“Manda.” I step forward when she ushers those ahead of me to the side. I have to fold my six and a half feet stature to place a kiss on her cheek, but it’s what we do.
I ooze charm, allegedly. I play my part, and I remain in her good graces when I know I could get myself booted from the circuit if she decides she doesn’t want me.
I could drive in circles anywhere, anytime. I could race dudes down Main Street to get a charge. I don’t need Piper’s Lane for the payday, so none of this is a necessity for my bank or groceries, like it is for many others.
Most of the folks who come out here work regular jobs that don’t quite cover the bills, then they come down on the weekends and pray they can win and set their families up a little more comfortably.
My grandfather, the first Bryan Kincaid, was one of those people. A win was the difference between feeding his family or not. The car he drove, he won from someone else. His victories, many. He was good behind the wheel of a fast car, and sent that ability down through his blood into mine.
But though I don’t need Manda or Piper’s Lane for the income, I do need it for the adrenaline, for the fun, for the hit I’m addicted to.
So I play the game.
“You look good. Got a haircut?”
Manda scoffs and ticks me off her list of racers. “You think that a compliment on my hair will do you favors?” Then she grins. “You’d be absolutely right. I was in the salon only this morning.”
“The pink looks good.” I reach forward and finger the long strands that hang over her shoulder. “Looks like cotton candy.”
“The bottle was literally labeled ‘cotton candy’,” she snickers. “I’ve got you starting against Kallan.”
“He’s a little bitch.”
She laughs. “If you say so. Roll up when he does. Don’t be late, or you lose by default.”
“I’m never late.”
I release her hair and cast a glance around the crowd. Hundreds of bodies mill around, hundreds of racers and their cheer squads who consist of women in less clothes than I see at the lake in the summer.
Not that I’m complaining.
“Is Jackson here?” I glance back in time to catch Manda’s little shrug.
“He might be. But seeing as you’re not racing him, you don’t have to worry about him.”
“You know we’ll be racing before the end of the night.”
“Cocky.” She laughs. “You assume you’ll beat Kallan. You assume you’ll beat everyone right up to the finals.”
“It’s a safe assumption.”
I glance to my left when a new, loud car pulls through the crowd. I don’t see him, but I know the sound of an engine as well as I know voices. I don’t need to see to know.
I turn back to Manda and grin. “He’s here.”
She rolls her eyes. “You need to stop antagonizing him, Bry. You’re gonna push too hard someday. He’ll snap, and then we’re all gonna be in trouble.”
“He’s a bitch, and you know I love poking at those.” I turn away from her and make my way through the crowd.
“Leave it alone, Bry!” Her voice follows me as I move. “Bryan! It’s tacky to keep poaching a man’s girl.”
“If he was a man, he’d be able to hold onto them.”
I pass Tucker, though it’s not because I walk by his bike or my car. He knows what I’m doing, so he rushes in to follow me into the crowd as they surround the brand-new, straight off the manufacturer’s floor, shiny, black Dodge Challenger.
I have a friend that drives a vintage Dodge. American muscle at its sexiest. But the newer kind, while sexy… the fact that Jackson lost his ride last night and needed to scramble for another today… that alone, and the fact he drove it here, instantly lowers its market value.
The crowd fangirls over the sparkling paintwork. They stroke the hood, ooh and ahh when he pops it open to show off the engine. They hope that being close means he’ll call them his friend, but I hold no such wishes.
I don’t want to be his friend. In fact, the more I piss him off, the happier I am.
I push through the crowd, fold my arms, and smirk when he slides out of the front seat with his aviator sunglasses shielding his douchebag eyes, despite the fact it’s nine at night.
Jackson Price has been a pain in my ass since the day I met him… in kindergarten.
He thinks he’s bad. And he thinks that because my family’s name means something, that I invite a prick into my life. He’s considered it his job to annoy me from the moment we met; as the years have passed, he’s done everything in his power to piss me off.
It’s all fun and games to fill a locker with dirt, to drop bottles of paint on my new shoes in home-economics, to knock me on my ass in the cafeteria and send my lunch to the floor for the third time in a single week. Switching out our assignments, putting my name on his science fair shit and taking the credit for something I spent hours and hours working on…
Then, as we got older, shoving a screwdriver into the tires of my bike, cutting the chain so I had to walk it home, then poaching the girl I could have sworn I would one day marry – in my thirteen-year-old brain, I thought I had it all worked out.
Every step I took in school, Jackson Price was standing right there to fuck it up for me.
But, hey, fair’s fair, right?
Knock my lunch to the floor? I had a dozen cousins in my school who would share their food. Trash my bike? No problem, I had family to walk home with. Steal my high school crush? If she could be stolen, then it was never going to work out anyway.
But the day Jackson fucking Price swore he was a changed man, took my sister out to dinner, then sent her home crying… that was the day our war officially began.
I can take a lot of shit, and I’ll accept a metric ton of “good-natured ribbing,” which is what the administrators of my school called his bullshit, but the day you fuck with a man’s family, you’ve gone too far.
My mom used to be all, “Be nice, honey. He wants your attention because he wants to be your friend.” But that night Brooke came home with her shoes in her hands and tears in her eyes, even my mom turned.
“Fuck him up, Bry. Do it before you’re eighteen. Juvie is easier than prison.”
That was years ago, and though I get a chance to fuck him up on a weekly basis, though my sister is in a happy relationship now with a good man, and maaaybe I went an eye for an eye – he fucked with my sister, so I went for his and delivered cold revenge that hurt a hundred times worse – my grudge refuses to burn away. Not when Jackson turns up every weekend and pokes, pokes, pokes some more.
I approach his car now and check out the shiny new engine with a fast glance, then I continue forward until I stop, and our eyes meet.
“Bry.” Tucker grabs my arm when Jackson takes a step forward. He tries to pull me back, to at the very least delay the inevitable. “Cool it.”
“Kincaid,” Jackson sneers. “You’re back, even after the beatdown you took last night?”
I burst out with loud, startling laughter that makes the crowd around us jump. “I took your car, I took your cash, your date sure as shit didn’t leave with you, and I jacked up your face. Remind me, Price. When was my beatdown? Because it seems to have slipped my mind.”