License to Thrill (10 page)

“What?”

“We’ll never be able to elude our
compadres
back there while we’re driving this white elephant.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder and her braids bobbed provocatively from beneath her battered straw cowboy hat.

“Hey, no insulting Matilda.”

“Hell, Gentry, we might as well be piloting a Goodyear blimp. There’s no such thing as incognito in a vintage Bentley.”

“We’re not leaving the car.”

He stubbornly clenched his jaw. His attitude might not be practical but Matilda was his prize possession and he wasn’t about to abandon her. The car had been his ticket to freedom when he was sixteen, allowing him—if only briefly—to escape the high demands of his family. He would sneak off in Matilda during his parents’ business parties when he was supposed to be currying political favors. But even more than that, Matilda represented the lurking wildness inside him that had all but disappeared after his best friend Kip was killed.

Matilda was the one solid thing that kept Kip alive for him. They’d shared their first beer together, sitting on Matilda’s hood in his parents’ garage, listening to Nirvana and talking about girls. They’d cruised the local strip, listening to Boyz II Men and trying to pick up girls. They’d parked by the lake, listening to UB40 and trying to get to second base with the girls they’d picked up.

He wondered what Kip would think of Charlee and he knew immediately they would have been rivals for her affections. Kip had always gone for the sassy ones.

At the memory of his buddy, a lump tightened his throat. It had been almost ten years since the accident but the loss still gnawed at him with a painful sting.

He would never stop feeling responsible. He had never stopped trying to make amends by staying on the straight and narrow and doing exactly what his family expected of him. It was the least he could do to pay for his gravest mistake.

Yeah, but Kip wouldn’t hold you responsible and you know it. He would be mad because you’ve stopped doing what you loved.

Unable to handle the thoughts of how he’d failed his friend, Mason stiffened his upper lip and stared straight ahead.

“I know a woman in Phoenix. We can leave the Bentley with her and borrow her Neon,” she persisted.

“Over my dead body,” Mason growled. He knew it was prideful of him to be so mulish. Vain even. But he didn’t care. Charlee would just have to deal with it.

“Don’t tempt me.” She looked completely serious with her dark eyebrows drawn into a V and her lush full lips pursed.

“I’m getting the distinct impression you’re frustrated with me,” he said.

“You pick up on that all by yourself?” She glared.

“I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

“For one thing, I’m worried about my grandmother and you’re putt-putting along at sixty miles an hour. We’ll never catch up to the camper at this rate.”

“How serious can it be? They
are
with your father.”

“Which is precisely what I’m worried about. You don’t understand. My father is both unpredictable and easily influenced by others.”

“All right,” Mason conceded. “I’ll drive faster.” He sped up to sixty-five.

Charlee groaned and rolled her eyes.

“What now?”

“You drive like a little old lady on Zoloft. Hands at ten and two o’clock, eyes straight ahead. I swear, Gentry, you’re old before your time.”

“I drive by the rules of the road.”

“You live your entire life by someone else’s rules, is what you do,” she mumbled.

“What?” He cocked his head. “I didn’t quite catch what you said.”

“Nothing.”

“You muttered something. Let’s hear it.”

Charlee folded her arms over her chest. “I said, lest you forget, we’re being followed.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“Pretend it is.”

He knew exactly what she’d said and she was right. He was a law-abiding man. Where would society be if everyone threw the rules of civilized behavior out the window? Charlee probably went for those swaggering bad boy types who broke the law and broke her heart with equal ease.

“So let them follow us.”

“Need I remind you my grandmother’s trailer was ransacked, we were shot at, and someone torched my father’s apartment complex?”

“Your father did that.”

“No he didn’t.”

“Whatever you say.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m tired of arguing with you.” The woman could wear a professional filibuster into the ground.

“Oh, no, no, no.” She shook a finger. “You don’t believe me and simply saying you do doesn’t change your mind. You can’t just give in because you don’t want to argue.”

“Yes I can. See, I’m shutting up. No more arguing with you.”

Gleefully, Charlee found the chink in his logic. “Good, then let’s ditch the Bentley.”

“No.”

“Thought you weren’t going to argue.”

“Sit back and hush.”

He wondered if he was going to have to kiss her in order to shut her up. Why was kissing her such an appealing idea?

This had to stop. He was almost engaged.

Think of Daphne.

Determined, he tried to call up Daphne’s image and his mind went blank. He struggled to summon her scent but instead of the floral aroma of Daphne’s expensive perfume, he could only smell Charlee’s fresh soap scent. Instead of mentally seeing Daphne’s sleekly coiffed blond hair, he saw long, jet-black tresses twisted in beguiling braids. Instead of hearing Daphne’s dulcet acquiescence, his ears vibrated with the sound of Charlee’s deep, throaty-voiced firmly held opinions.

Something about Charlee called to that wildness inside of him he’d buried along with Kip. The wildness that scared him because he knew what trouble it could cause. The wildness he missed and feared with equal intensity.

Why did she stir him so? Not just physically. That was easy. The woman was a looker with a body that wouldn’t quit. No, there was an energy about her, a power that compelled him on a level he could not explain.

She moved him in ways far beyond his experience. Her courage sparked a corresponding bravery inside him. Her audacity dared him to rise to the challenge. Her toughness engendered his strength.

Charlee was a force of nature that had blown into his life and altered everything.

His stomach lurched but he convinced himself it was because he hadn’t eaten breakfast. They drove for several miles in dead silence. Eventually they approached the outskirts of Phoenix. Mason struggled not to glance over at Charlee again, but no matter how hard he tried he could not seem to deny the unsettling awareness radiating between them.

Was this what people meant by chemistry?

In spite of his best intentions to the contrary, he found his gaze veering from the highway stripes to the woman at his side. She was gnawing on a thumbnail and when she realized he was watching her, she jerked her hand from her mouth and dropped it into her lap.

“Nervous?”

“Who me? What have I got to be nervous about?”

“The Chevy Malibu.”

“Oh, yeah. That.” Charlee checked the rearview mirror.

“Are they still behind us?”

“I don’t see them, but I know they’re back there.”

“Maybe we can lose them in the Phoenix traffic.”

She nodded. His gaze traveled from her face, down the curve of her neck to the skin exposed beneath the opening of her collar. He moistened his lips, mesmerized by the swell of her breasts and the way they moved when she breathed.

Heaven help him, he was ogling her. Mason jerked his gaze back to the road.

“Get an eyeful?” she asked tartly.

The woman didn’t miss a trick. When was he going to realize Charlee was sharp as a suture needle and twice as prickly?

“I apologize. I shouldn’t have stared at you.”

“Damn skippee. I’m not some amusement park ride for the slumming rich boy.”

“I don’t think of you in that way,” he protested, flustered because he’d been caught visually undressing her like some horny fifteen-year-old.

Charlee pushed the brim of her hat up with one slender finger and peered down at her breasts as if trying to fathom the appeal. Surely the woman was aware of just how sexy she looked.

“You know,” she said a few moments later. “After my mother died and Maybelline took me in, she bought us a travel trailer. She showed me the kind of life skills they don’t teach you in school.”

“Odd view on child rearing.”

“She said she didn’t want me to get in trouble the way she had when she was young. She worked odd jobs to support us. Mechanic, bartender, hotel maid, even drove a school bus. She took me with her everywhere she went.” Charlee paused.

Mason contrasted her past with his childhood. His entire life spent in one place, raised by nannies and housekeepers, seeing his parents only on occasion as they flitted from party to party, from one business deal to the next, from Paris to Japan to Timbuktu.

“I remember one time, when I was, oh, about fourteen, Maybelline got hired as a housekeeper for a state senator in Utah. I developed early figure-wise and the old letch couldn’t keep his paws to himself. One afternoon he cornered me in the kitchen pantry and stuck his hands up my blouse. He told me if I’d do him a few favors he’d pay me handsomely.

“I told him if he didn’t get his grubby mitts off me I was going to send his balls up to visit his throat. I always wondered what made a man think he could manhandle his servants.”

“Charlee,” Mason said, feeling awful to the core, “I hope you don’t think I’m that sort of man.”

“Of course not.” She grinned. “I was just pondering the power of boobs.”

Disconcerted, he too pondered the power of boobs. Why did Charlee excite him in a way Daphne never had? And not just Daphne. None of his elegant, refined female counterparts had ever made him yearn to do something totally rash and reckless the way this pert private detective did.

A sense of longing swept over him, for something he’d never had. The freedom to follow his heart.

And if he married Daphne, he never would.

There was the rub.

He felt as if Charlee held the key to his freedom if only he was brave enough to reach out and take it.

Was he?

For one crazy, foolish second, he envisioned Charlee as his fiancée.

Mother would faint. Father would have a coronary. Hunter would gloat and say something like, “Way to make me look good.”

If he was married to Charlee he’d be whispered about behind his back. His social contacts would dwindle, his business accounts would suffer. He had seen the phenomenon before when anyone in his circle married someone from the outside. Never mind that this was the new millennium. High society still operated on a class system.

Besides, why would he want to do something so cruel as to cage a bright, vibrant woman like Charlee in his claustrophobic, walk-on-eggshells-or-get-ostracized world? He would never be that selfish.

“So whatever happened with the senator?” he asked, changing lanes and passing a slow-moving tractor-trailer rig.

She studied him for a long while before replying. “The guy ended up paying me not to squeal on him to his wife and I gave the money to a women’s shelter.”

“Pretty resourceful for a fourteen-year-old.”

“Told you, Maybelline was determined to give me a real life education and that she did.”

“Maybe too much of an education. You grew up way too soon.”

“Not soon enough. If I’d really been resourceful, I would have gone to the newspapers, created a scandal, got the sucker thrown out of office before he used his power to disgrace some other poor maid.”

Mason looked at her. He thought of his own housekeepers and of the servants who had worked for his parents. He realized with a disturbing jolt he never considered them as anything more than his employees.

Sure, he paid well, did his best to treat them with compassion, but he’d never imagined what their lives were like when they weren’t cleaning his house or taking care of his needs. Guilt needled him and he swore to himself when he got home he would take more of a personal interest in the people he employed.

“The Malibu’s right behind us,” Charlee said.

Mason swore under his breath. He’d forgotten about being followed.

“Slow down. Let them get closer.”

“What for?”

“Just do it and don’t give me any grief for once, okay?”

She’d been right on the previous occasions. Resisting the urge to ask for more details before embarking on her plan, Mason slowed the car.

“Get in the middle lane.”

He turned on the blinker and moved over.

“Thank you,” she replied tartly and stuck out her tongue at him.

“You’re welcome.” He fought the strange thrill darting through him at the sight of her glorious pink tongue.

Holy guacamole but her sauciness inflamed him.

“Slower.” Her eyes were trained on the mirror, her body tensed, her muscles on alert.

“I’m practically crawling as it is.”

“I want them right on our tails so when you radically veer off at the next exit ramp they won’t have time to follow us.”

“Oh.” He checked the rearview mirror too and saw the Malibu was on his bumper.

“Here we go.” Charlee inhaled audibly.

Up ahead Mason spotted the Los Angeles exit sign.

“Keep driving, keep driving.”

“But I thought you said…”

“Wait, wait.”

If he waited any longer it was going to be too late to make the exit ramp.

“Floor it, floor it, change lanes, go, go, go.” She barked orders like a prison warden.

Dear Lord, there were a string of cars in the inside lane.

“Now!”

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t drive erratically on purpose and risk their lives. What if they had a wreck? What if they hurt someone?

For one damn time in your life, don’t overthink things. Just friggin’ let go and do it.

Mason stomped the foot feed. Matilda leaped to the challenge. She shot forward like a torpedo. He swerved across the white line, barreling straight for the exit ramp.

Holy crap, we ‘re going to die.

He braced himself for an impact and prayed Matilda could handle whatever came her way.