Page 34 of Love Worth Gold
Blaire nodded without fully hearing. Her pulse hammered too loud in her ears, and her body felt like a clenched fist. Last night’s encounter with Isaline hadn’t burned off any tension—it had added jet fuel to a fire already out of control.
Jordy patted her on her shoulder. “You good?”
“Always.”
The lie tasted familiar.
She pushed out of the gate when her number was called, finding her tuck in the opening glide. The first section felt clean. Her weight was forward, her skis were tracking true, and her breathing was steady. Then the course tightened into thetechnical middle stretch where margins disappeared and timing mattered more than nerve.
Coming into the compression that Tess had flagged, Blaire made a choice. She pressed earlier than planned, committed to a line that was sharper and riskier than her inspection notes. It was a choice that came from wanting to prove something instead of skiing something.
Her timing was off by inches.
At eighty-plus miles per hour, inches were catastrophic.
The ski bit wrong. The edge caught, and suddenly she was fighting physics with her body instead of riding it. For one suspended heartbeat, she almost saved it—almost pulled the balance back—then she lost it completely.
She launched sideways into a violent tumble. Snow exploded around her. Her skis tore free. Fences caught her in a spray of powder and equipment, and the world went sideways before slamming to a stop.
Silence.
She lay there, breath knocked out, staring up at sky and safety netting. Radios crackled somewhere above her. Voices shouted in multiple languages.
One thought cut through the shock with brutal clarity.Not like this.
She was not ending her career on her back in the snow because she couldn’t keep her head straight.
She moved her fingers. Then her toes. Everything responded. Ski patrol reached her within seconds and ran through the typical post-crash questions. She answered monotone. Nothing broken. Nothing torn. Just bruises, rattled bones, and ego scattered across fifty meters of course.
She waved them off, gathered her scattered gear, and clicked back into her skis. She skied down the rest of the hill at a humiliating crawl.
Chapter Fourteen
Isaline stood in her race suit with her jacket thrown over her shoulders, boots buckled, helmet in hand. The air up was thin and bright, radios hissing with course reports. She’d already done her visual inspection, walked through the key sections with Matthias, and now waited for her own training slot. While she was waiting, Blaire’s name came over the radio.
The small monitor beside the coach showed Blaire dropping into the steep sections, solid and aggressive, exactly as expected. Isaline watched with the detached attention of a professional at first—tracking line choices, pressure points, tiny corrections. Then Blaire hit the blind transition. One moment she was perfectly stacked over her skis; the next she was pitched wrong. The ski hooked.
On the screen, it happened fast and slow at the same time. She could see that Blaire had fought it for a heartbeat, then exploded into a spray of snow and flying gear before disappearing into the fence. The radio spiked with clipped voices.
Around Isaline, the usual start chatter died; even other teams went quiet. Her stomach bottomed out. She realized she was holding her breath so hard her chest hurt.
Those few seconds before Blaire finally moved felt like a small private hell. When the camera caught the American rolling to her knees and waving patrol off, Isaline’s knees went weak with sheer relief.
In that moment, it stopped being about rivals and results. All she wanted was for Blaire to stand up and walk away. The idea of winning anything because Blaire was broken suddenly felt like the ugliest outcome possible.
She forced herself to look away from the monitor. Her fingers bit into the edge of her poles, and she tried to steady her breathing before anyone noticed that her hands were shaking.
Matthias appeared at her shoulder. “You saw?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice.
“She walked away on her own. That’s good.” His tone was neutral, but his hand squeezed her shoulder once.
Isaline swallowed hard. Around them, other racers started moving again, resuming warmups, shaking out nerves. The training run would continue. It always did. But the image of Blaire’s body hitting the fence had burned itself behind her eyelids, and no amount of blinking would clear it.
Everyone in Isaline’s camp pretended to focus on clips of different racers’ lines. Reto handed her water without comment. A younger teammate rewound footage of a gate sequence, narrating angles that had nothing to do with the American who’d just scattered across fifty meters of course. Still, Blaire’s crash had sat in the air like static. Nobody said her name, but the silence surrounding it was louder than any commentary.
Reto watched his sister from the corner of his eye, noting how often her gaze flicked across the hill to where Blaire was talking to Tess and Jordy. The American’s jaw was tight, and her shoulders were squared in that stubborn way Isaline recognized from breakfast tables and darkened hallways.