“Ah, yeah.” His eyes widened as the full brunt of her emotions hit him.
“I need to get down there, right now.”
“You’re really not supposed—”
“Right now!”
“Sure. Sure.” He backed up a step. “Follow me.” He led her to a gate that opened onto the track. “Be careful.”
But she was already on the track, pelting toward Jason’s ruined car without any thought to her own safety. Because of the dozen or so men gathered around the car, she couldn’t see Jason. Wielding her elbows and voice like blunt instruments, she worked her way to the front of the crowd in time to see Jason pulled through the car’s window.
He was cursing as he emerged, but he was alive. Relief slammed into her. She stopped five feet from the car and watched him shake off the hands that reached for him when he swayed. He limped toward the crumpled hood, favoring his left knee.
Jason pulled off his helmet. “Damn it, there’s the end of my season.”
It could have been the end of him. Ming sucked in a breath as a sharp pain lanced through her chest. It was just typical of him to worry about his race car instead of himself. Didn’t he realize what losing him would do to the people who loved him?
She stepped up and grabbed his helmet from his hands, but she lost the ability to speak as his eyes swung her way. She loved him. And not like a friend. As a man she wanted to claim for her own.
“Ming?” Dazed, he stared at her as if she’d appeared in a puff of smoke. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to watch you race.” She gripped his helmet hard enough to crack it. “I saw you crash. Are you okay?”
“My shoulder’s sore and I think I did something to my knee, but other than that, I’m great.” His lips twisted as he grimaced. “My car’s another thing entirely.”
Who cares about your stupid car? Shock made her want to shout at him, but her chest was so tight she had only enough air for a whisper. “You really scared me.”
“Jason, we need to get the car off the track.” Gus Stover and his brother had been part of Jason’s racing team for the past ten years. They’d modified and repaired all his race cars. Ming had lost track of how many hours she and Jason had spent at the man’s shop.
“That’s a good idea,” she said.
“A little help?” Jason suggested after his first attempt at putting weight on his injured knee didn’t go so well.
Ming slipped her arm around his waist and began moving in the direction of the pit area. As his body heat began to warm her, Ming realized she was shaking from reaction. As soon as they reached a safe distance from the track, Jason stopped walking and turned her to face him.
“You’re trembling. Are you okay?”
Not even close. She loved him. And had for a long time. Only she’d been too scared to admit it to herself.
“I should be asking you that question,” she said, placing her palm against his unshaven cheek, savoring the rasp of his beard against her skin. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and never let go. “You should get checked out.”
“I’m just a little banged up, that’s all.”
“Jason, that was a bad crash.” A man in his late-thirties with prematurely graying hair approached as they neared the area where the trailers were parked. He wore a maroon racing suit and carried his helmet under one arm. “You okay?”
“Any crash you can walk away from is a good one.” Leave it to Jason to make light of something as disastrous as what she’d just witnessed. “Ming, this is Jim Pearce. He’s the current points leader in the Texas region.”
“And likely to remain on top now that Jason’s done for the season.”
Is that all these men thought about? Ming’s temper began to simmer again until she saw the worry the other driver was masking with his big, confident grin and his posturing. It could have been any of these guys. Accidents didn’t happen a lot, but they were part of racing. This was only Jason’s second in the entire sixteen years he’d been racing. If something had gone wrong on another area of the track, he might have ended up driving safely onto the shoulder or he could have taken out a half dozen other cars.
“Nice to meet you.” As she shook Jim’s hand, some of the tension in her muscles eased. “Were you on the track when it happened?”
“No. I’m driving in the second warm-up lap.” His broad smile dimmed. “Any idea what happened, Jason? From where I stood it looked like something gave on the right side.”
“Felt like the right front strut rod. We recently installed Agent 47 suspension and might have adjusted a little too aggressively on the front-end alignment settings.”