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whether or not she should pick him up. No wonder he loved his career. He got to fly around the track every weekend at ridiculously fast speeds, which was seriously more fun than walking.
    Suzanne pulled in a second later, driving the black mini-SUV he’d bought her a few years back. A punch of melancholy hit him and Ryder mentally shook his head. Clearly, watching an unlikely couple like Strickland and Nikki throwing themselves into marriage had him feeling nostalgic.
    He opened the passenger door and climbed in. Before he even had the door shut, Suzanne blurted out, “Sorry.”
    “What?” He was so startled by that word coming from her mouth that he turned and stared at her blankly. She wasn’t looking at him, her eyes forward, hands gripping the steering wheel.
    “I shouldn’t have made you walk.”
    Now he really was touched. Saying the S word was comparable to running a marathon for Suzanne. “It’s okay. I think being sideswiped by those papers with all those people around did a number on both of us. I’m sorry for egging you on.”
    She finally looked at him, a smile tugging at her lips. “Holy shit. Are we actually maturing or something?”
    Ryder grinned back. It was an interesting theory. “Maybe. Or maybe we’ve just beaten each other down so much we’re too tired to fight anymore.”
    She made a face. “Six years of beating you down? Is that how you see our relationship?”
    He hadn’t meant it like that. He had just meant that instead of talking, they fought out their differences, and it hadn’t gotten them anywhere. “No, that’s not how I see our relationship.” Maybe it had just been too long of a day, with too many weird twists and turns, but as Ryder studied Suzanne’s profile, her narrow, straight nose, her plump lips, her smooth skin still holding a touch of color from the summer sun, her dark blond hair tumbling down onto her shoulders, he felt the rush of former emotions, ones he no longer had but remembered clearly.
    “I was happy with you,” he said simply, because it was the truth. He had loved this woman when she’d been his wife.
    Of course she was still his wife.
    Suzanne gave a sharp laugh, breaking the mood. “Now you’re smoking crack. You were not happy with me.”
    He had been, once upon a time, before he’d fallen into a pit of relationship quicksand he hadn’t been able to haul himself out of. “Ten bucks says I was.”
    She pulled up to the road, looking left for traffic. “Please. How are you going to prove it one way or the other? I’m not taking that bet. Where is your car?”
    “At Slim and Chubby’s bar. Next intersection.”
    “What an awful name for a bar,” she said absently as she whipped her SUV out into traffic.
    He didn’t give a shit about the offensive bar name. What he cared about was getting Suzanne to understand, to acknowledge that, at times, their marriage had been good. He wasn’t sure why it mattered right then and there, but it did.
    “Come in and have a drink with me.”
    She raised her eyebrows, but she said easily enough, “Okay. One drink. I thought maybe we could call the lawyer and leave him a message that we want to have a conference call to discuss what we need to do. Are you cool with that? That way we’re both hearing what he says, so we both feel in control.”
    “Sure.” He didn’t have the same need she did to be in charge of the situation, but he wanted her to see that he could do what was needed. That he wasn’t always a total screwup who forgot everything.
    “Great.” Suzanne parked her car next to his truck in the bar’s parking lot and pulled out her cell phone. “When can you take a conference call? How does tomorrow at noon sound?”
    Ryder scanned his mental calendar for conflicts and didn’t come up with any. The next few weeks were the lightest of the whole year for him since the season was over and they wouldn’t start intensive training for Daytona until December. “That works.”
    “Great.”