, got it. Kendall, right this way, please. I’m Trevor and I’m going to make you gorgeous.”

“Good luck,” Frankie said.

Kendall glared at her, but Frankie was playing on her phone and didn’t notice.

Trevor plopped her down on a chair, ripped her purse out of her hand, and tossed it onto the counter. Hunching down, he scrutinized her for so long Kendall squirmed uncomfortably in her seat.

Clutching her Red Bull, she took another giant swallow, then said, “What? Is there a problem, Trevor?” Damned if she’d flown all night to have some hair-gelled twenty-two-year-old staring at her like she was gum on the bottom of his shoe.

“No, no. You’re actually quite beautiful. Lovely cheekbones. Exotic eyes.”

No one had ever called her eyes exotic before. “Trevor, you’re my new best friend.”

“And damn, what a rack.” He eyed her chest. “How much did those run you?”

Or not her best friend. “They’re natural!”

“I can back her up on that one,” Evan said, strolling in looking well rested and generally pleased with the world. How he did that was beyond her. He’d had a lousy finish the day before, engaged in a public pissing match with his brother, then a private fistfight with Elec, and had probably gotten the same amount of sleep she had. Yet here he was, looking sexy and adorable and talking about her breasts with a roomful of hair and makeup professionals.

“Really?” Trevor asked Evan. “They totally have a roundness that you just don’t see in nature.”

“Trust me. They’ve been like that since before her eighteenth birthday. Totally hers.”

“Do you mind not talking about my breasts?” Kendall went to take another sip of her Red Bull and hit her tooth with the rim. “Oww.”

Evan leaned against the counter and studied her. “How many of those have you had, babe? You look a little jittery.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re talking about my breasts like they’re the weather forecast. And aside from being totally offensive, you’re giving the impression we’re in a relationship.”

“I was just trying to prevent an implant rumor starting up, but alright, I apologize.” Evan leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, his fingers lightly brushing her hair off her cheeks. “I wish you had stayed with me last night.”

It must have been the lack of sleep, but Kendall thought he looked amazingly hot leaning over her in a T-shirt, a ball cap on his head, his breath smelling like coffee and cinnamon. The way he looked at her, like he wanted to just lick her from head to toe, made her heart race even faster than it did on Red Bull, and her insides went warm and squishy. “I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep if I had stayed with you.”

He grinned, a slow, lazy, arrogant smile that had her nipples hardening and her fingers twitching to touch him. His crotch was only inches from her hand and she desperately wanted to reach out and stroke the front of his jeans.

“But you would have had more fun if you’d stayed with me.”

There was no doubt about that. She’d have been having an orgasm instead of listening to one.

But no need to swell his head. “Maybe.”

Evan laughed. “I can prove it.”

The loud clapping of hands startled Kendall.

“I hate to break up your early morning flirt, but I need to get to work here,” Trevor said. “If you want to talk dirty to each other, send a text. You can sext and have your hair done at the same time.”

Embarrassed, Kendall put her hand on Evan’s chest and pushed him backwards. “No sexting, Monroe. We’re doing this commercial and then I’m going to bed. In and out, we’re done.”

Evan laughed. Trevor’s eyebrows shot up.

Her cheeks flushed. “I mean, the commercial! In and out, quickly, we’ll be done.
Then
I’m going to the hotel and sleeping for eight hours before flying home. That’s what I meant.”

“Whatever, doll baby,” Trevor said. “Doesn’t matter to me as long as you let me at those eyebrows.”

“What’s wrong with my eyebrows?” Kendall had a very real fear of waxing. Ripping hair out of skin just seemed abusive. Self-mutilation. Unnecessary. And mostly, she imagined it just hurt a lot.

“Just a little trimming and shaping. Nothing major.” Trevor shoved a fashion magazine in her hands. “Here, read this. Relax. And for the love of God, stop bouncing your leg up and down like that. Your whole body is vibrating.”

Was she bouncing her leg? Kendall looked down. She was. She made it stop. But then she started tapping the arm of the chair with her fingers. And biting her lip. While turning her foot in circles. She ignored the magazine in her hands.

“I don’t think Kendall knows how to relax,” Evan told Trevor. “I would just slap some makeup on as fast as you can.”

Kendall was about to open her mouth and deliver a scathing response when he added, “Besides, she doesn’t need any makeup. She’s gorgeous the way she is.”

Well, that was sweet. Kendall stopped twitching her fingers quite so violently as she contemplated Evan’s many good qualities. He was thoughtful and funny and loyal and so very, very sexy . . .

Trevor rolled his eyes. “Says the man who is playing hide the salami with her.”

Trevor most definitely was not her best friend. In fact, she kind of didn’t like him.

She was bordering on hating him twenty minutes later when she looked in the mirror and saw that somehow she’d entered into the Valley of the Dolls.

“Oh, my God.”

“It’s fab, isn’t it?” Trevor asked, beaming behind her, hands still playing with her hair.

Her giant hair.

Her enormous, teased, massive, seven-foot-wing-span hair.

“I look like I fell into a seventies porno!” Kendall turned her head sideways, hoping that would help. It didn’t. The bizarre thing was Trevor hadn’t used a lot of hair spray, so it looked fairly natural. Just gigantic. “What am I supposed to be wearing?”

“Denim shorts, a tube top, and stilettos.”

Not in this lifetime. Kendall shook her head so rapidly her vision blurred. “No. No, no, and no. No denim shorts. No shorts. No tube top. I’ll wear the stilettos but that’s it.”

Evan came up beside her, a pastry in his hand, wearing sexy jeans and a black ribbed tank top. “You’re wearing nothing but shoes? That will sell a lot of deodorant.”

Kendall shoved Trevor’s primping hands away from her hair and jumped up out of the chair. She couldn’t sit still for another minute. “Very funny. I’ll wear jeans. And a cute top, but not a tube top. Forget it.”

“Why are you telling me? I’m not in charge of this gig. Nice hair, by the way. I think I had a poster on my bedroom wall of a chick with hair like that when I was thirteen.”

Glaring at him, she yanked the pastry from his hands and took an oversized bite, closing her eyes as the icing melted on her tongue. Sugar made it better.