Page 112 of Red Flagged
Her chin dipped and she looked up at me through her lashes, andGod, she was so fucking pretty.
A beat passed. Then another. And then—Jesus help me—she smiled. It wasn’t sweet. It wasknowing. Coy. Calculated. Absolutely diabolical.
She leaned forward slightly, voice deceptively casual. “Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind, baby.”
My jaw actually dropped. I gaped at her like she’d just cast a fucking spell and walked away whistling. “Excuse me?” I demand, blinking. “What kind of—witchcraft—was that?” I gestured wildly at her.
She sipped her coffee with zero remorse. “What? I’m just listening.”
“You’re not listening. You’re–you’re orchestrating some kind of emotional checkmate.”
“I’m just really good at puzzles,” she said with a shrug, eyes sparkling.
I dragged a hand down my face again, this time to hide the way I was spiraling into the center of the earth.
“You’re a menace,” I muttered.
“Mmm, must’ve been from the emotional exorcism.”
I burst into laughter, and she followed—head tipping back, eyes crinkling, the kind of unfiltered sound I hadn’t realized I’d missed until now.
That’s what we’d started calling it—the incident in the bathroom. The emotional exorcism.
“Are you going to use that against me for the rest of my life?” I asked, still catching my breath.
“I don’t know,” she said with a faux-innocent shrug. “Are you going to use the diaper strip tease againstmefor the rest ofmine?”
“Touché,” I grumbled.
“Do you even know what that means?”
“I’m not completely uncultured, Aurélie. I can speak French when it’s used to insult me.”
She smirked, clearly pleased with herself, then went back to sipping her coffee, but the quiet that followed wasn’t uncomfortable. It was thoughtful.
My fingers tapped against the side of my mug.
“Made up mind or not,” I pressed, “I still needed to know what you thought. Because this doesn’t just affect my life anymore.” I looked up to meet her eyes. “It affects yours, too.”
Her expression didn’t change, and she didn’t interrupt. She asked me honest and difficult questions, absorbing every word I spoke as if she was cataloging them, putting together a puzzle no one else had ever cared enough to solve.
I hadn’t said a word about this to anyone else. Because the only person whose opinion mattered was sitting across from me now.
Aurélie licked her lips, considering me. I watched the movement, resisting the urge to pull her into my lap and kiss her. Sounded a lot more fun than trying to figure out my career all over again.
“You’ve been doing this for so long, Callum. You built your entire life around it, so I can understand why this is nerve-wracking for you.”
“I thought making this decision would be easy,” I admitted. “I thought I’d know.”
“That’s the thing. Youdoknow. It’s just hard for a control-freak to accept change.”
I flipped her off, and she blew me a kiss.
“So how the fuck do I just… stop?”
Her brows drew together. “Do you want to?”
The question hit me harder than I expected, because that Ididn’tknow. Racing had been my identity since I was a kid. My purpose. My reason for waking up in the morning.
