by Noelle Adams
She pulled the sheet up to cover her chest.
Then she noticed the time. “It’s after 8:30. We were supposed to meet the guy about the car an hour ago!”
“Already did that.” He was focused on her now that he wouldn’t have to look at any undesirable flesh. “The car is in the parking lot.”
Ashley almost jumped up to look out the window, but decided to wait until she was more fully clothed. “Why didn’t you wake me up? How’s the car?”
“You were snoring away, so I didn’t feel intrepid enough to disturb your slumbers. And the car is about what you would expect for $350. It does seem to move—for the most part.”
“You got a car for $350?” Her eyes widened, and she didn’t even object to his rude comment about her sleeping habits.
“Oh, believe me. It’s not worth any more than that. Anyway, we worked out an agreement. He even let me keep the expired tags on the car, so we won’t have to drive around without a license plate.”
This piece of information required another gulp of coffee to absorb. “This isn’t sounding very promising. What kind of an agreement did you work out?”
“A gentleman’s agreement,” Ethan said obnoxiously, eyeing her as if from a great height. “And since you are a woman, you don’t get to be in on it.”
Ashley was about to give this patronizing, chauvinistic comment the vitriolic response it deserved, but Ethan distracted her by pulling a breakfast sandwich out of a paper sack.
“You brought me food? Since when have you been nice and considerate?”
He certainly wasn’t looking nice and considerate. He looked handsome, rumpled, and grouchy, and he was giving her a mild form of his sneer. “It was purely for efficiency’s sake. I don’t want to have to stop in two hours to feed you. We’ve got almost eighteen hours to drive today in a dubious vehicle with a dwindling amount of money.”
Ashley was munching on her food, but after she swallowed a bite, she said, “I suppose stopping at an ATM for more cash is not an option?”
“Your sheet’s slipping,” he said curtly, glancing away until she impatiently pulled the sheet back up over her bra. “They can track debit cards as easily as credit cards.”
“Yeah, I guess. But surely there’s something we can do. You’re supposed to be the criminal mastermind of the county. Why can’t you think of something?
She was expecting him to give her a fine put-down—she was actually kind of looking forward to it—but he was sidetracked when her sheet slipped down to her waist again. “Ashley, would you please cover yourself up?”
Her feelings were a little hurt at his angry tone when they’d just been beginning a delightful argument, so she stopped laughing and pulled the sheet up again. “Sorry. You act like you’ve never seen a woman in a bra before. I thought I was supposed to be the good one. Who knew a bad boy could be such a prude?”
He snarled and then strode out of the room.
Sighing and feeling a little glum, she was just about to get out of bed when Ethan poked his head back in the room. “You’ve got twenty minutes to get dressed.”
She let out an outraged wail. “But I haven’t even finished eating yet.”
“All right. Twenty-five. Don’t waste your time primping. I don’t care how you look.”
When Ashley went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, she was grumbling under her breath and trying not to smile.
***
The car was a twenty-year-old Thunderbird. Not old enough to be an antique, but too old to be much use to anyone. It wasn’t in good shape. The seats were full of holes, rust adorned the body, and neither of the windows shut all the way. Plus, the car was yellow—really, really yellow.
Ashley had a grand time mocking the car as they started off, but the reality of the situation hit home when they pulled out onto the interstate.
They were going to have to drive this car all the way to South Dakota.
“I think the speed limit is 70,” she said, trying to speak over the mournful howl of the engine.
Ethan was manfully chugging along at about 48mph. “I know,” he said through his teeth, shooting her a lethal gaze, although her voice had been perfectly benign and helpful. “This is as fast as this appalling excuse for a car will go.”
“I thought Thunderbirds were supposed to last forever.” She winced at a strange clattering sound coming from somewhere beneath the car.
Ethan let out a pitiful sigh as a black Porsche went flying by them at twice their speed. “This one clearly won’t. All I’m hoping is that it will last for about eighteen more hours.”
“At this speed, we better estimate twenty-four.”
A wide-load truck carrying farm equipment and an ancient school bus both sped past them, quickly leaving them in the dust. The truck driver honked at them cheerfully as he went by.
Ethan didn’t seem to appreciate her comment, so Ashley thought it might be strategic to change the subject. “Am I going to get to drive?” she asked, hiding a grin at his strained expression.
“Of course. If we manage to make it more than two hours today—which is not, I assure you, an assumption I’m willing to make—then you can take a turn. I have no desire to drive this heap halfway across the country without a break.”
There was another strange sound coming from the back of the car now. It went clippety-clop-bop-bop. Clippety-clop-bop-bop. “Surely we’ll make it more than two hours,” she said optimistically. “But hopefully we won’t get into any more car chases today. We wouldn’t have a prayer in this piece of junk.”
Ethan’s mumbled reply was not particularly reassuring.
***
“So why did you decide to get out of the moonshine business?” she asked randomly, later in the morning. She’d been thinking about him—a lot—and the reflections finally pushed her into the question.
“What?”
She’d been quiet for a long time, so she’d obviously startled him. “Why did you decide you wanted out? You got your fancy truck and your fancy boat and no doubt a huge-ass TV with all your ill-gotten gains. Why did you decide you wanted out?”
“Believe it or not, a moonshiner was not what I wanted to be when I grew up.”
She couldn’t read his expression very well. He had that same tense look she’d seen before, as if he was holding something back. She really wanted to know what it was.
“You always wanted to build bridges.”
“Yeah. That’s never going to happen.”
“Well, you’re the one who dropped out of college and got arrested.” He’d been majoring in civil engineering at Virginia Tech. Doing really well, if what she’d heard was true.
“I know that.”
She felt kind of bad for bringing it up, although it was absolutely nothing but the truth. “I guess you could go back to college and grad school if you wanted. You’ve only lost less than two years.”
“With a record? What kind of career do you think I could have?”
She studied his face. It was handsome and controlled and lost somehow. “It could happen. It’s just a misdemeanor. Employers could understand. It will make it harder, but I don’t think it would be impossible. At least, that’s what I’m hoping with Mark. So what do you want to do now?”
“I don’t have a clue. I just want out.”
She could tell he was telling the truth. He was almost desperate to be out of whatever mess he’d gotten himself in. And, instead of feeling vindicated, she felt sympathetic. Deeply moved by his earnestness. He felt more like the boy she used to know than ever. “What were you doing to try to get out of it that caused all this trouble in the first place?”
He sighed, apparently giving up on what he’d refused to tell her before. “I was trying to work on a plan. With the guy on the other end of the distribution route—in South Dakota. We’d talked some—just to take care of business—and eventually we were understanding each other. We both wanted out, but Jones had too much on us to let us go. We started talking about
possibilities. Getting licenses. Going legit. There’s a whole new market for moonshine now—city-folk think it’s cool. There could be a real business there. We’d just have to pay taxes and change some of our methods. We put together a whole proposal to spin off part of the network into a legit business. We’d have paid Jones a hefty percentage, but we would have been legit.”
“I guess Buster wasn’t too fond of that idea.”
“No. I guess I should have known. It was too reasonable a plan. He’s never been reasonable. The moonshine is like his family honor or something, and making it legal—even just part of it—would be spitting on his father and grandfather and great-grandfather’s memory.” He gave Ashley a rueful look. “I didn’t expect him to call in the cavalry, though.”
“I’d have thought he’d use his own guys instead of hired guns for something like this. If it’s personal, I mean.”
“Nah. I’m just business to him. And he’s careful about muddying his own water. He’s got a lot of the county officials on his payroll, but that could change if he started leaving bodies around. If it’s outsiders who do the dirty work, though, then there are plenty of folks who would just refuse to connect the dots back to him.”
Ashley’s mind was whirling with all this information. He hadn’t spoken so openly to her in…forever.
“So he’s trying to kill you?”
“I don’t know if he wants to kill me or just wants to round me up and keep me from talking to the other guy.”
She was glad to know all of this. It confirmed in her own mind that she was right to trust him. He’d made mistakes. A lot of them. Really bad mistakes. But he was still a little of the Ethan she used to know.
“So you’re not meeting this guy at the other end of the route to set up that business you wanted?”
“No. That’s out now. We’d need Jones on our side to make it happen. But the guy says he has some sort of evidence to leverage against Jones—something other than our testimony, which neither of us wants to give—but he doesn’t have enough information on my side of the business to interpret all of it.”
“And he refused to use the phone or email.”
“Or snail mail. Right. Paranoid. I thought he was crazy at first, but Jones does seem to have several dozen loose screws I didn’t know about before. So I’ve got to get there to interpret his evidence, and then we should be able leverage it against Jones.”
“You don’t know what the evidence is?”
“No.”
“But you think you can trust this guy?”
“I have to.”
She nodded. “Okay. I hope it will work.”
He gave her a curious glance. “I’m surprised you believe me. You haven’t been big on trusting me lately.”
“Well, what do you expect? All my life, I thought you were this certain person, and then you just…” She felt a poignant lump in her throat and didn’t continue.
“Then I what?” His voice was much softer, much less curt, than usual.
“Then you became someone else.”
There was a strange silence in the car for a minute until Ashley pulled herself together, pushing the fond memories of the Ethan she used to know back into the corner of her mind. She added, “But I’d pull for you over Buster Jones and his hired goons any day of the week.”
Ethan chuckled. “Thanks.”
“So this is what you were starting to say the other day? Something that Mark didn’t tell me? That you were trying to get out of all this?”
Ethan shot her a quick look but then almost immediately looked away. “Something like that.”
She sighed, feeling a lot better. About a lot of things. “When you get this straightened out,” she began, trying to sort out everything in her mind, “maybe you should move. I know it’s your home, but everyone in the county knows what you’ve been up to. I don’t think you could ever really put it behind you there.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“So you think you’ll move?”
If he moved, she’d probably never see him again. It didn’t make her as happy as she’d expected.
“I don’t know. It’s my home, and there’s a lot that matters to me there.”
Their eyes met then, and she couldn’t look away. The shared look felt deep and meaningful, and it made her heartbeat accelerate.
“Like what?” she breathed.
He jerked his head back to face the road and said dryly, “Like the best fishing in the state.”
Ashley felt a bit of a let-down at the shift in mood between them. “Well, I guess you have to decide what’s more important to you. Fishing or building a new life.”
“That’s a tough decision.”
Ashley had always loved fishing, since her father had started taking her early. She’d followed Mark and Ethan to the creeks and river banks, where they’d fished for hours.
She’d felt close to them then. Both of them.
To distract herself, she put her feet on the dashboard and tried to stretch her legs, checking out her skinned knees, which were starting to heal already.
“Would you put your legs down?” Ethan asked, rather tersely.
The afterglow from their warm gaze earlier was quickly dying away. “Why should I? My legs are stiff.”
“You’re flashing the entire highway. Your skirt is down around your hips.” Ethan glanced over at her bare legs with an expression that Ashley took to be disgust.
She pulled her skirt up a little to hide some her offending thighs from Ethan’s disapproving gaze. “Well you don’t have to be rude about it. Anyway, everyone is flying by us so fast that no one has time to even notice my legs.” She kept her legs up, more out of stubbornness than anything else.
If he’d asked her nicely, she would have lowered her legs immediately, but he didn’t seem capable of asking her anything nicely.
Ethan clenched his jaw and waited in silence for a minute. There was definitely a difference between his grouchiness (which Ashley had to admit was kind of cute) and his real anger (which wasn’t cute at all). Finally he demanded roughly, “Ashley, put your legs down right now. They’re distracting, and I don’t want to look at them.”
“Fine,” she mumbled and put her feet back on the floor. “There’s no reason to be so mean. I’m sorry my legs offend you so much.” She felt irrationally hurt.
She turned her face away from Ethan to hide her expression from him. She must not have done a very good job because he kept darting glances over at her. “Ashley,” he began, his tone softer and milder, “I didn’t mean—”
Ashley never learned what Ethan didn’t mean. For just at that moment the engine of their dilapidated Thunderbird made a discouraging crackling sound and started to sputter.
“Oh no!” she breathed, turning to Ethan in dismay.
Their speed was reducing, and the car started jerking. “Damn!” Ethan bit out. “Damn! Fucking piece of shit!”
Despite the unfortunate circumstances and forgetting her earlier hurt feelings, Ashley chided, “Watch your language, young man. Or I’ll have to put you over my knee and spank you.”
Ethan growled—an angry sound in his throat—and turned the steering wheel to guide the dying car to the shoulder of the road.
It jerked to a stop and made a hissing sound. Then kept clicking, as if it refused to surrender.
“What now?” Ashley asked glumly.
Ethan reached under the dashboard and popped the hood. “I guess I can look at the engine,” he said dubiously.
“Looking at it isn’t going to help much.”
But he had already gotten out of the car. So she pulled herself out too, and they both stood and stared at the smoking engine.
Eventually, Ashley inquired sweetly, “Working up your power-ray vision to magically put our engine back to together again?”
“This is ridiculous. We’ll need to get help. I guess I could call...someone.” He sounded frustrated and almost helpless.
“Would it be a good idea to u
se your phone? I thought the bad guys could trace it. And who would you call? Triple A? The police?”
He shook his head. “Not a good idea. We should lay low as much as possible. But we’re kind of stuck here otherwise.”
“We both have feet. And there’s an exit with a couple of gas stations less than a mile from here.”
Ethan stared at her.
“At least, that’s what the signs said back there,” Ashley explained, pointing behind them at the back of the road signs. “We can just walk to one of them and see if someone will tow our car and then fix it.”
Ethan slammed down the hood. “You don’t mind walking?”
“Of course not.” She tried not to think of her pretty, strappy sandals and the eight blisters on her feet. “Just let me grab my bag.”
She reached into the back seat and pulled out the tote she’d bought at the drugstore to carry their toiletries. The bag had “West Virginia, Wild and Wonderful” scrawled over the front in bright blue lettering.
“Hold on,” she called out to Ethan, who had already started down the road. Ashley pulled out the sunblock she had purchased as an afterthought. She squirted out a little and rubbed it onto her face and bare arms. Then squeezed out some more on her hand.
Ethan had walked back over to her. “Are you coming?”
“Come here.” When he took a few slow steps over to her, she pulled his head down toward her and rubbed the sunblock into his cheeks, nose, and forehead.
“For God’s sake, Ashley,” he groaned. “That stuff smells horrible.”
She sniffed his skin. “No, it doesn’t.” She finished her massage of his face and patted the top of his head. “It smells like the beach. And you’ll thank me later when your skin isn’t burned to a crisp. It’s noon, the sun is blazing, and it must be a hundred degrees out today. You’ve got red hair, so I bet you burn easily.”
That comment got a cool glare.
“Fine,” he said, touching his face, as if he was making sure it was still there. “Can we go now?”
