'You won! Sasha, you won the Singapore Grand Prix!'
Tears prickled her eyes even as her fist pumped through the air. Her father's face floated through her mind and a sense of peace settled momentarily over her. It was broken a second later by the sound of the crowd's deafening roar.
Exiting the car, Sasha squinted through the bright flashes of the paparazzi, desperate to see familiar hazel eyes through the sea of faces screaming her name.
No Marco.
A stab of disappointment hollowed out her stomach. With a sense of detachment, she accepted the congratulations of her fellow drivers and blinked back tears through the British national anthem.
Dad would be proud, she reminded herself fiercely. He was all that mattered. Plastering a smile on her face, she accepted her trophy from the Prime Minister.
This was what she wanted. What she'd fought for. The team-her team-were cheering wildly. Yet Sasha felt numb inside.
Fighting the alarming emptiness, she picked up the obligatory champagne magnum, letting the spray loose over her fellow podium winners. Brusquely she told herself to live in the moment, to enjoy the dream-come-true experience of winning her first race.
Camera flashes blinded her as she stepped off the podium. When it cleared Tom stood in front of her, a huge grin on his face.
'I knew you could do it! Prepare yourself, Sasha. Your world's about to rock!'
The obligatory press conference for the top three winning drivers took half an hour. When she emerged, Tom grabbed her arm and steered her towards the bank of reporters waiting behind the barriers.
'Tom, I don't really want-'
'You've just won your first race. "I don't really want" shouldn't feature in your vocabulary. The world's your oyster.'
But I don't want the world, she screamed silently. I want Marco. I want not to feel alone on a night like this.
Feeling the stupid tears build again, Sasha rapidly blinked them back as a microphone was thrust in her face.
'How does it feel to be the first woman to win the Singapore Grand Prix?'
From deep inside she summoned a smile. 'Just as brilliant as the first man felt when he won, I expect.'
Beside her she heard Tom's sharp intake of breath.
Behave, Sasha.
'Are you still involved with Rafael de Cervantes?' asked an odious reporter she recognised from a Brazilian sports channel.
'Rafael and I were never involved. We're just friends.'
'So now he's in a coma there's nothing to stop you from switching friendships to his brother, no?'
Tom stepped forward. 'Listen, mate-'
Sasha stopped him. 'No. It's fine.' She faced the reporter. 'Marco de Cervantes is a world-class engineer and a visionary in his field. His incredible race car design is the reason we won the race today. It would be an honour for me to call him my friend.' She tagged on another smile and watched the reporter's face droop with disappointment.
Tom nodded at a British female reporter. 'Next question.'
'As the winner of the race, you'll be the guest of honour at the rock concert. What will you be wearing?'
Mild shock went through her at the question, followed swiftly by a deepening sense of hollowness. The X1 Premier Rock Concert had become a fixture on every A-List celebrity's calendar. No doubt Marco would be there with his latest girlfriend.
'It doesn't matter what I'll be wearing because I'm not going to the concert.'
* * *
Sasha dashed into the foyer of her six-star hotel, grateful when the two burly doormen blocked the chasing paparazzi. She heaved in a sigh of relief when she shut her suite door behind her.
The ever-widening chasm of emptiness she couldn't shake threatened to overwhelm her. Quickly she stripped off her clothes and showered.
The knock came as she was towelling herself dry. For a second she considered not answering it.
A sense of déjà vu hit her as she opened the door to another perfectly coiffed stylist, carting another rack of clothes.
'I think you've got the wrong suite.'
The diminutive Asian woman in a pink suit simply bowed, smiled and let herself in. Her assistant sailed in behind her, clutching a large and stunningly beautiful bouquet of purple lilies and cream roses.
'For you.' She thrust the flowers and a long oblong box into Sasha's hand.
Stifling a need to scream, Sasha calmly shut the door and opened the box. On a red velvet cushion lay the most exquisite diamond necklace she'd ever seen. With shaking fingers, she plucked the card from the tiny peg.
Pick a dress, then they'll leave. Romano is waiting downstairs.
Sasha stared at Marco's bold scrawl in disbelief. When she looked up, the women smiled and started pulling clothes off the hangers.
'No-wait!'
'No wait. Twenty minutes.'
'But...where am I going?' she asked.
The stylist shrugged, picked up a green-sequinned dress barely larger than a handkerchief, and advanced towards her. Sasha stepped back as the tiny woman waved her hand in front of her.
'Off.'
With a sense of damning inevitability...and more than a little thrill of excitement...she let herself be pulled forward. 'Okay, but definitely not the green.'
The stylist nodded, trilled out an order in Mandarin, and advanced again with another dress.
Twenty minutes later Sasha stepped from the cool, air-conditioned car onto another red carpet. This time, without Marco, she was even more self-conscious than before. On a warm, sultry Singapore night, the cream silk dress she'd chosen felt more exposing than it had in the safety of her hotel room. At first glance she'd refused to wear the bohemian mini-dress because...well, because it had no back. But then the stylist had fastened the draping material across her lower back and Sasha had felt...sexy-like a woman for the first time in her life.
Her hair was fastened with gold lamé rope, her nails polished and glittering. The look was completed with four-inch gold stilettos she'd never dreamt she'd be able to walk in, but she found it surprisingly easy.
Romano appeared at her side, his presence a reminder that somewhere beyond the wild flashes of the paparazzi's cameras Marco was waiting for her.
All the way from her hotel she'd felt the emptiness receding, but had been too scared to acknowledge that Marco had anything to do with it. Now she couldn't stop a smile from forming on her face as the loud boom of fireworks signalled the start of the rock concert.
The VIP lounge teemed with rock stars and pop princesses. She tried to make small talk as she surreptitiously searched the crowd for Marco. Someone thrust a glass of champagne in her hand.
Half an hour later, when a Columbian platinum-selling songstress with snake hips asked who her designer was, Sasha started to answer, then stopped as an ice-cold thought struck her. Was Marco even here? Had she foolishly misinterpreted his note and dressed up only to be stood up?
The depths of her hurt stunned her into silence.
She barely felt any remorse as the pop star flounced off in a huff. Blindly she turned for the exit, humiliation scouring through her.
'Sasha? You're heading for the stage, right?' Tom grabbed her arm and stopped her.
'The...the stage?'
'Your favourite band is about to perform. Marco had me fly them out here just for you.'
'He what?' A different kind of stun stopped her heart.
'Come on-you don't want them to start without you.'
A thousand questions raced through her brain, but she didn't have time to voice a single one before she was propelled onto the stage and into the arms of the band's lead singer.
Torn between awe at sharing the stage with her favourite band, and happiness that she hadn't misinterpreted Marco's note after all, Sasha knew the next ten minutes were the most surreal of her life. Even seeing herself super-sized on half a dozen giant screens didn't freak her out as much as she'd imagined.
She exited the stage to the crowd's deafening roar. Tom beamed as he helped her down the stairs.
'Have you seen Marco?' Sasha attributed her breathlessness to her onstage excitement-not her yearning to see Marco de Cervantes.
Tom's smile slipped and his gaze dropped. 'Um, he was around a moment ago...'
She told herself not to read anything into Tom's answer. 'Where is he?'
'Sasha...' He sighed and pointed towards the roped-off area manned by three burly bodyguards.
At first she didn't see him, her sight still fuzzy from the bright stage lights.
When she finally focused, when she finally saw what her mind refused to compute, Sasha was convinced her heart had been ripped from her chest.
Each step she took out of the concert grounds felt like a walk towards the opening mouth of a yawning chasm. But Sasha forced herself to keep going, to smile, to acknowledge the accolades and respect she finally had from her team.
Even though inside she was numb and frozen.
* * *
The knock came less than ten minutes later.
Marco leaned against the lintel. The buttons of his shirt were still undone; his hair was unkempt. As if hands-female hands-had run through it several times. He stood there, arrogantly imposing, larger than life.
She hated him more than she could coherently express. And yet the sight of him kicked her heart into her throat.