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This was making him uncomfortable. This is what he got for opening up to her. She was kicking off her shoes, climbing into his brain, making herself right at home, running barefoot through his psyche. He folded his arms over his chest. “You sure take your time over a meal.”
“You’re supposed to eat slowly. It aids digestion.”
“It does not aid expediency.”
“You went to college,” she said.
“I did.”
“You use a lot of big words.”
“In some circles, a large vocabulary is considered an asset.”
“I didn’t go,” she said, wistfully licking syrup from her fork. “To college, that is. My parents couldn’t afford it. Not on a plumber and secretary’s salary. Too many kids. I put myself through beauty school.”
“Doing what?”
“Swear you won’t laugh.”
“What? Did you work in a strip club?”
“Boone!” She looked half amused, half insulted. “What in the world do you think of me?”
He raked a gaze over her. “With a body like that you could make a fortune dancing.”
Her cheeks pinked and she looked both pleased and embarrassed. “Thank you. I think. No, I worked at an amusement park.”
“Doing what?”
“I was a character.”
“You are that.”
She rolled her eyes. “Specifically, a chipmunk.”
“You got the spunk of a chipmunk. I’ll give you that.”
“Why, thank you. That’s exactly what they told me at Florida Land.”
“You finished?” He tapped the face of his watch. “It’s almost nine. We’ve got to hit the road.”
“You know, if you keep doing that I’m gonna have to smash that watch.”
He narrowed his eyes, pretended to be affronted when he wasn’t. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“It’s for your own good.” She bit into a crisp slice of bacon, her gaze hooked on his. “You don’t know how to slow down, relax and take it easy.”
“I’ve had plenty of time to sit around. It drives me batty. Relaxing is severely overrated.”
“Because your mindset is rush, rush, rush, go, go, go. It’s killing you to be incapacitated. That’s why you had to go back for a third surgery. Because you couldn’t sit still and just be. Now you’re having to learn the hard way that life doesn’t always turn out the way you planned.”
“How much do I owe you for the analysis, Dr. Freud?”
Tara grinned. “It’s on the house.”
“And the advice is well worth every penny.”
“Oh-ho, here come the barbs.”
“I wanted to be on the road hours ago.”
“And here we were getting along so well there for a split second.”
“You’d think you’d be in a hurry, too,” Boone said. “To see your mother.”
A shadow flickered over her face. “I’m not very good when those I love are sick.”
“But you’re going home anyway.”
“Of course. I love my mother.”
“Yet here you are, over a thousand miles away.”
She shifted uncomfortably. “It was my mom who told me to follow my bliss. She encouraged me to leave Florida.”
“Why’s that?”
“She got married young and started having kids, and even though she never said it, I think she regretted not getting to have adventures.”
“What did your dad say?”
“He’s my dad. He was dead set against it, but Mom convinced him.”
“Could you get a to-go bag for the rest of that?” He nodded at her half-eaten breakfast.
The waitress led a cowboy past their table. Boone pointed at Tara’s plate, silently mouthed “to-go box” to the waitress and pantomimed signing the check.
The waitress nodded.
“I90 East is a mess,” the cowboy told the waitress. “Eighteen-wheeler jackknifed and turned over, blocked that entire side of the freeway. Bread truck. Loaves of bread and buns strewn everywhere. You should have seen the birds flocking. I thought I was in a Hitchcock movie.”
Tara tucked her legs underneath her, sat up higher in her seat, looked over Boone’s head to the cowboy in the booth behind him. “Excuse me, sir.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the cowboy said.
“Did you say a bread truck overturned on the freeway?”
“Yep. Traffic is backed up all the way from here to the state line. It’ll be hours before they get that mess untangled. If you’re headed that direction, stay on the access road.”
“Thank you.” She threw the cowboy a beaming smile, then slipped her feet back on the floor and was back eye-to-eye with Boone. “You owe me an apology,” she said.
“How do you figure?”
“If we’d been on the road like you wanted, we’d be trapped in traffic with no way out. In fact, we probably would have been right behind that bread truck. It might have turned over on us. Squashed us flat.”
“You have a very active imagination,” Boone said because there was no way he was going to admit she was right. It was one thing to put up with her Mary Sunshine attitude. It was quite another to give her a reason to gloat.
She gloated anyway. “And the moral of that story, Toliver, is that sometimes it’s better to be the tortoise than the hare.”
4 (#ulink_866834f1-5661-5355-8ac3-399ac3a3433f)
Wednesday, July 1, 4:45 p.m.
TARA HAD A MISSION. Cheer Boone up. Whenever he smiled, he dazzled, and when he laughed, well, she melted, gooey as chocolate in the hot sun. Unfortunately, he rarely laughed.
Why do you care? He’s not your problem. He’s not a project and you’re not chocolate.
No, but she was stuck in the car with him and she preferred sunshine to rain. They’d been driving for hours and they were almost out of Nebraska. Once they’d left the truck stop, taking an alternate route that the cowboy had suggested to avoid the bread truck smashup on the freeway, they’d made great time.
She slid a glance over at Boone. He was staring out the window at the Nebraska cornfields rolling by. His clenched fist rested on his right leg.
“Are you hurting?”
“What?” He blinked, turned to meet her gaze.
“Your leg. Do you need some pain pills?”
“It’s fine. I’ll live. I’m trying to taper off.”
“You don’t have to suffer. If you need a pill, take it.”
He shook his head. “I’ve been taking the easy way out. This thing with Jackie woke me up. I can’t keep stewing in pills and self-pity.”
“It’s only been three weeks since your last surgery. You’re still healing.”
He grunted. “Or maybe this is as good as it gets.”
Tara didn’t know what to say to that. She knew he was going to get better, but from his point of view things had to look a little dark right now. “I broke my leg once.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“When I was eleven.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Stilts accident.”
“Stilts?” An amused smile flitted at the corners of his mouth. “Now that’s unusual.”
“My brother Matt is a powerbocker.”
“A power what?”
“It’s an extreme sport where you jump and run on spring-loaded stilts, but that’s not the kind I fell off of. Matt experimented with all kinds of stilts before he discovered powerbocking.”
“Is he short?”
“Who? My brother? Yeah, kinda. Five foot six.”
“What kind of stilts did you fall off of?”
“Peg stilts.”
“What are peg stilts?”
“They’re also called Chinese stilts and are used by professional performers. On peg stilts you have to keep walking at all times in order to keep yourself from falling over.”
“No stopping, huh?”
“None.”
“Can’t stay in one place?”
“Nope.”
“How in the world do you dismount?”
“Therein lies the challenge that I was working on when Matt caught me and hollered. I started running to get away from him. Not smart. Seriously, do not run on peg stilts.”
“I’ll take that into consideration the next time I’m stilt walking. What happened next?”
“I stepped on some boggy ground—we’ve got a lot of that in Florida—and one of the stilts got stuck. I did the splits midair.”
“Ouch.” Sympathy tinged his voice.
She winced in memory. “It was not a pretty sight.”
“How long were you in a cast?”
“Six weeks. But shh, it was sort of humorous after I got past the initial pain. I didn’t have to do dishes and I got to be the center of attention, which is very important to the middle child in a family with six kids. I milked it for all it was worth.”
“Ah,” he said. “You’re one of those lemonade people.”
“Pardon?”
“Life gives you lemons, yada, yada.”
“There’s nothing wrong with lemonade.”
