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tale of yours? Who else besides Pete and those prepubescent boys drooling outside the elevator heard about what happened? Does the entire office know?” she asked, lifting her head a fraction.
    “Oh, come on. I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know the woman we were meeting for business would be you.” Emerson was annoyed to hear how much he sounded like Josh, but it didn’t stop him from continuing, “I only found out we had a new employee coming ten minutes before the elevator thing, so how could I know you were the you, you were supposed to be?”
    Pete rubbed his hands together, moving backward toward the door. “The suit. You were blinded by the suit, weren’t you? Oh, please tell me it wasn’t his suit, Olivia,” he mumbled. “Yeah. Okay,” he said as he opened the door, “maybe I’d better leave you two to sort this out.”
    Emerson barely noticed Pete’s departure. The gray matter traffic control tower in his head directed him to land, but the pilot flying his body took the opposite bearing. He contemplated wrapping an arm around her waist and zeroing in on that Cupid’s-bow top lip with both of his, but who knew what sorts of stories that would start. Emerson crossed his arms and glanced out the window, chewing over his options.
    Olivia thought the situation was absurdly funny. Air rushed out of her nose in a long rumbling snort.
    He met her eyes and started laughing too. His fingers tucked into the soft, fuzzy angora on her shoulder.
    Olivia glanced at the fingers on her arm. It was easy to admit this sort of high-speed tension she felt with him was fun, attractive, and addictive. She’d always been drawn to lively and quick-thinking men. For a few seconds, a fine mist, like rain spray on the windows, obscured the view she had of a laughing Maxwell. His face blurred and all she saw was Karl, Karl, Karl .
    From touring cars to open wheelers, she’d raced them all, on and off track. Over time, she moved on to engineering and design, settling into working as a test driver for various European car companies as well as the Halray Racing and Klimat racing teams. She gave it all up for Austrian Formula One driver, Karl Abenteuer. Blond, with a strong jaw and blue eyes, Karl had been good-natured and worldly—everything her first husband, Adam, wasn’t—and Karl was exactly the man to make up for the scrawny, moody boy she’d married too young. For two years, Karl had been a doting affectionate husband, who enjoyed playing practical jokes that shocked her.
    And boy, had his little video been a shock.
    Rumors were part of Formula One racing. Success made a driver a target for professional jealousy and mud-slinging. People liked to gossip. Photos with Miss Indy and scantily clad Grid girls could always be misconstrued, but world number eleven Karl Abenteuer’s homemade movie was impossible to misconstrue.
    Especially since it involved getting caught with his fingers in someone else’s pot of honey.
    Especially since the proof became one of the most watched videos on YouTube.
    Especially since British tabloids and trash magazines throughout Europe were suddenly interested in Mrs. Karl Abenteuer’s reaction to images of her decade-younger husband tonsil-wrestling with a naked, tattooed redhead.
    Olivia had had one or two impressive crashes in her test-driving days. The traction control electronic stability program failed on an icy course in Norway, which caused the prototype Roadster she was testing to flip and roll several times. Bits of rubber on a test track jammed into the air intake on the first run of another new design and that car slammed into a wall, the nose cone taking the brunt of the impact, the engine catching fire. Banged up and singed, she limped away from the twisted metal. Yet nothing was as spectacular as when she walked away from the wreckage of Karl.
    With the car crash of a second disastrous marriage part of her history, Olivia wanted to continue life far away from chicanes,