And it landed with a thud, flat as well.
“Shit.”
Jack hid a smirk behind his hand. “Sure you don’t need anything?”
“I’m fine,” I said a bit too loudly.
“Sure you are,” Jack replied. He sashayed up next to me, and yes, it was a sashay, he was far too damn smug for his good looks. Damn me for getting all girly inside at the sight of him coming over to rescue my damsel in distress.
Then he became the ultimate man.
He picked up the flat spare, looked at it, and said “Yep, it’s flat.”
“What are you, a rocket scientist in your spare time?” I muttered.
“Only on the weekends,” Jack said with a grin.
I stuck my tongue out at him. Yep, I’m mature. Really.
Then Jack started rooting around in my trunk, pulling out the jack.
“What are you doing? I can’t put that flat spare on.” I put my hands on my hips and glared at him.
Jack positioned the lift under my car, and started raising the poor old Mazda that I drove. “But I can take you to get this tire fixed,” he said as he popped off the hubcap and started on the bolts.
What an arrogant ass! What am I? Incapable of taking care of myself? I mean I can very easily change a tire. It’s not like it’s hard. ’Course, truth be told, I would call my dad, and have him come do it for me, because, well, he’s my dad, and he lives for this stuff.
“What if I don’t want you to? I’m perfectly capable,” I started to argue, but with amazing pit crew speed, Jack had the flat tire off my car before I could finish my sentence. I threw my arms up in the air in frustration.
“What?” Jack asked. “You know where there’s a place that can fix this?”
I shrugged. “There’s a Pep Boys or something like that around the corner,” I said letting out a sigh.
’Course, I really couldn’t help the part of me that was excited that the new guy was helping me get my tire fixed. He led me to a huge black Chevy Tahoe, immaculate inside and out. I couldn’t help whistling at the perfection of it and feeling like crap that Jack had to see my Mazda that seriously needed to be traded in for something else.
The stars must have aligned just right, because as Jack and I were climbing in, Tina Smith and several of her minions were leaving the building. Instantly her gaze locked on mine, and she shot daggers at me.
It took all my strength not to stick my tongue out at her.
Pep Boys wasn’t horribly busy, and they managed to get me right in to fix my tire. While I was waiting, Jack and I roamed the aisles to see if there was anything that we couldn’t live without.
’Course, they don’t sell whole new cars at Pep Boys, so I was out of luck there.
I stared at some of the racks of cleaning wipes for the dashboard. And sprays. And rags. My God, did people really need all this stuff to keep their car clean?
“It’s no wonder my car’s a mess,” I muttered.
“Why?” Jack asked.
“If I knew I had to buy all this stuff,” I said gesturing to the shelves, “I might have given up on buying a car in the first place.”
Jack grinned, flashing a bright mouth full of pearly white teeth at me.
Be still my beating heart.
I spied one of my favorite car accessories. “Oh, look, air fresheners,” I said, darting down the aisle.
Nope, not one single one with Buffy on it. Darn it.
Jack smirked and came after me. “So who do you want to be when you grow up, Lynn?” he asked as we sniffed the different fresheners. He grimaced at a fruity one and hung it back up.
“I am grown up. I just don’t have to act like it,” I said. “Who do you want to be?”
“I want to save the world,” Jack said.
I raised my eyebrow. “Like a superhero or something?”
“Sure,” he said hanging up another one, straightening the row out as he did. “Why not?”
“Because you’re going to have to be better on the computer to be Super Jack—the Accountant.”
Jack laughed.
They called my name over the intercom and Jack and I headed up to the front. The guy behind the counter, smelling of grease rags and motor oil, stood there waiting for us. A smear of black goo covered part of his name patch, concealing the “J” in John.
“We got it fixed,” John said. “Looks almost like your tire got stabbed.”
“Stabbed?” I asked staring at him. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“Well, usually, if something’s been driven over, there’s a nail or what have you stuck in the tire. You didn’t have anything like that.”
I glanced at Jack. “Has that been going on lately?”
The guy shrugged. “Sometimes kids do it. You live somewhere around here?”
“I work down the way,” I said pointing over my shoulder toward the office.
“Probably just kids. I wouldn’t worry about it much,” said John. He handed me the bill, and Jack promptly yanked it from my hand.
“Hey,” I said, “I was going to pay for that.”
Jack shrugged. “I’ll pay, and you can buy dinner.”
I crossed my hands over my chest. “Oh, so you just assume that I’ll buy you dinner now?” Presumptuous ass.
“I’m fixing your tire, you should,” Jack said.
John couldn’t help adding his thoughts. “Sounds only fair to me,” he replied.
I gritted my teeth. Great, now I have to buy dinner for Jack.
Then my brain kicked in. Whoa, this would kinda count as a date, wouldn’t it? Dinner with Jack? Even if I just get Burger King?
Oh the possibilities.
Duty requires sacrifice…but the heart will not be denied.
Matilda’s Song
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At the time, pretending marriage to her middle-aged widower cousin seemed like the best way to escape a politically motivated betrothal to a brutal knight. Now, her journey toward a new life has landed her in hot water—she’s been waylaid by a local Norman baron who’s mistaken her for a real bride. And he demands First Night rights.
Hot water turns to steam in a scalding night of passion…passion she has never known. And now must live without.
Lord Geoffrey is entranced at first sight of the Anglo-Saxon beauty, and finds that one night in her arms is not nearly enough. But all he can offer the low-born Matilda is a life in the shadows—as his mistress.
Her head warring with her heart, Matilda resigns herself to her duty in a masquerade of a marriage. It’s a choice that could cost her life.
For the knight who first sought her hand is back with murder on his mind. Now it’s Geoff who’s faced with the ultimate choice: which is more precious…his estates or the love of the one woman who can heal his soul?
Enjoy the following excerpt for Matilda’s Song:
1120 A.D., Britain
Matilda’s heart threatened to escape it was beating so hard. Panic invaded every corner. If Sir Loric discovered her deception, it could be the end of her life. And that of her cousin.
“Hurry!”
She urged her mother and younger sister Nellopa to store the last bundles of clothing and household goods into the wooden cart so she could lash everything down. Her older brother Hylltun and Cousin William were hitching the ox. They kept their voices low and made as little noise as possible to avoid waking neighbors.
“You must be well away from here before Sir Loric knows you’re gone,” her mother said.
It was nearly midnight in early spring. Matilda and her middle-aged cousin were journeying to his home village of Caelfield where they would live the lie of a newly married couple. They must live this deception until the vindictive knight who demanded her hand to secure his loyalty to the earl saw fit to marry someone else. At eighteen, she was sacrificing all that was familiar to her—family, friends and home village—to evade this knight’s attentions.
“You're a saint, William,” he
r mother whispered, “to agree to this sham marriage.”
“I could never let the family down,” he replied matter-of-factly.
When her blacksmith father died last year, the earl invoked his right to choose a husband for her. While the law forbade a lord from marrying a woman to a man beneath her station, it didn’t require the husband to be loving, generous or even to her liking. Her skin crawled when Sir Loric just looked at her. He won honors on the battlefield, but off the field he was a lout and a brute.
To escape, she was sacrificing a dream of a love so breathtaking her heart would sing. The lie protected her from a politically motivated betrothal, but it destroyed any prospects of finding and marrying the “man of her dreams”—a reality as bitter and chilling as the night air.
She gave one last tug and tied off the rope securing all her worldly belongings. Her brother—the village blacksmith upon their father’s death—finished the harnessing and fed the ox a handful of grain while Nellopa strapped Matilda’s most prized possession—a Simple Chest filled with healing herbs—under the cart’s seat.
“I’ll miss you, Daughter.”
Her mother’s love reached out and awareness of that loss almost broke Matilda’s resolve. She compressed her lips to keep a sob from escaping.
“The earl may never forgive you for this,” her older sister said. “It will embarrass him. He may even withdraw my dowry so I can’t marry.”
Tension built across Matilda’s back. She couldn’t sacrifice Ingunde’s happiness for her own.
“I won’t have you hurt. I’ll come back if he withdraws your dowry.”
“If you return, the earl would have no choice but to give you to Sir Loric,” her brother said.
“Surely, he wouldn’t harm Ingunde,” their mother assured them. “If for nothing else, to honor his late wife, my dear cousin.”
“But he might not let Matilda return to us,” Hylltun said, “even if that bastard marries.”
Matilda shuddered. She missed her family already and she was not yet gone.
She pulled her cloak closer around her neck.
“The sooner we leave here, the safer I’ll feel,” William said pragmatically as he took the lead rope and angled the ox toward the moonlit roadway.
Her older sister spoke urgently.
“Go!”
Matilda quickly hugged each one. Her mother’s comforting scent of herbs and potions lingered when she tore herself away and caught up with her cousin who was already leading the ox down the rutted lane. Lashed to the cart, her wedding dowry—all her worldly belongings—teetered and wobbled.
As the ox-cart lurched over a large stone uprooted by the spring thaw, she clung with one hand to its wooden side. She looked back, searing her family’s shadowed outlines into her memory until the darkness swallowed them.
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Fleeced in Stonington Page 18