Free Racing Heart (The Billionaire Brothers 1) by Victoria Villeneuve Page B

quickly without getting honked at. It seemed that half the soccer moms in Boston had congregated on the slender stretch of real estate outside Patrick Gavin Middle School, and despite everyone trying to collect their kids as quickly as they could bundle them into the car, it took long, frustrating minutes to reach the pick-up zone. Megan’s bright reward was a grinning Andrea who flung open the door and jumped into the backseat as though finally allowed onto a bouncy castle.
    “Hey Megan!” she trilled. “Guess what I did today?” Andrea buckled herself up and pulled her curly red hair back into its usual ponytail.
    Megan loved this refrain and played along, as ever. “Hey, Andrea! Hmmm... Let me think.” The Fiesta found a gap and was propelled headlong into it. “Did you meet a wizard who turned homework into cupcakes?”
    “No...” the girl answered, her tone rising to encourage another guess.
    “Let’s see... Did you find a potion which turns bullies into the nicest people in the world?”
    “No, not today...” she said, welcoming another try.
    Megan wracked her brains. “Did you see a flying, purple elephant trailing a banner which said, ‘Andrea is Awesome’?”
    “Yes!” she cried. “But it was yellow .”
    “Yellow, you say? Well, did this flying, yellow elephant help you practice the piano?” There was silence from the back seat. “Hello?” Nothing. “Earth to Andrea, come in, please?”
    “I did a little bit,” she said, unwilling to lie. “But I think I know that piece now.”
    Megan chuckled skeptically. “You do? Well, I guess we’ll see about that. How was your day, sweetie?”
    Andrea ran through the details of a school day with the attention to detail, and celebration of the mundane, known best to nine year-olds and savants. “Mrs. Parker made us sit very still for five whole minutes !” she reported, alarmed. “All we did was breathe, in and out, in and out.”
    “That sounds like a nice, quiet five minutes for Mrs. Parker! Do you think she just wanted a break?”
    “I don’t know! She said we had to try not to think .”
    Megan changed lanes and prepared for the turn onto her street in Jamaica Plain, a recently gentrified neighborhood of Boston. She had liked the area ever since first driving through to look at apartments, finding a nice contrast here with the intense traffic and bustle of the U-Mass area, and the barely imaginable bedlam around Andrea’s school. “Maybe she’s right. We all need to take time out. Thinking is over-rated, I’d say.”
    “No way!” Andrea objected. “I love thinking!”
    “Too much will fry your brain,” Megan warned, half-serious. “A calm five minutes sounds like a good way to relax. You should try it before you play the piano, just to calm everything down.”
    “OK,” she replied, noncommittally. Megan pulled up outside the apartment building, glad that her space hadn’t been commandeered by a Croatian dentist.
    Andrea waited until Megan had unlocked the door before bounding up the stairs and into the apartment with an absolute familiarity. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she announced. Megan opened the piano, ready for their lesson. A few chords showed her keen ears that it had kept its tuning well despite the changing humidity as winter finally gave way to spring. Andrea had, at the very least, remembered to bring her music this time, whether or not the pieces had actually been practiced.
    A precocious and obviously talented young lady, Andrea had been through a lot but seemed able to soldier on, optimistic and endlessly curious, her horizons broadening more quickly each year. Megan very often found herself simply amazed.
    “Bach first!” Andrea proclaimed.
    “No... What have I always said?” Megan said with a wagging finger.
    “Ugh!” Andrea huffed. “ Scales ...”
    “Come on, now. What are scales, really?” she asked, seemingly for the ten millionth time.
    Andrea pulled a face. “The building blocks of