No Limits (Stacked Deck #5) - Emilia Finn Page 0,10

Lane for the income, I do need it for the adrenaline, for the fun, for the hit I’m addicted to.

So I play the game.

“You look good. Got a haircut?”

Manda scoffs and ticks me off her list of racers. “You think that a compliment on my hair will do you favors?” Then she grins. “You’d be absolutely right. I was in the salon only this morning.”

“The pink looks good.” I reach forward and finger the long strands that hang over her shoulder. “Looks like cotton candy.”

“The bottle was literally labeled ‘cotton candy’,” she snickers. “I’ve got you starting against Kallan.”

“He’s a little bitch.”

She laughs. “If you say so. Roll up when he does. Don’t be late, or you lose by default.”

“I’m never late.”

I release her hair and cast a glance around the crowd. Hundreds of bodies mill around, hundreds of racers and their cheer squads who consist of women in less clothes than I see at the lake in the summer.

Not that I’m complaining.

“Is Jackson here?” I glance back in time to catch Manda’s little shrug.

“He might be. But seeing as you’re not racing him, you don’t have to worry about him.”

“You know we’ll be racing before the end of the night.”

“Cocky.” She laughs. “You assume you’ll beat Kallan. You assume you’ll beat everyone right up to the finals.”

“It’s a safe assumption.”

I glance to my left when a new, loud car pulls through the crowd. I don’t see him, but I know the sound of an engine as well as I know voices. I don’t need to see to know.

I turn back to Manda and grin. “He’s here.”

She rolls her eyes. “You need to stop antagonizing him, Bry. You’re gonna push too hard someday. He’ll snap, and then we’re all gonna be in trouble.”

“He’s a bitch, and you know I love poking at those.” I turn away from her and make my way through the crowd.

“Leave it alone, Bry!” Her voice follows me as I move. “Bryan! It’s tacky to keep poaching a man’s girl.”

“If he was a man, he’d be able to hold onto them.”

I pass Tucker, though it’s not because I walk by his bike or my car. He knows what I’m doing, so he rushes in to follow me into the crowd as they surround the brand-new, straight off the manufacturer’s floor, shiny, black Dodge Challenger.

I have a friend that drives a vintage Dodge. American muscle at its sexiest. But the newer kind, while sexy… the fact that Jackson lost his ride last night and needed to scramble for another today… that alone, and the fact he drove it here, instantly lowers its market value.

The crowd fangirls over the sparkling paintwork. They stroke the hood, ooh and ahh when he pops it open to show off the engine. They hope that being close means he’ll call them his friend, but I hold no such wishes.

I don’t want to be his friend. In fact, the more I piss him off, the happier I am.

I push through the crowd, fold my arms, and smirk when he slides out of the front seat with his aviator sunglasses shielding his douchebag eyes, despite the fact it’s nine at night.

Jackson Price has been a pain in my ass since the day I met him… in kindergarten.

He thinks he’s bad. And he thinks that because my family’s name means something, that I invite a prick into my life. He’s considered it his job to annoy me from the moment we met; as the years have passed, he’s done everything in his power to piss me off.

It’s all fun and games to fill a locker with dirt, to drop bottles of paint on my new shoes in home-economics, to knock me on my ass in the cafeteria and send my lunch to the floor for the third time in a single week. Switching out our assignments, putting my name on his science fair shit and taking the credit for something I spent hours and hours working on…

Then, as we got older, shoving a screwdriver into the tires of my bike, cutting the chain so I had to walk it home, then poaching the girl I could have sworn I would one day marry – in my thirteen-year-old brain, I thought I had it all worked out.

Every step I took in school, Jackson Price was standing right there to fuck it up for me.

But, hey, fair’s fair, right?

Knock my lunch to the floor? I had a dozen cousins in my school who would share their food.