Honeytrap (5 page)

Everyone was cheering him on right before someone shouted, “Bust that bronc!”

The car revved its engine and . . . holy shit. It took off in a spray of dust while the fool gave a yell.

“That's Zachary Lowe!” Evie said.

I was trying not to let my jaw hit the ground because, somehow, our valedictorian had ended up doing rodeo tricks on a car. This wasn't like any party I'd ever been to in town. Not that I'd been a high school party girl, but . . . Wow.

When the Impala slammed on its breaks, Zachary went flying into a bunch of hay that'd been set out, and a collective
“Ooo!”
drowned out the music. No one moved.

“Shit!” Evie whispered.

Was the smartest guy in our class dead? Paralyzed?

“Zach!” Jimmy Holland, with his ranch-boy shoulders and plaid shirt, dove toward the idiot in the hay.

But when Zachary bounded up like a jack-in-the-box, his hands above his head in a victory cheer, everyone pumped their fists and drank their beer.

Evie pulled me toward the keg. “Good God. I've gotta get drunk.”

“You think beer's going to top that?”

“It'll ease the surreal nature of our surroundings, that's a guarantee.”

As we approached the keg, we were spotted by a bunch of kids I knew but didn't really know. They'd eaten at the tables on the opposite side of the high school cafeteria. They'd gone to parties after the football games—the ones that standoffish girls like me and Evie never knew about until the next day at school, when gossip made its rounds. They'd worked after school on their family's ranches or farms while Evie and I had stuck around town, doing chores in our homes or parents' businesses.

“Look here—the brain squad!” shouted a guy I recognized from the football team who'd graduated a few years ago. He'd been a receiver, one of Rex's favorite targets when my ex was a boy-wonder freshman who'd made second-string varsity. Jefferson Mayes, with his short, curly black hair covered by a Stetson.

The moonlight danced over his dark skin. “First came Zachary, then you two. Is there a message on some nerd web page about making up for lost party time?”

“No,” Evie said, accepting a Solo cup from a kid in a Texas Rangers cap who'd been on the baseball team and sat in the back of my English class—Reese Darnell. “We nerds have a hive mind, so we know one another's thoughts.”

Blank looks from the 'necks.

“No one watches
Star Trek
?” Evie asked.

Some of them coughed, saying “nerd” at the same time, but they did it teasingly, not cruelly.

Reese Darnell smiled shyly at me, like he kind-of-sort-of recognized me. No surprise, since I was taller, slimmer, and curvier now. My hair was longer and swimming pool–blonder than it'd been senior year, too, since I'd taken a swimming class last semester. He started to fill a cup from the keg, but I asked for water from a nearby container instead. In the background, another rider was all set to go on the Impala, which revved its engine, gearing up for a second drunk to go flying.

Jefferson shook his head and hopped onto the truck's tailgate. “How long before someone gets himself killed over there?”

“Jimmy'll stop it from happening,” another farm boy said. I didn't know who he was but I was pretty sure he was older than we were, based on his scruffy beard and an air of not really belonging. As a matter of fact, the more I looked around, it seemed that this was a more “mature” party that had landed at Jimmy's house. He always had hung out with an older crowd.

Jefferson tipped back his cowboy hat. “Jimmy's too drunk to stop this.” He nodded to Reese, and it was like they had some kind of signal, because he left, heading for the Impala and the crowd around it. Then Jefferson focused on me and Evie again.

“What brings you here then?” he asked over the music.

Evie had already downed half her cup, and she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, avoiding her lip piercing. “We're in search of pleasant company. But I'm not sure we've found it with all that bull riding going on . . .”

“Bronc busting,” Jefferson said. “That's what they're calling it. These kids started it up last year after the graduation party. If it wasn't so dangerous, I'd say you girls should hop on and give it a go. It'd be a turn on.”

Evie and I cracked up. But when I stopped laughing, I still had to wonder how long it'd take for Jefferson to comment about me and Rex. Or for someone else to say something that'd make me want to leave.

Evie was sticking by my side, like she was silently telling me to stand my ground.

Jefferson refilled his cup. “So you're both in college now?”

He was looking at me, so I answered. “I'm at Texas-U. Evie's at UCSD on the West Coast. She wants to study marine biology.”

“And art,” Evie added. “Wonderful combo. Maybe I'll be Wyland someday.”

More blank looks. Okay, they weren't so much into artists, either.

I nodded at Jefferson. “You went off to be a Longhorn?”

“Yeah. Made the team, too.”

Everyone in Aidan Falls knew that Jefferson rode the bench at the University of Texas. They said he'd been a big shark here, but a small fish outside town limits, which was just the jerk way of saying that they were disappointed in him.

By now, I was
really
praying he wouldn't ask about Rex since we were on the subject of football. But just as I thought he was about to say something, there was a roar in the distance, coming from the road.

Everyone near the truck—and near the Impala, which was mercifully sitting still without any riders on the roof—turned to see what was arriving.

It turned out to be a red car with stripes and a jacked-up rear, and Jefferson jumped off the truck to go running toward it. Several other 'necks did, too, except for a crowd that stayed near the Impala.

“Oh my God,” Evie said, grabbing my arm. “Look at that Camaro. My dad would get such a woody if he saw this.”

A laugh sputtered out of me, but it trailed off as I recalled something Micah Wyatt had said earlier in the day.

“I'm more into cars. Racing. All that.”

The Camaro steered off the road, into the grass, and I could see the silhouetted driver's muscled arm relaxing out the window, his other hand gripping the wheel. As he came to a stop, the passenger door opened, and someone tall and equally built got out. Another person followed, his shape imitating the other man's.

Deacon and Darwin?

It didn't take a brain to guess who was driving, and when Micah opened his door and stood tall, the knot that'd been tied between my legs earlier got even tighter. Something in my belly wrapped into itself, too, my skin going prickly and hot.

“Evie,” I said between my teeth.

We were the only ones at the keg now since the rest of the guys had gravitated toward Micah, who shook Jefferson's hand right before the guy started circling the Camaro, scanning it. His friends followed him until they got to the twins, giving them pat-on-the-back guy hugs.

“I swear,” Evie said, crossing her heart, “I had no idea he'd be here.”

I believed her, but that didn't do me much good now, as Micah locked me into his sights.

He smiled in the moonlight, his gaze burning into me—the girl he'd vowed to nail by the end of summer.

Early March, Two Days After the Last ParlorFly Chat Message, Private Chat

T-Rex Alvarez:
U there?

10:43pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
 . . . ?

10:45pm

Lana Peyton:
Hi.

10:46pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
Damn. U cold or what?

10:46pm

Lana Peyton:
I just thought we agreed to cut this out.

10:47pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
U agreed.

10:47pm

Lana Peyton:
God. I told you—things went too far. You've got a girlfriend, and this isn't right.

10:48pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
That didn't bug u much the 1st time. And the 2nd. And the 3rd.

10:48pm

Lana Peyton:
I DON'T WANT TO TALK TO YOU.

10:49pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
Ur not serious. Cum on Lana.

10:49pm

Lana Peyton:
I can't believe you want to keep on with this. I never thought I'd be a cheater, and it's disgusting. I liked you, Rex, but I have to wonder what kind of person you are now.

10:50pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
Same kind of person u r.

10:50pm

Lana Peyton:
Fuck you.

10:50pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
Invitation? I have a better idea. Cum 2 my room for real.

10:50pm

Lana Peyton:
Stop joking around.

10:52pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
No joke.

10:52pm

Lana Peyton:
I'm not amused.

10:52pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
??? U there?

10:54pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
K. Have it ur way. Do u no how many girlz would want to b in ur place?

10:55pm

Lana Peyton:
Famous last words, Rex.

10:55pm

T-Rex Alvarez:
WTF duz that even mean?

10:56pm

Lana Peyton has blocked T-Rex Alvarez.

10:56pm

I was still under the heat of Micah's gaze as he stood by his car. I was rooted to the ground, my knees too weak for me to run or hide, when another girl went over to him.

She looked like she'd just stepped out of a NASCAR wet dream with short shorts that cupped her butt, cowboy boots, and a red tank top that showed off her ample charms. A bottle blonde with hairsprayed hair and lipsticked lips, holding a green bandana in one hand while she draped her other arm around Micah's neck.

He smiled at me across the distance—a sideswipe grin that told me he thought it was funny that I couldn't drag my gaze away from him—and rested a hand on NASCAR's butt.

As a flush raged over my skin—damn, sometimes it sucked to be a blonde—the crowd hooted, the girl pressing herself up against Micah and pulling him down for a kiss.

He kept watching me, including me in the kiss like this was some kind of threesome, or like he was letting me know that this girl could be me, Shelby Carson, with a little more hairspray, lipstick, and willingness. All it'd take was one word.

Yes
. And that's exactly what I was hearing in the back of my mind: a soft whisper, a sigh of surrender that melted through my bones.

Yes
. His lips, hot and urgent, a first, scary kiss from a guy I shouldn't be anywhere close to. His mouth against mine, slow and insistent, wrong and right . . .

As the girl threw her other arm around his neck, bringing him even closer, I made myself look away, crossing my arms over my chest. Making myself breathe again because, somewhere along the line, I'd stopped, as usual.

Everybody was still cheering him on as I gazed at the small group that lingered by the Impala. The driver leaned against his door, and he was big one. Not Hulk-big, but stocky in a former glory-day wrestler kind of way. It'd been a while since he'd been in high school, too.

“Evie,” I said. “What kind of party is this?”

“It's supposed to be a kegger.” She followed my gaze to the Impala crowd, her voice so casual that I knew she was trying to get my mind off Micah's little show. “But now I'm not so sure. All I know is that's Brian Taggert who's driving the Impala. He went to school over in Arbuckle.”

A county rival, and his friends were quietly talking to him, jerking their chins toward Micah. Then Brian pushed away from his car.

“You ready to get this done, Wyatt?” he asked.

In spite of my reluctance to look at Micah again, I did. NASCAR was still cuddled up to him, but he only had a nonchalant arm around her. Then again, all of him looked cool and lackadaisical in that plain white T-shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of work boots. That slant of dark blond hair had come loose from his low ponytail, emphasizing every I-don't-give-a-shit inch of him.

“I just got here, Taggert,” he drawled. “Give a guy a second to get acclimated?”

Taggert laughed. “From the looks of it, you should be right at home.” He nodded toward the dirt lane. “This stretch isn't big enough, so we'll need to use the main road.”

Evie leaned over to whisper to me. “They're gonna drag race. Holy shit.”

Micah patted NASCAR on the butt, gave her a fond smile, and ignored Taggert while he walked away from her, heading toward me.

I couldn't even gulp. That's how cluttered my throat was. I was fairly certain my heart was somewhere in there, too, because my pulse was choking me. To make things worse, all I could hear was my throttled body, plus the country music coming from the truck near the bonfire, as Micah sauntered toward me.

Someone in the Impala camp snickered and said something about Micah taking care of business before he took care of
business
, but I barely heard it. I was trying too hard to remain just as cool as he was.

“This is the last place I expected to find you,” he said, coming to stand a couple feet away.

His intense gaze made the adrenaline shoot through me. I was sure my heart had scampered to the center of my chest, pattering so loudly that he had to hear it.

“I didn't know you'd be here, either,” I said. “Believe me.”

“Well, here I am.”

Oh, God's gift or something? I rolled my eyes just to show him how in control of everything I was. Maybe he could seduce Jadyn Dandritch and all the others with a lopsided smile and a low, revving voice, but I knew better.

“Wyatt!” Taggert said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the other guy get into his car.

“Don't you have a race?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Some fool always wants to put his ride up against mine. Some fool always gets his ass kicked, too, and, damn, it gets old. You're
far
more interesting to me than a race.”

He stepped even closer, looming. So near that I could smell the laundry detergent on his shirt and soap on his skin and something else I couldn't name—smoky, spicy, a mystery.

I should've distanced myself like any smart person would, but I kept looking at his lips. They were fascinating, full, tipping down slightly at the corners like he had to fight to smile, even if it seemed like the gesture came so naturally to him.

“Wyatt!”

This time it was a girl's voice—NASCAR—and she didn't sound all that happy.

“Duty calls,” I said, breaking the moment like a stick I'd just snapped under my shoe.

The mechanical pulse of the Impala's revving engine sounded, and Taggert wheeled around, driving south toward the entrance of Jimmy's ranch, toward the main road. While he motored off, he shouted out the window.

“Chickenshit!”

Micah was still looking down at me and, at the insult, he laughed softly, taking a single step away, lifting one of those long, naughty eyebrows.

“Duty calls,” he repeated. “You gonna watch?”

“Only if there's nothing else to do.”

Evie came swooping over, linking my arm through hers. Had she been here the whole time?

“Sure, we're gonna watch,” she said, hauling me in the direction of my pickup.

Everyone else was swarming toward their own vehicles, and in the exodus, Micah seemed like the center of a slow storm, still watching me with those hungry eyes. Still sending my stomach butterflying.

Evie kept pulling me along. “Want to go home or stay?”

The right answer was obvious, but I'd tried to do so many things right in life, and where had it gotten me? To a party that'd just started, and I wasn't sure I wanted to leave now that things were hopping.

What would it matter if I watched a drag race? It wasn't like I was the one doing yet another thing that'd make the town talk. More to the point, I wasn't about to let Micah chase me away from anything.

Besides, blobs didn't watch drag races, they only heard about them the next day.

“We're staying,” I said as Evie and I got into my truck.

We trailed everyone to the main road, where white fences guarded cattle, and fields stretched into nowhere all around us. A couple of cars drove farther down the blacktop, but I parked on the shoulder, where everyone else had settled.

Jefferson was waiting for us there, his cowboy hat angled back, exposing his whole face. “You nice girls ever seen one of these?”

Both of us shook our heads.

“Figured that much.” He pointed down the way, where the other trucks' taillights still burned bright. They were parked well off the road. “There's your finish line. Reese is down there for Micah, and Taggert has one of his friends there to mark the finish, too. They're both recording the race on their phones.”

Evie put her hands on her hips. “They're not dumb enough to post this online, are they?”

“Hell, no.” Jefferson laughed. “If there's a photo finish, we can slow down the footage to see who won. That's why Taggert came out here—because these boys can get some business done without any upstanding citizens—or Jimmy's parents—being around. When he heard there was some good racing stretch available tonight, he called Micah out.”

“Is there a big prize for winning?” I asked. Surely Micah had more than one bet going.

“Yeah,” Jefferson said. “Pride. Micah's got the best rig around, and Taggert's been jawing to the county that he's going to make a boy out of my man. Taggert was an ass on the field when I played ball in school with the twins, and I can't wait to see him checked.”

Boyhood never ended for some of these guys, I thought. But I'd always known that nothing much changed in this county. There were grudges that were so old that they'd cycled around to being new again. Huge surprise that Micah had become a part of one.

Taggert had positioned his Impala on the left side of the road, his friends hanging by his window, giving him encouragement. Micah was on the right, Deacon and Darwin waving everyone back from the starting line.

Deacon pointed at Micah. “Get this done.” I could tell it was Deacon because he didn't have a Phoenix tattoo creeping over his neck. He was the one with all the ear piercings.

Darwin merely patted the Camaro's roof, then backed off from the car. Deacon followed him, and they retreated toward us. Taggert's friends did the same. Meanwhile, NASCAR girl stood in the center of the road, legs braced, wild hair sprayed around her, that green bandana in hand.

I looked at Micah, my pulse thundering, and I could've sworn I saw him gazing at me in his side mirror. But it could've only been a trick of the moonlight. Or my moronic hormones.

Deacon was standing next to Evie, towering over her. “I can't wait to see Taggert get smoked by Micah. It's one way to shut him up.”

Darwin chuckled. “Punching him in the neck sure didn't work in high school when he was on the field with us.”

Micah's friends started to chant as the racers revved their engines, their cars creeping up to the starting line, where NASCAR was still holding that green bandana by her side.

“Hugger, hugger, hugger . . .”

Darwin caught the confusion on my face and Evie's. “That's the kind of paint Micah used on his Camaro. Hugger orange.”

I had enough time to see that, yeah, the Camaro wasn't red, it was something different than what I'd first thought. Then NASCAR raised her green bandana in the air, poising it there as shouts erupted from both sides of the road.

My blood was burbling, keeping time with the growl of the engines. It never occurred to me that Micah might crash or lose control. Neither option seemed possible with a guy who had such arrogance.

Damn, was it bad that this was such a turn on?

As NASCAR looked from one driver to the other, I realized that she was giving Taggert and Micah the same expression—lust. Excitement.

Groupie?

After a final, thrilling pause, she shouted and chopped down the bandana, and both cars burned rubber, taking off down the road into the night. With a surge of energy, we all ran after them like we were going to catch up. Even if all we could see were taillights ahead, my heartbeat kept going, like it didn't have sense enough to stop itself from chasing that car . . . and the guy inside it.

When a squealing sound hit the air, everyone froze—especially when Taggert's car swerved off the road just before the finish line taillights. Micah's car veered, too, but he got it back on track as Taggert's car angled downward past the shoulder, like it was in a shallow ditch or hole.

There was a collective yell, and everyone started running again . . . until we heard the car horn in back of us.

I took Evie by the arm and pulled her off the road as an unfamiliar pickup made its way toward the finish line.

“Jimmy's mom!” someone yelled.

Crap.
Jimmy's mom was a former Marine—bad-ass and law-abiding.

Deacon and Darwin were suddenly by our sides, leading us back toward our cars.

“Act like this is nothing,” one of them said. “Just walk.”

I looked over my shoulder to see what'd happened with Micah's car. It seemed like he'd turned around and parked next to Taggert. Mrs. Holland's pickup was right there, too, and she'd hopped out of it, going to the Impala like something might be wrong.

I didn't like walking away from this. Not that I was a superhero or anything, but I'd taken CPR courses for a lot of babysitting I'd done after school and on weekends. What if Taggert was hurt and I was walking away from the scene of an accident?

Turning around, I started running toward the finish line.

“Shelby!” Evie yelled.

But I heard her footsteps right behind me, even as everyone else was scooting to their cars and taking off.

Marathons were shorter than the distance I had to go to reach the finish line, and when I got there, I was panting, my lungs on fire. I bent over and braced my hands on my thighs as I took in the scene: a Queensland heeler trotting around and sniffing the fence, while Taggert's car tilted in a ditch as shallow as I'd suspected. He leaned against the Impala, which didn't seem damaged. Still, he was pissed as hell while getting an earful from Mrs. Holland, who was tall, wiry, short-haired, and not just bad-ass, but pretty
damned
bad-ass.

“Did you stop to think,” she was saying, “that there might be other people on the road besides you? You almost hit my dog, son.”

Micah wasn't exactly escaping a tongue-lashing, either, because Mrs. Holland shook a finger at him, too, while he stood with his hands tucked beneath his armpits, his face stoic.

“I should turn y'all in,” she said.

By now, the twins and Evie had caught up with me, along with Jimmy himself, and they hung back.

Taggert shrugged. “So what? I missed hitting the dog.”

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Holland said.

Micah stepped in. “Ma'am, I'm sure he means to apologize. You're right—racing out here was foolish, and it won't happen again.”

Taggert wiped a hand over his face, hiding a laugh at the ass-kissing his rival was doing, and Mrs. Holland noticed.