Driving Her Crazy (6 page)

He slid into a booth near the window so he could keep an eye on the car. The fact he felt the need to do that probably pointed to the diner being a little more of a dive than even he was comfortable with. But there was no backing out now, though it was a bit of a moot point since he couldn’t really see through the grime on the glass, anyway.

He picked up the menu and looked over his options. He’d made it through the appetizers before he realized Cherice was standing at the end of the table staring at him.

He sighed. “Cher, sit. I realize it’s not Spago or wherever the hell you usually eat, but it’s not going to kill you.”

“It might.” She glared at him but slid carefully into the booth. He pushed a menu across the table to her but she left it where it was and opened her handbag, taking out the travel wet-wipes.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Her eyes narrowed even farther. “I don’t feel like eating my meal on top of whatever this substance is,” she said, scrubbing at the table in front of her.

Oz ducked back behind his menu. He did enjoy watching her being uncomfortable after spending the last several hours with her. But even he had to admit the place was nasty. Fifty-year-old wallpaper peeled from the walls in spots and the broken neon light outside the dirty window was probably going to induce a seizure in someone at any minute. An old jukebox in the corner didn’t look like it had been touched in years and Oz was pretty sure the woman standing outside who had just spit on her cigarette and tucked it behind her ear was their waitress.

She nodded at him through the window and shouted, “Be right with you!”

Oz didn’t dare look at Cher. He could feel her look of disgust through the laminated menu he held.

Their waitress came back inside and dug a pad and pencil out of her apron. After noisily hacking into the crook of her arm, she asked, “You folks ready?”

Oz put down the menu. “I’ll have the tuna melt and fries, and a large Coke, please.”

“
Um hmm
. And you?” She turned to Cher who hadn’t even opened her menu.

“
Um
. Just a salad with ranch dressing, please. And a bottled water if you have one.”

“Sure thing.”

The moment the waitress lumbered away, Cher lit into him. “If I get food poisoning from this place I’m aiming at you.”

“Oh please. I’m sure the food is fine. Even places like this have to follow the health code. Besides, it’s usually these kinds of places that have the best food. Like hidden local treasures.”

Cher shook her head. “Impressive.”

“What?”

“You almost sound like you believe that.”

“I do.”

“
Uh huh
.”

Oz managed to keep up the act until their waitress came back with their meals. She seemed to have forgotten their drinks entirely but one look at their food and Oz had no intention of reminding her.

“
Bon appétit
,” she said, in a surprisingly good French accent.

Cher looked at her salad and then looked back at him. He peered into her bowl. The lettuce looked as though it had been microwaved. And he hoped that dressing was blue cheese because if not…he swallowed and turned his attention to his own plate. And…he wished he hadn’t. Was tuna supposed to be gray?

“Go ahead,” Cher said, a little smile dancing on her lips. “I dare you.”

Oz narrowed his eyes. Oh, she was not going to win this one. He picked up one of the pieces of toast covered in what he assumed was tuna smothered in a layer of what looked like a melted crayon but must have been the cheese.

He brought it to his mouth. Got a good whiff of it. And put it right back down. Even his pride wasn’t worth the near-certain food-poisoning episode that was sitting on his plate.

“Fine,” he said, standing up and slapping a twenty on the table. “You win. Let’s go.”

Cher gathered up her bag, a huge grin spreading across her face. Oz stopped short. He’d never seen her smile so genuinely. It transformed her. She was already beautiful, in an impersonal way, kind of like the china dolls his sister used to collect as a child.

But that smile…it warmed her from the inside out, softened her features, made her seem happy and carefree. Now that right there,
that
person he could like. He could more than like. Before he could get too excited over her, Cher pushed through the doors and the humid heat slapped him in the face like a wet blanket.

He hurried to get back in the car and crank the air conditioning up.

“Well, that was fun,” Cher said.

“Okay, sorry. I didn’t think it would be quite that bad.”

“
Uh huh
. Well I have no intention of getting out of this car again in this getup so do you have any other bright ideas?”

Oz couldn’t really blame her. “Actually,” he said, remembering the sign they’d passed not too far back. “I do have an idea.”

Cher sighed. “Fine. Just wake me up when we get there.”

She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, laying one arm over them. Oz snorted. That pose couldn’t say “prima donna” any more than if she’d had it tattooed across her forehead.

She kept her eyes closed, like she was afraid to see what new hellhole he was going to drag her to. He couldn’t blame her, he supposed, after what he’d just subjected her to.

He pulled into a parking lot and stopped the car.

Cherice peeked out from under her arm. “Where are we now?”

“Sonic.”

“What?” She leaned forward to look out the windshield, a small frown creasing her forehead.

“You’ve never been to a Sonic?”

She shook her head.

“Well, I’m glad your first time gets to be with me.”

Her gaze shot to his and he fought to keep his expression bland. Just innocent ol’ Oz, clueless as to what his harmless statements might imply. Her eyes narrowed, not buying it for a second.

He gestured to the menu. “Great food, amazing ice cream, and you don’t even have to get out of your car. They’ll bring your food right to you.”

“Really? Okay…I can get behind that.”

Oz laughed. “Just pick what you want from the menu.”

She nearly leaned across his lap to see the menu items and he froze. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I don’t have my reading glasses.”

He would have thought she was playing with him, but she seemed genuinely embarrassed to be half in his lap. And she
was
squinting at the menu board.

“No problem,” he said, his words sounding slightly choked. He cleared his throat and took a deep breath. A faint hint of some exotic flower filled his senses and it was all he could do not to hold her close so he could breathe her in.

She sat back a little, a slight frown narrowing her eyes, and looked like she was about to say something. But before she could, a loud noise from the direction of her stomach interrupted. It reminded him that his own stomach was about ready to turn itself inside out in a fit of hunger. So he did his best to ignore the woman in his lap and concentrate on the menu.

“Okay,” she said, “don’t judge, but I’ll have that hamburger meal there with the curly fries and a cookies-and-cream blast thing.”

“Are you kidding? Total girl after my own heart,” he said with a wink. “I think I’ll have the exact same thing.”

Her cheeks flushed and her frown deepened. Like she was attracted to him but really hated it. Not surprising. He supposed he wasn’t the type of guy she was brought up to be attracted to. He might ring all her bells but he wasn’t the one who was supposed to be pulling the ropes. Too bad for her.

He ordered and then leaned against his door, letting one finger stroke along his upper lip while he stared at her. Her eyes followed his finger, her lips parting slightly, and he couldn’t keep the smug look from his face. It must chap her ass something fierce to be turned on by him. Only he really didn’t have room to judge her so harshly because the sight of the tongue that quickly darted out to moisten her lips made things clench low in his belly.

Time to shake things up before he took his chances and found out what would happen if he kissed those lips of hers.

“So, what is it you really want to do?” he asked.

She threw her hands up like some 1950s movie starlet throwing a hissy fit. Damn, but it was fun to aggravate her.

“You don’t give up, do you?” she asked.

Oz grinned. “No. So you might as well just answer. I can do this all day. And you can’t escape. It’s starting to rain again,” he said, pointing out the window where a few fat raindrops lazily ran down the glass.

“What difference does it make?”

“I want to know.”

She looked out the window, her finger tracing little circles on her leg. “I don’t have it pinned down yet. But I’d like to be…I don’t know, like a life coach, maybe.”

She couldn’t have surprised him more if she’d announced she wanted to be a headliner at some strip club. In fact,
that
he might have actually understood. She’d make good money and piss her parents off. Win-win. But a life coach? Her?

“A life coach?”

“Yes,” she said, though she frowned a bit. “Or…maybe start my own company that expands on what I’m already doing. It could be the whole package.”

“Shopping and life coaching?”

She sighed like he was totally missing the point and she didn’t want to explain it to him for the thousandth time. “It’s not shopping.”

“So, clothes and advice?”

“Something like that.”

She glanced over at him, and despite the fact that he wanted to throttle her ninety percent of their time together, the look on her face made his heart twist. He’d found a puppy once that had been abused. It had been huddled in a ball, drawn in on itself, its eyes full of fear and pain when he’d first reached out to it. Cher had that same look in her eyes; like she expected him to kick her, and she just wanted to hide.

“No wise cracks?”

Oz shook his head and swallowed past the sudden tightness in his throat. “No. I think that’s great.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. A little odd maybe,” he said, winking at her. “But great.”

Cher smiled and a little of the ache in Oz’s chest eased. He might not think she was qualified for the job, but at least it seemed geared toward helping people, in some weird way. Maybe there was a real person under all that glitz and glamour.

“So, why don’t you be a life coach or start up your business, then?”

“I’ve looked into it. And I do volunteer.”

“No, I mean for real. Quit shopping. Go do your thing.”

She shook her head. “My parents don’t think it is a good use of my time.”

“And being a personal shopper is?”

Cher snorted. “No. And I’ve told you, that’s not really what I do. But I think the only reason they’ve left me alone until now is because they haven’t figured out what to do with me yet. Opening a business, or being a life coach? I’d have to go to school, get certified, and spend a ton of money to get everything I need to run the type of operation I’m thinking of running. It’s a major undertaking. A career. One that would be completely unacceptable for them. There is no advantage for me or the family that they’d understand.”

“But it would be advantageous, to you. You’ve got to start living your own life at some point. So go do it.”

“Oh sure. I’ll just go home and interrupt my sister’s wedding to tell my parents that to make up for completely failing at everything else they wanted for me, I’m going to dedicate my life to continuing what I’m doing, only on a much larger scale. That’ll go over real well. I’m sure my sister will appreciate the knock-down drag-out fight in the middle of her wedding.”

“Why not? You have the right to do what you want with your life, don’t you? Do it. I dare you.”

“Good plan. I’ll just go destroy my life on a dare.”

“Don’t they want you to be happy?”

Cher looked down at her lap, her nose wrinkling in a delicate sneer. “Not nearly as much as they want to preserve and glorify the name of Debusshere.”

Oz shook his head. “Sorry, I just have a hard time believing any parent would rather their kid be miserable her whole life than go against some grand plan for the betterment of the family.”

“Yeah, well like I said, you wouldn’t understand. My family has had our whole lives planned out since before we were born. What schools we would go to, what friends we’d have. We were on a preschool waiting list when we were still in the womb. You have no idea what it’s like to have the kind of pressure on you that I do. When you come from a family like mine, what you do matters.”

Oz snorted, any lingering amusement or sympathy for her gone. “So, apparently when you’re just a poor second-class citizen like I am, living paycheck to tiny paycheck, what you do with your life doesn’t matter.”

Cher’s mouth dropped open. “No. That’s not what I meant, at all.”

Yeah. That’s what was so sad about it. She obviously didn’t see anything wrong with what she’d just said. It didn’t even occur to her that it might be just the slightest bit offensive.

“Well, Cher, no matter what you think, when you’re ready to live your own life, all you really have to do is go for it. I guess we’ll see if you ever have the balls to do it.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Since I do not have
balls
, I guess you’ll be waiting a long time. And will you please stop calling me Cher. My name is Cherice.”

“Fine. Sorry. Cherice.”

“Thank you, Nathaniel.”

“Oz.”

Cher just groaned.

…

His eyes twinkled in amusement and that insanely kissable mouth pulled into that sexy little half grin. Cherice’s heart did that inappropriate flutter again, which kicked up a hundred notches at the thought of her lying in his lap a few moments earlier. His firm, warm, very appealing lap. She sat back with a slight frown, but her cheeks were uncomfortably warm. What was wrong with her? She should not be reacting to him like that. And what the hell was he doing throwing around winks and half stripping in front of her and rubbing that lip and…and…
sniffing
her?

She had half a mind to…
oohhh the food is being brought right to our car!
How had she never been to one of these places before?