Bad for Her

by Christi Barth

  “Hey there. Do you need some help?”

  She turned to him with a whirl of her olive-colored skirt. It was too long to flash him any leg. But the motion did part her denim jacket to reveal a skin-tight orange tank. Too bad a green scarf covered what Rafe expected to be pretty spectacular breasts. “Only if you’ve got some sort of magic wand that’ll fix my tire.”

  “I don’t like to talk about my magic wand before I buy a girl dinner.”

  She cocked her head. Looked left, then right, then back at him. “You know, we’re all alone on a forested stretch of highway. Maybe save the sexual innuendo for a better time and place?”

  “Name it, and I will.” Because she wasn’t scared of him. Nothing about her posture had gone defensive after he’d made his comment. Which, yeah, was sleazy and cheap. Rafe had to remember that he wasn’t in a big city with nine million people anymore. The disposable dating pool was limited. Probably not even eight thousand.

  Sauntering forward—which proved the woman wasn’t scared of him—she gave him an up-and-down stare. Fair enough. Rafe did the same to her. Except he didn’t make it even partway down. He stalled out at her eyes. They were a smoky green; the color of the pine trees behind them, wrapped in fog. Bedroom eyes. Yeah, he could stare into those all night . . . and all the way through to breakfast.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “You’re cute. But why should I give you a chance?”

  Rafe liked that she went toe-to-toe with him. “I’m the one doing you the favor, remember? Turnabout is fair play.”

  “What favor?”

  “I’m going to fix your car.”

  “Really?” She brightened all over, from her suddenly sparkling eyes to a bounce in her hair and a twitch in her ass as she rushed back to the tire. “I called for a tow truck, but they said it’d be more than an hour.”

  “I don’t have a magic wand, but if you hand me that jack, I’ll get that flat off and the spare on in less than ten minutes.”

  She shot him a sassy smirk. “This is one time when speed won’t count against you, I promise.” Which then turned into a frown. “Except that the tire won’t come off. I tried.”

  “You tried. With those arms.” Rafe snorted. The woman was on the taller side and skinny. He had no doubt she could roll a suitcase through an airport. But he had every doubt that she could hold her own against a guy who worked out in the boxing ring with his brothers every week. “What do you do for a living? Unless the answer is work for UPS, my case is closed.”

  Her chin shot up. Guess she didn’t like being challenged. That was okay. Neither did Rafe. “I’m a doctor.”

  “That means you lift a one-pound stethoscope, right?” he teased.

  “I work out,” she shot back. Now she was super defensive. Arms crossed. Shoulders hunched. “I have muscles.”

  Rafe unzipped his black leather jacket. He draped it over the hood of the car while pretending not to hear her indrawn hiss of breath. It wasn’t the first time a woman had ogled the biceps popping from beneath his tight black tee. It never got old, though. “Not like mine.”

  “So I see. What do you do for a living?”

  Whatever the U.S. Marshals Service told him to do.

  But Rafe went with a simpler answer as he crouched by the rear tire. This week’s answer, anyway. “I’m a mechanic.”

  “Wow. I really hit the jackpot when you stopped, didn’t I?”

  Rafe craned his neck up to look at the delighted smile that transformed her from pretty to gorgeous. “Would it make me sound like a cocky jackass if I say yes?”

  “Cocky, yes. Jackass . . . well, time will tell.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So what should I call you when I tell my friends how you saved me?”

  “Mr. Wonderful?”

  “Seriously. I’m Mollie Vickers.” She thrust her hand right in front of his nose.

  Standing, wiping his hands on his jeans afforded him the few extra seconds to ensure he’d get the name right that had only been his for two days. “Rafe Maguire.”

  “Nice to meet you. Extremely nice to meet you, as it so happens.”

  As an excuse to keep holding it, he swung her hand toward the tire. “You didn’t take off the lug nuts.”

  “Is that a technical term? Like when I tell a patient that his proximal interphalangeal joint is suffering from longitudinal compression?”

  “Dunno. What is that?”

  “A jammed finger.”

  “Then no. Lug nuts are these things.” He pointed as he rummaged back through her trunk for the necessary bits and pieces. “Think of them as the screw holding your tire to the car.”

  “Oh.” She bent at the waist to look at the nuts. It gave him one heck of a sightline down her cleavage. “Is that why the tire didn’t come off?”

  Rafe wanted to laugh. He definitely would, later, when he told his brothers the story. “That, and you didn’t jack up the car. So there’s still four thousand pounds, give or take, pressing down to keep that tire in place. Did you think you could just pop it off like getting a Life Saver out of a roll?”

  “Can I tell you a secret?” she whispered in his ear. “I don’t know how to change a tire.”

  This time there was no stopping the laughter. It rolled out of him, long and loud, startling a flock of who the hell knew what kind of birds out of the pine trees lining the road. “Babe, that’s no secret.”

  “I left Oregon for college at sixteen, so, of course, I only had a provisional license.”

  “Uh, right.” What kind of idiots ran this state if they made you wait past your sixteenth birthday to get a real license? “Sixteen, huh? I suppose I should be impressed?” What he actually felt was seven kinds of stupid. Since McGinty had made him drop out halfway through senior year to work for him full-time and just get a GED.

  “Don’t be. I skipped second grade. Just about anyone could do that, if they wanted to, honest.” The way she dismissed her obviously genius-sized brain put Rafe back at ease. “I did college and med school in Boston, and then my residency in Chicago. They’ve got some of the best public transit in the country.” Leaning sideways against the door to watch him, she trailed her fingers along the handle. “I’m not really used to driving.”

  Chicago.

  Dr. Mollie with the pretty green eyes had lived in Chicago. Rafe white-knuckled the lug wrench. The marshal had been way beyond specific about not contacting anyone from his hometown.

  Wait.

  The doc with the forest-secret eyes wasn’t from Chicago. It sounded like she’d grown up right here, and then came back once her shit-ton of schooling was done. Rafe had binged his way through a couple of medical shows while healing from his last gunshot wound. He knew residency meant working thirty-six hours straight with no sleep. The shows also made it look like any time grabbed on mattresses was to knock boots, but that part was less believable.

  The point being, she’d been too busy to roam around Chicago. Too busy to notice Rafe amidst nine million other people clogging up the city streets. And the only time he took the elevated train was to go to Wrigley Field and lose money betting on the Cubs.

  It was safe.

  He was safe.

  His brothers were safe.

  Rafe put all that pent-up adrenaline of the last sixty seconds into spinning the lug wrench and jacking up the car. He suddenly wasn’t sure if he wanted to get this whole business over with and get away from her ASAP, or linger with the prettiest woman he’d talked to in weeks. Excluding the hot marshal, who would a) be nothing but trouble, b) be the stupidest thing he’d ever done aside from joining the mob in the first place, and c) was already spoken for by his idiot youngest brother, who now called himself Kellan. Rafe kept repeating his and Flynn’s name a half-dozen times a day, still getting used to them.

  Harsher than he intended, Rafe said, “You should learn a few things, Doc. The basics. How to change a tire, check your oil, swap out wiper blades. Why didn’t you learn all that the same time
you learned to pump your own gas?”

  “Ha ha. Very funny.”

  “What’s funny?” He pulled the spare off the back gate of the Jeep.

  “You know we can’t pump our own gas in Oregon.”

  Aaaand Rafe almost dropped the damn tire. “You’re shitting me.”

  First the no-driving-at-sixteen thing, and now this? Clearly the marshal had forgotten to give them a really important background info file on the weirdness of their new state. As soon as he got home, he’d have to fill in the others. Right after bitching out the marshal in an email about how she hadn’t “prepared them sufficiently for success in their new life”—a phrase she freaking loved to spout.

  Lips pursed, Mollie asked, “You’re not from here, are you?”

  “No.” He hadn’t needed tips from the marshal on how to lie well. Rafe had learned the two basic rules of lying before he rolled on his first rubber. Keep it short, and stick to the truth as much as possible.

  “But you live here now?”

  He jerked his thumb some direction up or down the road. No idea which. The wall of pines on both sides of the highway made everything look the same. “That way, about ten miles.”

  “Same here. Except in the opposite direction.” Those flat orange shoes of hers toe-heeled it out of his way. “Should I be helping?”

  “Hell, no.” But it made her as cute as could be for offering. So far she’d shown him sass, strength, stubbornness, and now a sweet side. Along with sexy when she’d given him that unintentional boob shot. Yeah, the doctor was the whole package. The only thing missing—by a mile—was street smarts. God knew Rafe had enough of those for both of them. “You save lives. That’s important. Let me save your fingers.”

  “Mechanics are important, too. You’re rescuing me from an hour of sheer boredom right now.”

  “Yeah. That really stacks up against straddling a guy, reaching into his blood-spurting chest, and plugging a hole in his heart with your finger without compressing the spinal cord and accidentally paralyzing him.” The tire came off with one smooth pull. Rafe might’ve put a little more effort—and biceps—into it than strictly required. He’d decided that he did want to impress the doc. And from the way her eyes didn’t leave his biceps, impressing her didn’t take too much extra effort.

  “That’s oddly specific.” Her dark brows drew together. “So specific that I think I can quote the episode of Heartbeat it came from.” She slapped the door several times. It made a tinny, stinging noise, probably from the silver ring on her right forefinger. “Omigod. You watch cheesy medical dramas!”

  Rafe jacked the car up a little more to fit the fully inflated spare. “I do not.”

  Chortling, she danced around him in a semicircle. “I am not letting you get away with this. What you just described is not an ordinary occurrence. My aforementioned proximal interphalangeal joint suffering from longitudinal compression is common. A gusher of an aortic tear is not. Especially not to laymen. Very much especially not to laymen mechanics who wear leather jackets. Admit it. You watch.”

  What he wanted to admit was how cute she looked, prancing around trying to make him feel like an idiot. Mollie wasn’t all that graceful. Clearly she’d spent any ballet classes as a kid on the sidelines with her nose in a book. But her glee was adorable. The flailing arms she kept pointing at him with stretched her shirt even tighter across her nicely large breasts. And the bouncing made her long hair move like dark, sensual water.

  Okay. He’d toss her a bone.

  “I watched. Past tense. When I was, ah, sick.” He’d had an IV, a button to push for morphine, and a postsurgical infection from falling in the Chicago River after getting shot. That should count as “sick.” Not a lie at all. “Daytime television is either courtroom crap or five-year-old reruns. So, yeah, I chose the smaller risk. Still killed off a few brain cells watching it. Probably gave my eyeballs whiplash from rolling them so many times. And once I was all better, I didn’t think about it again.”

  “Riiiiight.” She picked up the lug nuts and handed them over, one at a time.

  As if he’d let her have the last word. “You’re the one who should be ashamed to admit you even got my reference.”

  “Why?”

  He tightened everything in an X pattern, just the way his dad taught him decades ago. “Isn’t a show like that beneath someone with all your smarts? And all your real medical know-how?”

  “Well, sure. When you put it that way. But I watch it as a stress reliever. Stress kills. That’s a medical fact. And I’d rather watch every week while really hot guys rip off their scrub tops every fifteen minutes than meditate.”

  Rafe made a mental note that apparently the lady liked ripped abs as much as she liked popped biceps. He also filed away jacking off as a medically certified stress-buster. Less boring than meditating, and he sure felt relaxed afterward. Flynn would get a kick out of that. “What color scrubs do you wear, Doc?”

  “Me?” She pulled her jacket tighter and crossed her arms over it. “How do you know I don’t wear a starched white lab coat over pearls and a pencil skirt?”

  Hot. If she took his blood pressure in that getup, he’d start having a fantasy about bending her over the exam table. Still in her heels. And he’d probably bust right out of the cuff. Hell, he was starting to get hard right now.

  “I’d be fine with either scenario. But the way you look today—casual but put together—makes me think you’re the kind of person who appreciates the perk of wearing more or less pajamas to work.”

  Mollie burst out laughing. “You’ve got me there. I actually said that on my first day of med school. And I say it again every time I eat too many slices of pizza and get to slide into that drawstring waistband the next morning.”

  “Color?” he prompted her. Rafe suddenly needed the visual.

  “Hunter green. To match my surroundings,” she said grandly, throwing her arms wide to indicate the forest. “I overdosed on the boring blue during my internship and residency. There are just a few of us on staff at the hospital, so I pulled rank to choose. I think next year we may go bright red, to switch it up. But I’ll say it’s for heart disease awareness. Turn it into a teaching tool, instead of letting everyone know I did it because I look rocking in red.”

  Rafe was learning important stuff here. Mollie liked pizza and wasn’t embarrassed to eat more than one piece. That alone put her up a few pegs from at least a quarter of the women he’d dated in Chicago. She had confidence. Not boringly overmodest. It’d been so long that it took him a minute to realize he was having fun with her.

  “I’d call that a good use of your power. It makes me want to accidentally jam my proximal interphalangeal joint next year just to see you in them.” There. Low-dose flirting. Nothing too cocky or dangerous. He should be freaking taping this whole encounter to earn a gold star from the marshal.

  After laughing again, Mollie asked, “Do you like it here?”

  Shit. Talk about a loaded question.

  No.

  Rafe hated it here, because it wasn’t Chicago. Because he heard freaking crickets at night instead of traffic and people hustling. Because there wasn’t any deep-dish pizza. Because of no jazz clubs like the Green Mill.

  Because it wasn’t home.

  But . . . yes.

  Because this new place would keep his brothers alive. It was their shot. Their best shot. Their only shot. And if he didn’t somehow find a reason to like it here, Rafe was screwed.

  None of which he could say to Mollie. So he kept it simple. Shifted one knee to the ground so he could twist to look up at her and said, “I’m a big fan of the roadside attractions.”

  She pursed her lips, slicked the same orange as her top and shoes. “Before you were hitting on me. Now you’re flirting with me. What’s with the change in tactics?”

  “Figure I’ll just throw everything at the wall until something sticks.” He stood. Crowded right up into her space. Used his thumb to tuck a long strand of hair behind
her ear. Watched her chest rise and fall twice in rapid succession before continuing. “You let me know when that happens, Doc.”

  “I will,” she said. Pretty much breathlessly.

  This had all the markings of a slam dunk. “You’re good.”

  “How do you know? You haven’t even kissed me yet.”

  That was it. He could hear the swish of the ball going through the net. “Your car.” Rafe edged to the right to kick the replaced tire. “The tire’s changed out. You’re good to hit the road.”

  “Oh.” Her eyelids fluttered down.

  “But now that it’s on the table, I want to know.”

  “What?” And back up those long, dark lashes came. She had him locked in her sights like a laser.

  Rafe moved to cage her against the car with his arms. They weren’t touching anywhere, but he hadn’t left room between for daylight to pass. “How good you are. Better yet, how bad you are.”

  Then he waited. Didn’t move a muscle. Because it needed to be Mollie’s choice. Mostly because they were on the side of a semi-deserted highway. The sun—or Oregon’s pale version of it—was streaming down from overhead, and they were still on the blacktop. Rafe knew, though, that it could be seen as a potentially risky situation. He didn’t want her to feel pressured or scared. He just wanted to keep having fun with her.

  But he’d read all the signals right and didn’t have to wait long.

  “Stop flirting. Start doing,” she ordered. And then Mollie crooked her leg around his calf in an invitation about as subtle as a gun to the head.

  Rafe was a big fan of going for the obvious. It made life easier. So he leaned forward the extra eighth of an inch to bring their bodies flush. Waited again. The second she tipped her chin up in anticipation, then it was go time.

  He took her mouth. This wasn’t a good night kiss at the front door with her parents watching. It was two strangers on the side of the damn road who were into each other. So he showed her his heat, showed her what she’d stirred up in him. Rafe molded her lips with his. Instantly, he discovered that Mollie’s lips were made for kissing. They were wide and warm and matched him move for move. Nip for nip.