The scent of fresh coffee brewing nudged Payton awake, but the distant coo of a mourning dove threatened to lull him back to sleep.  Lying on his side, his head buried in soft down, a light quilt tucked around him, he didn’t want to move.  His muscles felt liquid, his joints rubbery.  His back didn’t even hurt.     

    And then he remembered where he was.  Rachel’s bed.  He remembered what they’d together and he was on fire all over again.     

    Where was she, anyway?  He wanted to feel her again, smell her, hold her close against him.  With a smile on his face, he flipped over and glanced around.  He didn’t have to look too far to find her.  She was in this room, all right.

    Pieces of her surrounded him like a warm sleeping bag on a frosty mountain morning.  Lacy white curtains, feminine yet functional, draped around the windows and filtered the bright morning sun.  Pictures hung on the wall, images of Justin, Kim, and Hugo everywhere.  NASCAR and Fulcrum Racing baseball caps hung on hooks by the door while the clothes she’d worn last night lay in a pool on the floor.  A framed photo of her parents and her cell phone, with something black and greasy smudged along the side, sat on the bedside table, along with a flat, round rock—a skipping stone—and a wrench.     

    A wrench.  His woman was a motorhead.  His woman.  He’d never believed it could happen, that he could feel this sense of possession, and along with it, this sense of completeness and belonging.

    He imagined himself waking here, in Rachel’s bed.  Every morning.  Day after day.  Strangely enough, he felt no strangling sense of panic along with that mental image.  No claustrophobic heaviness settled on his shoulders.  No sweat bloomed on his brow.  Only contentment settled in his gut at the possibility of having her body tucked in front of him, his lips against her neck.  He was home.  Settled.  Settled in.  Settled down.

    Into Rachel’s house.  Rachel’s life.

    Settling?  For what?  He sat up and swung his feet onto the floor.  This was Rachel’s life.  Not his.  What he wanted, his dream job, L.A., didn’t fit in Rachel’s life.  And if he gave it all up?  What about six months, two years, or five years from now when he’d want a change?  What then?  Rachel might say she’d move for his sake, but she wouldn’t be happy.  Her feet were so firmly planted in this life it was hard to imagine uprooting and replanting her anywhere.  Maybe for NASCAR, or her family, but certainly not for him.  He couldn’t ask her to do that for him.

    He might be able to delay this current job offer, but eventually he’d be riding out of Dodge alone.  So what was the point?  Why go through all that pain?  They had no future, and the longer he stayed with her, the more it was going to hurt.  Bite the bullet.  Now.  Today.  For her sake, if not his own.

    “Payton?”  He’d miss hearing her say his name, soft and laced with a hint of North Carolina sweetness.  He’d miss hearing her voice.  “You all right?”  She set two cups of coffee onto the bedside table and kneeled in front of him.  Her cool hands wrapped around his and drew them away his face.  “What’s the matter?”

    He gazed into her eyes.  Sleepy eyes.  Bedhead hair.  He’d never seen a more beautiful sight in his life.  Standing, he picked his jeans up off the floor and yanked them onto his legs.  “Last night was a mistake.”

    Rachel went motionless.  At first, she didn’t think she’d heard him correctly, and then his words sank in.  Hard.  The air left her chest in a whoosh.  She felt as if she’d been punched in the gut.

    “Last night wasn’t fair to you,” he said.

    As if hearing him regret making love with her once wasn’t enough, she had to hear it twice.  This couldn’t be happening.  Her thoughts scattered.  She couldn’t form the right words, couldn’t find her voice.

    “You know we don’t belong together.  I shouldn’t have let this happen.”

    He shouldn’t have let this happen.  He?

    He pulled his shirt on over his head and Rachel’s thoughts immediately flew to what it had felt like to take that shirt off of him, to kiss a trail up his chest, to unbuckle his pants.  Last night hadn’t been a mistake at all.  Last night had felt, at least for Rachel, like the most right thing she’d ever done.

    “I’ll get out of your hair,” he moved toward the door.  “We can both move on.”

    Payton would be moving on alone.  She’d already fallen in love with him.

    “I guess it’s a good thing I’ll be moving to L.A.”  He double-timed it down the stairs.  Somehow she managed to put one foot in front of the other and follow him into the hall.  She stopped at the top of the steps and watched him put his hand on the knob, his head bent.  “I’m sorry, Rachel.”  And without turning back, he left.  He closed the door and he left.

    Rachel swallowed.  The most important thing in the world to her had just walked out the door, and she hadn’t said a single word.  Not one single damned word.  She was sick of standing there and taking it, taking anything from anybody.  No more.  She didn’t care if everything that came out of her mouth made no sense whatsoever, it was coming out.  “Sorry, my ass.”  She ran back to her nightstand, snatched up her stone, and shot outside. 

    He opened his car door.

    “Payton Reese!” she yelled.  “You stop right there.”  He was upset all right, but she was down right angry.  “Last night was absolutely not a mistake, and it hurts like hell that you’d suggest it.”  She shook her index finger at him.  “And don’t you dare tell me to move on.”

    “Rachel, don’t do th—”
   
    “Don’t tell me what to do!  I listened to you.  Now you listen to me.”

    He clenched his jaw, set his mouth in a thin straight line.  In the past, encountering that rock hard demeanor on anyone would’ve been enough to send her running for cover.  Not today.  Not with this man.

    “You want to go to L.A.?  Fine.  Go.  I would never want to hold you back from anything.  I want you to make your dreams come true.  Every single one of them.  I want you to be happy.  But breaking it off with me?  Because you’re moving?  Well, that’s … that’s plain old … stupid.  Stupid.”  She nodded.

    “Stupid?”  He shook his head.  “You’ll be traveling all over the states to races.  I’ll be traveling all over the world, gone for months at a time.  Our schedules will be crazy.  When are we supposed to see each other?”
   

     “How should I know?”  She stalked around the car and jabbed him in the chest.  “But you breaking it off with me without giving us a shot says one thing and one thing only.  You’re running away.”

    He straightened his shoulders.  “I’ve never run away from anything in my life.”

    “There’s a first time for everything.”

    He shook his head.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You love me, and you’re scared.”

    At that, his eyes faltered.

    “Say you don’t love me.”

    He shoulders quickly rose and fell.  “I don’t love you.”

    “Liar.”

    “I don’t love you!” he yelled.

     “Big fat liar!”

     “Rachel—”

     “Don’t you Rachel me.”  The anger quickly fizzled and panic set in.  She was losing the most important battle of her life.  Tears streamed down her face and she didn’t care.  “Payton, don’t do this.”

      He tucked her hair behind her ear.  “Goodbye.”  And he drove away.