by Jane Graves
He looked down at her. “Do we really have to go over this again?”
“How did you get my car up on this truck?”
“Repo magic.”
She banged her fist on the door again. “I can’t believe you’re doing this!”
“Of course you can believe it. What you can’t believe is that I did it so quickly.”
Boy, he had that right. She made it a policy never to underestimate her adversaries, but she’d underestimated this one big time.
Darcy heard a barrage of barking. She turned to see Pepé galloping through the grass, dodging dandelions as tall as he was. He came to a halt beside her, looking up at the large man in the mammoth truck and barking wildly.
“Well, now,” he said. “You should have told me you had a dangerous watchdog. I wouldn’t have dared step foot back here again.”
Darcy scooped Pepé up and held him close to her chest, finally wrapping her fingers around his muzzle to stem the tide of barking. “Dogs always know what kind of people they’re dealing with, and he doesn’t like you. What does that tell you?”
“That I’m on a minimongrel’s hit list?”
Darcy all but snarled herself. “You are so pitiful.”
“I’m pitiful?”
“Yes. I mean, look at this truck. Really.”
“Okay. I’ll bite. What’s wrong with my truck?”
“Don’t you know what they say about men who drive big trucks?”
“That they can haul a lot of cars to impound lots?”
“No,” she said. “That they’re compensating for something.”
“Oh, yeah?” He raised an eyebrow. “If I were you, I don’t believe I’d take their word for that.”
The low, throaty tone of his voice caught Darcy off guard. Large, stubborn men had never held much appeal for her—they were far too hard to control—but then her gaze drifted to his hands gripping the steering wheel, big, strong hands that looked as if they could grab a charging bull by the horns and flip him over like a pancake. Large truck notwithstanding, according to them, big hands meant a big—
“You have my card,” he said, putting the truck in gear. “You know the drill. Twenty-four hundred bucks, plus the impound fee, and the car’s all yours again.”
“Wait a minute! You told me you wouldn’t charge me the impound fee!”
“I believe that was before you ran off with the key and slammed the door in my face.”
And she didn’t regret that one bit. What she regretted was that she hadn’t had the foresight to park her car two blocks away before he showed up again.
He started to pull away from the curb, then braked to a halt again. “Oh,” he said, “one more thing. I need to return something you gave me earlier.”
“What’s that?”
He touched his fingertips to his lips and blew her a kiss.
When Darcy’s mouth fell open with surprise, he hit the gas and took off. She snapped her mouth shut again, all kinds of homicidal feelings welling up inside her.
Soon, though, her anger gave way to utter hopelessness. She stood under the harsh streetlamp, listening to the chirp of crickets and the faint but irate voices of the neighbors having a high-volume discussion, and watching the truck’s taillights until they became nothing more than twinkly dots in the distance.
So that was it. Now she really had lost everything.
An hour later, her mother and father returned home. Ten minutes after that, her mother still refused to believe she was no longer going to have the occasional privilege of joining her daughter on a trip around town in a fifty-thousand-dollar sports car.
“I told you, Mom,” Darcy said for the third time. “It was repossessed.”
Lyla lit a cigarette and took a heavy drag. “But does that make any sense? Any at all? What was Warren doing financing a car?”
Her questions came quickly, even though about half her words were slurred. Somebody had clearly spiked the potluck punch, and her mother had been very thirsty.
“I don’t know,” Darcy said. “Maybe he was having money problems I didn’t know about.”
“They can’t just take your car right out from under you,” Lyla said. “There has to be a law against that.”
“Nope,” Clayton said from the living room. “But there are laws against not paying your bills.”
“For God’s sake!” Lyla snapped. “There are extenuating circumstances!”
“The loan company won’t care much about those.”
“You have to do something! Get Darcy’s car back!”
“That would require making up the back payments.”
“Will you stop being such a tightwad? She’s your daughter!” She turned to Darcy. “How much are the back payments?”
“Twenty-four hundred dollars.”
Lyla froze. “Oh,” she said, and reached for the bottle of Wild Turkey in the lower cabinet.
Great. The one time Darcy needed her mother’s outrage, it had fizzled like a lit match in a mud puddle. Thanks a lot, Mom. Drink up.
Lyla poured a hefty amount of bourbon into a glass. In the living room, Clayton settled into his recliner, ran the TV dial, and landed on a monster truck rally.
“We could loan you money,” Lyla said, “but we just got back from Vegas. Damned slots. Swear to God they’re tighter every time we go.”
Which was about four times a year. Darcy knew that whatever her mother hadn’t lost at the blackjack table last week had undoubtedly been invested in the Texas state lottery this week. No eighty-three-million-dollar jackpot was getting past her.
Unfortunately, Warren had shared her mother’s love of gambling. He also shared her inability to know when to stop, always gambling away every penny he came with and then some. “It’s just entertainment,” he’d always told her, but sometimes she had the feeling he was going to entertain himself right into the poorhouse.
“Did you make some calls?” Lyla asked. “Try to find Warren?”
“Yes. Nobody knows where he is.”
“Try again tomorrow. When a man is having an affair, he can never keep his mouth shut about it. Somebody will know what he’s up to.”
Darcy could barely concentrate on the horrible things she was sure Warren had done, much less on those she hadn’t proven yet. She just couldn’t make sense of it. If he’d wanted to leave her, all he had to do was hire a divorce lawyer, and considering the prenup she’d signed, it didn’t even have to be a very good one. He still would have ended up with the lion’s share of all they owned. Yet he’d cashed out everything and disappeared. Why?
She thought about reporting him as a missing person, but she’d seen enough cop shows to know that if it looked as if he’d left of his own accord, the police wouldn’t do anything. Selling the house and cleaning out the bank accounts certainly seemed to point to a voluntary absence.
“Talk to an attorney,” Lyla said. “Eventually you should be able to get something out of this mess.”
“Assuming Warren shows up again,” Clayton said. “And even if he does, how long will it take to get him into court?”
Forever, of course. Everyone knew the American judicial system moved with the speed of an asthmatic snail.
Lyla tossed down the shot, stuck the glass in the sink, and announced she was going to bed. As she stumbled toward the hall, Darcy was struck by the most surreal feeling that her life with Warren had been a dream and now she’d woken up to a horrible reality.
“Mom?”
Lyla stopped at the doorway. “What?”
Darcy’s voice came out in a choked whisper. “I have nothing left. What am I going to do?”
She teared up a little, and she thought she saw a flicker of sympathy in her mother’s eyes. After all, Darcy was undergoing the biggest crisis of her life. Of course her mother would sympathize. In spite of her accusations that this was all her daughter’s fault, in the end, blood was thicker than—
“You might as well stop crying,” Lyla snapped. “You’ll only mak
e your mascara run. No woman ever won a man back when her makeup was a mess.”
With that, she turned and headed down the hall, swaying like a willow in a light breeze. There was nothing like a few warm fuzzies from her mother to make Darcy feel as if everything was going to be just fine.
“I have a car I can loan you,” her father said, his eyes never leaving the television.
“What kind of car?” Darcy asked, wiping her eyes.
“One with four tires that runs. Come with me to the shop in the morning to get it. Be ready to leave at seven-thirty.”
Clayton picked up the remote and turned up the volume on the TV, shutting out any potential complaints Darcy might have about the crack-of-dawn departure. But seven-thirty? Who in his right mind got up at that ungodly hour of the morning?
Pepé brushed against Darcy’s ankle. She scooped him up and held him against her shoulder, his nose snuffing against her ear, and his whole body trembling. He let out a little doggy sigh that matched Darcy’s mood exactly.
“I know, sweetie,” she murmured, stroking his furry ears. “But look at the bright side. If I can’t pay to get my car back, it means we never have to see that awful repo man again.”
And the thought of that actually made her feel better—until she remembered that the luggage she’d brought home from Mexico was still in the trunk of her car, which was currently sitting in the impound lot of Lone Star Repossessions.
Darcy had always had difficulty relating to her father. Growing up, she’d known him primarily as the balding head sticking up over the black vinyl recliner and the empty chair at the breakfast table during deer season. He was a man with perpetual grease beneath his fingernails and a permanent frown on his face, a man whose life had been scripted for him since the fateful day in ’67 when he hit a home run with Lyla Scarsdale in the backseat of his GTO. Shortly after their shotgun wedding and the birth of their daughter seven months after that, her father discovered his mechanic’s salary was never going to afford his wife the lifestyle to which she desperately wanted to become accustomed.
And now, as he presented Darcy with the keys to her new loaner car parked on the grease-stained floor of his mechanic shop, she could see he’d been absolutely correct. The car had four tires and ran. It also had sun-bleached paint, hail damage, and a headliner that drooped like the hem of a twenty-year-old skirt. It hadn’t been the most beautiful car when it was fresh off the lot fifteen years ago, and age hadn’t improved it in the least.
“You can use it as long as you need to,” her father said.
“Why? Because nobody else on earth would get near it?”
“It’ll get you where you need to go. That’s all that counts.”
Darcy cringed when she thought about what her first stop today was going to be. John Stark thought he’d had the last laugh last night, but if he saw her driving this car today, the hilarity would begin all over again.
“The tires were shot, so I put on new ones last week,” her father said. “So at least that part of the car is safe.”
“Are there parts that aren’t safe?”
“The transmission’s a little slow. Just be careful pulling out into busy intersections.”
Good Lord. “The tires are probably worth more than the car itself.”
When her father offered no argument against that, Darcy sighed. Just what she wanted to be driving. Four tires whose value was diminished by the car attached to them.
She looked out the door to her father’s pickup truck. She’d never had any desire to be seen behind the wheel of one of those, but anything beat this heap.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Just for today, could you let me drive your truck?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll bring it back in two hours.”
“Nope.”
“One hour.”
“Nope.”
“But—”
“Nobody drives my truck.”
Darcy put her fists on her hips. “So you’re telling me if Dale Earnhardt came back to life and wanted to drive your truck, you’d tell him to forget it?”
“Darcy, if God himself offered me heaven on a silver platter for the keys, I’d tell him to forget it.”
Darcy didn’t think the exclusive use of a Ford F-150 was worth eternal damnation, but that was her father. And since her mother quit driving after the train-crossing incident three years ago, they were a one-vehicle family, so grabbing her mother’s keys and taking off wasn’t an option.
“Besides,” her father said, “you don’t know how to drive a car that has a manual transmission.”
Okay, so she’d forgotten about that.
As long as she stayed in east Plano, she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew. And she had to drive the old car only as long as it took her to find Warren, put her hands around his throat, and squeeze some of the money he’d taken right back out of him.
Warren. Where in the world was he?
No. She couldn’t think about him now. She had to concentrate on the problem at hand—getting back what few possessions she had so she could begin to feel normal again.
“Watch your pressure gauges,” her father said. “It leaks oil.”
Darcy sighed. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. The latch is broken on the driver’s door. You’ll have to crawl in from the passenger side.”
This could not be happening.
Her father opened the door for her, and she climbed inside none too gracefully, putting one knee on the passenger seat, then turning around to plop behind the wheel. She started the car. It gasped and sputtered, reminding her of her great-aunt Gertie, who had continued to smoke even as emphysema was driving her into the grave.
Darcy closed her eyes. Every time she thought she’d hit rock bottom, she sank a little lower.
“The stock market’s on a downturn. Unemployment is up. Interest rates are on the rise.” John tossed the business section of the Dallas Morning News onto his desk. “If this keeps up, I might actually make a decent profit one of these days.”
Tony leaned against the door frame, morning coffee in hand. “In other words, what’s bad for America is good for John Stark?”
“It’s hard to stay in this business when people don’t default on their loans.”
“Hey, we already have plenty of work. You got that Mercedes, didn’t you?”
“Finally.”
“Did she give you any trouble when you went back with the tow truck?”
Now that put a smile on John’s face. “Not a bit.”
“Ah. A smile. Does that mean you finally got your priorities straight?”
“What?”
“You’re focusing on the woman as much as the car?”
John frowned. “I told you. She’s a nutcase.”
“So you’re not going to see her again?”
“I repossessed her car. Just how amenable do you think she’d be if I said, ‘Hey, baby, wanna go out?’” As if he’d even consider it.
“Well,” Tony said, “I agree it doesn’t usually set the stage very well, but I’ve dated women whose cars I’ve taken.”
“You’d find a way to date a woman if you shot her mother.”
“Hmm. There’s a pickup scenario I hadn’t considered, but—”
Just then the door to the outer office opened. Both men craned their necks around to see who it was.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Tony said. “Speak of the devil. What’s she doing here?”
Actually, after taking inventory of her car last night, John had been expecting her. “She had luggage in the trunk of her car. I assume she’s here to pick it up.”
“Well, then. Here’s your chance to get the Mercedes and the girl.”
John just shook his head. Tony’s preoccupation with the opposite sex was an amazing thing to behold. When he wasn’t thinking about women, he was drinking with them, eating with them, showering with them, or sleeping with them. Being surrounded by all that estr
ogen was bound to get him into trouble someday.
The men went to the outer office. John’s gaze automatically drifted to the woman’s snug little pants, which ended just below her knees, then upward to a stretchy blue top. Following her curves up and down and all around reminded him that it had been a while since he’d gotten up close and personal with a woman, but he had no intention of ending that streak with a marginally insane one.
She stood there with her purse draped over one shoulder, jingling her keys, as if she expected this visit to be a short one. Good. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more.
Tony gave her a brilliant smile and stuck out his hand. “Hi, there. We didn’t get a chance to meet last night. I’m Tony McCaffrey.”
She shook Tony’s hand, giving him a smile of her own. “Darcy McDaniel.”
“What brings you here today?”
“Knock it off, Tony,” John said. “This isn’t social hour. You know why she’s here. She’s getting her luggage, and then she’s leaving.”
Darcy turned to John, her smile evaporating. “Well, aren’t you Mr. Hospitality.”
“Don’t mind John,” Tony said. “He’s all business.” Leaning closer to Darcy, he whispered, “He doesn’t know a thing about pleasure.”
She raised an eyebrow at John. “Is that so?”
John shot Tony a look of irritation. “Come help me with her stuff.”
A few moments later, they brought her luggage out of the back room—all five pieces of it.
“How long were you on vacation?” John asked.
“A week.”
He stopped short. “You went on a weeklong vacation and took all this luggage with you?”
“Why not?”
“It’s an awful lot to lug around.”
“I don’t lug. That’s what porters and limousine drivers are for.”
Of course. What was he thinking?
He handed her the form to sign that said she’d picked up her possessions and that they were in good condition. She stopped halfway through her signature and looked around the office.
“Wait a minute. Where’s my wine?”