Med school at Emory? Check! Yay!
Pediatric residency at Journey’s End Medical Center, her hometown hospital? Not so fast on that one. She’d landed the gig already, true, but she still had three years of training to put in, starting bright and early Monday morning. Hence, the move back to Journey’s End, her destination today.
Find an apartment? That was priority number one on her list, especially since she’d be staying with Sofia, her BFF since high school, in the interim. She and Sofia got along great, but Sofia was now living with her boyfriend, Toby, in the McMansion they’d recently bought together, and Reeve didn’t want to be a third wheel for any longer than she needed to. So she’d scheduled several apartment viewings and fervently hoped she’d be settling into her new digs no later than—what the hell?
Without warning, her ten-year-old Saab, which was crammed full of the belongings she could bring with her (the rest were in storage until she got settled), started acting crazy, juddering as though it had been dropped inside an earthquake simulator. She hung on to the steering wheel and ignored this bizarre behavior for as long as she could, telling herself that it'd go away in a minute and wasn't that bad. But then it got that bad and didn't go away, escalating until her teeth clacked.
Cursing, she turned off the stereo, edged her limping Saab to the side of the road and killed the engine. Then she got out and did a quick walk around to assess her situation, taking care to keep her front pressed tight to the car so she didn't lose her buttocks to any of the speeding passersby, none of whom stopped to help her, the bastards.
It didn’t take long to find the problem: a giant nail head, about the size of a railroad spike, embedded in the left front tire.
“Well, that’s just great,” she muttered, peering into the open window at Muffin. “We’ve got a flat tire.”
Muffin’s pale green eyes narrowed into a glare. Apparently he’d never received—or, more likely, had ripped to shreds with his sharp front claws—the memo informing him that orange cats had uniformly sweet dispositions.
“Oh, sure,” she snapped as Muffin turned his back on her and stared out the window at the back of his carrier, probably plotting how best to escape and kill the sparrows twittering in the nearest tree. “Blame the victim.”
Fishing her cell phone out of her shorts pocket, she shoved her sunglasses to the top of her head, eyed the forbidding mass of gray clouds as they inched overhead, and thought about her options. Well, option. Singular:
Change the tire.
Sighing, she dialed. Sofia’s voice came over the line after half a ring.
“Reeve?” Her tone had the usual undercurrent of low-grade worry, as though she expected and was prepared for Reeve to bear news of anything from a nasty case of the flu to incarceration in a Turkish prison. “Are you here yet?”
“No, I'm not there yet — hey! Watch where you're going, you maniac!” Jumping quickly out of the way and deeper into the berm, Reeve used her free hand to give the finger to a disappearing minivan that had sped by a little too close for comfort. The driver responded with an angry honk. “I'm on the side of the road with a flat tire,” she told Sofia, swiping her blowing hair back out of her face. “Just wanted you to know before I started changing the tire in case I get killed by someone who's texting and driving at the same time. Which seems like a real possibility.”
“That’s not safe. I’ll come get you.”
“It’s okay.” Reeve said. “I’ll just change the tire.”
“Don't you dare! I'll call Triple A. They can change the tire. I’ll come get you. You stay on the berm.”
“That's crazy,” Reeve said, trying to exude more confidence than she felt. But how hard could it be? She'd watch a tire-changing tutorial on her smart phone, get it done herself, and hit the road again. “I can deliver babies and take out appendixes—”
“No, you can’t. Just because you’ve watched those procedures doesn’t mean you can do them.”
“Details,” Reeve said, waving a hand. “I can totally change a tire. No worries.”
“I'm on my way,” Sofia said firmly. “Where exactly are you?”
Reeve told her and hung up, secretly glad the cavalry was riding to her rescue. Especially since the sky was getting moodier by the second. Then she pursed her lips at the offending tire, wondering how long it’d take for Sofia to get there.
Forty-five minutes or so, probably.
Reeve leaned against the car, crossed her arms and ankles and told herself to be patient.
Two seconds later, she’d run through her day’s supply of patience.
The thing was, forty-five minutes seemed like a ridiculously long time, especially when she could change that tire herself.
She wavered, wondering if she could really do it.
At that exact moment, a gust of wind whipped through the overgrown grasses framing the road, making them ripple with menace and announcing the storm’s imminent arrival.
Yeah, okay. Decision made. Worst case? She’d have the tire halfway changed by the time Sofia and/or Triple A turned up.
Adam would help you.
Adam would know how to change a tire.
The thoughts, distant and unwelcome whispers that seemed to originate in her heart rather than her head, had the usual effect. A chill trickled over her skin despite the day’s heat. The echoing emptiness inside her pulsed and expanded, taking up a bit more space than it had yesterday. The world dimmed independently of the looming rain. Her shoulders got heavier and heavier until the extra weight threatened to put a bend in her spine.
Stop it, Reeve, she told herself sternly.
The Black wasn’t going to take over her mood again.
Not today.
Tipping her face up to the sky, she took a deep breath that forced her belly to expand and push out any lingering wisps of darkness. And another. And another. Then she gave her bare arms a brisk rub and warmed up enough to focus on the task at hand.
Change the damn tire.
Peeking inside the car—Muffin, apparently now disgusted by the sight of her, didn’t deign to look in her direction—Reeve made sure the parking brake and hazard lights were on and rolled up the windows in case the threatened storm became an actual storm. Then she opened the trunk and got an unpleasant wake-up call: spare tire and accessories were buried beneath layers of luggage and boxes full of medical texts and a lot of the other stuff that comprised the last four years of her life.
Grumbling, she unloaded some of the junk, making a neat stack on the berm, and was just dragging out the spare tire when she heard the approaching purr of a sleek engine. Straightening, she glanced over her shoulder in time to see a slowing blaze of headlights roll past and park in front of the Saab.
Black BMW SUV with some sort of a sports rack on top, she saw at a glance. Propping the spare tire against the car, she make a quick reach for the tire iron, just in case, and stared at the BMW, which was pretty sweet. A few years old, but still pricey enough to finance a couple years of tuition at her former med school. Must be nice, she thought, shooting the Saab a sidelong glare.
She watched as the driver's door opened, feeling forty percent hopeful and sixty percent uneasy. If the local serial killer was on the prowl for an abduction, rape and murder, this was a pretty good scenario, wasn’t it? Other cars continued to race past, so there’d be plenty of witnesses to the crime, but still. She’d prefer not to make tonight’s local news.
She waited.
A guy wearing a black T-shirt, faded jeans and hiking boots climbed out of the Beemer, but he might as well have been climbing out of the pages of Men’s Health. He was a few years older than Reeve, she guessed, putting him in the early-thirties-ish range, and looked athletic. Brown-skinned, he was on the tall and lean side, which made him the basketball type rather than the football type, and his sable hair was an unruly mass of curls. He had thick brows to match the hair, straight lines of attitude over hooded black eyes, and his cheeks and nose were sharp, but his full
lips softened his edges a little. He sported the kind of five o’clock shadow that was the Central Casting requirement of hot guys everywhere—a walking cliché—and it worked for him. Probably because he was also working the kind of gleaming-eyed intensity that proved his facial hair was not an affectation. He seemed like a guy who rolled out of bed in the morning, decided whether he felt like shaving or not, then told people to go screw themselves if they didn’t like his choice.
All the air left Reeve’s lungs in a single breathless whoosh.
The guy was the anti-Adam, darkly imposing compared to Adam’s olive skin, amber eyes and brown hair, and so unreasonably hot that she could almost see waves of steam rippling over his body as he strode toward her. Dumbstruck, she stared at him, tracking his easy stride and the way he now seemed to own the road and the situation. Commanding. That was the word she was looking for. This was the sort of man who’d instruct pirates on pillaging, generals on leading and Don Juan on seduction. He was—
Hang on. Suddenly becoming aware of her tightening skin and shallow breath, Reeve mentally backhanded herself across the face and snapped out of it. He was good-looking, true, but so what? Ted Bundy had been handsome, too, and it hadn’t stopped him from raping and murdering all those women in the 1970s, had it?
Lightning flashed just then, emphasizing the glint in the guy's dark eyes.
Widening her stance a little, she gripped the tire iron and waited.
“Hey,” he said, eyeballing Reeve and the metal with a healthy respect. He had a drawling voice, husky and deep, and it wasn’t hard to imagine him singing in a blues band. When he wasn’t bludgeoning helpless young women to death by the side of the road, that is. “You're not going to hit me with that thing, are you?”
She shrugged. “Depends.”
One dark brow headed north. “On?”
“On whether you make any funny moves or not.”
His lips pressed together. Crouching, he examined the flatter-than-a-pancake tire and stood again, looking grim. “Suspicious, much?”
“Yeah. Much.”
“Well, I stopped to help. I'm not a murderer.”
She frowned at him, torn between wanting to believe him and a double dose of caution.
“Do I look like a murderer?” he asked when it took her too long to respond.
She pointed out the obvious. “What you look like and what you are could be two different things.”
The edge of his mouth curled. “Are you going to give me the tire iron so I can get started, or not?”
“No, thanks. I can handle it,” she said, motivated by an irritating combination of lingering caution and stubborn pride. Why did everyone think she couldn’t handle a simple tire change?
The guy’s gaze swept her up and down, skimming her white tank top, frayed jeans shorts and hot-pink-painted toes in flip-flops. His attention lingered on her bare legs for a beat, after which his jaw tightened. Then he made a skeptical noise she didn’t appreciate.
His gaze flicked back to hers as he studied her face. “You. Can handle it.”
“Yes. But if you'd like to be helpful, please stand guard and make sure none of these speeding maniacs swipe off my butt when I’m bending over.”
“And that would be a real shame.”
“What did you say?” she asked, shocked and not sure she’d heard him right. She and her butt had a troubled history together, probably because it insisted on being way bigger than it should be, even now that she’d shed most of her med school freshman forty, and she wasn’t always a fan of it.
And what kind of Good Samaritan commented on the needy woman’s ass, anyway?
“Nothing.” His expression was bland, but exasperation crept into his voice. “Look. Give me the tire iron so I can work on the lug nuts for you. It's about to rain.”
She glanced up at the sky, which now looked as if it were thinking about spawning a tornado. The wind was a continuous swirl, and the lightning flashes were coming on top of each other. All in all, there was no cause for optimism, but she didn’t let that stop her.
“There’s plenty of time,” she said.
“Yeah, okay. Buh-bye.”
With a dismissive wave over his shoulder, he stalked back to the BMW and leaned against the safer passenger side, crossing his arms and ankles the way she’d done a few minutes ago. She thought she heard him murmur something like Unbelievable as he went, but it could just as easily have been Idiot.
In a classic example of poor timing, the first cold sprinkles began to fall.
“Really, God?” Reeve asked the sky.
More sprinkles. Harder sprinkles.
Galvanized and muttering, she stooped and went to work loosening the lug nuts with the tire iron, which was difficult given their ancient condition and the guy’s unwavering attention.
Uncomfortable with an audience, she decided to ignore him.
Tried to ignore him, anyway, but his watchful gaze was like a warm finger pressed to her nape.
The lug nuts, meanwhile, were rusted into permanent place and refused to budge, no matter how she struggled with the tire iron. Increasing frustration made her lose her head and wrench at the thing, and that, naturally, made her overcompensate and lose her balance. She toppled out of her squat and landed, flat on her butt, on the damp pavement.
A soft noise that sounded suspiciously like a snicker came from his direction.
“Don't let me keep you,” she called, risking a glance at him. “I’m sure I’ll be fine. My friend’s coming soon, anyway.”
He had his head bent low and was tapping on his phone, probably texting someone, and didn’t bother looking at her. “The thing is,” he said, “I don't think it's a good idea to leave a woman, even a stubborn to the point of foolish woman like you—”
She made an involuntary sound of outrage.
“—alone by the side of the road in the rain. Because then you’d be in trouble if any real murderers showed up, and I'd feel bad when hikers discovered your dismembered body in the undergrowth come fall. How're you coming with those lug nuts?”
He had to see that they weren’t moving despite her increasingly desperate attempts to turn them, so he was just having fun needling her, the jackass.
Pride―yeah, you could add pride to her list of shortcomings, right next to stubbornness and impatience—made her lie.
“I'm coming along great.”
“Great. Really?”
“Yeah,” she said through gritted teeth. “Really.”
Her divine punishment for this tiny falsehood came quick and harsh. With another flash of lightning, the skies opened up, pelting her with raindrops the size of water balloons and the temperature of ice cubes. Dropping the metal, she scurried to put her belongings back in the trunk before they got soaked.
“Oh, look,” he said in that dry tone she was beginning to hate. For emphasis, he stretched his arms out, palms up. “It's raining. Who could've predicted?”
Slamming the trunk, she hitched up her chin as she walked back to the flat tire and tried not to feel the embarrassed burn in her cheeks. Being the bigger person, she chose not to rise to his bait or dignify his stupid observation with a response.
“I'll be in the car,” he said. “Where it's dry. Holler if you need me.”
With that, he climbed back inside his luxury-mobile and the door swung shut with the quiet ease of a well-made car.
She picked up the tire iron with no real enthusiasm. By now, her back, thighs and fingers were aching from effort. Her chilled flesh fought the shivers because her clothes were soaked and her body temperature had dropped into the subzero range. Needing a break, she stood for a minute, swiping water out of her dripping hair and eyes, and stared at the BMW, where it was warm and dry and the low thump of music could now be heard. Then she looked at her own loser car.
Stupid Saab.
Cursing, she went back to work on the lug nuts, fueled by the strong desire to prove―to the guy, Sofia and probably to herself—that she wasn’t
some helpless female who needed rescuing, someone with book smarts but no common sense or basic life skills. She was a grown and capable twenty-six-year-old woman. Back in the day, she’d already have five or six kids by now, cows to milk, a house to run and fields of cotton or corn or some such to grow. She would not disgrace her ancestors by failing to change a lousy tire.
Menial labor is not your strong suit, Princess. Adam had always teased her about that.
Shut up, Adam, she told the voice in her head.
Five minutes later, though, she came to one inescapable conclusion: she couldn’t change that lousy tire and therefore needed rescuing. There was no more room for denial.
Dejected and knowing she’d have to eat some serious crow, she trudged through the rain, which was now falling sideways, straight into her face, and squishing between her bare toes in their flip-flops.
Thoroughly drenched, she reached the driver's side door of the BMW. The guy sat inside on the tan leather seat, reading a book. Though he had to see her out of his peripheral vision, he didn’t glance up.
Forcing her to knock.
It took two or three more beats for him to finish his paragraph and lower the book. Meanwhile, she stood there like an idiot, soaked and seething. Then he took his time about lowering the automatic window just enough for her to see the quiet gleam of triumph in his dark eyes. The silky voice of Ella Fitzgerald drifted from the high-end speakers and over the rain.
“‘Let’s Do It,’ eh?” she asked. “Good choice. And I love everything she did with Louis Armstrong. Don't you? Lately I’ve been getting into Sarah Vaughan. She’s got a version of ‘Let’s Do It,’ too.”
His eyes widened, but he recovered quickly and gave her an indifferent stare that made her think he was probably amazing at poker.
“Yes…?” he asked.
“Ah,” she began.
He waited, like there could be some puzzle about what she needed. As though he wanted to make sure she didn't pop by to get his opinions on world hunger and climate change before she continued changing the tire herself.
A Journey's End Page 9
