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Hayden laughed as the front door opened and Betty walked out to greet them. “Hey, you two lovebirds. That’s just the way you were last night. Covered in stink but still laughing. Although you smell so much better this morning, but it’s nice to see the smiles are still there.”
“Thanks for helping us out. We didn’t seem, uh, strange to you last night?”
Betty just laughed. “Honey, you were covered in skunk, of course you seemed strange. But no odder than any other high-on-love couple.”
High on...what?
“We didn’t leave our phones with you?” Tony asked.
“No, just the car. Mike’s bringing it around now. Maybe you left your phones in the car. By the way, I used my homemade air freshener in it last night and again this morning. Lilac and pine. Between that and the breeze, I think you’re good.”
Car tires crunched on the gravel and they all turned to watch a bright red car with black polka dots painted on it—it was a ladybug on wheels. “That’s your car?” she whispered.
“I was hoping that was yours,” he groaned.
Oh, crap.
She’d had about a million questions to ask Betty and Mike and every single one of them vanished the moment a ladybug car neither of them owned rolled toward them. Mike slid out of the car and handed Tony the keys. Ugh, as if the keys belonged in Tony’s hand.
“That’s a tight squeeze, Tony. Not sure how you’re comfortable wedged behind the steering wheel. But anything for the ladies, huh?” Mike asked as he draped an arm around Betty’s shoulders and kissed her temple.
“Oh, well...” Tony mumbled.
Get out of here.Now. Before Mike and Betty began to ask questions that would lead to 9-1-1, handcuffs and a single phone call. Hayden didn’t know which was worse. The prospect of that jailhouse phone call or that she really had no one to phone. She might as well dial the HR person at Hastings Engineering because she definitely wouldn’t be working there after she was arrested.
She swiped the keys from Tony’s hands. “Actually, I do most of the driving. He’s the navigator.”
The other couple laughed.
“Speaking of navigating, you wouldn’t happen to have an extra map?” Tony asked.
Mike nodded. “Follow me. I think I might have one in the garage.”
Betty handed Hayden a small bag as they watched the two men walk away. “Some homemade cookies for the road.”
“Thanks,” she told her, distracted by Tony’s muscular legs and firm—
“Uh-huh.” The other woman smiled.
Had she just been caught staring at a man’s ass? By someone who could be her grandma?
“Glad it goes both ways between you two. That boy is enchanted by you. He’s a keeper.”
Hayden didn’t know which was more startling. A six-foot plus man being referred to as a boy or that he’d appeared enchanted by her. What a sweet word. How would it feel to have a man like Tony enchanted by her? Very agreeable as long as they were using words Jane Austen would write.
“Yeah, he’s something.”
Hayden slid into the driver’s seat as Mike and Tony rounded the corner, map in hand. At least that was one problem they’d been able to solve.
Tony joined her in the car with a strained smile. Oh yeah, they were driving off in a car that neither of them owned.
“Did we steal this car last night?” she asked through clenched teeth that hopefully looked like a smile to the waving Mike and Betty.
“I’m going with we just borrowed it from a new acquaintance, since no one I know drives a ladybug car.” He glanced up from the map as she shifted the car into Drive and headed down the gravel path. “I’m assuming none of your friends do, either?”
She shook her head.
“According to the map, this is a private road that winds through the trees for about a mile. Pull over when you no longer see Betty and Mike’s fence line.”
Hayden drove another quarter of a mile until the friendly white fence turned to barbed wire. “Maybe we stashed our phones in the glove box,” she suggested as she pulled off the main road and put the car in Park.
Tony twisted the knob and as the glove box sprang open, dozens of green bills plopped onto his lap. “Holy shit.” Several more stacks of neatly piled cash remained in the glove box. “There has to be at least two thousand dollars in here.”
“I’m hoping that’s yours,” she said, afraid to hear the answer with the way their morning began. Her bank account currently sat at a nice, minimum-deposit requirement of fifty bucks.
He shook his head. “Nope. Your guess as to where this came from is as good as mine.”
Her throat began to tighten. “We’ve got to ditch the car. Wipe it down. Remove all trace evidence we were even here,” she told him, desperately trying to recall helpful hints from every crime movie she’d watched in the past decade. “Maybe we can give the rest of the cash to Mike and Betty so they forget they even saw us.”
Tony reached for her hands and drew them into his. “Hayden, would you normally steal a car?”
She exhaled in a deflated hiss. “Well, no.”
There was that reassuring smile of his again. “Something weird happened to us last night, but we wouldn’t do one-eighties on our personalities.”
She relaxed against the seat cushion. That was the first really good news she’d had since the coffee.
“Our phones aren’t in the glove box. Maybe we put them in the trunk to keep them safe,” he said, as he reached for the door handle.
“If we weren’t worried about stashing the money in the car, I doubt we would have been worried about the phones.”
“True, but I’ll check anyway.”
She popped the trunk so he could search. A minute later he crouched outside her window. “Nope, nothing.”
The sun glinted off his dark hair. She really wanted to touch it. Run her fingers through it. It would help to take her mind off their situation. Of course it also helped that he was such an easy distraction. What was it he’d said about himself? Couldn’t fault his taste? Yeah. Same here, buddy.
“Tony, I might steal a car if the circumstances really warranted it.” Where had that sobering thought come from? Wherever it had originated, she wanted to shut that part of her brain down before her mind added any other irritating revelations.
“Only after you left a note and promised to return it with a full tank,” he told her with a wink.
She pulled a piece of fluff off her shorts. “Well, that goes without saying.”
“Hayden.”
His voice gently urged her to look up. She raised her gaze to his and sucked in a breath. Something heated and elusive stirred inside her.
The humor faded from his eyes and he stiffened. “You feel it, too.”
She could only nod, and twisted in her seat so she could stare down the road and not at him. Her heart raced and her mouth was dry; she was having a serious case of want.
Hayden’s grandma was fond of sayings about closed doors leading to open windows—this morning had felt very much as if she’d run into a closed door, but that smile of his was like a fresh breeze through an open window.
“Hayden, I don’t want to get back to the city and forget all about this...this thing between us. I don’t know what it is, but I know it doesn’t happen. At least not to me.”
“Me, either,” Hayden admitted. She glanced his way, memorized every part of his strong profile because she didn’t want to forget this beautiful man. But then she didn’t really have to. She wasn’t playing the avoidance game this time. Last night, call it instinct or lack of inhibitions, but something had drawn her to this man. And so far that hadn’t been misplaced; he’d proven to be concerned for her and had given her space when she’d needed it.
Oh, Hayden could tell herself she’d stick with Mr. Abs because it was an adventure or that she wanted to make sure there weren’t any, er, indiscreet pictures that could derail her career, but if she were being truthful, intuition also told her she didn’t have to be guarded around this man.
She got out of the car to stand beside him. “Let’s find out what happened to us,” she said.
He flashed her that amazing smile of his and her skin grew warm. Memories of waking up in his strong arms and feeling the heat of his naked body against hers flooded her senses. Made her nipples tingle. But she had no memory of kissing him, breathing him in and tasting him. She wanted to change that. Right. Now.
“We could always do the old trick of making out to jog our memory,” he suggested, his voice playful.
She lifted a brow. “That’s an old tactic, is it?”
He nodded. “Tried and true, dates back way before the Jazz Age—”
Hayden cut off his words with her lips. He stood there rigid, his mouth unmoving. Then his arm encircled her waist, drawing her flush against his body. She pressed against him, and he groaned. His lips parted and she slipped her tongue inside his mouth, tasting coffee and pumpkin and something delicious that could just be Tony.
“You taste good,” she whispered against his lips.
“So do you. Amazing. Um...not that I’m complaining, but that came out of nowhere.”
“Not that you’d believe me, but I don’t usually indulge in my impulsive side. But any guy who uses the Jazz Age as an excuse to make out is a man I’d try to jog my memory with.”
“Actually I know all kinds of history,” he told her with a wink.
“All except ours. Speaking of...? Did you remember anything? I got nothing.”
He made a faux flinching movement that was too charming. “You got nothing? Surely I was better than that.”
She patted his arm. “Oh, you were a lot better—okay no. I’m not falling for that ruse. I’m keeping my opinions of your kiss to myself.”
“How will I know if I’m doing it right?” he asked, all innocence. Yeah, like this man held any doubts about his technique.
Hot. Sensual. Carnal. And those were just the first three words that popped into her head to describe the kiss. “I’ll tell you what, if I come back for more, then you’ll know if you’re doing it right.”
“Fair enough.” He eyed the front seat. “As uncomfortable as this car is, I think I should drive.”
“Why?” she asked.
His eyes softened, and a rueful smile touched his lips. “Because if we’re caught I can make them believe you had no idea I’d stolen the car. Only one of us gets arrested.”
It was strangely chivalrous. Hayden reached up, sank her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck so she could draw him nearer. The reality of his kiss was way better than the fantasy.
“Besides,” he said, his gaze dropping from hers to study something far off in the distance. “I’ve been in jail before.”
2 (#ulink_eeccec7f-c7e0-5854-9cbc-287ebf7a63c4)
JAIL. BEFORE?
Hayden’s hands fell.
“Yeah. That usually does it,” he told her, his voice tired. Tony turned away from her and just like that, the figurative window slammed shut, too.
She squinted against the sunshine as she tried to read his body language. Back straight and hands fisted at his sides. Didn’t need that one lone psychology class to diagnose him as tense and agitated.
Had she been too quick to trust him? Was he really an ax murderer or the mastermind of a Ponzi scheme? What she needed was answers. And maybe an escape route.
Okay, before she got all weird about this, people were arrested all the time for bizarre stuff. Not returning a library book for twenty years. Changing the clothes on a mannequin in full view of the public. She’d even heard a crazy story about how a police officer had dragged a lady—with her toddler strapped to the car seat—right to the clinker, all for a few days’ expired driver’s license.
Did people still use words like clinker?
Focus.
People also got arrested for grand theft auto, burglary or kidnapping. Check. Check. And check?
She could reach for his hand and talk this out with him, or reach for the keys and zoom down the road away from him. Both made sense. But if Tony had planned to hurt her, he must be pretty inept because he’d really missed his chance. In fact, when he’d had the opportunity, he’d kept his distance, had in fact taken near-Herculean efforts to avoid touching her and done everything a man could do to put her at ease in what must have been an incredibly awkward situation for him, too.
He turned as she approached him, her footsteps crunching the leaves and twigs scattered along the side of the road. He towered above her, and when his brown eyes met hers, they gave no hint of his thoughts.
“I’m so used to the people around me being aware of my past, that I forget how people can judge.”
Okay, that was defensive—and an overreaction. “Listen, I’ve known you, what? Half an hour fully clothed? No one makes good decisions naked. Besides, you don’t get to casually throw out that you were in prison, and then get all sensitive when I’m nervous about it. Understandably nervous.”
He sucked in a deep breath and his brow furrowed. This must be deep-in-thought Tony. Considering she’d only known him half an hour—fully clothed—she’d already seen him, chivalrous, considerate, playful and very, very naughty.
Or was that naked. Definitely naked.
Focus.
“You’re right,” he said.
“What’s your angle here?”
Tony shook his head, but a small smile toyed with that übersexy lower lip of his. “You are the suspicious one. No angle, just truth.”
Then he shrugged.
A shrug? As if what he’d said was no big deal? Hayden had never thought of herself as the suspicious type, but what kind of man tells a woman she’s right? Things weren’t adding up.
“So you’re saying you were wrong a moment ago?” she asked, just to make sure she’d heard him correctly.
Tony nodded, then ran his palms down the denim material of his borrowed shorts. “Hayden, this doesn’t have to be so hard. Take the car. Take the cash. I can walk into town. Just leave me enough money to make a call at a pay phone somewhere.”
“Do they still even have pay phones?”
