Page 5

The frown on my dad’s face deepened as he pushed his hair from his eyes. For being damn near fifty-five now, you would never know it looking at my dad. He was the same Rowdy Riley he had always been, just older. Grass-green eyes, bright with the fading sun blinding him, flushed cheeks a product of the heat, and the same rusty-brown unruly hair he had yet to lose. Sure, there was some gray in there now, but not much had changed about him over the years.
He’d stepped away from NASCAR completely recently and even signed over Riley-Harris Racing to Uncle Spencer. At first I didn’t understand why he’d done it, but now that our lives for the last year had been on the road from February to November, I understood. This was our way of life.
One would think Dad would step away from racing dirt, too, as that had been speculated by many, but not Jameson Riley. This guy on a track, unstoppable. In fact, he broke the track record last night and tonight, quick time so far.
Dad turned and watched Easton disappear into the Riley-Harris hauler parked at the far end of the pits. “I saw his name on the sign-in sheet.” His eyes met mine. “Think he’ll cause problems?”
“If I know Easton, yes.” Sighing, I checked my cell phone for the time. Shortly after three. “Could be a busy night for me.”
Dad laughed, hauling Hudson onto his shoulders. “I’d say it won’t be from me, but I’d be lying.”
“Oh, by the way, Tommy has a squirt gun filled with vodka. If Jerry finds out he has alcohol in the pits, you know what he’ll do.”
“Oh, I know. I already told him.”
“Told who?” I followed behind him, looking down at my shoes, the white now brown from the dust in the pits.
“Jerry.”
“Why?”
“Because Tommy shot me in the face with it and I got pissed off.”
Shit. If Jerry banned Tommy from the pits, then who would pit for Axel? Just as I was going to voice my concern, Rosa walked by, Knox in her arms, but no Pace or Bristol. “Rosa?” I yelled, chasing after her and her fanny-pack-wearing ass. Rosa used to be my parents’ house cleaner, but she sucked at it and never cleaned. So after I had my fourth baby in three years, we hired her to be a nanny.
Believe me, everyone warned me this would be a bad idea. Turned out, they were right.
“Rosa?” I yelled again when she started to jog through the pits. “Where are my children?”
“You’re only missing two,” she defended, as if that should make me feel better.
I caught up with her because Rosa was not a runner. Unless she was running to try to catch a glimpse of my husband naked—part of the reason she agreed to be our nanny. “I shouldn’t be missing any. You said you were watching them.” The cars doing motor heat in the distance jolted fear inside me. We shouldn’t have even had our kids in the pits to begin with, but they were until the start of the heat races when we usually banned them to motor homes, merchandise haulers or the grandstands with supervision. For good reason.
Six years ago, my nephew Jack was killed in the pits at Cottage Grove. It was a freak accident, but it shook our family to the point that my dad had been insistent on the kids not being in the pits during races. For that reason, I held onto the reality that it could happen again if we weren’t careful.
I scanned the pits again. “Were they in the motor home?”
“No.” She sighed. “I’m looking for them.” She pointed to my dad. “And there’s one, so we’re only missing two.”
“How’d you lose them?”
Rosa chewed on her lip. “I was making a sandwich and they got away.”
“You mean a drink?”
“Yes.”
“Look who I found,” someone said from behind us. “Looking for these two?”
Twisting around, I found Kinsley standing before me. Thank God. I sighed in relief, reaching for the twins. Bristol took off the other direction the minute Kinsley let go of her hand. “I was looking for the shirts in the merchandise hauler and found them in the back of Willie’s truck.”
Figured. Pace and Bristol had been little escape artists since the day they learned to crawl. Taking a hold of Pace’s hand, he smiled up at me. “Hi, Mama!”
“Hey, buddy. You have to stay with an adult. You can’t run wild in the pits.”
He looked at me like he didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. And he probably didn’t because I had to tell them that every damn night. When I was a kid, this was literally burned into our brains.Do not run away the pits unattended. My dad actually made us repeat it to him before we ever entered the pits for the night.
“I’m serious, Pace. You guys keep running off and you’ll be confined to the motor home until the races are done.”