Page 1 of Speeding Hearts

Chapter 1

Stella

A sprayof dirt hit me straight across my clean white t-shirt—and I wasn’t even mad about it.

I grinned, adrenaline jolting through my core as if I were behind the wheel of the stock cars speeding around the dirt track before me.

Nerves too. My stomach swayed as a driver took a corner so fast his car nearly tilted up on two wheels.

I twirled my ponytail as I stood there watching the cars on this little dirt track outside of Oak Bend, Michigan. Then I forced myself to drop my hands. That habit made me look like a nervous teenager.

Though I kind of felt like one right now. My whole life was packed up in my little held-together-with-tape-and-tar hatchback in the parking lot of the Oak Bend Speedway, and my whole future—at least the next three and a half months of it—was right here on this track.

Suddenly, I was gripped with insidious doubt. I’d been wrestling with it in my head the whole drive over. Was I sure this was what I wanted to do? Or was I here because of Dean?

My best friend, Dean Hughes,wasthe reason I was here, but only because he’d told me his uncle ran a dirt track back in his hometown of Oak Bend, Michigan.

Dean and I hadn’t actually been friends all that long—I’d met him at home in Jewel Lakes County, New York, two years ago. He worked for a local builder, and I ran my family auto shop. I was the first woman mechanic in Jewel Lakes.

At first, Dean made me nervous as hell. Not just because he always knew with unnerving accuracy what was wrong with the vehicles, which I found weird until he told me he was actually a mechanic by trade. But also because the man was so hot he made me turn into a tomato every time he pulled into my shop. If I had a list of what I found attractive in a man, Dean would tick off every last box twice over. Tall, with thick dark hair that fell in his eyes. Broad shoulders. Tattoos. God, everywhere tattoos—they peeked out of his sleeves and up his neck, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t lie awake at night wondering if there was any part of him that wasn’t inked.

Any particular part.

But I’d learned a lot more about Dean as we’d chit-chatted over the hoods of the trucks. He had a family mechanic shop back home like me, and most interestingly, his uncle ran a dirt track. I’d been harboring aspirations of racing cars my whole life, and having found someone who actually knew about this, I’d started bending his ear every time he came in the shop.

That was also how I’d learned, in an accidental beer-fueled confession in my shop after hours that he had an on-again, off-again high school sweetheart back home. He’d made it clear by the way he never mentioned his love life again, then or now, that he didn’t do relationships anymore, and it must have been because of her.

Not that it mattered—I didn’t do them either. Growing up, my older brothers had been protective. They never said it, but I heard the message from everyone else that most guys only wanted one thing, and their protectiveness kind of corroborated that.

But I was no victim. Anything boys could do, I could do better. By the time I reached adulthood, I decidedIwould be the one who only wanted one thing, and when I got it, I’d move on. It became my way of life. Fool around, don’t get too close, get the hell out.

But spending time with Dean was different. He didn’t treat me the way so many men meeting a woman mechanic did. He didn’t just want one thing either, and I found myself opening up to him in a way I never had with other men. It felt safe, because I knew he wasn’t trying to hook up with me. By the time we became really good friends, I’d had to shove whatever attraction I felt toward him further and further down. I couldn’t risk the best friendship I’d ever known.

I’d stick to the odd hook-up, thank you very much. Though now that I was here, I vowed I wasn’t going to get together with anyone. Fooling around with men made you lose focus. And I currently had a laser-sharp focus on my dream: racing cars.

I thought back to my childhood bedroom. While my friends had been putting up posters of boys from teen magazines, I’d plastered mine with images of Formula One race cars (okay, and the occasional teen hunk). I thought about how, whenever a sports car had come in for servicing at Archer Mechanical back home, I sometimes closed my eyes and gripped the wheel while revving the engine and imagining I was flying around a track in a Grand Prix.

Then I’d feel like a complete fool. I was thirty-one years old. A grown woman. I was running out of chances to realize my dream.

When Dean told me he was moving back home, I’d been devastated. More than I should have been for a friend. Until he casually mentioned that his uncle had an opening for a mechanic at his racetrack over the summer.

It had been like the universe screaming in my ear. Stay in Jewel Lakes and watch my dream—and best friend—slip away? Or go to Oak Bend and try to hang onto both?

This was what I’d come here for. Those drivers in the cars flying around the track before me—that was going to be me.

Nerves rattled in my stomach once again. That was going to be me.

You sure you didn’t just come here for Dean?

“You Dean’s little friend?” a gravelly voice came from behind.

I spun around so fast my ponytail flicked me in the eye. “Ow,” I said.

Smooth.

The potbellied gray-haired man before me went blurry as I rubbed at my lashes with my knuckle.

Speak of the devil—this must be Dean’s uncle, Colin.

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