by Kat Ransom
“Cole?”
“Yes, GG?”
“The only place I ever want to run again is into your arms. I know what I want, it’s the same thing I’ve always wanted. I’m locking you down, Cole Ballentine. Marry me?”
I can see all the heads in the paddock turn towards me, but I don’t hear anything except the white noise in my headphones as I wait for his response. A thousandth of a second, twelve-seconds, four hours, I have no idea how much time passes because my world stands still.
Finally, his familiar, throaty voice is my ear.
“Baby. My gorgeous girl. I’m gonna marry the shit out of you.”
I feel like I’ve just won the race myself because there are hands all over me, hugging me, patting me on the back, fingers mussing my hair up. Someone behind me wraps their arms around me in a bear hug and lifts me out of my stool for a second. The whole crew is cheering, and cameramen are racing down the paddock to capture the moment.
Cole’s car zooms past us just in front of the pit wall, and he comes on the radio again, “For the permanent record, I’ll be asking you again because I’ve waited six years to do it. And you’re going to say yes.”
“I will,” I answer him, my cheeks aching from smiling so hard. “Right now, though, you win this race.”
“Copy that, baby.”
There are a dozen or more reporters and cameras pointing at me when Mallory arrives, pulls me off my stool, and we squeal like schoolgirls. “I get first dibs on the post-race interview,” she hugs me again.
“Yes, yes,” I laugh.
“Looks like it’s going around,” she holds up her left hand and shows me a beautiful diamond engagement ring on her finger, gleaming in the light.
“Oh, I’m so happy for you!” I cry and hug her.
“Right back at you.”
Makenna and Mila come racing through the garage and join us. “Holy shit,” Makenna screams. “It was on every big screen on the circuit!”
“Oh my god,” I laugh.
Edmund taps my shoulder and points to the television monitor above the pit wall, “Last lap, bring your boy home.”
I jump back on my stool. I’ve missed how Cole got into first place, but he’s there.
“Two seconds to the car behind, Cole. It’s yours for the taking.”
“Get your ass to parc ferme, this is for you.”
Edmund waves his hands at me with a proud smile, “Go, go!”
I give him a big kiss on the cheek, and I race my as fast as my legs will run down the paddock toward parc ferme where the winning cars will be pulling in any second.
The camera crews are chasing me, the other garages are shouting words of congratulations and putting their hands out for high-fives as I run past.
“Permission for celebratory donuts?” Cole asks. I didn’t even realize I left my headset on, and I can still hear him, though I can’t respond.
“Permission granted,” Edmund answers.
I gaze up at a giant outdoor television monitor, and Cole’s car is spinning around and around, blue smoke rising up the sides of his car. The engineer inside me can’t even cringe watching what he’s doing to those tires and his engine life right now.
I’m too happy to care.
Then he takes off like a rocket toward the pit lane and is pulling up to his parking spot before me.
I try to run to him, but FIA personnel holds me back because there are still moving cars, and, technically, no one is allowed to be in that area. But I’m right here, twenty feet away, as Cole climbs out of the car and looks around for me.
“Cole,” I scream and wave while the FIA guy keeps one hand on my arm.
Cole’s head turns, and he lifts one hand up and motions a finger for me to come to him.
“Oh hell with it, go,” the FIA man tells me and gives me a little push on my back.
Cole lifts his helmet visor up a split second before I launch myself at him, wrapping my legs around his hips and my arms around his neck. His strong arms hold me tight while I take his helmet in my hands and try like hell to kiss him through it.
“I love you so much,” I keep telling him and trying to kiss him, though the only thing I can connect my lips to is his nose.
He’s laughing, and the corners of those gorgeous blue eyes are all crinkled up like he’s sporting the biggest grin ever under his gear.
“Get this damn helmet off,” I start pulling at his chin strap while the crowd grows around us. I’m oblivious to it, though. I just need my lips on his.
Finally, I loosen the chin strap, and Cole flips his helmet and balaclava over his head, both fall to the ground, and our mouths smash together.
One hand under my ass and one in my hair, he ravishes me hard as I squeeze my legs around him tighter, kiss him like my life depends on it—because it does—and tears start streaming down my face again.
Happy tears.
Incredible, beautiful, happy tears that wash away all the years of the ones that came before.
“God damn I love you,” he smiles around my lips as my fingers run through his hair.
“Boy, I kind of hate to break this up,” the official podium interviewer steps up to us with a microphone. “Can we cut in, offer congratulations, and get a comment?”
“Piss off,” Cole answers, never making eye contact with him and continuing to kiss me.
The crowd roars in laughter.
“Umm, sorry again for the language, folks, hopefully, we were able to bleep that out in time, umm,” the interviewer fumbles around.
I pull away and smile down at Cole, unwrap my legs from him, and slide down. He lets me but doesn’t fully let me go.
This is his home crowd, this is his race. I want him to bask in it, enjoy it, let all of his fans celebrate alongside him. With his hand in mine, I raise it above us and point at him. The crowd goes nuts.
Cole climbs on top of his car and pumps his fists, waves to all the hometown fans in the crowd, relishes in the glory he’s earned. I beam at him from the ground, so proud.
I’m watching Cole so intensely I’m caught off guard when my feet lift off the ground, and I’m being spun around in a circle.
“Making an honest man out of him, huh?” Dante cheers before he stops spinning me and puts me down.
“You’re next,” I tell him and give him a huge hug.
“Hell no, bellissima.”
Cole jumps down from his car, and the interviewer swarms him, “We’ll have to check the history books, but I think this may be a first. What an incredible day! We had a rain delay, an absolute stunner of a race, and then this! Were you expecting this at all, Cole?”
“Which part?”
The interviewer laughs, “Well, any of it.”
“Then yes, yes, and yes,” Cole answers.
“I suppose you wouldn’t be an F1 driver if you weren’t so confident, but you’re saying you knew there’d be a marriage proposal over your team radio today?”
“No, but I did know many years ago that there’d be one, one day,” he runs his hand through his hair then waves to the crowd again.
“Amazing, just amazing. Congratulations from all of us, you’ve given the fans quite a show today.”
“Thank you to all the fans, thank you for coming out in the rain today, for all of your support. My team, everyone back home in London, thank you all so much. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s some champagne to be sprayed, and then I’d like to take my fiancé home,” he winks at the camera, and the crowd goes wild again.
He walks away from the interviewer and speeds up to the podium ceremony while the other two top drivers answer their questions. I feel a little bad, but not too bad, that we’ve upstaged the whole thing.
Champagne sprays down on all of us below the podium after everyone is presented with their trophies. I’m drenched in it by the time Cole takes my hand, and we race back to the motorhome.
There’s more cheering and clapping as he drags me upstairs and into his room. I expect him to pin me
up against the wall as soon as he kicks the door closed behind him, but he’s ripping his race suit off and pulling new clothes out of his closet.
“You didn’t seriously think I was going to make love to my fiancé for the first time in the motorhome?” He asks when he sees my questioning eyes.
“I kind of did, yes,” I laugh.
He pulls on a pair of jeans and stalks to me, takes my face in his hands, and whispers into my lips, “You thought wrong, gorgeous girl. I’ll be damned if we walked through fire all these years not to do this right.”
“Where are we going, then?”
“Wherever you want. I’m thinking we need a hotel suite for a few days, a private jet home, then I intend to do just what I said—marry the shit out of you. Immediately.”
“Yes, please.”
“Unless you want to get married here, in the States?”
“No, our family is back in London. Take me home.”
Epilogue
December - London
Cole
“It’s technically Christmas morning.”
“It’s 12:01 am, Cole.”
“Exactly, Christmas morning.”
Emily’s back is pressed up against my chest, sitting in between my legs on the couch. An oversized wool throw over us keeps her barely clad body warm. Her fingers lazily trace up and down my thigh.
Just outside the windows, the city lights twinkle. Fat, heavy snowflakes have been coming down for hours, coating London in a thick, white blanket. It’ll be gone tomorrow, but it’s here tonight, and it’s perfect.
“You know that saying, excited as a kid on Christmas morning? They’re talking about you,” she arches her neck backward into my shoulder. I press a kiss to her temple and breathe in the smell of her shampoo.
Even though the whole apartment smells like pine and gingerbread and cinnamon, I can still smell her when she’s up close like this.
“We may have gone a little overboard.”
“We, nothing. This is all on you. I purchased a reasonable amount of Christmas decorations.” Her eyes twinkle, reflecting the warm glow from all the strategically placed, battery-powered candles.
We can’t have real candles for fear the place would go up like a tinderbox if they got too close to one of the many decorated fir trees. There’s an enormous one—Big Mama—in the living room, before us. Em wants to decorate that one with ornaments from all the countries we travel to.
But there’s another tree in every single room, I think. And on the deck.
I may have gone a little overboard, I’ll admit it. I may have overcompensated, knowing it was Emily’s first Christmas away from her parents.
But she started it, overcompensating for my first real Christmas, period.
Now, between the two of us, it looks like Santa’s workshop up in here.
“Want more cider?” She asks before she stands, wraps the blanket around herself, and leaves me naked on the couch.
“Sure. Is there any more of that pudding left?” I ask as she walks into the kitchen. I take the opportunity to pick my pants up off the floor and slip them on.
“Christmas pudding, Yorkshire pudding, or figgy pudding?”
“I’ll eat any pudding you bring me, baby.” It’s winter break, I can live it up. Besides, someone has to eat the metric ton of food in this place.
Emily’s been cooking all month, including a few batches of ‘healthy’ sugar-free cookies that were a massive fail. She fed them to the ducks on the river instead of throwing them straight into the bin.
But food production and experimentation really ramped up earlier today for Christmas Eve dinner. I’ve never done so many dishes in my life.
I can’t say I ever thought I would have a full house on Christmas Eve, but we did. Dante’s not flying home to Italy until tomorrow, so he was here. Edmund and his wife stopped over, Klara and her new boyfriend. Emily issued an open invitation to anyone at Imperium who didn’t have anywhere to go.
Between everyone who came and went all night long, we demolished a twenty-four-pound turkey and enough liquor to fill a river.
Tomorrow it should be much quieter, and I’m actually looking forward to that. I want to watch Emily and Danica open all the gifts under the tree, the heaping mound she scolded me for adding to every day. I can’t help it.
I don’t want to help it.
As I polish off another one of the puddings that Em brings me—no clue which variety this one is, but it’s delicious—she snuggles back into the couch with her mug of cider.
“Time for presents yet?” I’ve been harassing her all day, but she’s insistent we have to wait until Christmas morning, which it now is. Technically.
“No.”
“Just one? You gave me one present already. Fair is fair.”
“I was kidding about that being a present,” she laughs.
I wasn’t. I may not have received too many Christmas presents over the years, but I don’t see how it could get any better than the strappy, freaky little lingerie thing she pranced out of the bedroom in once everyone left.
I glance at the three stockings hung up by the fireplace. I just want to give Emily the one little present while we’re still alone, before Dante returns home with my sister.
And he’d better return home with my sister, or he’s not going to live to see New Year’s Eve. If I weren’t so determined to finally have time alone with Emily, I would never have let him leave with her tonight. But I was desperate.
Come hell or high water, that ring is going on her finger tonight.
It’s been one thing after another preventing it since we got home from the US Grand Prix.
We had races left to attend, all of them on last season’s tires, which Emily had to catch up on. Concordia, officially, claimed they discovered a simple defect in their manufacturing process. Their statement was, more or less, a very unsatisfying “Whoops.”
Officially, Oliver and a few other executives resigned.
Officially, Emily and Professor Tillman never got credit. Both said they didn’t want to be involved in publicity or scandal, anyway. They are writing a new scientific paper about what they learned, though.
But unofficially, and where it matters most to her, Emily has respect from the teams, engineers, and crews. They know.
Then, Emily’s parents did not exactly go quietly into the night. There’s a Christmas card from them sitting in a kitchen drawer, in fact. It doesn’t get displayed with the others, but Emily hasn’t thrown it out, either.
Emily is still working through her feelings about them, and she probably will for a long time. She did set boundaries for her parents. Under threat of a total ban on contact, they’re adhering to her rules, for now.
Honestly, I don’t know if it will work out or not. It’s up to Emily.
I don’t know that people ever fundamentally change who they are at their cores. Emily is always going to be good, though she lets the bad-girl out frequently and with unapologetic passion these days. Her inner badass flies freer than it ever has.
Everyone has chains around their neck from someone, somewhere, something that weighs them down. Cutting that shit off is the best thing either of us has ever done.
Stan and Kristy, on the other hand, it’s been a clean break away from them. Instead of wondering if this is the year either of them would contact me on Christmas, I took control of the situation and made the decision for them. One more weight around my neck fell away.
I won’t feel guilty for it.
Then it was Thanksgiving.
It was around then Danica came into our lives. Apparently, I have a younger sister. Half-sister, technically, but that’s just semantics. Her mother was one of Stan’s hookups, and I never knew about it.
She’s only a few years younger than me and, my whole life, I never knew it. Never knew I had other family out there in the world.
She’s had a rough go of things and is staying with us for a bit since, like me, she isn’t interested in spendi
ng the holidays with her biological father.
While I’m glad to have Danica here, I intend to marry my girl before the year is up, and, right now, we finally have the apartment to ourselves.
“If this is really our Christmas and we’re doing things how we want, then I’m doing it my way,” I tell her.
“I kind of want to keep teasing you, but I also want my ring. Okay, go get it,” she smiles.
She beat me to proposing, so it isn’t like I could drop to my knee and surprise her with a grand gesture. I’m trying to make up for it in other ways and am nervous as hell about them.
Standing from the couch, I take her hand and pull her up. She’s still wrapped in only a blanket, and we move over to the stockings by the fireplace.
“I’m so excited, gimme, gimme, gimme,” she squeals.
God, I hope she likes it. I researched and read everything I could find online, but I was on my own for this.
She was so specific on the kind of ring she did not want, I may have gone too far. No diamonds because she has ethical concerns about their sourcing, plus she thinks lab-created diamonds are ‘cooler’ anyway. Nothing too showy because that isn’t her. Nothing that can get damaged at work.
The same girl who wanted to ride a beat up Vespa around Budapest was not going to be impressed with a giant rock from Tiffany’s.
She also doesn’t want a fancy wedding because she’s happier covered in tire grime than designer gowns. So, I have a private ceremony scheduled for us on New Year’s Eve and then one hell of a party planned afterward at the London Tower Bridge.
Makenna is flying in, Klara and several friends and professors from Cambridge, Liam, and Mila, obviously. Half of the F1 grid and team members, damn near everyone from Imperium, will be there.
It’ll be huge, but still intimate because these are friends and family, now.
I’ll wear a tux because Emily gets off on it. She can come in pancake pajamas if she wants. But I have stylists with gowns and all the frilly shit on standby if she does want it. I’ve covered every base.
And then we’re leaving for a two week Anthony Bourdain food tour of Vietnam, with a third week at the end dedicated to holing up, just the two of us, along the beaches of Amanoi.
