His truck door popped open, and when he unfolded out of his seat, to his full height, I swallowed heavily. Captain America was easily six-five, and as broad as a tree trunk. Bearded though he was, his hair was immaculate, same as his truck, which gleamed like it'd been freshly waxed.
His thick legs were covered in dark denim, and the simple white T-shirt stretched over his broad chest was as blinding as his poster boy grin.
"I'm Tucker, pleasure to meet you." He held out his hand and I narrowed my eyes at that too.
A bitchy-faced alien had taken over my body because every part of me was responding without a single conscious thought on my end.
I’d never narrowed my eyes this frequently in my entire friggin’ life.
"Uh-huh. Can I borrow your phone, please?"
With a rueful grin, he pulled his hand back. "You can try to get through to your aunt," he said, pulling his phone from his front pocket, "but pretty as this stretch is, it doesn't get much in the way of service, no matter which carrier you have."
"Great," I mumbled, pulling up Aunt Fran's number on my phone so I could dial it into his. While I did that, he ambled over to the opened hood of my car and braced his arms in the same way I had.
Except I didn't have bulging forearm muscles or veins that popped.
Not that I was looking.
I screwed my lips up when his phone wouldn't connect the call either, finally punching the red button on his screen a little bit harder than I needed to.
The way my body was reacting to his presence could only be described as weird. Really, really weird.
Have you played with magnets? You flip one of them the wrong way, and they instantly repel each other. No matter what you do, you’ll never get them to snap in place.
There’s a force field between those incorrectly flipped magnets—invisible and impenetrable—that you’ll never be able to overcome with your mind.
I wanted to take a step closer, see what he was looking at in my car, and try to start over.
But my body wouldn’t. A steel wall between us couldn’t have been more effective, because when my brain screamed at my feet to move, at my tongue to say something nicer, sweeter, with a bucket-load more gratitude, I couldn’t do any of those things.
The signals being sent to my hands and arms and feet and facial expressions was an all caps command that WE DO NOT LIKE THIS PERSON.
Maybe this was a really extreme case of hangry. I rubbed my forehead and tried to remember the last time I ate. Was the apple an hour ago? Or two?
Was I hallucinating this entire exchange? Because that would be a loss of sanity I could accept.
"Where's your aunt from?" he asked, eyes down while his large hand checked a few knobs or belts or whatever.
I held my snort at his question, because this was the south. In California, we went out of our way not to ask stranger's questions for fear that they might engage us in conversation.
"Can you see what's wrong?" I asked in lieu of an answer.
He wasn't fooled, judging by the way his cheeks lifted, as if he was smiling.
"Not yet." He glanced up, eyes dark, dark brown in his face. "Might be your alternator, or your distributor sensor, if it just died while you were driving."
"Dead as a fucking doornail," I muttered, resisting the urge to kick the back tire of my car.
He whistled softly.
"What? Did you find what's wrong?"
"No, ma'am, just don't usually hear a woman curse like that in front of a stranger."
"Yeah well, I'm not from around here, if you hadn't fucking noticed," I said. "I curse in front of whoever I damn well please."
Oh
My
Good
Lord
what was wrong with me?
"Good for you," he said, completely unruffled. He stood and crossed his arms over his chest and let his eyes roam my face, unhurried and without any attempt to hide his curiosity.
Why didn’t he say anything else? Why was he hanging out in front of my car like he had nowhere better to be?
"Yeah, it is good for me," I said, marching closer to him, barely stopping my finger from poking him in that chest of his. "Do you even know what year it is? If I want to drink, or swear, or screw someone I just met, that's my prerogative, and I don't need some southern asshole judging me for it. You don't know me, buddy, so back off."
Just once, oh-so-briefly, his eyes flashed hot and his hard jaw tightened when I said screw someone I just met. In the space of one breath, I got a sweaty, tangled, moan-inducing vision of him and I in the front of his truck, clothes barely removed, me sprawled across the bench and him hovering above me, braced up by his massive arms as he moved between my legs.
Which would've been an awesome mental image, if I didn't hate him with every annoyed, hangry, exhausted cell in my body.
Yes, I liked the idea of hallucinating, the more I thought about it. A heat-induced mental breakdown. I’d take any sort of explanation, because even as I heard the words come out of my mouth, I desperately wanted to stop them, but I couldn’t.
Like a child might if they started spilling a jar of tiny beads, I wished I could slap my fingers across my mouth and hold all the individual letters forming each individual word and keep them in where they were safe and couldn’t make a horrible mess.
"Lemme guess," he drawled, "you're either from New York or LA"
Beads. Beads were flying everywhere as the jar tipped past the point of no return.
"Bite me. Women like me live all over this country, maybe not in Green Valley, Tennessee, but just about everywhere else."
He scratched the side of his jaw as he watched me. "Oh, I'm sure we've got 'em here too, Angry Girl."
My chin jerked up. "That is not my name."
"I wouldn't know, now would I? You chose not to tell me." He tsked. "Not very friendly of you, if you ask me."
"I didn't ask you," I snapped. I rolled my lips between my teeth, because honestly, I was ready to slap myself across the face. “S-sorry,” I forced the words out, even though it physically hurt my jaw to do so. “I’m a little … hungry. I haven’t eaten in a while.”
A nightmare, I thought desperately. Let this be a nightmare.
But no, even in my nightmares, I wouldn't have conjured this. So maybe I wasn't little miss sunshine with everyone, but my mother would rip my ear off if she could hear me speak to a stranger the way I was speaking to him.
But … I couldn't stop.
Why couldn’t I stop?
On the verge of absolute hysteria, I thought about what I’d said to my dad, about a man falling prostrate before me as soon as I got into town.
Instead, here I was, channeling every hidden psychotic shred of my DNA into this one entirely innocent person who had the terrible misfortune of being the first one to find me on the side of the road.
He walked toward his truck, only pausing to hold out his hand for his cell phone, which I slapped down onto his palm. Inexplicably, it made him grin.
"You're heading to Green Valley then?" he asked, opening the driver's side door of his truck and leaning against the frame.
I slicked my tongue over my teeth, cursing that little slip. "Why do you need to know?"
"So suspicious," he mused. "I'm heading that way myself, since that's where I live. If that's your destination, I can give you a lift into town. Drop you wherever you need to go."
I eyed his truck, then his carefully smooth facial expression. It was like he knew the emotional tightrope I was walking.
He didn’t know the half of it.
"You could walk, if you wanted to," he said, "but it's about a twenty-minute drive, so you'd be good and tired by the time you got there. Your stomach would probably be crawling out of your own body to find some food, if you think you’re hungry now.”
I cocked my head. "You know, Ted Bundy would've used the same logic on someone like me."
With the patience of a saint, he reached into his pocket, fished out his
wallet and then leaned forward to hand me his driver's license.
"Go ahead," he said. "Snap a pic, send it to your aunt, it'll go through eventually, and even if it doesn't whoever finds your hypothetical body will have a record that you were with me."
I scoffed. "Sure, until you steal my cell phone and delete the outgoing text while it's sending."
But did I snap a picture? Sure as shit did.
Tucker Ames Haywood, age twenty-six, from Green Valley, Tennessee.
Huh. Exactly the same age as I was. Actually, our birthdays were two days apart.
I ignored his expression when I handed his license back, pivoting quickly to yank the keys out of the ignition, grab my laptop bag, my camera, and purse from the floor of the passenger seat, slam the hood of the car down, and then lock the doors. I hit the lock button again, waiting for the reassuring beep of the horn to let me know it was secured.
I lifted my chin and walked to the passenger side of the truck, keeping my eyes forward while I hooked the seatbelt. The truck smelled like him, clean and masculine, and I vaguely wondered if I could make it the entire drive to Green Valley without inhaling a single time.
"Where we headed?" he asked, turning the key and sliding his sunglasses back onto his face.
For some reason, I felt better when his eyes were covered. Like my body could relax, just a little bit.
I rattled off my aunt's address.
A smile broke over that face again. "Fran and Robert's place? Francine Buchanan is your aunt?"
I turned and eyed him. "Why?"
"I work with your uncle from time to time." That stupid smile widened. "I was just there for dinner a couple nights ago."
My jaw dropped somewhere around the vicinity of my ankles.
"Careful there, Angry Girl, wouldn't want to catch any flies with that mouth open."
When I snapped it shut, he chuckled, low and slow, the sound catching on his southern accent in a way that I did not appreciate.
Tucker Ames Haywood hooked a wrist over the top of the steering wheel as he started in the direction of town.
I already kinda hated Green Valley.
Chapter 2
Tucker
About a year back, I had to deliver a stray cat back to its owner in Maryville. Someone found it sitting on the base of the tree in front of work, and I was volunteered by my father to bring it back to its distraught owner.
It was a Red Ragdoll named Angel, with a beautiful coat of golden hair, and greenish hazel eyes that looked straight into my soul. That's what it'd felt like, at least, when I tried to pet Angel, reaching out carefully where he sat regally in the passenger seat of my truck. His eyes watched me warily as my hand made slow, steady progress in his direction.
Right before the tips of my fingers stroked the top of his head, I saw them narrow ominously. His lips drew back in a snarl, the white tips of his teeth shining in his mouth. That cat hissed something fierce, but it wasn't until he took a swipe of my hand and drew blood, that I knew I was better off keeping my hands to myself while as I got him back to his home.
As I navigated my truck back to Green Valley, my newest reluctant passenger might've been of the human variety, but she'd taken a hit at me nonetheless. And as she currently sat, long legs tucked up against her chest and her eyes trained straight ahead on the tree-lined roads that would lead us into town, I got a vivid flashback of Angel the cat.
Miss Big City, with her heavy black combat boots and short shorts, had the same color hair, golden and wild, as the cat did. Same color eyes too, I thought with an amused smile, thinking about how she'd swatted and hissed in much the same way as the forgotten feline.
I’d done road trips before, and I remember that edgy frustration of being trapped in a small space for too long. But not once could I remember snapping at the first person I saw.
I eased my foot off the gas when a combine harvester appeared in front of us over the slope of a hill and brought our forward progress to about twenty miles an hour.
There was a heavy, irritated sigh from the person next to me, who probably wasn't used to farmers taking up road space. I waited for a black Chevy to pass in the opposite direction before I pulled around the harvester, and something unfamiliar rose up inside me, the insane desire to see what would happen if I tugged on her tail, so to speak.
“Frank,” I yelled as I slowed my truck to match his speed. My passenger gaped at me, when I leaned forward to see the farmer in the cab. He lifted a hand.
“Tucker, what’s the word?” he yelled over the rumble of the engine.
“Your wife feeling better?”
He nodded. “Much, thank you. Tell your momma thank you for the soup she brought over.”
My passenger pinched the bridge of her nose and took a few deep breaths.
“Will do. See you later.”
I pressed down on the gas and pulled in front of him, trying incredibly hard to keep the grin off my face when I noticed her foot jittering impatiently.
"Where you driving from?" I asked, risking a small sideways glance at her profile.
Her lips rolled inward, like she was trying to keep words stuffed inside. All it did, quite inexplicably, was make my smile stretch even wider. I'd never met anyone like this, so tightly wound, claws out like a weapon. And I'd definitely never met anyone who, apparently, hated me on sight. Made for quite a quiet truck, and yet, I couldn't dig up a shred of dislike for her.
Nothing about this made a single lick of sense.
"Thought you already had me pegged," she said under her breath, like the words came out against her will. "Foul-mouthed woman from New York or LA, right?"
I shrugged, making careful, deliberate movements given that her claws were sheathed enough that she was willing to speak to me. "I can manage some pretty terrible language when I've had a bad day too. I've got no plans to hold that against you."
"Gee thanks."
I'd tasted pickles less sour than she sounded.
I felt those golden-green eyes hit the side of my face like she'd punched me, and I shifted in my seat from the force of them.
"What's so funny?" she asked, turning slightly in my direction.
I sighed and gave her another quick look, even though she couldn't see my eyes from behind my sunglasses.
"Honest answer?"
Her full lips pursed tightly, and I knew that any amusement was mine and mine alone. I'd take that as a yes.
"Well, Angry Girl, I've never met someone who's just hated me right off the bat like you seem to. It's making me a bit curious about you is all."
"That nickname certainly doesn't help me feel gracious," she said in a deceptively sweet voice that had me chuckling.
"Fair enough." I flipped on my blinker and waited for a trailer to pass before I made the last turn toward town. I lifted my hand in greeting when the driver passed us. "But you've gotta admit that it's hard for me to call you something else when you won't tell me your name."
That made her lips pinch shut again.
Something about this girl had the back of my brain twitching and jumping. And that interest caused a whole different level of discomfort. I was in no place to be interested in anyone.
"It's fine," I said casually. "I'll figure it out eventually."
She snorted while she reached up and yanked her hair down from the knot it'd been twisted up into. Yeah, she reminded me a lot of Angel, all right. There was something feline about Angry Girl, in the way she arched her neck as she attempted something a bit neater and more contained with all that hair. The way her eyes tilted and took everything in, at her own pace and only when she deemed it necessary. Like the world was simply there, waiting patiently for her to take notice.
"Small town perks, eh?" she said.
"Oh, that's one on a long list. Like picking up stranded strangers without a second thought, bringing them where they need to go without expecting anything in return." I gave her a meaningful look.
I saw it, quick and then gone, the tiniest
start of a smile. Then she glared again, like she suddenly remembered that I was public enemy number one.
Remembering something I’d shoved in my glove box, I murmured an “Excuse my reach,” and flipped it down.
I heard her suck in air at the sight of the granola bar as I grabbed it.
Her mouth hung open as I snapped the compartment shut. But instead of handing it to her, I lifted the probably-stale, older-than-I-wanted-to-eat snack up to my mouth.
With my teeth, I ripped open the side of the wrapper and took a giant bite. Her mouth fell open even farther as I chewed.
Maybe I’d lost my mind, but the way she stared daggers at me, chewing away at that oat and raisin granola bar that I wasn’t all that hungry for, was the most fun I’d had in a while.
“Oh,” I said around the last bite, then swallowed, and slid my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose so she could see my eyes, “where are my manners. You didn’t want that, did you?”
Angry Girl rubbed a hand over her mouth, like it could help her keep whatever foul words were stamped clear as day across her pretty face.
I swallowed a laugh.
We drove through downtown Green Valley, a stretch of road I knew by heart, lined with small shops and brick buildings, waving to a few people as we did. On the corner, waiting to cross the street, Scotia Simmons peered into the cab of my truck with narrowed eyes, and I grimaced.
All I could do was pray her cell phone battery was dead so that the news of my unfamiliar passenger wouldn't reach too many ears in the next hour. If it did, I'd hear about it from more than one person in my life, that was for sure. In fact, by the time I dropped her off at Fran and Robert’s, I'd bet my phone would already be ringing.
First from Magnolia, second only to my father, if there was anyone to beat her to it.
We drove the rest of the way to the Buchanan's place in silence, and I noticed the way she started fiddling with her fingers after she dropped her combat boot-clad feet down onto the floor. It was the first flinch of nerves I'd seen out of her, and that ratcheted my interest another notch or two.
Batter of Wits: An Enemies to Lovers Small Town Romance (Donner Bakery Book 5) Page 2
