“Oh, please, you don’t really expect me to buy that garbage, do you? Keep yourself healthy, my butt. Next you’ll be flipping them all nasty one-handed gestures and telling me it’s an AMA approved method of controlling your blood pressure.”
He shot her a grin, and Kaylee’s heart stuttered. Studying him a while through narrowed lashes, she tried to ignore the part of her that screamed, Oh, God, so handsome! Great hands! Great smile! because that only made it too damn difficult to stick to the No Sex Until We’ve Found Catherine rule she’d imposed on them. Now, why had that sounded like such a good idea again? Well, whatever the reason, she seemed to remember it had made a lot of sense at the time. And she was sticking to it, too, by God, at least as far as instigating anything herself went. She had to. To do otherwise would not only probably violate whatever her reasons had been in the first place, but make her look like a damn wishy-washy idiot to boot.
The smart thing to do, obviously, was to get him to break the rule. Now, that would be the perfect solution because then she could enjoy the benefits without all that nasty responsibility. And hey, how hard could it be anyhow? Guys were notorious for thinking with their dicks, and Bobby was certainly no exception. She’d developed some moves over the years guaranteed to make a grown man beg, and maybe, if she eased up on Bobby’s blind side with one or two of them, he’d get so tired of the frustration, he’d throw her down on the nearest bed or other reasonably horizontal surface and do his wicked worst to her.
It made her warm just thinking about it. Bobby’s wicked worst was very good indeed.
Of course, on the downside, she never had been overly fond of women who played teasing games to get their way. And Bobby did have that big ol’ chivalrous streak when it came to women, so the idea of him actually reduced to using the tiniest bit of force to get something going between them was so unlikely as to be pretty much guaranteed out of the question.
Seduction was more Bobby’s style. As long as she’d known him, she had never seen him be anything but unfailingly gentle and charming with any woman he’d ever come into contact with, and face it, that included the one or two really nasty ones he’d had to remove from the club. She had yet to see his charm slip.
Well, except with her. Swiveling to face him more fully, she wondered why that was. Gazing blindly at his handsome profile, she tried to work it out in her mind.
“What?” he suddenly snarled, and Kaylee gave a small start of surprise. She slapped a hand to her chest to contain her thundering heart.
“Jayzus, Bobby, you scared the shit outta me! What do you mean, what?”
“Why are you staring at me like that?”
“Was I staring? Huh, I’ll be damned. I didn’t realize.”
He waited for several silent heartbeats and when it sunk in that she had no intention of elaborating, snapped, “Well?”
Kaylee blinked at him. “Well, what?”
“Why were you staring!”
“I told you I didn’t know I was. I was just thinking about you and women.”
The glance he shot her was abruptly wary. “Me and women,” he repeated, careful to leave all inflection out of his voice. “Did you, uh, have any particular woman in mind?”
“No, not really. I was just thinking about how you are with all of us.”
“And that is…?”
Kaylee gave him a tender smile, for he clearly expected a trap. Where did he get all these suspicions? “Charming,” she said gently. “Easygoing. Even-tempered.” Her voice trailed away as she stared at him in openmouthed amazement. “Why, Bobby LaBon, you’re blushing!”
“Like hell.” The color flooding his cheeks made his eyes blaze bluer than usual when he took them off the traffic to shoot her a quelling glance.
She decided, quite magnanimously if she did say so herself, to cut him some slack. “Okay, if you insist, then of course you’re not.” She nibbled a cuticle for a moment, then forced her hand down into her lap. “Listen, do you remember that woman you had to remove from the Tropicana last winter? The one who kept trying to join us chorus girls onstage?”
“Hell, yeah, I remember. She ripped off half of my face before I finally got her out the door.”
“I always wondered why you didn’t just deck her after she got in the first pop.”
His head swung around, and shock, genuine and bone deep, filled his eyes as he stared at her. “She was a woman!”
“Bobby, she was drunk and vicious, and your face was infected for more than a week because of her dirty fingernails. If she’d been a man, you would’ve decked her in a minute.”
“Well, hell, baby, what’s your point? Of course I’m not gonna let a guy get away with shit like that. It’s kinda fun then to mix it up a little—it gets all those aggressions worked out.” He turned his attention back to the road, but spared enough time to shoot her a quick look of reproval. “But a guy sure hell doesn’t go around hitting women—I don’t care if they deserve it or not.”
“You pointed a gun at me.”
“But I wasn’t gonna use it! That was just to get your cooperation when I still thought you were your sister.”
“Speaking of which,” Kaylee said with a sudden narrowing of her eyes, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you. Just what was all that bullshit with Catherine’s—my—legs?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Bobby. When I was trying to prove I was Cat, you gave a great big once-over to what we both know damn well you thought at the time were her legs. And you said nice.” She gave the word the same deep, sexy inflection he had given it.
“What, you’re jealous over a little complim—?”
“I’m not jealous over anything!”
“Uh-huh.” Bobby grinned. “Well, they are nice.” He glanced over at them, taking in their long, sleek length showcased by her short skirt and skyscraper heels, and his eyes went dark for a moment before he dragged his attention back to the road. “Very nice. So I just told her—you—the truth.”
“You were flirting with her!”
“If I was flirting with anybody, baby—and I’m not admitting to a thing here—it was you.”
“Yeah, nice try, Bobby, except you didn’t know it was me at the time. As far as you knew I was out the door, and you sure didn’t wait for the dust to settle before you started flirting with my sister.”
“I wasn’t flirting! I was just appreciating her—damn, your!—legs.” He took one hand off the steering wheel and rubbed at his head. “Yours, hers, hers, yours—Christ, I’m getting a headache here. They were nice, so I said so. So, shoot me. Women like to hear these things.”
Kaylee snorted. “You obviously don’t know as much about the female gender as you think you do. Sure, some like to hear it. Maybe even most do. But if I really had been Cat, I would have ripped you a new one right where you stood.”
“What, she doesn’t like compliments?”
“She wouldn’t like strangers busting into her home and then ogling her legs, that’s for damn sure.”
“Yeah? So what would she have done about it, you suppose? Gotten physical with me? That makes her sound a whole lot more like you than you’ve led me to believe.”
“Damn your black heart, even now you’re dreaming about wrestling around with my sister! Well, in your dreams, Ace! She woulda ripped you to shreds with the nasty side of her tongue. Froze you into a big ole Popsicle man. Reduced you to a stammering idiot.”
Bobby’s eyebrows were elevated when he turned to meet her gaze. “Then I guess it’s a lucky thing for me that it was you and not Catherine in that house, huh? The fire and ice twins and I got me the hot one.” His brows snapped together in a sudden scowl. “Least I did before you decided to cut me off. Now all I got is a big hurkin’ case of blue balls.”
“Ah, poor baby. Want me to kiss ’em and make it better?”
“Yes,” he growled.
The atmosphere in the car was suddenly full of the hot jitters, and they were both silent for a few
moments. Then Kaylee took a deep breath, eased it out, and reached for the road map. “What was the name of that town again, where Scott said we might catch up with them?”
“Arabesque.”
“I wonder if I can get a manicure there. Cat’s got all my good stuff, and my nails need attention something fierce. They’re a mess.” She ran one down the map. When it stopped at the town under discussion, she frowned. “Why, it’s nothing but a little bitty dot.”
“Yeah, I guess all they really require for a lunch stop is a café.”
“God, would you look at this?” she demanded, staring down at the map spread out over her lap. “There’s only but one, two, three, four towns of any size at all in this state. I wonder what people do around here for fun.”
They drove in silence for a while. Eventually, Bobby glanced over at her. “Have you given any thought to what we’re going to do when we do catch up with your sister, baby?”
Kaylee looked at him blankly. “Sure. Rescue her.”
“Okay. How?”
She blinked.
“It’s not enough simply to find her, Kaylee. She’s being escorted back to Miami by a bounty hunter, and he’s sure hell not going to just hand her over to us without a fight. The guy’s probably armed to the teeth.”
“You’ve got a gun.”
“Yeah, but he’s probably prepared to actually use his!”
Kaylee gave her shoulders a thoughtful shimmy. “So, we’ll take him by surprise.”
“All right, say for the sake of argument we do that. If he gets a look at you, he might even realize he has the wrong twin.” He took a hand off the steering wheel and reached over to grip her thigh just above the knee. His eyes left the road long enough to pin her in place with the intensity of his gaze. “But what makes you think the guy’s gonna just give up? This is the man’s livelihood we’re talking about, and we can be pretty damn sure he’ll come after us with everything he’s got.”
“Well, then, maybe we’ll tie him up and get just as far away as we can before he gets himself undone. I don’t know, Bobby!” she wailed in frustration. “Cat’s the smart one—”
His fingers tightened on her leg. “Would you quit friggin’ doing that to yourself?” he roared.
“What? Quit doing what?” She slapped at his forearm with both hands, then tried to pry his hand away. “Bobby, you’re hurting me!”
“Quit implying that you’re somehow stupid,” he yelled. But he released his grip on her leg, bringing his hand back to clasp the steering wheel with white-knuckled fingers. He glanced away from traffic long enough to pin her in place with his fierce gaze. “Just because you didn’t go to a goddamn college like your precious sister doesn’t mean you’re not every bit as bright as she is.”
“But I’m not.” He glared at her, and she reached over to touch conciliatory fingertips to his thigh. “It’s the truth, Bobby. Saying so doesn’t mean I think I’m dumb, because I don’t. I’m not. But Catherine is the quick-witted one. She kinda had to be. Most of the time I don’t even care, except maybe when I get myself in some stupid jam that I can’t figure out how to get out of again without calling her first. I was always the social one. I can make friends faster than she can. Hell, I know I’m more fun than she is. But Cat is smarter or at least faster at thinking on her feet. It’s just a fact of life, like my red hair or exceptionally pretty boobs.” She watched her fingers weave abstract patterns up and down his hard-muscled thigh.
Bobby’s gaze glanced off her exceptionally pretty breasts. “Maybe it’s more a matter of not exercising your natural smarts.”
“Huh?”
“Well, I imagine it’s like any muscle—if you don’t work it, it doesn’t develop. You’ve never had to exercise your problem-solving abilities because you always had your sister there to do your thinking for you. But if we’re gonna do this, baby, then we’d better put some thought into what, exactly, we plan to do when we catch up with Catherine and the bounty hunter.”
“Can’t we just let her know I’m nearby and ready and willing to help, and let her figure out a way to use it?”
“No. We can either give it up right here and now and save our own butts, which is what I vote for, or we can make up our minds to do it right.”
Depend on her own intelligence? The very idea scared her to death. She chewed on her bottom lip, tempted to go with Bobby’s vote and give up. But she took a deep breath, slowly let it out, and then said, “Okay. We do it right.”
“Damn.” He slapped the steering wheel. “That’s what I was afraid you were gonna say.”
11
IT WAS BARELY eight o’clock in the morning and already it was breathlessly hot. Mirage waves had begun to shimmer above the blacktop surface of the highway Catherine and Sam trudged along.
Catherine’s breakfast sat heavy in her stomach, and she cursed the whim that had driven her to put on a pair of Kaylee’s spiked heels this morning. She had to quit giving into these childish impulses to spite Sam; invariably, they only rebounded on her. Tripping along trying to keep up with his long-legged stride, tugging damp, clingy Lycra away from her perspiring chest, she dreamed of loose clothing that allowed air to circulate next to her skin. Cool cotton shifts and baggy-legged shorts. Long dresses that merely skimmed her body instead of sticking to every inch of it. If she ever got back to the real world, she was going to climb into the roomiest outfit she owned and never come out again.
And why was she trying to keep up with him anyway? Immediately, Catherine slowed her pace. It wasn’t as if it were to her benefit if they got to the bus station on time.
Sam took an additional three strides down the shoulder of the road before he realized she was no longer with him. He turned back impatiently. “What’s the holdup, Red?”
“Aside from the fact that I’m hot, my feet hurt, and I’m through trotting along in your wake like a trick poodle? Not a blessed thing, McKade.”
Taking a giant step back toward her, he scowled at the long, bare length of her legs. “Hey, don’t blame me for your sore feet. If you’d worn your Keds instead of those dumb heels, like I suggested…” But that wasn’t a good road to go down. It brought to mind a ruthlessly clear vision of her mincing around the motel room this morning, taking baby steps in those damn high heels and wearing his oversize white oxford cloth shirt buttoned to the throat over the little pink dress she had on now. It had entirely covered the skintight garment, which should have been a relief. Instead, it had made her look naked underneath, and between the thought of that and the memory of those smooth white legs wrapped around his waist that kept popping to mind, he’d damn near started howling.
“Suggested, my fanny, Ace—you demanded.”
Okay, he admitted it—if only to himself; that had probably been a mistake. She’d immediately stuck her slender little nose in the air and plunged him into the business end of yet another one of her damn silent treatments.
And the sexy heels had remained firmly on her feet.
“Besides,” she sniped, raising an arm to blot perspiration off her forehead, “if you weren’t such an all-fired cheapskate, maybe we could catch an occasional ride to the bus station instead of always having to hike down the highway.”
“If you didn’t eat like a damn trucker, maybe I could afford to!”
She took an angry step in his direction. “Don’t you even get started on that ‘fat’ business again.”
“Dammit, Red!” Frustration had him taking a huge step forward, which left him looming so far over her, she had to bend back from the waist simply to see up into his face. “I never once said you were fat—not once! I said some might say you were well fed. Well trust me on this, sweetheart, you are. As the guy who’s been paying for your meals, I can sure as hell testify to that.” He backed off a step and watched her slowly straighten as he readjusted his grip on their bags. “Now get your butt in gear,” he said through his teeth. “We’ve got a bus to catch.” He turned and stomped off down the shoulder again.
A car roared past, kicking up dust. Coughing, Catherine stopped by the side of the road to wait for the grimy cloud to blow past, irritably waving away the grit that swirled around her head.
Sam turned and saw her standing there and uttered a phrase so foul Catherine backed up a step. He was back at her side in a few ground-eating strides, switching both bags into one hand as he walked. Without so much as a pause, he ducked, got a shoulder into her midsection, and rose to his feet with her dangling over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Slapping a big hand to the back of her thigh to hold her in place, he turned and strode off down the highway.
“Dammit, Sam, it is way too hot for this.” She banged a fist into the small of his back and felt sweat begin to adhere their bodies together everywhere they touched. “Put me down.” Another car roared by and honked enthusiastically. Derisive hoots from what sounded like teenage male throats floated back on the heat-laden air. “Dammit, Sam, put me down! They can probably see clear up my skirt to my tonsils!”
“Like I’m supposed to believe that would bother an exhibitionist like you?”
“Sam!”
“You gonna put on your Keds like a good little girl and quit giving me grief?”
Her stomach jounced on his hard shoulder with every long-legged stride he took, and the breakfast she’d eaten a short while ago threatened to make a return appearance. His wording was enough to give her a bad case of tight teeth, but she bit back her resentment and answered, “Yes. Now put me down.”
He leaned forward and eased her to her feet. Then he dropped her bag to the road and squatted in front of it. A moment later he handed her the tennis shoes. “Fork over the heels.”
She passed them to him and stooped to tie her shoes. Looking up a moment later, she caught him weighing the strappy pink heels in one large hand while staring consideringly out at the shrub brush beyond the shoulder of the road. “Don’t even think about it, buster,” she advised. “Not unless you’re prepared to part with some of your precious cash to buy me a replacement pair.”
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