Page 206 of Rogue Riders Duet

The way he looked at me.

And yeah, maybe he does want to fight me, or maybe we’re both idiots who can’t say what we mean until someone is halfway bleeding.

Are you okay?

He asked me that. Luc-fucking-Delacroix. The same guy who used to spit chewing gum into my helmet and call it a peace offering. The same guy I thought hated me now.

It should feel like something, but all it does is make everything worse, because I don’t know how I feel. Or maybe I do, and I just don’t want to name it.

My brain keeps circling the same pit, like a wheel stuck in the mud. Luc’s voice, that damn hoodie, the way he looked at me in the rain, and then, right next to it, a shadow stitched to the same thought, her.

Alaina Crews.

Because yeah, Luc is complicated, but she’s the one who cracked something open in me, while lying about who she was the whole damn time.

I think about her eyes, those big, Bambi eyes, and about her skin under my fingertips, and the way she let me trace her forearms. How she smiled when she told me I was allowed, that I was her nobody, and that she was mine.

She let me in.

She chose me.

Except she didn’t, not really, and now I feel like a fool. Again. It seems I’ve got a real talent for trusting the wrong women. First, Isla, with her crocodile tears and poison kiss, and now Alaina.

Is it fair to compare them, though?

It’s not, but I already did it in the hospital and hurt Alaina with it.

“I’m gonna eat so much pizza,” my dad announces, shattering my thoughts. “You can keep your protein shit. I’m going full-on gluten. Pizza, pasta, bam, I’m gonna be five kilos heavier by the time we leave Italy.”

I huff a dry laugh. “You’ll explode.”

“No, son. I will evolve. I’ll be the king of Italy.”

“Italy doesn’t have a king.”

“Well, it will soon.”

I shake my head and keep staring out at the passing fields, the golden light bleeding off the edges of the hills.

“And that will make you the prince,” he adds after a beat. “Little Prince Payne. Suits you.”

I finally look over, glaring. “Are you trying to be annoying?”

He smirks. “Always.” But then he glances over again, just a flash of something serious in his face. “You said Delacroix is back to his annoying self and that Crews is doing okay, right? So why are you so bloody moody?”

I tense. “Why would it be about Crews?”

I haven’t mentioned her to him at all today.

“I don’t know, maybe because you saw the crash, ran off like a maniac after him, even forgot about the podium, and then came back looking like someone spat in your cereal.”

“It’s not about Crews. It doesn’t fucking matter.”

He shrugs, unconvinced. “You said he had two broken fingers, right? The pinky and ring on the left?”

“Yeah.”

“Then he’ll race.”