Authors: Erin Nicholas
She reached up to pull her hair into a ponytail. “I can pickpocket a wallet out of a guy’s pants. I’ve never done it for real, but in practice I’m pretty good.”
He smiled in spite of himself. She’d taken in a bunch of strays who paid her back with useless and/or illegal knowledge. How great. “I suppose that could be considered practical in desperate circumstances.”
“Yeah, too bad there weren’t any guys walking the streets of Muddy Gap—too bad there aren’t any streets in Muddy Gap—I wouldn’t have had to call you.”
“Right.” He frowned. She wouldn’t have called him. She would have waltzed back into Justice without any warning. At least this way he had a chance of preventing some of the Tasmanian destruction she brought with her. “Speaking of which, you ready to go or what?” He stretched to his feet, hoping she’d be too distracted with gathering her things to notice the semi-erection he had going.
Except she didn’t seem to have any things to gather.
“Yeah, almost. I need to…go to the bathroom.”
“Hurry up.” He wasn’t going to win any chivalry awards, but what was she going to do? He was her only hope at the moment.
“I don’t suppose you could, um, get me some toothpaste?” she asked.
He frowned. “Toothpaste? Is there a store nearby?”
“They have some for sale in the motel office. I noticed a basket of stuff on the counter when I checked in.”
He looked at her to see if she was messing with him. “Why didn’t you get one on your way up?”
“No money, remember?”
“It’s fifty-dollar toothpaste?”
“I think it said a dollar twenty-five.”
He gaped at her. “You don’t even have a couple of dollars for toothpaste?”
She shrugged, not looking very apologetic. “Nope. I used my last nineteen bucks to pay the guy from the gas station to bring me over here.”
His frown deepened. “I thought I told you I would take care of that.”
“I had the money. It seemed silly to make the guy wait.”
“But you needed toothpaste,” Marc pointed out impatiently. She never had listened to him. Or anyone really. “Didn’t it occur to you that you might need that money?”
She shrugged again. “Nope. I knew Luke was on his way.”
His annoyance level shot up instantly. Luke was willing to do almost anything for her and she knew it. She knew he’d give her anything she needed. Of course, why would she think any differently? It had always been that way.
“But I’m going to pay you back,” she told him, picking up the pad of paper with the motel’s logo from the bedside table. On it was scribbled a column of numbers.
“What’s that?”
“A running tally of what I owe you,” she told him, handing the pad to him.
Beside each number was what the amount was for, including the motel room and a tank of gas.
“Did you eat anything on the way?” she asked.
Still distracted by the fact that she intended to pay him back for the gas he’d volunteered to use to come and get her and the motel room he’d practically forced her to get, he said absently, “Some cupcakes and a cup of coffee.”
She took the paper from him, added some numbers to the bottom and re-totaled the column.
“You added the cupcakes to the amount?” he asked as he watched her.
“Of course. Those were cupcakes that you wouldn’t have needed to buy if it weren’t for me.”
“I don’t…” he stopped short of telling her that he didn’t expect re-payment for any of the expenses of the trip, least of all a dollar and twenty-nine cent package of snack cakes, as it occurred to him what was going on.
Sabrina was in debt to him.
“Add toothpaste on the bottom there and I’ll be back in a minute,” he told her.
“Toothpaste,” Marc announced as he re-entered the motel room. “I also took the liberty of buying deodorant. It’s close confines in my car.”
“Thanks.” She already had deodorant, toothbrush, had even had toothpaste until sometime yesterday when she used the last of it. But she wasn’t going to confess that to him. She’d use the deodorant he’d bought without hesitation. She was startled by his lighthearted mood and teasing words and didn’t want to mess it up. She hadn’t even been totally sure he was going to come back.
“We’ll stop for something to eat after we get on the road,” he called to her as she headed for the bathroom to brush her teeth. “I don’t think they even have cupcakes in Dusty Grove.”
“Muddy Gap.” It sounded great to her. She was starving. She’d been pretty distracted from it since Marc had showed up, but her stomach rumbled now.
She was still in shock from seeing Marc too.
She hadn’t seen him in four years and they had never spent much time together alone. In fact, she couldn’t come up with more than maybe twenty minutes total in all the time they’d known each other. But apparently it had been enough over the years for her to catalogue things like the fact that his light brown hair was shorter and his face was leaner and his chest was harder than when she’d last seen him.
He was as tall as Luke but broader. He was solid through the chest and shoulders with thick thighs, but a hard, flat stomach and tight butt. In spite of just getting out of the car after a long drive, he looked good. He was sporting a jaw of stubble, but instead of looking disheveled, it looked sexy. Unfortunately.
The thing that had always unnerved her about Marc, besides being built like a battle-ready Marine, was his eyes. They were a deep green and when he made direct eye contact with her she had the weirdest feeling that she was on the verge of blurting out all her deepest secrets and desires.
She had never acknowledged an attraction between them, but she’d always been
aware
of him. Like watching a predator. It was always better to know where he was and what he was doing. And then avoid him.
She and Marc had never been what anyone would consider friends. But she knew he wasn’t here out of concern for her. It was to keep Luke from coming. And she understood. She could imagine Luke’s reaction after she left.
She was going to have to face Luke eventually though.
Still, she could hardly think about that with Marc here. She was amazed by her reaction to him. He’d always rubbed her the wrong way, making her defensive and sarcastic and full of bravado. He hadn’t, however, made her tingle deep in her belly.
Until today.
She wasn’t sure what exactly had gotten into her with refusing to go into the bathroom to get dressed. She supposed it was his typical cocky attitude, the smugness that seemed to hint that he was absolutely not affected by her in the least and couldn’t care less if she was naked in front of him, that made her want to prove him wrong.
She’d never thought about a physical attraction between them. But if
he
was unaffected by her, then she was—by God—going to be unaffected by him. And was going to prove it.
That hadn’t happened. She was still vibrating from the whole scene.
“Is the next town bigger than Muddy Gap?” she asked.
Marc chuckled. “I don’t think it could get smaller.”
It was not fair that his quiet laughter melted her like hot fudge on ice cream. “Do you think they have a drug store?” she asked, determined to ignore all of these stupid feelings.
She was basically homeless, stressed, tired, hungry. Hormonal. Marc was the first familiar face she’d seen in two days. Liking him wouldn’t last.
“What for?”
“Some…thing I need.”
He didn’t answer and she quickly brushed her teeth and rinsed, then stepped back into the main room.
“Why didn’t you ask me to get it when I went for the toothpaste?” he asked when she appeared.
“They don’t have this in their basket.” The plastic basket held the basics—toothbrush and paste, disposable razors, deodorant, combs and ibuprofen.
“What is it, Sabrina?”
It was the first time he’d used her name and the goose bumps that erupted on her skin were very real.
And terrifying. God help her. She couldn’t react like this to Marc. Maybe it really was hormones or something.
“It’s no big deal,” she muttered.
It was too much to ask that Marc leave it at that. He continued to watch her, eyebrow quirked, clearly waiting for her to go on.
“I need some hydrocortisone cream.”
“What for?”
Marc never had been particularly tactful where she was concerned.
“I have a rash.”
“A rash?” He wrinkled his nose as if she’d announced she had an STD.
“
Heat
rash.”
“Heat rash?”
Marc was an intelligent guy but sometimes she wondered how he’d managed to obtain his Master’s degree.
“I have heat rash from where the denim of my shorts rubbed on the back and inside of my thighs as I walked down the highway in eighty-seven degree heat, looking for a service station for my damned car.”
He stared at her for a full ten seconds. Then his eyes dropped to her thighs. He stared harder, seeming puzzled.
“What?” she finally demanded.
“How’d I miss that?”
“Excuse me?”
“You were standing there in your panties and I thought I looked you over pretty good.”
She felt a jolt of heat remembering his eyes on her. If he’d been looking
really
closely he could have seen her heart thumping in her chest. “You were staring at my tattoo.”
“And thinking about proceeding with caution.”
She froze. Had he meant to say that? Was he teasing her or had it slipped? Or did that even mean what she thought it might mean?
Marc Sterling drove her crazy. That had obviously not changed in four years.
“It’s…” She cleared her throat. “It’s pretty high up. Probably hard to see.”
“Those are damn short shorts.”
“Right.”
His attention made its way from her thighs to her face. “Where do you buy stuff like that cream?”
“There’s got to be a Walmart between here and Justice.”
“Well, this is America.”
It took forty minutes to get to a city of any size—which only had a tiny airport with a charter service and no bus station. There was also no Walmart, but there was a decent-sized grocery store that had hydrocortisone cream.
Her next problem was how to get the cream on and maintain some dignity. She was contemplating that and wishing she’d gone into the restroom at the grocery store, when Marc said, “Let’s find someplace to eat. Are you hungry?”
“You have no idea what I’d do for food right now,” she answered without thinking.
Then she felt his eyes on her. And it felt… She glanced at him quickly, hoping to see amusement or teasing. That wasn’t how it felt, but that’s what she could handle. Instead it was—she swallowed hard—just like it felt.
Hot.
So much so that she stopped walking and turned to face him fully.
“What?” she asked, hands on her hips, wondering if he’d follow up on that look on his face and wondering what she’d do if he did.
“I was reviewing my ideas and trying to decide which to go with.”
She licked her lips, unintentionally, but saw his gaze drop to her mouth and follow her tongue. How had this happened? This was
Marc
standing in a grocery store parking lot making her breathe harder just by looking at her mouth. Dammit. Maybe it was the elevation here. Or low blood sugar. Yeah, low blood sugar. That was good. She’d go with that. She needed to eat something fast.
“Are you paying for the food?” she asked, shifting her weight to her other foot.
“I was under the impression that was the only option.”
“It’s illegal to expect…something like that…in return for payment.”
“Something like that? Geez, Seattle, maybe I was thinking about having you do hand stands or wash my car.”
“Were you?” she challenged.
One corner of his mouth curled up. “Definitely not.”
“Uh-huh. Illegal.”
Her stomach rumbled in loud enough that he heard it. He laughed. “I’ll let you give me a rain check.”
She vowed to
not
think about that. At all. Ever again. He was kidding anyway. Probably. Surely he was kidding. He liked pushing her buttons and maybe it was obvious that he was turning her on a little. If it was, she wouldn’t put it past him to take advantage of the chance to make her uncomfortable.
Seven minutes later, it didn’t matter a bit. If he asked her to clean his house in a pink bunny costume for the next six months, she’d do it. The diner they found smelled that good.
“I’m going to make a call. Order a cheeseburger, fries and iced tea for me, ’kay?” He slid out of the booth and she nodded.
It was nice to have some space from him. They’d been together constantly and it seemed that the weird, unexpected, what-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-do-with-this chemistry between them was pressing in on her on from all sides.
It was nice to be able to take a deep breath.
She leaned back and surveyed the restaurant. It was strange that until Marc was gone she hadn’t even realized that she’d paid little attention to her surroundings. Why was he so distracting? She’d known him for years and didn’t remember being unable to focus on anything else when he was around. She wasn’t that starved for male companionship. Male companionship she had plenty of. Besides her band mates, who were all men, she spent time with plenty of men as she bartended from time to time and there were men at school—teachers, administrators, janitors. And she did date. She put a hand against her stomach. In fact, if she’d had less male company she wouldn’t be on her way back to Justice.
Butterflies kicked up in her stomach at the thought of her return home. It was really going to happen. Not that she’d expected the car to break down, or any other true barrier to keep her out of Justice, but she hadn’t let herself think about where the road was taking her as she drove east. Now that Marc was here, in a car that seemed to be in perfect working order and on the interstate that would take her to Nebraska, there was no reason she wouldn’t get to Justice.
She made herself block those thoughts and looked around the restaurant. It was a typical roadside diner with black vinyl booths and white laminate tabletops. It was small and clean, but the faded paint, chipped countertops and menus frayed at the edges all told of a long history. Country music played from the speakers, but it wasn’t Tim McGraw or Alan Jackson. Instead it was the good old boys: Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash.