by Liz Ireland
As they climbed into the truck, Ruby looked grim. “Can you beat that? She was out with my brother and flirting with you!”
“She told me I was scrawny.”
“Oh, puh-lease!” Ruby rolled her eyes. “That’s the oldest trick in the book. The next thing she’d be suggesting is cooking you dinner. Believe me, she was covering all the bases. What nerve!”
“I should carry you around with me as an interpreter of the female language.”
“You obviously need one.”
“Or you could offer your services to Berlitz.”
“I think she’s all wrong for you.”
“Who would be better?”
Ruby steeled her glittery gaze out the window. “I’ll let you know when I find her.”
IT WAS NO SURPRISE to Ruby when they just happened to bump into Buck and Farley at the movies. Nor was she the least bit taken aback when her two siblings, claiming not to want to sit with them and spoil their fun, chose seats exactly two rows behind them. Farley rattled his Reese’s Pieces every time Ruby or Cody shifted toward one another, and since it was a long, dull movie, there was a lot of shifting and rattling.
Her only surprise was that Cody was shocked to see her brothers there. Some folks were slow learners, she guessed.
“Where’s Bill going to turn up, in the parking lot?” he whispered as the final credits rolled.
Reese’s Pieces tumbled loudly in their cardboard box.
Ruby shook her head. “No, he’ll be waiting for us back at the house. Just as we walk up the porch steps and start to linger, he’ll throw open the front door and exclaim, ‘Oh, it’s you! I thought I heard a noise!’ And then there will be no getting rid of him. But it won’t matter, because Buck and Farley will follow us home, and when we get there they’ll hijack you from me, claiming to want to talk to you about some burning issue of the day, like how your chickens are doing.”
“You could be a fortune-teller.”
“Mysticism has nothing to do with it. It’s pure science. I call it the Treadwell Method for Keeping Ruby in Perpetual Virginity.”
He laughed, and at just that minute, she had an overwhelming desire to kiss him. Well, correction. She’d had an overwhelming desire to kiss him for about three weeks, but right this second, she felt she was within a stone’s throw of being her own genie and making her dream come true.
“Cody?” She touched his arm. “Let’s do it!”
Behind them, someone dropped his candy box.
Cody looked startled. “Listen, I know you’re worried about your virginity and all—”
“No, not that!” She let out an impatient breath. “I only meant, let’s shake them.”
“What?”
“You must know the territory better than anybody,” Ruby whispered enthusiastically. “For once, let’s lose these brothers of mine and let them think we’ve gone wild.”
Cody’s blue eyes locked onto her, and she had to keep her lip from trembling with nerves. Fact was, she wouldn’t mind going wild with Cody one bit. He was quite a specimen of a male, she decided, and if she ran across him in New Orleans or San Francisco or any one of the exciting places she hoped to hit, there was no doubt in her mind that she’d go for him in a big way. Naturally she didn’t want to tell him that because he was so skittish and probably feeling low after having sighted Leila out with another man.
Leila! she thought disgustedly. Any woman who would pretend to enjoy watching wrestling with Lucian on a Friday night needed to have her head examined. Ruby didn’t trust her for a minute, and she didn’t trust her not to turn her sights on Cody next. That would be a disaster!
“I don’t know…” Cody said, hesitating.
“It would be fun!” she said. “I’ll drive. That way if my brothers catch us and want to kill you, I can tell them I hijacked the car.”
He laughed. “You forget one problem. How are we going to lose them when they’re ten feet away?”
“The bathroom trick,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Something I’ve dreamed of but never tried. I’ll go to the ladies’ room, and while Buck and Farley are loitering around the lobby, playing pinball and pretending not to be following us, you sneak out and get the car and take it to the emergency exit for this screening room. I’ll pretend I left my purse under the seat and sneak back through here and voila`! We escape!”
He shook his head. “This is what you dream about in your free time?”
She shot him a withering stare. “Yeah, well, maybe if I were into beekeeping I’d use my time more wisely.”
“Touché.”
She wriggled impatiently. “Will you do it?”
He looked toward the ceiling as if seeking guidance. “Why do I have the feeling I’ll regret this?”
She laughed. “You won’t. I promise, Cody Tucker, this will be the best night of your life!”
6
THE MOST TERRIFYING NIGHT of his life, she should have said.
Ruby at the wheel of his truck careened down small rutted country roads as if she were hugging the track at the Indianapolis Speedway. Hairpin mountain curves barely slowed her down. They flew—if you could call the jolting, bouncing roller-coaster of a ride something so graceful as flying. Gravel sprayed angrily against the vehicle’s underbelly, creating a firecracker racket that set Cody’s teeth on edge. He gripped the armrests with white knuckles as the dark scenery skimmed past his window. He didn’t dare glance at the dashboard to see how fast they were going.
“I think we’re losing them!” she said excitedly.
Cody gritted his teeth. “We lost them twenty miles ago.”
“Can’t be too careful.”
“Is careful even in your vocabulary?”
She laughed. “Okay, I’ll give it a rest.”
Speed Racer’s foot hit the brake, churning up more gravel but slowing the truck to a wonderfully poky crawl. Cody felt like kissing the speedometer. The relief he experienced must have been akin to that of the Apollo astronauts when their reentry capsule bobbed safely in the ocean. “Just pull over and I’ll drive.”
She glanced at him, brows knit. “Say, you look kind of jittery. Think you had too many Jordan almonds at the movies?”
“I don’t think it’s the almonds making me jittery.”
She began to pull over. “I’d better douse the lights, in case my brothers are somewhere below.”
Cody leaned forward, a warning on the tip of his tongue, but it was already too late. In the inky darkness, the truck lurched and dived. Ruby let out a yelp and, in the heat of the moment, Cody reached out to grab either her or the wheel or both. For a second he was fairly certain they were dropping right off the mountain.
But in the next moment the truck hit earth, woppy-jawed, so that Ruby was practically in his lap and both of them were a lot more friendly with the dashboard than heretofore.
Ruby gasped. “Where did that ditch come from?”
Cody laughed. “I don’t know, but if it weren’t for that ditch we might have taken the express elevator down the mountain.”
“Oh, Cody!” She moaned. “I’m so sorry. I hope your truck’s okay.”
“I’m just glad we’re okay.” He frowned, lifting her chin and inspecting her face in the scant light. “You are okay, aren’t you?”
She certainly smelled okay, a delicious combination of perfume and barbecue.
She looked worried. “I won’t be if I’ve done any damage to the truck.”
“How bad could it be? We were only going three miles an hour.”
Carefully, they undid their seat belts, pushed themselves upright and slid out the passenger side door. There was only a sliver of a moon in the sky, so it was hard to tell the condition of the truck, or if there was any damage.
Ruby snapped her fingers. “I know, the first-aid kit!”
Thankfully, it was still nestled in the truck bed. She opened the big box and started rummaging through its contents, tossing aside blanket
s and canned goods. Finally, she came across the flashlight and handed it to Cody.
The truck didn’t appear to have a scratch, but other than that the news wasn’t good. The vehicle had landed crookedly and wedged itself into a wet culvert. One wheel wasn’t even touching ground.
Ruby put her hands on her hips. “All we have to do is give it a few pushes and we’ll be up and running again.”
Cody smiled, remembering Ruby’s expertise with automobiles. “I guess I capsized my truck with the right person.”
“Without me you never would have had this wreck,” she reminded him.
“True, but you’re a lot more pragmatic about cars than your love life,” he observed.
That brought a laugh. “One’s fixable, the other isn’t.”
Maybe she was right. At least, this latest attempt at fixing her love life wasn’t working out so well.
They immediately set to work, but a half hour of grunting and shoving and spinning their wheels indicated that they were in a stickier wicket than they had guessed.
“Where are we?” Ruby asked, rubbing her brow with the back of her hand as she eyeballed the countryside. His eyes were accustomed to the darkness enough to make out a greasy smudge on her nose.
Cody laughed. “I thought you knew!”
She blinked. “We’re somewhere near the ridge, aren’t we?”
“I hope so.” Heartbreak Ridge was a bluff some five mountainous miles above the town of Heartbreak Ridge. His brother lived on Heartbreak Ridge in an old cabin. “I might be able to find Cal’s house.”
Ruby’s face brightened, then she frowned. “Correction. We might be able to find Cal’s house.”
Her nervous tone surprised him. “Are you afraid of the dark?”
“Not the dark. But the dark and mountain lions is a combination I don’t relish.”
“Mountain lions are rarer than icebergs around here.”
“It doesn’t matter to me if there’s only one in the whole state,” she said. “I don’t want to be his midnight snack.”
He laughed and reached into the truck bed for the box.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking the first-aid kit.” However much of it he could carry. He heaved a bottle of water out of the box to lighten the load.
She frowned. “Are you expecting to spend the night in these woods?”
“No, but this way if we run across one of those mountain lions you’re so afraid of, maybe instead of eating us he’ll settle for a can of beenie weenies.”
RUBY WAS FREEZING COLD and her feet hurt like all heck, but she was hesitant to stop their progress—if you could call trudging around a mountaintop in a circle for hours on end progress. At least it seemed like hours to her. Since she wasn’t wearing a watch, she was reduced to judging the passage of time by nature. For instance, she estimated that her teeth clocked in at ten chatters per second, and her big toe was ticking away the hours at about twenty throbs per minute.
“Cody, what time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “About one. Why don’t we take a rest?”
“You wouldn’t have to talk me into it.” She dropped in her tracks and lay on the ground as if there were a feather bed beneath her instead of grass, leaves and twigs.
Cody put down the box and plopped next to her with a sigh. He rooted through the first-aid kit and came up with two blankets, a big plastic jug of water and a flare.
“Are you going to set that thing off?” she asked, pointing to the flare.
He nodded.
“So you really think we’re lost.”
He laughed. “What did you think we were doing, taking a midnight constitutional?”
She shook her head ruefully. “No, I figured we’d wandered off the range, so to speak.”
The flare shot into the air almost like a Roman candle. For a moment the world was brighter, and as Cody settled next to her, she could see his face clearly. He was a dazzler in the simulated starlight, his chiseled jaw and straight nose perfectly proportioned to his blue eyes and extremely kissable lips.
Realizing the disturbing direction her thoughts were taking, she forced herself to look at the sky. “Do you think anybody saw the flare?”
“Maybe,” he said, hardly brimming with optimism. Then he handed her a jug of water. While she sat up enough to slug down some liquid, he tucked the blanket around her shoulders tenderly.
“I’m sorry, Ruby.”
His touch aroused her most intense feminine interests—and astonished her. All during their silly date, she remembered, she’d kept wondering, foolishly, if he intended to kiss her. After hours in the wilderness, when she was so tired she felt she’d burned all the fuel in her tank, those reckless musings sprang to life again. “You’re sorry?” She laughed. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. I got us into this predicament!”
He shook his head. “I thought I could find my brother’s house, but I not only didn’t find it, I also managed to lose the road.”
“It’s my fault. I was the one who drove us so far out into the hinterlands.”
He took a long draw on the water, and Ruby couldn’t force herself to look away from him, his head tipped, a droplet of cool liquid spilling down his chin, his Adams’s apple bobbing. She shivered and glanced away. “I’m the one who’s behaved like a fool.” And if she kept lusting after Cody, by the end of the evening she might earn her cap and bells.
“No, you haven’t.”
“I don’t mean just about getting the pickup stuck,” she admitted, although that should have been embarrassing enough. “My foolishness goes way back. All the while you were at the restaurant gawking at Leila—”
“I was not gawking.”
She harrumphed. “All the while you were casually looking at Leila with adoration in your eyes, I was burning with envy.”
She’d obviously stunned him speechless.
“I don’t know what it is—my competitive nature, I guess. Maybe I just didn’t want anyone to have what I had, even if I only had you out of a sort of practical arrangement.” She shrugged and grudgingly added, “So I sort of bad-mouthed Leila. But I suppose she’s all right.”
When she dared to cast a glance at him, Cody smiled at her. “Then I hope she and your brother will be very happy.”
She couldn’t believe her ears. “You mean it?”
He shrugged. “Going out with Leila was probably not a practical idea.”
She didn’t know why that news made her feel so jubilant, and she was fairly certain it shouldn’t have. She wiped the joyful grin off her face and burrowed deeper into her blanket. Whether Cody was footloose and fancy-free wouldn’t matter one whit to her once she’d shaken Heartbreak Ridge off her feet.
“Are you cold?”
She shook her head, but as she took in a breath, her teeth chattered.
He laughed. “I guess that was a definite maybe.” Scooting over until their bodies were touching, he draped his blanket over both of them, shawl-style.
More than the added covering, the heat from his body warmed her. In fact, the minute they touched, the temperature under that shared blanket of theirs probably shot up about thirty degrees. Her teeth stopped chattering. Her aching feet were history. And although she was fairly certain Cody was just saying all that about not really caring for Leila to make her feel better, her thoughts roamed to kissing him. At this moment, she’d take the warmth of his lips over a potbellied stove—and that was saying a lot!
“Maybe I should make a fire.”
Or, in a twist on the old Boy Scout routine, if they rubbed themselves together, they might work up some combustion. “Do you think we’re going to be here that long?”
Two implications struck her. First, Cody must think they were very, very lost. More interestingly, he obviously didn’t find the idea of staying in her company too terrible if he was ready to spend the night with her.
“Well, we’ve got the equipment.”
No kidding. Her equipment was c
ertainly revving up for a wild overnight experience. Her throat felt bone dry, and she cleared it with effort. “But what about my brothers? They’ll be frantic.”
He grinned. “Isn’t that the point?”
She sucked in her breath as it occurred to her what her brothers would think, which was precisely what she had immediately thought when Cody proposed tucking themselves in for the evening. She’d immediately started fantasizing about herself and Cody frolicking under the woolly blankets.
Oh, dear.
“We’re supposed to make them want to loosen the reins, not strangle you with them, which they just might do if we tromp home in the morning talking about getting the truck stuck in a ditch.”
He laughed, and the rumbling from his chest sent a shiver through her. She’d never noticed before, but Cody had a very sexy laugh: it was just like his voice, deep and resonant.
“You won’t be laughing tomorrow,” she warned.
“But just think, Ruby. If they assumed that the worst had happened, and that you…” He shifted uncomfortably beneath their blanket. “Well, you know…”
“Lost my virginity?”
He squinted at her. “If you ever did lose your virginity, what the heck would we talk about?”
She gave him a playful dig in the ribs. “Don’t get sidetracked. You were talking about my brothers.”
“Right. Maybe you should let them think the worst. Maybe your trouble is you haven’t really gone far enough in scandalizing them.”
The logic of his words registered. “So you think if my brothers knew I wasn’t so squeaky clean and innocent, they might just toss up their hands and leave me alone?”
“Precisely.”
“So instead of being a general screwup all these years, I really should have been a tramp.”
“Well, in a manner of speaking…”
“And you’d be willing to risk your reputation to soil mine?” she asked admiringly.
He chuckled, setting off that rumbling again. “I guess there’s still a pretty good double standard going. Your downfall could only enhance my reputation.”
She tilted her head, studying him. Was he really willing to run the gauntlet of jeers he’d receive in places like the Feed Bag just to help her? She couldn’t think why, unless… “Word would surely get back to Leila.”
