by Lucy Connors
I gave the mare one last ear scratch and headed toward the door, but Pete’s voice stopped me.
“About Mickey Rhodale, Victoria. All you need to know is that you’d better stay far away from him. Don’t talk to your family about him, either, okay? We’ve had enough problems with Rhodales to last a lifetime.”
• • •
“No, no, no, no, no!” I pulled the stuttering old truck over to the side of the road and used up my admittedly limited supply of swear words.
The gas tank needle showed the tank was half full. Now that I thought about it, the needle had been showing the tank as half full for more than a week, and I hadn’t put any gas in it. Half full, half empty, all the way gone; the damn gas gauge must be broken.
There was a lesson in there somewhere about the global failure of optimism, but I was too annoyed to think about it.
I pulled out my phone and wondered who to call. Not Gran. I’d just dropped her off at her Sunday afternoon church group. Not my mother, who would shriek at me about personal responsibility and not know what to do. Not my father, who would expect me to handle it myself, if he even picked up a phone call from me in the middle of the day, which he probably wouldn’t. Not Pete, because he was taking a rare day off today.
Okay, Victoria, think.
I dialed information for Clark, Kentucky, and asked for a gas station. Gas stations had gas, right? And also usually trucks that towed people. Maybe somebody could bring me some gas, and I could pay them, and nobody else needed to know about this.
The operator put me through to Howard’s Gas Station, and I explained my dilemma to a cranky old man who sounded like he was approximately a hundred and ten.
“I’ll send the boy.”
“Thanks. But, ah, when do you expect—”
“He’ll be there when he gets there. If you’re in such an all-fired hurry, maybe you should have filled up your gas tank before you ran out.”
Click.
I stared at the phone in my hand for second, thinking evil thoughts about small-town businesses that had monopolies and therefore no need to be pleasant. Then I pulled my book bag closer and grabbed To Kill a Mockingbird, hunched down in the driver’s seat so nobody could see me, and prepared to wait.
An hour later, I was still waiting.
I sighed and started to call Pete after all, so he could send somebody after me, when a truck that was even older than mine pulled up behind me and a guy got out. My heart jumped into my throat when I realized it was Mickey.
His tight black T-shirt advertised some beer I’d never heard of, and the sleeves left his muscular, tanned arms bare so I could see the ink encircling the top of his left arm. Somehow, that glimpse of tattoo made him even more intriguing.
He smiled, sauntering up to my window, and I was toast.
Mickey Rhodale hooked his thumbs in his pockets and grinned down at me.
“You didn’t have to pretend to run out of gas just to get me alone, Princess.”
I started to sputter. “I didn’t—you don’t—argh. Just give me the gas so I can get out of here.”
He tilted his head, saying nothing, but his smile faded. I couldn’t see his eyes through the dark lenses of his sunglasses, but I couldn’t miss the way his lips tightened.
“How about you get out of the truck and pour your own gas,” he said. “I’m not one of your flunkies.”
“I didn’t mean—I just—”
But he turned and stalked back to his truck, so I jumped out of mine so fast that my book went flying. I bent down to get it and turned to see Mickey openly staring at my butt.
“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” he said. “You have a very nice ass, Princess. Why is that? Personal trainer? Thousand-dollar gym membership?”
“I ride horses,” I snapped. “But thank you for the instant stereotyping.”
He pulled his glasses off and stuffed them in his pocket, and those spectacular blue eyes danced with amusement. Yeah, he was laughing at me. Again. I was a little tired of it, and so I decided to turn the tables on him.
I checked him out. Slowly. From head to toe, I took my time staring at every glorious inch of that hard, toned, muscular body.
And it backfired on me—I almost choked when my mouth dried out completely, but no way was I letting him know that.
“On the other hand, you’ve got a nice ass, too,” I said, trying for a slow drawl of my own.
“Oh, I’m nice all over,” he said, and his gaze turned hot. “You have no idea.”
I swallowed, hard, because I kind of did have an idea, and I was about an inch away from hyperventilating.
“Well, okay,” I said, clearing my throat. “Now that we’ve established the relative niceness of our respective posteriors, maybe we can get on with the filling of my gas tank.”
He blinked and then started laughing. “Oh, sweetheart. You are adorable.”
Suddenly I’d had it. We kept dancing around this fierce attraction, and I had no idea what to do with it, but this tension was about to make my head explode, right here on the side of the road.
“Look, Mickey, either help me or go away. I’m not your sweetheart, and I’m not adorable. I’m tired and hungry and I’m getting a headache. Are you going to help me or what?”
He stared down at me, his eyes blazing with intent, as if he wanted to back me up against the truck and kiss me right then and there. Or maybe I was just projecting a whole boatload of wishful thinking on the moment because, up close, he was fiercely beautiful. His muscled arms were cut and carved like a sculptor’s dream, and the silky waves of his hair made me want to throw my arms around him and run my fingers through it, over and over. I was caught in a bizarre spell created by pure want, and I’d never felt this way before in my life.
Naturally, it scared the crap out of me.
I took a step back.
“Mickey . . .” My voice was barely a whisper, a sound too fragile for the weight of the moment.
He took a step closer.
CHAPTER 8
Mickey
I had to kiss her. Every instinct was telling me to pick her up so that hot little body was plastered against mine and kiss her until she didn’t remember who she was, or that my last name was Rhodale. She made a tiny sound, almost like a gasp, and I stared down at those lush, parted lips, and wanted her so much my body actually ached with it.
I took a step back, and both of us let out shaky breaths at exactly the same time.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to be myself around you,” I muttered. A lame-ass confession that made me wince even as I said it. “You don’t make sense. I barely know you, but I want to know everything about you. You’re smart and gorgeous, and you make my skin too tight.”
The more I rattled on with this stupid confession, the more bewildered she got. She tilted her head and stared at me, and by the time I got to the end, confusion was very apparent in her green, green eyes.
“What do you mean, I don’t make sense?” She threw her hands in the air. “You’re the one who doesn’t make sense. You’re always ordering me around, or calling me Princess like you know anything about my life at all. Maybe if you’d quit being such a . . . such a dumb head, you might get to know me.”
I couldn’t help it. I grinned. “Dumb head? I’m not sure I can recover from such a foul insult.”
She actually growled. Clenched her delicate little hands into fists and growled at me.
It made me want to kiss her even more.
“You . . . you asshole!” she finally shouted, and all I could think was that she was even more freaking gorgeous when she was pissed off.
“Asshole. That’s way better,” I said, nodding as if contemplating the subject of insults.
And then I kissed her.
It wasn’t a gentle kiss or a practiced kiss; I suddenly had no moves, n
o technique. No game. All I had was an overwhelming want—an all-consuming need. I needed to taste her lips more than I needed to think or breathe or exist on the planet.
So I kissed her.
And she kissed me back.
For one long, glorious moment, Victoria’s arms wrapped around my neck and she kissed me with a heat and passion I’d never experienced. Never believed was possible.
When the kiss finally ended, I stumbled back a step or two and stared at her in disbelief while everything I thought I knew about girls and myself and, hell, life itself went up in flames.
Her eyes were a little unfocused, so at least it hadn’t just been me whirling around in that tornado of feeling.
“Holy shit,” I said reverently.
She inhaled sharply. “Really? ‘Holy shit?’ Evidently kissing a frog doesn’t always turn him into a prince. Bad boys are called that for a reason, right? I’m the dumb one here.”
“Victoria—”
“Nice, Mickey. Really lovely. You might work on your charming ways before you kiss the next girl you’ve lined up, though.”
The warmth in my chest congealed and turned icy, becoming a rock in my gut.
“There’s no next girl lined up, and you’d better not even be thinking about the next guy,” I said flatly. “We need to figure this out. We need—”
“We need nothing. All I need from you is that gasoline,” she snapped.
Over the next five minutes, while I poured the gas in her tank and then watched her drive away, she never said a single word.
Way to crash and burn, Rhodale.
• • •
I wasn’t exactly sure how Victoria managed to sound sexy answering a question about carpetbaggers, but somehow she did. Maybe it was the little blue dress she was wearing.
Or maybe I was just losing it.
Two solid weeks of watching Victoria ignore me would be enough to drive the most reasonable person to distraction, and I was a Rhodale, which meant I wasn’t on even a handshake acquaintance with reasonable. She didn’t speak to me, didn’t look at me, and didn’t answer me when I tried to talk to her. To make things worse, while her campaign of studied indifference kept running longer, her skirts kept getting shorter.
Or maybe that part was just in my imagination, which had been working overtime trying to give me a mental picture of those long legs all the way up.
Everything else in my life felt like it was caught in the same stasis bubble, too. Ethan, for once, had been lying low. My mom was busy with her own students; she said this year’s crop of fourth graders was the most challenging she’d ever had. Pa was around less and less in the evenings, which usually meant he was heading back down inside a bottle of bourbon.
Football practice was same old, same old, and even my job at the gas station had been slow.
“Do you plan to answer me sometime this class period, Mr. Rhodale, or shall I fax you a written request?” Mr. Gerard’s dry voice cut through my mental meanderings, and I looked up from the drawing of a mule I’d been doodling to see that everyone was staring at me.
“Nobody faxes anymore,” I said, not really trying to be a smart-ass but rather buying myself time to think back and see if I could figure out what he’d asked me.
Victoria glanced over at me, and I could almost see a hint of compassion in her eyes.
“Kentucky declared neutrality at the beginning of the Civil War, but it didn’t last,” she said.
He actually smiled. I thought I heard Derek gasp. Nobody had seen Gerard’s teeth in years. There’d been bets as to whether he actually had real ones or if, like fireflies over the Kentucky hills, they only came out at night.
“Very nice, Miss Whitfield. Most people forget that. Perhaps you can manage to stay awake in my class from now on,” he said, directing that last bit at me.
When he walked away, choosing his next victim, I leaned across the aisle. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
She shrugged, but I noticed her cheeks turned pink. The beautiful and brilliant Victoria Whitfield wasn’t as indifferent to me as she pretended.
“Remember outside the school office where you said we’d start over? What happened to that?” I persisted.
“That was before you were such a jerk when you kissed me. Now keep your voice down,” she whispered.
“I will if you promise to talk to me after class.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t?”
“I won’t.”
“Then I won’t keep my voice down,” I said loudly.
Mr. Gerard turned to peer at me over the top of his glasses. “Yes, Mr. Rhodale? You have something to add?”
“No, sorry. I just get so excited about the Civil War,” I said, straight-faced.
When he turned around, I turned in my seat and faced Victoria. “Well?”
“Leave me alone,” she demanded. Ice cubes would have been a few degrees warmer than her voice, and something inside me snapped.
“I don’t think so, Princess,” I drawled, being sure to put a lot of Kentucky-hills accent in there. “I need to talk to you, so I can quit wondering what in the hell I did to offend you.”
She opened her mouth to say something, probably something really rude, and I deliberately cut her off.
“Or are you just afraid I’ll Hulk out and beat you up?”
Heat turned her cheeks pink again. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Good. After class?”
The bell rang before she could reply, and I followed her out of the room. I was determined to figure out what was going on, and why the only girl I’d been interested in for a long time was shutting me down before I’d even had a chance to get to know her.
Usually it took me a while longer to piss people off.
I knew that at least a couple of the guys watching me in the hall were probably Ethan’s thugs. The last thing I needed was for him to hear that I was chasing after a Whitfield down the school hallway. I realized I was clenching my fists at the thought, and I deliberately forced my fingers to relax. I would not impress Victoria by getting into a fight with these idiots.
As I watched Victoria disappear around the corner, though, the flash of blue skirt flaring out behind her was enough to make me realize that I didn’t give a shit about Ethan and his flunkies, anyway.
I went after her.
I caught up to her and grabbed her arm just before she got to her math class. She looked down at my hand and then up at me, and slowly her eyebrows rose.
“I have to go to class,” she said.
I glanced inside the room. “It’s a substitute. Substitutes never know anything about calculus, or so Derek tells me, so you won’t be missing anything.”
“It doesn’t matter. I need—”
“Please.” I couldn’t believe I’d said it, even as the word came out of my mouth. I was practically begging a girl to spend time with me. A Whitfield girl.
Great. Now I sounded like Ethan.
But apparently Mama hadn’t called it the magic word for nothing, because Victoria was nodding. I froze, not wanting to act too eager or do anything else that would make her quit speaking to me again.
“Okay,” she said, biting her lip. “I agree that we should talk. Let’s go now, before the sub sees me.”
Before she could change her mind, I grabbed her hand and practically dragged her down the hall toward the staircase that nobody was allowed to use until the cracked handrail was fixed. I had forty-eight minutes until lunch, and I intended to use them to get to know Victoria Whitfield.
CHAPTER 9
Victoria
I took long, slow yoga breaths as I followed Mickey down the hall, trying not to hyperventilate or stare at his wavy black hair or his muscular back and shoulders, and especially not at his butt in those well-worn jeans.
It’s j
ust . . . it was a really, really great butt.
He pulled me into the stairway through the door with the ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRANCE sign posted on it, and we sat on the steps and looked at each other. Now that we were here, I was chickening out and wanted to escape back to class.
“You wanted to talk, so talk,” I said gracelessly. “Am I really so interesting, just because I’m the new girl, that you had to use all of your dubious charms to get me here? Wait—do I need to define the term ‘dubious’?”
He scowled. “You think I’m stupid? Not quite up to your fancy Whitfield standards?”
“Unbelievable. I just skipped my first class ever, so I could talk to you, and you’re giving me crap about ‘fancy Whitfield standards’?” I stood up and brushed off my skirt. “You and your Rhodale prejudices can kiss my fancy Whitfield butt.”
Unexpectedly, he flashed that killer grin that he used so rarely, the one that I’d seen melt freshman girls into swooning puddles in the cafeteria. It ticked me off just thinking about it.
“Your Whitfield butt? There are several parts of you that I’d like to kiss, Princess, but I wouldn’t have started with your butt.”
He stood up, too, and stared at my mouth. I suddenly felt way too hot, too confined—claustrophobic, almost—in the dusty stairwell, and I was finding it hard to breathe. I didn’t know whether to kiss him or slap him. Maybe I should do both, like some swooning heroine in an Austen novel.
Mickey Rhodale was the most infuriating person I’d ever met.
“Let’s try this again,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “Why did you want to talk to me? Because you kissed me?”
“You kissed me back. Anyway, you’re good at that, aren’t you? Deflecting your anger?” He raised one eyebrow and grinned down at me, and my pulse went crazy. “Wait. Do I need to define the term ‘deflecting’?”
I had to laugh at hearing him toss my words back at me. I deserved it; it had been a snotty thing to say.
