by Sarina Bowen
She sighed. “Yes. It’s flat. Busted. Irreparably destroyed. Kaput—”
“I got it. Move over.”
That made her turn around. “Why?”
“So I can get to the trunk.”
She put her arm out, barring his way. “Let me repeat, why?”
He closed his eyes for a moment and inhaled. Let the air out on a slow exhale before looking at her again, blue eyes flaring in the shifting glare of approaching headlights.
“Because I need to check the spare in the trunk. Cross your fingers it’s good.”
She shifted to stand square in his way. “Absolutely not. No way.”
“Maxie—”
“I’m not kidding. People get killed doing that. Call AAA and wait for a tow. Don’t be stupid.”
He stepped into her personal space and she inhaled sharply, fighting back the desire to step forward, too, and press up against him. It should be impossible to be this mad at someone and want to jump them at the same, shouldn’t it?
But she couldn’t help it. He loomed over her, pushing at her with the force of his personality and the spell his very presence always cast over her. A thick pulse started beating in her belly, the lightning crackle of want flickering over her skin until the hairs on her arms stood on end and her breasts tightened. She widened her stance, unconsciously bracing herself for impact.
A heartbeat. Another.
His nostrils flared. A muscle twitched in the corner of his jaw. He didn’t blink as he stared down at her.
She didn’t think it was her imagination that his eyes were locked on her mouth.
Another heartbeat.
He shifted forward almost imperceptibly. She didn’t realize she’d arched her back until his thighs brushed hers and just inches separated their torsos. A steady ache built between her legs, a throb that tugged her closer to him, pulling her upright until she felt her breasts flatten against his chest with every deep inhale.
God, she loathed him. His stupid sports car that broke down at the worst possible time. His pretentious worries about society gossip that made him sound as if he’d walked straight out of the pages of a Jane Austen novel. Which, hello, she’d always held as a personal fantasy—Mr. Darcy, yes, please. But she’d never thought she’d end up with a Willoughby. Damn it.
His ever-present ability to light up her body in an instant. To make her toes curl, make her fingernails dig into her palms in an effort to keep herself from reaching out to touch him.
Another heartbeat.
His eyes narrowed, barely visible twitches of his facial muscles fluttering as he regained enough control over himself to bite out four words.
“Get in the car.”
“Promise me.”
“Maxie.”
“Promise me or I swear to god I’ll make a scene on the side of this highway that’ll make the front page.”
She waited for him to back down. He had to know it was a stupid idea. Every few months there was a headline news item about someone—a highway worker, a tow-truck operator—who was killed on the side of the expressway while doing his or her job.
And those people were professionals.
Nick blinked. When his hands landed on her shoulders and steered her to the side of the car, they were gentle.
“I promise. I just want to look. Get in the car, okay, Maxie? I’m not gonna get myself killed.”
She’d thought it was just anger and irritation—she needed to show up at the police station in no more than five hours and she’d very much prefer not to be a sleepless zombie when she arrived—driving her. God knows, if Nick was flattened by a semi, that would certainly result in an even bigger delay. Ha ha.
But the knee-weakening surge of relief that swept over her at his words knocked the sarcasm right out of her.
“Okay.” She lifted her hand for a moment, then watched it hang awkwardly in the air over his shoulder before dropping it. “Okay.”
She didn’t close the car door, though—she sat sideways in the seat with her legs outside the vehicle, watching Nick repeat her own examination. Crouching next to the car and peering underneath it for confirmation that the tire was shot.
His shoulders dropped while he knelt there, his head down, and she wondered if he’d been as eager to get away from her as she’d been to get away from him during this fast-track trip back to Chicago. She swore she could hear him sigh.
In that moment, she wanted to cry so bad her heart ached. They were such a long way from where she’d thought they were going earlier tonight. It was like watching a movie filmed in 3-D without the special glasses on—everything was offset and blurry, a couple inches to the side of where she’d expected it. How was it possible that the same man who could see her so clearly one minute could have flipped the switch to cold anger and shuttered emotions after just one phone call?
She watched him rise and place the call to AAA, giving them his estimate of their location. His mouth tightened and his brows lowered as he listened. When he ended the call, the only question was how bad the news was going to be.
“Three hours?” It would be safe to say that her shriek was probably heard downtown.
“It’s a hot Saturday night. Tires blow and engines overheat. They’re backed up and we’re not in danger, so they’ll get to us as soon as they can.”
“Not in danger?” She flung a hand at the traffic zooming by. “Hello?”
“We’re not in traffic. We’ll be fine.”
She dug her fingers into her hair. “Of course we’ll be fine, but you couldn’t make it sound dangerous enough to get them out here faster?”
“There are people having actual emergencies right now who need to be prioritized.”
“I’m due at the precinct in less than five hours. That’s an actual emergency. Shit.” She dug into her bag. Where had she put her cell phone? Nick leaned against the embankment wall and watched as she dialed 1-800-TAXICAB.
Yellow Cab, Checker, American. No dice. Company policy absolutely forbade anything so insane as picking up a passenger on the side of the expressway, not to mention that they were still past O’Hare and city cabs didn’t go past the airport without heavy bribery and a punishing surcharge.
If they were in the city, she would have risked hoofing it to the nearest exit to improve her chances of getting picked up. But in the suburbs, there wouldn’t be any open businesses or taxis, so there’d be no point.
“Hey,” she said. Nick looked up from his phone. “Want your seat back?” She cocked her head toward the driver’s seat.
“No. I’d just get restless.”
She blew a gust of air at her forehead, shifting the hair that was sticking to her in the hot night air. Restless. Right. She could identify.
“So, this is it, huh?”
“What?”
“This is it. The end of—” she flapped a hand back and forth between them “—everything.”
“Is it?”
She blinked. “Well, I think it’s going to be pretty hard to keep sleeping together once you’ve fired me.”
“I don’t know how many times I can tell you that you don’t work for me before you start believing it.”
“Whatever. Your opinion is all that matters.”
“And you’re sure you know what that opinion is?”
The late hour, along with her genuine fear that she was about to be arrested, caught up to her. She was so incredibly tired and sad. Maxie shook her head. “It ain’t good, I know that.”
“Guess I don’t need to bother you with it then.”
“Whatever.” She knew he loathed her. Okay, maybe a bit of her inner drama queen was sneaking out. He probably didn’t loathe her. But was he embarrassed by her? Did he regret his association with her? She didn’t doubt it.
After fumbling below her hip for the correct button, she reclined her seat with a smooth hum. “I need to get some sleep if I’m not going to be dangerously stupid with the police.” She waited for a crack about how dumb she’d already b
een, but Nick remained silent.
Right. No need to rub it in. They both knew it. She turned her back to him and curled up on the seat, her knees bumping the gearshift.
Before she fell asleep, she heard the click of the back door opening and the car adjusted to weight in the backseat. She curled a hand over the edge of her seatback and tried to ignore how little effort it would take to reach into the back and fumble a hand onto Nick’s knee.
Chapter Fourteen
A sudden jolt woke her.
Maxie lifted a hand in front of her eyes against the light streaming in through the windshield and gripped the edge of the seat as the car jerked again. The sun was blinding her.
A knock on the window frame made her yelp.
She almost smiled at Nick’s face in the opened window before the details of the scene sunk in…
Sun? The sun was up?
“Holy shit. What time is it?” Adrenaline flooded her system so fast her toes curled painfully and she jerked upright. “What the hell happened?”
“It’s six. They couldn’t get anyone to us until now.”
“And you just let me sleep! Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“There wasn’t anything we could do. I decided you were better off getting rest.”
“You decided? Remind me of when I put you in charge of making my decisions!” She punched the door open, feeling a twisted satisfaction when Nick had to jump back to avoid catching it in the balls. She got out of the car. “Oh, that’s right. Never. Jesus, I could have called—”
“Who, Maxie? One of your siblings? To come out in the middle of the night and pick you up on the side of the highway?” Nick grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her to look at the road. “You called it. It’s too dangerous.”
The tow-truck driver finished lining up the forklift with the front of the sports car and shouted to Nick, who waved him off.
Turning back to her, Nick pointed to the stretch of highway behind them. Flares blocked the nearest lanes for a hundred feet. The traffic was lighter now that the sun was up and the early-morning drivers merged carefully into other lanes to stay clear of their breakdown.
“The AAA guy wouldn’t even look at the spare in the trunk until he set those up. This breakdown lane is barely wide enough for a car. Were you seriously going to ask one of your sisters to pull over and pick you up in the middle of the night?”
She blushed and ducked her head. Okay. So, he was right. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to risk it. The margin of error was just too high. The tow-truck driver shouted again.
“Ready to go, folks?”
“We can leave our bags in the car. There isn’t room for them and us in the cab of the truck.”
“So, wait. He didn’t change the tire?”
Now it was Nick’s turn to flush and purse his lips. “It was flat.” She stared at him and he shrugged. “I hardly ever drive it. It’s not like it goes in for a tune-up regularly.”
Her brain was already whirring at a hundred miles an hour as she climbed into the truck cab, where she—oh yay—would get to squeeze into the middle of the front seat between Leon, the AAA guy, and Nick. She wondered if Leon would consider it a turn-on or harassment if she snuggled up against him to avoid being pressed shoulder-to-knee with Nick.
Who was practically sitting in her lap. Was the passenger door wired with 10,000 volts of electricity or something? The closer she squirmed to Leon, attempting to maintain a non-harassing inch of space between them, the farther Nick slid toward the middle of the seat. Finally she gave up and resigned herself to touching him, ignoring the heat that radiated from Nick’s body and the pressure of his knee against her.
“Leon, can you drop me off at the Irving Park exit please?” She’d decided it was the first place she could be sure of flagging down a cab at this hour of the morning. Because there was a Blue Line L stop at that exit, taxis cruised by regularly to pick up travelers who had opted to take the El-train in from the airport.
Leon’s “Sure thing” was overridden by Nick’s “No.”
She was so not arguing with him.
“Dude. I need to be at the police station in—” she glanced at the dashboard clock “—less than an hour. Do not get up my ass about this.”
Nick’s hand landed heavily on her thigh, his grip tight. Heat flared in his eyes as they skimmed over her, on a direct mission for her lap. Clearly the up-the-ass comment had someone’s mind in the gutter.
He jerked his gaze back up to her face. “Give me some credit. I know that.”
“Then leave me alone.”
Nick leaned close enough for his lips to brush her ear. She shivered, and Leon started to whistle an I’m-totally-ignoring-you-people song.
“There’s zero chance of me leaving you alone in the foreseeable future.”
What did that mean? Did he honestly think they were still going to continue to hook up, or whatever it was they’d been doing, in the wake of this scandal-in-the-making?
Still, the fantasy thrilled her. The idea that this guy would stick. That he’d be the one who wouldn’t leave, at the end of the show or ever.
Never gonna happen, girl.
It took real willpower to pick his hand up from her thigh and drop it back into his own lap. “I’m serious.”
She saw the flex and curl of his fingers and knew he was thinking of touching her again. She skewered him with a look and shook her head. This was not the time.
“So am I,” he said. “We’re going to a twenty-four-hour garage up on Peterson. Leon can get us in and out fast and then I’ll drive you.”
She pulled back far enough to bump Leon’s shoulder and muttered an apology to him.
“Why?”
Because I want to be there for you. Because you need me.
Her heart tripped. There were at least a dozen responses that would have made her melt.
“It’ll be faster than if I wait to hear an update later. If you end up under arrest, I’m guessing I won’t be your first phone call.”
Right. That wasn’t one of them. Of course he wanted to know how this would affect his mother’s investment.
She leaned her head against Leon’s shoulder for a moment before sitting up straight again. It was all on her. Good thing she was used to making her own plans.
* * *
Nick looked down at Maxie’s wild curls, smashed on one side from her long nap in the front seat while he’d shuttled between sitting in the backseat and pacing the skinny strip of pavement between his car and the concrete wall. Disappointment settled in his stomach with a greasy churn and he sighed.
She hadn’t even blinked.
He’d wanted her to tell him he was wrong. That he was the first person she’d call in an emergency.
And he knew it was too much to ask. Maxie came from a large family that was close and she and her siblings supported each other to the final mile. She had employees who were more friends than staff. He tried not to let the envy poison his perspective, but it was hard not to feel extraneous. Like he was the whim she indulged in between the things she took seriously.
The bottom line was, Maxie didn’t need him. She never would. And as much as he struggled with his own instinctive need to withdraw whenever the spotlight shone down on her—which it so often did—he needed her to, well, need him. He’d spent his entire life being the guy who dealt with the fallout but was never asked to help prevent the bomb from going off.
He didn’t mind playing cleanup crew for his parents’ disastrous choices. Which was a lie, actually. He hated it. He hated waiting for the next phone call asking for the name of that great divorce attorney he’d mentioned or help figuring out if an investment was a total loss or could only be salvaged for pennies on the dollar. For once, he wanted to be the guy who got the call when things started to go bad.
But it hadn’t even occurred to her to ask him for help, had it?
He tipped his head back and pinched the bridge of his nose. This was going to suck. But he’d wai
t around for as long as it took, damn it. Whether or not she knew it, Maxie did need him, and he was going to be there for her, damn it. Maybe at some point she’d realize that.
The hundred-buck tip was totally worth it for the priority treatment they got at the twenty-four-hour garage. They were in and out in fifteen minutes and shooting down Western Avenue to the precinct stationhouse.
When his phone chimed with a text message, he waited until the next red light to glance at it.
The screenshot attached to the message froze him in his seat.
Maxie noticed his sudden stillness and straightened in her seat. “Problem?”
The light turned green.
A picture was worth a thousand words, right? He passed her his phone and locked his hands on the steering wheel, his every muscle vibrating with tension.
“Oh, fuck.” Her low gasp at any other time would have made his dick hard.
Ah, who was he fooling? It made him hard now, even when he knew it wasn’t a gasp of pleasure but dismay.
Gossip columns always sounded so old-fashioned, like something out of the previous century. But the twenty-first century had arrived even for gossip columnists and it was no joke when your picture was splashed across a Gold Coast gossip blog.
VC Angel Canoodles with Gun-Running Girlfriend. Will the Show Go On?
Canoodling. Please. He had an arm around Maxie’s waist in the photo, not a hand on her ass.
Christ, rumors flew fast. The reporter had called his mother just yesterday afternoon. He had no doubt that she’d immediately broadcast the shocking news to all her friends, since his mother had the discretion of a…well, she had none. Even in the Gold Coast, it was surprising that news had gotten around fast enough for some social climber who was spending the weekend in Lake Geneva to capture a photo of him and Maxie before midnight. Admittedly, it was the obvious weekend getaway for the casually rich, but even if he’d thought there was a reason to hide, he would have considered that a safe place. Still, hard to believe the news had traveled that fast. Even harder to believe that this journo was so pissed he’d sent a photographer all the way to Lake Geneva. Either way, someone had gotten a lucky shot.