CHAPTER SIX

“So? Why Credence?”

Beatrice glanced away from the Farewell from Credence sign they’d just passed to take in Austin. She’d been trying to pretend he and his flirty eyes and his flirty tongue and his flirty pie and his very flirty a little turned on, to be honest weren’t sitting so damn close. Even staring out her window, though, he was still a tempting hunk of man in her peripheral vision. The temptation level increased a hundredfold when she was looking right at him.

“Would you believe the throw of a dart?” she replied.

He laughed, and it was rich and deep and also flirty. Okay, maybe it wasn’t. That was probably just her reading too much into everything.

“No way.”

“Yes way.” Beatrice nodded. “I threw a dart at a map, and it landed on Credence.”

“So you’re telling me that of all the places in the continental United States, the dart hit Credence?”

“Well…eventually, yes.”

He quirked an eyebrow in her direction. “Eventually?”

“The process was a little more convoluted than that.”

“Oh, this sounds good.” He laughed. “Convoluted how?”

“Well, see, I drew a big red ring around all the central states because I wanted to go to a small town and get away from as many people as possible because, frankly, people suck.”

He nodded. “They really do.”

Bea supposed she was preaching to the choir with an officer of the law. “Then I enlarged that part of the map up until it was about three feet by three feet and stuck it to my wall and threw a dart at it.”

“And the dart eventually landed on Credence? So, what… You kept throwing until you hit something that sounded okay?”

“No.” She shot him a withering look. “First, it took me several throws to actually hit the map.” The first one hadn’t even made the wall, and the second one hit the wall sideways. It took a few more after that to get the dart on the map, as several small holes in her wall could attest.

He laughed again. “What?”

“It was late,” she huffed. “I’m not exactly the most coordinated person in the world, and there may have been alcohol involved.”

“Sounds like you’ll be perfect for the Credence darts team.”

Credence has a darts team? “Credence has a darts team?”

Austin laughed harder. “I’m just messing with you.”

“Oh, I see, baiting the city girl, huh?” Feigning insult, Bea returned her attention to the window. “For that, you don’t get the rest of the story.”

“Okay, okay. No more city-girl baiting, I promise.”

Bea pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t smile as she kept her gaze firmly trained on the flat landscape whizzing by.

“Come on, Beatrice, spill. You know you want to.”

And hell if she wouldn’t have told him she’d seen aliens at Roswell if he’d asked. “Fine.” She rolled her head to look at him again. “When I did start hitting the map, many of my throws landed in areas where there wasn’t a town, while others landed between two towns or just outside a town.”

“Who knew it’d be so complicated, right?”

He was clearly having some fun at her expense, but it was good-natured and Bea, just as good-naturedly, ignored him and continued. “And I’d made a pact with myself to only go with a place where the dart hit the town dot square in the middle. It needed to be definitive.”

“And how many throws did it take to land on Credence?”

Bea sniffed. “Eleven. Or maybe it was twelve.” She held up a finger. “Don’t you dare laugh.”

Pressing his lips together, Austin said, “No, ma’am.”

Oh, sweet baby Jesus. This man could yes ma’am, no ma’am her all day. Throw in a Beatrice or two and she’d be happy as a clam here in Credence.

“So,” he said, valiantly trying to keep a straight face as the BMW efficiently ate up the miles, “the dart landed on Credence eventually and you just moved here. On a whim?”

“Pretty much.”

“That’s…” He shook his head as if searching for the right word. “Brave.”

“What?” Bea’s face screwed up. “No.” He was joking, right? “Brave is what you do. It’s what our soldiers do and our firemen and everyone else out there who puts their life on the line every day in their job or for a cause they believe in. I was just…done with my old life, and I’m lucky enough, privileged enough to be able to pick up and take off and land somewhere completely random without a second thought. Not everyone can do that.”

“Yeah.” He nodded slowly. “That’s very true.” And he lapsed into apparent contemplation for long moments. “So,” he said, finally breaking the silence, “where did you almost end up? Which dart throws got close?”

Bea remembered that night, three days after quitting. Three days of stewing, which had led to her decision to get the hell out of Dodge. She might have had a little too much wine affecting her thought processes and her throwing arm, but she remembered at least some of the contenders. “Colby in Kansas. Douglas in Wyoming. Farmington in Missouri.”

He flicked a glance at her. “Well, may I say, Kansas’s, Wyoming’s, and Missouri’s loss is our gain.”

Well, hell yes, Officer Smooth Talker, you may.

His low compliment slid into all the places that still felt raw and angry and pissed about how all her ambitions had come crashing down, soothing them like a cool cloth on feverish skin. It should be illegal for this man to flirt. Or just…be nice, really. To women who were thirty-five and going through a major identity crisis.

Bea wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say to that other than something unintelligible like, “Hunhmmph,” but Austin’s attention switched back as he slowed the car and flicked on the turn signal. She glanced at the approaching intersection: a big, old red barn that looked like it had seen better days sat on the corner, and a sign indicated the lake was thirty miles down the road.

It took another few minutes after turning right to reach their destination, during which Austin was silent again. Thank you, God. It was bad enough that the bulk of his thigh sitting snug within the confines of his blue jeans was like a flashing light in her peripheral vision. She didn’t need him ma’aming her and Beatriceing her and encouraging her to eat pie on top of all that.

He turned the car into what looked like an abandoned industrial estate on the left. It was dominated by deserted concrete shells that might have once housed businesses. There was a general air of decay. Peeling paint, broken windows, pockmarked exteriors. Even the graffiti was faded. Aged tire tracks stained streets that nature had taken back. Weeds thrived in the cracks of the road and the pavements and even the walls of buildings. Bea absently thought it’d be the perfect place to film a zombie movie. Or murder someone.

He hooked some lefts and rights until he was driving into a large abandoned parking lot with plenty of space to do illegal things with a motor vehicle in relative safety. Which led her to thoughts of other illegal things they could do with a motor vehicle that involved the back seat, not the back tires. Which really wasn’t helpful.

Stopping in the center of the lot, he turned off the engine, and the low rumble cut out, the silence suddenly charged. He half turned in his seat to face her. “You sure about this?”

Bea appreciated that he kept checking on her, but she really didn’t need such propriety. Yes, this was the first time she’d ever done anything remotely reckless, but she’d never felt so damn alive. The echo of her own heartbeat was already growing louder in her ears and pulsing through her temples and her fingertips. And they hadn’t done a damn thing yet.

Just the thought of what they were about to do and the endless list of possibilities of what they could do out here was making her breathy and squirmy. A potent mix of anticipation and danger brewed in her veins, and the sudden need to do something with it rode her hard. It made her edgy and…horny. It was burn rubber or reach over and yank down Austin’s fly.

“I am.”

“Okay.” He pushed the start button again. “Watch and learn.”

Bea listened intently as Austin went through the process of how to perform a perfect burnout while the car was stationary. She watched his feet movements on the brake and clutch and accelerator and how he held the wheel. His instructions were clear and easy to follow, his teaching style impressing her probably way more than it should. And her gaze didn’t wander once to his mouth or the way his throat moved as he spoke because she wanted to get this thing right the first time and impress him.

With the theory part of the lesson over, he said, “And now for the demo. Hang on to your seat.”

A thrill the size of a tsunami zipped up Bea’s spine as she slid a hand to each side of her seat and curled her fingers into the leather. Austin revved the engine just as he’d talked about, and it roared responsively. Everything inside the car vibrated with the throaty noise, including her seat, which was kinda dangerous given her current rather excitable state.

Next, with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gear knob, his feet worked the pedals. The tires squealed loudly, and the back of the car started to slip and slide a little as the wheels spun, but the vehicle held its ground. Bea could feel the urgent prowl of the car chomping at the bit to be set free, and her heart rate spiked. A plume of white smoke enveloped the car, shrouding the way ahead in a toxic cloud as the squealing seemed to get louder and her pulse roared in frantic syncopation.

And then, despite hardly anything being visible through the windshield, they were moving forward in a straight line. Or as far as Bea could tell, anyway. They weren’t speeding but definitely accelerating, the engine revving, the back wheels squealing, the smoke getting thicker. Her breath hitched in her throat, her heart rate catapulting into the stroke range. It felt like they were going to either rocket into space or her tires were about to burst into balls of flame, and who knew that could be so damn exciting?

If this was foreplay in the drag-race world, then sign her up.

They’d barely gone any distance at all when Austin braked and the revs cut out, and they were just sitting in the unused parking lot, smoke gradually dissipating with nothing but the low rumble of the engine and the sound of her ragged breathing.

Holy freaking moly—who needed drugs when there was burning rubber?

“Okay, Beatrice,” he said. “Your turn.”