RECKLESS THROTTLE

The hospitality unit smelled like espresso and money, and Nico Calder hated both.

He caught the two PR girls before they caught him — clipboards pressed to their chests, heads bent together just outside the glass doors of the Voss Racing motorhome, the kind of huddle that only ever meant one thing in this business.

"—I heard he broke a monitor in Jerez. Threw it across the room."

"I heard it was a chair."

"Either way. He's a liability. I don't know why Ingrid signed him."

Nico didn't correct them. He didn't announce himself, didn't clear his throat, didn't do any of the things a better-mannered man might do. He just stood there for one more second, hands in his jacket pockets, and let two strangers finish deciding who he was before he'd said a single word to either of them.

It wasn't the cruelest thing anyone had ever said about him. It wasn't even close. But there was something almost restful about it — about the plainness of it. *Liability.* At least it was honest. He'd take honest paddock cruelty over the smiling kind any day of the week.

He pushed through the doors anyway, because he had somewhere to be, and their conversation died the second they saw his face. He gave them a small, unbothered smile on his way past — the kind that said *I heard you, and I don't care* — and one of them actually flushed red to the ears.

Inside, the room was arranged like a stage. White backdrop, the Voss Racing logo repeated in a neat grid behind it, a low riser with two chairs and a table nobody was going to sit at. And behind all of it, gleaming under three studio lights like it had been poured rather than built, sat the bike.

*Rovente GP.* Deep, centenary red, a stripe of white cutting clean down the tail section, the number plates still blank because nobody had decided which number was going on his fairing yet. Nico looked at it the way he looked at very few things in his life — without irony, without performance, just want.

"There he is." Ingrid Voss crossed the room toward him with her hand already extended, her smile precise as an instrument calibration. She was smaller than her reputation, which he always found unsettling about powerful people — the mismatch between the size of the person and the size of the shadow they cast. "Nico. Welcome to the family."

"Ingrid." He shook her hand. Her grip was firm, dry, over in exactly one second — no lingering, no warmth beyond what the cameras required.

She turned him by the elbow toward a cluster of men in blazers already smiling with their teeth, and what followed was a blur of names Nico wouldn't remember by dinner — a bank executive, an energy drink rep who called him "champ" twice despite the fact that he'd never won a championship in his life, cameras flashing at exactly the moments Ingrid steered him into good light. Somewhere in that crowd, unnoticed, someone was already filming him without his permission — but he wouldn't clock that for another ten minutes.

Then, to the room at large, not really to him, Ingrid said the thing that made his jaw tighten under his practiced smile: "We're thrilled to have made this investment. Nico represents exactly the kind of high-risk, high-reward asset this team needs going into the new season."

*Asset.* Not *rider.* Not even *athlete.* He'd been called worse — liability, wildcard, disaster waiting to happen — but there was something almost more insulting about *asset*, about being spoken of like a stock position two men in blazers might discuss over lunch. He kept the smile on. He'd gotten very good at keeping the smile on.

"You alright?" Marco appeared at his shoulder like he always did, materializing out of nowhere with a can of something caffeinated already open in his hand. Marco Alvarez had been his teammate for exactly six hours and already felt like the only real person in the building.

"Never better," Nico said. "Apparently I'm an investment now."

"Better than a liability." Marco grinned. "I heard that one on the way in too. Word travels fast."

"Word travels at the speed of light in this paddock." Nico glanced toward the bike again, unable to help himself. "At least the bike doesn't talk."

"Give it time," Marco said. "Everything in this place eventually finds a way to complain about you."

Ingrid reappeared at Nico's other side before he could answer that, already talking, already moving to the next item on whatever schedule lived in her head. "One more thing, and then you're free to go breathe." She said it like a mercy, like she was doing him a favor by releasing him from his own signing party. "Going forward, you'll be working closely with someone on the marketing side. She'll be managing your public image, your social presence — the fan page, interviews, all of it. Given everything with the last team," and here her mouth flattened, diplomatic and pointed at once, "we want to make sure your story is being told the right way."

"Define 'right way,'" Nico said.

"The way that keeps the sponsors happy," Ingrid said, without missing a beat, "and keeps you on the grid."

She didn't wait for a response to that. She simply turned, scanning the room the way a general scans a battlefield, and Nico assumed — because it was easy to assume, because he'd met a hundred interchangeable people with headsets and clipboards in his career — that "she" would turn out to be someone he'd see twice a month and forget the name of in between.

He was wrong. But he wouldn't understand exactly how wrong for another twenty minutes.

***

Elena Voss had a rule about signing days: never stand where anyone can see you.

Not out of shyness. Out of professional instinct. The whole point of the job was to be the person behind the lens, not in front of it — to catch the moment nobody was performing for, the split second between the posed handshake and the next posed handshake, where something almost real slipped through. That was the content that actually worked. Sponsors loved a candid grin more than a hundred staged ones, and Elena had built an entire fan page strategy around understanding exactly why.

She had her tripod angled low, just off the edge of the press line, phone mounted and already rolling, when the new signing gave his first quote of the day to a reporter from a regional sports outlet.

"So, Nico — some are saying this move is a fresh start after a difficult season. How would you characterize your goals with Voss Racing this year?"

Elena had drafted the answer to that question herself. She had drafted six versions of the answer to that question, actually, color-coded by tone, and handed the safest one to the team's press liaison that morning: humble, forward-looking, a line about "trusting the process" and "earning it back on track." Clean. Boring. Unimpeachable.

"Honestly?" Nico said, leaning into the microphone with the kind of ease that made her stomach drop before he even finished the sentence. "My goal is to make the people who think I'm a liability regret saying it out loud where I can hear them."

The reporter laughed, delighted, already typing. Elena felt the carefully built narrative for the day crumble in real time, like watching a sandcastle meet the tide.

She was moving before she'd fully decided to. "Sorry — can I jump in for a second?" She slid into the frame with the kind of bright, practiced smile she'd perfected specifically for moments like this, the one that said *everything is fine* to a camera while her actual thoughts ran considerably hotter. "What Nico means is that he's focused on results, and he's excited to prove that on track with the team behind him. Right, Nico?"

He turned to look at her properly for the first time — and something in his chest did an inconvenient, unauthorized thing, a beat too fast, gone before he could name it. It took him a second longer than it should have to remember there was a reporter still standing there.

She wasn't dressed like most of the marketing girls who orbited this sport — the ones who showed up to a paddock in heels and necklines cut to be photographed, treating a Grand Prix like a red carpet with better catering. She wasn't dressed like that at all. Team polo buttoned all the way, sleeves at her elbows, hair pulled back with nothing loose enough to catch a breeze. If he hadn't been looking closely, he'd have filed her under *forgettable* and moved on. He was looking closely, though, and forgettable wasn't the word that came to mind.

There was something almost deliberate about how little she gave away. Clothes like armor rather than decoration — like she'd learned early that the less you showed, the less anyone got to comment on, and had built an entire wardrobe around that particular kind of self-defense. Small build, slim through the shoulders, and even under the shapeless black polo he could tell there was more to her than the outfit was trying to admit — nothing dramatic, nothing she was advertising, just present, softly rounded, the kind of thing a man noticed and then made himself stop noticing because it clearly wasn't on offer. Whatever she was hiding under all that fabric, she was hiding it on purpose.

She held herself well, too — spina straight, weight balanced, the kind of quiet physical discipline that came from actually taking care of a body instead of just photographing it. And her face didn't match the armor at all. Barely any makeup, just enough to even things out, and hair that had clearly never been anywhere near a flat iron — soft blond curls escaping the ponytail at her temples, giving her a face that looked, against every ounce of professional coldness she was radiating, disarmingly sweet. Like something out of a christening photo that had wandered onto a Grand Prix grid by mistake.

It didn't fit. That was the thing that caught him. The face said *harmless.* Everything else about her said *don't.*

"Sure," he said easily, dragging his attention back to where it belonged. "That's what I meant. Thanks for the translation."

"That's what I'm here for," Elena said, matching his tone exactly, refusing to let the edge in his voice land anywhere near her face. "Turning chaos into quotable content."

"Careful," he said, low enough that the reporter, already moving on to Marco, didn't catch it. "People who think they can manage me usually find out otherwise."

"People who think they can say whatever they want without consequences usually find out otherwise too," Elena said. "I'd say we're about even."

Something flickered across his face — not quite a smile, not quite annoyance, something caught in the middle that she didn't have a category for yet. "Bold words from someone I've known for ninety seconds."

"I've read your press file. I feel like I know you plenty."

"Careful," he said again, and this time there was something almost like real interest under the mockery. "A file's not a person."

"No," Elena agreed. "But it's usually a pretty good preview."

She might have said something else — she had at least three more sentences loaded and ready — but that was the exact moment her mother's voice cut cleanly across the room.

"Elena. There you are." Ingrid arrived with the specific brand of energy she reserved for moments she considered organizationally tidy. "Nico, I don't think you two have actually been introduced. This is Elena — my daughter. She's the one I mentioned. She'll be handling your image going forward. The fan page, the socials, interviews, all of it."

Elena watched it land on his face in real time — the exact half-second where *handler* recalculated into *the boss's daughter*, and something behind his eyes shuttered and reopened, recalibrated, filed away for later use.

"You're the daughter," he said, and it wasn't quite a question.

"I'm the daughter," Elena confirmed. "Also the person you were just being difficult with. Multitasking."

"Should've led with that."

"Would it have changed your answer?"

"No," he admitted. "But I'd have enjoyed watching you sweat about it more."

"Noted for next time," Elena said, and turned to her mother before he could get the last word, because some instincts you developed early and never unlearned. "I'll get you the highlight clip from the presser by tonight."

"Perfect," Ingrid said, already moving again, already three thoughts ahead. "Nico, go do the fitting session with the engineers before you disappear — and Elena, get him on camera for it. Sponsors want 'behind the scenes' content for the launch package."

"Of course," Elena said, already reaching for her tripod.

Nico did not look thrilled at being handed off like a piece of equipment with a shot list attached. Elena did not look thrilled at being handed the assignment either. Neither of them said so out loud.

***

The garage was quieter than the press room, the light dimmer, working bulbs instead of studio ones, and the Rovente GP sat up on its paddock stand looking less like a stage prop and more like what it actually was. A team of engineers moved around it with the unhurried efficiency of people who did this every day of their working lives — checking lever reach, footpeg height, the exact angle of the clip-ons — while Nico stood to one side, already changed.

Elena had expected the fitting session to be boring to film. A man sitting on a bike while people made notes on a tablet. She had not expected him to walk in wearing that.

He wasn't wearing the sponsor suit — that one lived in a garment bag with the patches stitched on in the exact regulation positions, the one she'd already photographed from six angles for the official gallery. This was something else entirely. A personal one-piece, matte black, unmarked except for a small embroidered set of initials at the collar, the kind of leather that had clearly been broken in over years rather than fitted fresh for a new contract. Real track leathers, not the softened, breathable kind civilians wore on rental bikes for an afternoon — armored at the shoulders, hips, and knees, stiff enough at the joints that he moved through the garage with a strange, deliberate hitch in his stride, like something had been set in a cast from the waist down. It should have looked clinical. Technical. A piece of safety equipment and nothing more.

It did not look like that.

She told herself she was watching the walk purely as a technical curiosity — the way the padding forced his knees to lift a fraction higher than normal, the way his hips couldn't quite swing the way they would in jeans — and for about four seconds, that was even true. Then the leather caught the light wrong, or right, depending on how she wanted to frame it later, and pulled taut across his thigh as he stepped up onto the paddock stand, and the curiosity stopped being about the engineering at all.

The suit held the shape of him with an honesty regular clothes never bothered with — the width of his shoulders tapering hard down to a waist that seemed almost narrow by comparison, the leather gathering and pulling faintly at his forearms with every small motion, outlining muscle without needing to try. His hips looked deceptively slight next to that shoulder line, built for leaning a four-hundred-horsepower machine through a corner rather than for anything decorative, and his thighs — she made herself look away from that thought before it finished forming, and then, because apparently she had no self-control left today, looked right back.

What she didn't see — what he made sure she didn't see — was the half-second where his own attention snagged on the wrong thing entirely: not the camera pointed at him, but the particular way she'd forgotten to breathe.

*It's the padding,* she told herself. *Anyone would look like that in armored leather. It's structural.* She almost believed it. Then he swung his leg back over the seat, and the stiffness that had made him walk like a man freshly out of a cast dissolved the second he settled into the bike's actual riding position — hips dropping, spine curving forward, everything about him suddenly fluid in a way the walk had never suggested was coming — and whatever clinical distance she'd been renting by the minute went with it.

He caught her looking on the second pass.

"See something you like?" he said, not even breaking stride as he swung a leg over the seat for the engineers, and there was nothing careful in the way he said it — just easy, unbothered amusement, like he already knew exactly what her face was doing and found it more funny than flatterin.

Elena's face went warm before her mouth caught up. "I'm assessing camera angles," she said, which was, technically, still true, in the same way that a diagnosis was technically still medicine

"Sure you are." He glanced sideways at her, close enough now that the practical, unglamorous leather stopped being an abstraction and became something she was standing uncomfortably near. "You can say the suit's doing its job. I won't tell anyone you have a professional interest in racing gear.

"It's very technically sound," Elena said, aiming for dry and landing somewhere closer to strangled. "Good ergonomics.

"Good ergonomics," he repeated, clearly delighted. He held her eyes a half-second longer than the joke required, close enough that she caught the faint leather-and-engine-oil smell clinging to the suit, before he finally looked away first — which felt, absurdly, like winning something. Then he let the engineers walk him through the last of the adjustments without looking at her again, which somehow felt worse than if he had.

***

By the time the session wrapped, most of the crew had cleared out, and Elena found herself alone in the garage for one unwitnessed minute, camera bag over her shoulder, a headache blooming behind her eyes from three hundred versions of the same footage. She let herself, for exactly that minute, just look at the bike without a job to perform

That was when she noticed the leather thigh bag hanging off the paddock stand where he must have set it down while he changed. Slim, worn, cinched-strap — the kind built to sit flat against a leg at speed, not swing or bounce. A small, sun-faded patch was stitched crookedly onto the flap, some symbol she didn't recognize and couldn't place to any sponsor she'd ever catalogued. It looked older than everything else in this garage combined

"Looking for souvenirs?

She hadn't heard him come back, changed now out of the leathers and into street clothes, the bag apparently the reason he'd returned. Nico stood a few feet away, watching her with an expression she couldn't quite read — not hostile, not quite anything else either.

"Just looking," she said, straightening. "It's a nice bike."

"It's a great bike," he corrected, crouching to buckle the thigh bag back around his leg in one practiced motion, patch disappearing against denim. "You'll want to remember that, given you're apparently in charge of making me look good now.

"I'm in charge of making you look *accurate*," Elena said. "Good is a separate project."

He almost laughed at that — she caught the very edge of it before he swallowed it back down. "This is going to be a problem for both of us. You know that, right?"

"I know," Elena said, and was faintly annoyed that it came out honest instead of dismissive. "I'm choosing to be optimistic anyway."

He held her gaze a beat too long before he answered, long enough that she felt it in her collarbone. "Don't," he said, finally turning to go, throwing the last of it over his shoulder like a dare he fully expected her to lose. "Optimism's the first thing this sport takes off you.

She watched him walk out into the corridor, thigh bag strapped tight and already forgotten against his leg, the stiff, armored hitch gone now that he was back in ordinary clothes, and told herself, very firmly, that the feeling currently sitting in her chest was irritation.

She was, it turned out, going to be wrong about that for quite a while — and some small, unhelpful, entirely honest part of her already knew it, the same part that was still thinking about the exact sound leather made when it moved against itself.