Page 2 of Drive Me Wild
Her eyes light up with excitement at my suggestion. “Don’t tell Blake I said this,” she lowers her voice conspiratorially, “but your talents areseriouslybeing wasted at McAllister, Jos.”
Shrugging in response, I grab a ball and position it by the chair Ella will be sitting in. She’s not wrong; I can do my job in my sleep at this point. McAllister isn’t the most creative when it comes to their marketing, but leaving my position isn’t part of the plan. I may be restless at work, but a breakup is enough upheaval for the foreseeable future. My only plan right now is to focus on myself. Figure out who the hell I am outside of a relationship.
I shoot her a pointed look. “Who else would put up with your boyfriend if I left?”
She laughs and lightly tosses a rugby ball at me. “He’s been on his best behavior lately.”
Blake’s the greatest Formula 1 driver the sport’s ever seen, but his grumpy—and sometimes hostile—attitude is notorious. Ella softens his tough exterior and makes him much more amenable, though, and everyone and their mother is thankful for that.
“I know, I know.” Taking a deep breath, I quickly admit, “I talked to Rhys about possibly implementing an influencer program.”
I went through my eighteen-slide presentation with my boss in a conference room calledSupportive, ironically enough. McAllister’s meeting rooms—both in the paddock and our offices outside of London—are all named positive adjectives that are supposed to “inspire and motivate” us.Teamwork. Apathy. Agility. Flexibility. It’s eyeroll-inducing to say the least.
Ella drops a ping-pong ball.Why the hell did Blake get ping-pong balls?“Look at you, you little confrontational… lady. Wait, that sounds weird. Assertive boss bitch…? Yeah. I like that.”
“Hardly a confrontation,” I admit. A mouse scares me more than McAllister’s director of marketing does. “And all he said was that he’d think about it.”
“Hey, that’s better than when he flat-out rejected your ‘fan-in-the-stand’ takeover idea,” Ella reminds me. “If anyone can pull this off, it’s you, Jos. You single-handedly made McAllister blow up on TikTok last year. That takes talent.”
I blush from the compliment. “We’ll see. Not getting my hopes up. Can you pass me the football behind your left foot, please?”
Ella grins at me, her dimple popping. “You mean the soccer ball?”
I slap my hands over my ears. “Blasphemous!”
Blake bursts through the door, an overflowing cup of coffee in one hand, his phone in the other. I expect to receive third-degree burns from him handing me the mug, but instead, he slips his phone into my open palm. “For you.” He rolls his dark eyes. “Anemergency.”
There’s only one person who’d be calling Blake simply to talk to me: McAllister’s other driver, Theo Walker. He’s the sunshine to Blake’s moonlight, and I mean that in the most bromantic way possible.
I walk to the other side of the room so I can hear him over Blake’s deep voice telling Ella something he learned about coffee beans from aBBCdocumentary.
“What’s going on, Walker?” I ask as his face comes into focus. If Adonis and Casanova somehow reproduced, Theo Walker would be their love child. He’s objectively gorgeous with his navy-blue eyes surrounded by dark, curling lashes women pay to replicate, espresso-colored hair, and a jawline that’s always covered in stubble. And don’t even get me started on his abs… They’re so defined, you could grate cheese on them. “Blake said it’s an emergency.”
My tone is teasing instead of worried. Theo’s emergencies are notrealemergencies. They’re usually him asking which photo of himself he should post on social media or whether eating a family-sized bag of crisps in one sitting will make him sick.
He sticks out his lower lip into a pout. “It is! And you’ve been neglecting me.”
“I’ve been a little busy to answer your five million texts.” I pan the phone over to where Blake and Ella are huddled in the middle of the set with balls surrounding their feet. “You’re quite needy. You know that, right?”
He shrugs as if this isn’t new information. “Tell Blakey Blake I always knew he liked playing with other people’s balls.”
I wait a moment before turning the camera back on my face so he doesn’t see me swallow back a laugh. “You have five seconds to tell me this so-called emergency before I hang up on you.”
“Do you know how to delete a text?”
I crinkle my brows together. “You’ve never deleted a text?”
“No, I have,” he reassures me with nod. “But can you delete one once you’ve sent it? Like how you showed me that unsend feature on Gmail?”
“No, not if it’s already delivered.”
Theo tips his head back and releases a string of swear words—some of which are Australian slang I’m unfamiliar with. “You’re supposed to know how to do this shit, Jos.”
Apparently, being an Adobe Photoshop wiz translates to anything and everything technological. “Texting isn’t the same as the social media algorithm, babes.”
“You’re a millennial, though,” he argues with a groan.
“You’re a millennial, too!”
