Read Racing to Love: Eli's Honor for Free Online

the strength to fight anymore. She nodded, letting Mac’s arms envelop her once more.
    ****
    Honor pulled her black ’69 Chevy Camaro into the garage and turned the key off. As far as possessions went, it was her one true pride and joy. It had been her uncle’s, painfully and lovingly restored to perfection. Her mother’s younger brother by eight years, Travis and Honor had been more like friends than uncle and niece, even closer after her mother’s death years before.
    Travis had laid the keys in her hand and closed her fingers around the playboy bunny keychain. As he told her goodbye, he asked her to take good care of his baby while he was away. She’d begged him not to re-enlist, and missed him terribly when he deployed. To share him for a third tour was more than Honor wanted. It was selfish, but she didn’t care.
    Unfortunately, on his last trip over, he hadn’t been able to keep his promise to return. They gave her a flag and his purple heart nineteen months later. Both were proudly displayed in her small living room.
    Dallas exited the car door and trudged into the house, dropping his backpack in the kitchen. Honor knew he would be in his bedroom half changed before she could even get out of the car with the one bag of groceries she’d stopped for. She shut her own car door and wiped a spot off it with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Smiling, she took a long look to admire the black beauty, and to remember the uncle she loved so dearly. Her own car sat outside, the Camaro taking precedence in the small one-car garage. Hers was nothing special, but it ran. She only drove Travis’s car once a week to keep it running right, only on the sunniest of days and only when she wasn’t going to be gone long. She also drove it every time she had to meet with Dallas’s school. Something about it gave her the strength to get through yet another meeting.
    Honor stepped into the kitchen shuffling her oversized purse and the bag of groceries and blindly reached down for the backpack she instinctively knew was on the floor. She let out a breath as she grabbed the strap and hung it on its dedicated hook on the wall just inside the door. After setting the paper bag down on the small kitchen table, she turned the radio on and flipped the light switch—in that order. In only a matter of moments, Dallas had completely stripped off his school clothes. He traded his jeans and a motocross t-shirt for riding gear, and was back in the kitchen looking for food. He grabbed the new package of cookies out of her hand before she could even place them on the counter.
    “Hey, brat.” Honor teased lovingly before hip-checking him out of the way. “That’s why you’ve grown so damn much so fast. No more food for you.”
    “Ah, Mom…”
    It was their joke, said more and more as Dallas skated the edges of puberty at the ripe old age of eleven. Honor shook her head chuckling. “Keep it up and you’re going to eat me out of house and home.”
    Dallas rolled his eyes as he opened the fridge, searching for more. “I’m hungry.”
    “You always are.” She laughed. “I don’t know where you put it. You look like a damn string bean with muscles.”
    Leaning on the open fridge door, he patted his abs. Even though they were covered with his jersey, he was proud of them. His Uncle Mac had set him up with a small workout area in their shop out behind the house, complete with a routine that Dallas was thriving on. Honor smiled as a swell of pride coursed through her at the thought of all he’d accomplished. She couldn’t give him what the other racers at the tracks had, but he took what she could and made the best of it. It was enough that he was starting to make a name for himself.
    “I had abs before you came along too, babe.” Honor winked and threw a bag of grapes and a package of cheese slices his direction. Dallas turned to put them in their appropriate spots in the refrigerator, but not before rolling his eyes.
    “Gross.”
    Honor