Harlequin NASCAR
March 2008. ISBN 0373217935
“[An] emotional and compelling tale” – Romantic Times, 4 stars. Buy the Book
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When Kim Murphy stumbles across an old list – “Ten Things To Do Before I Die” – she realizes she’s never really lived. It’s time to throw off her Science Geek persona and get a life….
NASCAR car chief Wade Abraham finds himself firmly in Kim’s sights – number seven on her list is “date a jock”. But she’s his boss’s daughter and she’s not his kind of woman. He can think of a million reasons why she’s not for him…and that’s without even knowing the real reason for her list.
Chapter One
The history of Kim Murphy’s life was stored in eight cardboard boxes in the garage of her condo in Charlotte.
With an increasing sense of unreality, Kim carried the heavy boxes into her living room, one by one. She shouldn’t be doing this—she wouldn’t be, if Dr. Peterson hadn’t extracted a promise that she would acknowledge somehow, if only to herself, the seriousness of her condition. “Put your affairs in order,” he’d said. His other suggestion—that she tell her father the latest prognosis—wasn’t going to happen.
There’s nothing to tell. Because for the first time in her life, Kim had chosen not to believe scientific evidence.
“I feel as healthy as a horse,” she announced out loud, as she walked from the garage to the living room for the eighth time. She propped the last box against the doorway to steady herself. As healthy as a horse that had just run the Kentucky Derby. Twice. Okay, so she was breathing a little heavily as she set the box down on the cream-colored carpet…but that wasn’t unexpected for a person whose major form of exercise was lifting a cup of coffee to her mouth.
Another pleasure those darned doctors were determined to deny her.
Kim pffed her irritation as she cut through the tape sealing a carton labeled High School / Correspondence. Thankfully, she was naturally well-organized, so Dr. Peterson’s little face-up-to-reality exercise wouldn’t prove as cathartic as he doubtless hoped.
Why should it? She might not have a medical degree, but she was a scientist, highly respected in the field of stem cell research. She was eminently qualified to analyze data and draw her own conclusion. Which just happened to differ from the medics’.
Before she could dig into the box, the cordless phone rang on the coffee table beside her. Her father’s phone number showed on the display; Kim pressed to answer.
“I’ve been calling since yesterday, where have you been? What did the doctor say?” Hugo Murphy’s gruff manner was off-putting to people who didn’t know him well. But it wasn’t personal, he just didn’t express his feelings—affection in particular—very well. Kim was used to having to second-guess her dad’s state of mind, though even after so many years it wasn’t easy.
She sat back on her heels and ignored the question as to why she hadn’t returned her father’s call. “Dr. Peterson said, and I’m quoting him here, ‘the disease is progressing as expected.’”
“That’s all?”
“Pretty much.” Half the truth, anyway.
“What are you doing now? It sounds mighty quiet there.” Dad always acted as if he’d rather she was having a raucous party. Of course, if she was, he’d fret about her getting over-tired. His protective instincts worked 24/7, and they never took a vacation.
“I’m tidying.” She figured tidiness was a learned behavior, rather than genetic, because in this, she took after her adoptive father.
Hugo made an approving sound, then launched into a familiar refrain. “It’s time you moved in with me. You’re sick, you’re alone, you need company.”
“But, Dad, who would look after these hundred cats?” Kim tucked the phone under her ear so she could pull a folder from the carton in front of her.
“Huh?”
She put a smile in her voice. “You make me sound like one of those old ladies with piles of garbage around the house and cats everywhere.”
Hugo barked a reluctant laugh. “Dammit, Kim, would you just let me look after you?”
“No.” She didn’t embellish her refusal with arguments; plain speaking worked best with Dad. She flicked through the folder, then set it aside to form the basis of her discard pile. No one would want a bunch of twelfth grade exam papers from seventeen years ago.
“I’m worried about you.”
He sounded almost pleading, which disconcerted her so much that before she could think better of it, she said, “I’m worried about me, too.”
Silence. Uh-oh.
“That’s it, you’re moving in.” Hugo’s voice took on the implacability that commanded instant obedience from the mechanics and over-the-wall guys at Fulcrum Racing, where he was the team’s top crew chief.
“I’m worried—” she backpedaled furiously “—that I don’t have a date for the silver anniversary party at work next month, and Jerry will think I’m a loser.”
Her father took the bait. “You’re not seeing him any more? What happened?”
“We just…broke up,” she said vaguely, aware that her colleague hadn’t given her much of a reason, and she hadn’t pressed him.
Hugo humphed. “Let me guess. He couldn’t handle that you’re so much smarter than he is.”
“Dad,” she protested, “Jerry’s one of the brightest guys in the lab.”
But there was a kernel of truth in Hugo’s words. Though Kim never talked about her genius-level IQ, her inability to speak any language other than Science Geek when she was nervous—as she invariably was on a date—didn’t make for a fabulous love life. Of course, she wouldn’t have the job she loved if she wasn’t smart…but momentarily, her mind drifted to the advantages of cute and funny over brainy.
“It won’t take five minutes to move your things in here.” Hugo renewed his attack on her independence. “I could come over now.”
A tiny part of her was tempted to say yes. But the minute she moved in with Dad, he’d be scrutinizing her every move, pressuring her to do things his way. As stubborn as they both were, they’d be at loggerheads in forty-eight hours. And if arguing didn’t finish them off, the deterioration in her health might. She’d resolved more years ago than she could remember that she would never be a burden to her father.
“I’m too busy,” she said. “My place is much nearer my office—” Booth Laboratories was on the west side of Charlotte, just ten minutes from her condo “—and I need every minute I can get in the lab. I’ve already cut back my hours.”
“There’s more to life than work.”
Kim grinned—her father devoted almost every waking hour to his job as a NASCAR crew chief. She stood, crossed her small living room to gaze out the window at the busy street below. “I also have a few social engagements coming up in this part of town.”
Now that was an outright lie. But when Hugo’s voice gladdened and he said, “That’s nice, honey. I’m pleased you’re seeing your friends,” she ditched the guilt. Then he said abruptly, “I haven’t heard from her.”
Kim groaned inwardly. She’d steered her way through one minefield, only to be pitched into another. Her. Kim’s mother. She said carefully, “I didn’t expect you would.”
“She would come back, if she knew you needed her,” Hugo said stubbornly.
“I don’t need her.”
“She might be a match.”
“She might not.” Kim doubted Sylvie Ketchum would donate a dollar, let alone a kidney, to Kim.
“I’d give you both my kidneys, if it would do any good,” Hugo said fiercely.
When he said things like that, she felt horrible for ever doubting his affection. But there was no escaping that when Sylvie left, he hadn’t had a choice about looking after his adoptive daughter. And Hugo was not a man who shirked his responsibilities, no matter what his feelings.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said.
“Will you be at the race this weekend?”
“You know I can never resist a trip to Indy.” Kim seldom attended the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races, even though she loved the intense action. NASCAR was her father’s world, and her cousins’, and whenever she went she was reminded that she didn’t fit in. She watched the races on TV, from a distance.
But she never missed a race at Indianapolis—she loved the track for its history, as well as for the rollercoaster ninety-degree turns that made both drivers and spectators feel as if the cars might plough right into the grandstands.
“If Justin wants to win, he’ll have to stop driving too hard into the turns,” Hugo said. Kim’s cousin Justin Murphy drove the No. 448 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series car, and Hugo was his crew chief. “And Wade Abraham’s going to have to stop feeding Justin ideas that don’t fit with our set-up.”
It wasn’t the first time Hugo has grumbled about Wade Abraham, Justin’s new car chief. Kim hadn’t met the guy, but she had a sneaking admiration for the way he’d reportedly withstood several run-ins with her father—most men caved under Hugo’s steely command.
“You tell him, Dad.” Kim was smiling when she ended the call, and she finished emptying the first carton with more enthusiasm than the contents warranted.
Letters from a penpal in New Zealand, a correspondence Kim had maintained diligently long after the letters coming the other way had ceased. A sheaf of straight-A school reports reflecting her accelerated progress through high school. She’d graduated at fifteen, moved on to Duke University. No prom photos, no pressed corsages, no love letters. She sighed—then gave herself a short, sharp shake. She’d never written a love letter so why should she regret not having received any?
Methodically, she progressed through several other boxes, all equally inoffensive.
As she worked, she was acutely aware of one carton that she’d instinctively placed a little apart from the others. The Mom Box. It held photos of herself as a toddler, then as a preschooler. Photos of Sylvie, and of Sylvie’s and Dad’s wedding, at which Kim had been a flower girl. Kim gave the box a little shove with her foot. She didn’t plan to open it.
The last three cartons held notes, folders, textbooks from her college studies. She didn’t really need to go through them, but nostalgia had her opening one. She pulled out a binder of notes from her sophomore cellular biology class. This class had given her what she thought of as her calling—her fascination with the stem cells whose ability to regenerate tissue over a lifetime assured them of a vital role in treating medical conditions that had previously been deemed hopeless. The class had inspired her choice of post-graduate study, and her thesis had won her the job at prestigious Booth Laboratories.
Kim opened the binder, inspected her meticulously organized notes. In that sophomore year, she’d been seventeen going on thirty.
She flipped to the section on stem cell differentiation, the focus of her work today.
“What’s this?” Her own voice startled her in the darkening room. She flicked on a lamp to examine her find. The section divider was decorated with hearts, flowers and elaborate curlicues, doodled in blue ink.
Kim grinned. Maybe not all those cellular biology lectures had been as fascinating as she remembered. She flipped to the other side of the divider. And found a list, which didn’t look as if she could have written it, except the neat handwriting was undoubtedly hers.
10 Things to Do Before I Die
She froze.
Saliva pooled in her mouth, metallic, bitter.
The list had nothing to do with her illness, she reminded herself. It wasn’t the result of some presentiment or foreboding.
If it had been, she surely wouldn’t have started with something as trivial as
1. Play hooky.
She skimmed the list in search of a more meaningful ambition. The seventh item arrested her gaze.
7. Date a jock.
Relief spread through her, loosening knots of tension in her neck and back, and she found herself smiling. Now she remembered. There’d been a guy, the quarterback on the college football team. Kim had admired him from afar, woven intriguing fantasies in her head.
She’d written the list after she’d realized that if he ever registered her existence, it would be as the freakish kid who’d had more A-plus grades than anyone in the college’s recent history. Guys like him, she remembered thinking, dated girls who, when they weren’t playing hooky, sat at the back of the lecture hall. Girls who—Kim glanced at item number two on the list—buy a push-up bra.
Cheeks heated, she glanced around, as if someone might be witnessing this testimony to her teenage nerdiness.
“My thirty-something nerdiness,” she corrected out loud. She’d capped off her flawless attendance record at college with a dedication to her job that saw her turning up at the laboratory most weekends. Until a few months ago, she’d never taken sick leave and had to be forced to take her vacations.
Nerd!
Kim unbuttoned the top of her blouse and peered inside. She still didn’t own a push-up bra. Her white cotton sports bra did nothing for her figure, and the dialysis that had added a few pounds to the rest of her over the past few months possessed its own sense of irony—it had left her chest the same unimpressive size it had always been.
She turned back to the list. Maybe somewhere on here she’d find a more noble intention—like curing cancer.
3. Get a tattoo
4. Get drunk
5. Be the life and soul of a wild party
6. Drive a stock car
7. Date a jock
8. Make out at the movies
9. Dump the jock
She snickered. She’d been smart enough to suspect the jock wouldn’t hold her interest for long, but arrogant enough to think he wouldn’t tire of her first. She’d probably have had more chance of finding that cancer cure than getting to dump the jock.
Kim read the last item on the list.
10. Find Mom.
She moved her thumb to cover the words, looked back up at those simpler goals.
Simpler? She hadn’t done any of them, for Pete’s sake. She’d never been to a wild party. Never dated a man who didn’t wear spectacles—Kim felt an unreasonable flash of annoyance toward all male scientists who hadn’t thought to invest in contact lenses.
She’d never even made out during a movie. Maybe that was because she usually went to foreign films that required her full attention to read the subtitles—and required her non-jock date to keep his glasses on for the same reason.
A thumping on her front door startled her. Oh, heck, don’t say Dad had turned up to forcibly remove her to his house. Kim fumbled to do up her blouse as she headed into the hallway.
The figure she could see through the opaque glass of her front door was too slim to be Hugo. And only one other person called around here regularly.
“Where’s the fire?” Kim demanded as she opened the door just in time to save her best friend Isabel Rogers from a renewed bout of thumping.
Isabel stepped inside and headed down the hallway, taking small, brisk steps in her elegant, high-heeled sandals. “I figured you’d be immersed in some horribly boring stem cell treatise.” Isabel was part-owner of Fulcrum Racing, and she considered just about everything except NASCAR to be horribly boring. “In which case you wouldn’t hear me knock. You know how you are.” She took in the stack of boxes in the living room. “What’s all this?”
“I’m getting rid of some old junk.” Kim saw the folder with that stupid list lying open, and moved swiftly to grab it. On impulse, she tore the list free, folded it and stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans. It was a tight fit, thanks to those extra pounds she’d gained, and she fancied she could feel the folded corner of the paper digging into her. Prodding her into action.
“I’m getting rid of my boring life,” she blurted, surprising herself so much that she clammed up and stared at Isabel.
Isabel’s beautifully-shaped eyebrows rose. “It’s about time. Tell me more.”
Kim already wished she hadn’t spoken. Maybe she could distract Isabel. “Let’s have a drink. I made tea this morning.” She glanced at her watch. Dialysis patients had to limit their fluid intake, but she was okay to have something now.
She poured tall glasses of iced tea, then she and Isabel sat down at the dining table, one of those round ones that folded down into a semicircle to save space when Kim ate alone. Which she almost always did.
“So, your boring life?” Isabel prompted.
The list had softened and crumpled in Kim’s pocket, and she could no longer feel it. “I need to think about it some more,” she hedged.
“Nonsense, you spend far too much time thinking.” When Isabel used that brisk tone, Kim was reminded of the age difference between them. Isabel was fifty, but she’d never been a maternal figure in Kim’s life, maybe because they’d become friends after Isabel had just suffered a series of personal losses. Ten years ago, when Kim had seen Isabel floundering and abandoned, for once in her life she’d known the right thing to say, and it had been Isabel who’d looked to Kim for support rather than the other way around.
These days, they were equals in the friendship, though the bond had been tested six months ago when, to Kim’s shock, her father and Isabel, who worked together at Fulcrum, had started dating. But the two women had soon fallen back into their old rapport. Kim admired Isabel’s social skills, and Isabel claimed to envy Kim’s self-possession, her lack of reliance on other people.
Kim wondered now if that was a polite term for “nerdy loner.”
Isabel chattered on, Isabel-style, not needing much input. As Kim listened with half an ear to her friend’s advice about the importance of acting rather than thinking, her fingers traced the outline of the list through her pocket.
Most of the items on it were so laughably tame that these days the average fourteen-year-old had done them. Surely it was too late for Kim to do them now? She was a mature adult, a busy scientist, with important work. She didn’t have time to—how long did it take to get a tattoo, anyway? She looked at the back of her hand, envisaged a cell division diagram permanently engraved there. Or maybe a daisy.
The idea was preposterous, yet it wouldn’t die. Kim took a sip of her tea, then another one. The chilled liquid seemed to seep through her body, down to her soul, reaching places that were parched from lack of living.
Isabel paused, expecting comment at last.
“You’re right, I think too much,” Kim said hesitantly. Then, as resolution firmed, “I need to get a life.”