He whistled softly.
"What? Did you find what's wrong?"
"No, ma'am, just don't usually hear a woman curse like that in front of a stranger."
"Yeah well, I'm not from around here, if you hadn't fucking noticed," I said. "I curse in front of whoever I damn well please."
Oh
My
Good
Lord
what was wrong with me?
"Good for you," he said, completely unruffled. He stood and crossed his arms over his chest and let his eyes roam my face, unhurried and without any attempt to hide his curiosity.
Why didn’t he say anything else? Why was he hanging out in front of my car like he had nowhere better to be?
"Yeah, it is good for me," I said, marching closer to him, barely stopping my finger from poking him in that chest of his. "Do you even know what year it is? If I want to drink, or swear, or screw someone I just met, that's my prerogative, and I don't need some southern asshole judging me for it. You don't know me, buddy, so back off."
Just once, oh-so-briefly, his eyes flashed hot and his hard jaw tightened when I said screw someone I just met. In the space of one breath, I got a sweaty, tangled, moan-inducing vision of him and I in the front of his truck, clothes barely removed, me sprawled across the bench and him hovering above me, braced up by his massive arms as he moved between my legs.
Which would've been an awesome mental image, if I didn't hate him with every annoyed, hangry, exhausted cell in my body.
Yes, I liked the idea of hallucinating, the more I thought about it. A heat-induced mental breakdown. I’d take any sort of explanation, because even as I heard the words come out of my mouth, I desperately wanted to stop them, but I couldn’t.
Like a child might if they started spilling a jar of tiny beads, I wished I could slap my fingers across my mouth and hold all the individual letters forming each individual word and keep them in where they were safe and couldn’t make a horrible mess.
"Lemme guess," he drawled, "you're either from New York or LA"
Beads. Beads were flying everywhere as the jar tipped past the point of no return.
"Bite me. Women like me live all over this country, maybe not in Green Valley, Tennessee, but just about everywhere else."
He scratched the side of his jaw as he watched me. "Oh, I'm sure we've got 'em here too, Angry Girl."
My chin jerked up. "That is not my name."
"I wouldn't know, now would I? You chose not to tell me." He tsked. "Not very friendly of you, if you ask me."
"I didn't ask you," I snapped. I rolled my lips between my teeth, because honestly, I was ready to slap myself across the face. “S-sorry,” I forced the words out, even though it physically hurt my jaw to do so. “I’m a little … hungry. I haven’t eaten in a while.”
A nightmare, I thought desperately. Let this be a nightmare.
But no, even in my nightmares, I wouldn't have conjured this. So maybe I wasn't little miss sunshine with everyone, but my mother would rip my ear off if she could hear me speak to a stranger the way I was speaking to him.
But … I couldn't stop.
Why couldn’t I stop?
On the verge of absolute hysteria, I thought about what I’d said to my dad, about a man falling prostrate before me as soon as I got into town.
Instead, here I was, channeling every hidden psychotic shred of my DNA into this one entirely innocent person who had the terrible misfortune of being the first one to find me on the side of the road.
He walked toward his truck, only pausing to hold out his hand for his cell phone, which I slapped down onto his palm. Inexplicably, it made him grin.
"You're heading to Green Valley then?" he asked, opening the driver's side door of his truck and leaning against the frame.
I slicked my tongue over my teeth, cursing that little slip. "Why do you need to know?"
"So suspicious," he mused. "I'm heading that way myself, since that's where I live. If that's your destination, I can give you a lift into town. Drop you wherever you need to go."
I eyed his truck, then his carefully smooth facial expression. It was like he knew the emotional tightrope I was walking.
He didn’t know the half of it.
"You could walk, if you wanted to," he said, "but it's about a twenty-minute drive, so you'd be good and tired by the time you got there. Your stomach would probably be crawling out of your own body to find some food, if you think you’re hungry now.”
I cocked my head. "You know, Ted Bundy would've used the same logic on someone like me."
With the patience of a saint, he reached into his pocket, fished out his wallet and then leaned forward to hand me his driver's license.
"Go ahead," he said. "Snap a pic, send it to your aunt, it'll go through eventually, and even if it doesn't whoever finds your hypothetical body will have a record that you were with me."
I scoffed. "Sure, until you steal my cell phone and delete the outgoing text while it's sending."
But did I snap a picture? Sure as shit did.
Tucker Ames Haywood, age twenty-six, from Green Valley, Tennessee.
Huh. Exactly the same age as I was. Actually, our birthdays were two days apart.
I ignored his expression when I handed his license back, pivoting quickly to yank the keys out of the ignition, grab my laptop bag, my camera, and purse from the floor of the passenger seat, slam the hood of the car down, and then lock the doors. I hit the lock button again, waiting for the reassuring beep of the horn to let me know it was secured.
I lifted my chin and walked to the passenger side of the truck, keeping my eyes forward while I hooked the seatbelt. The truck smelled like him, clean and masculine, and I
