Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Rachel
“Why are you suddenly so red?” she asked, peering down at him. “Whatever it is, it must be bad, because you have so much hair and such a thick beard, it’s hard to see around it, but you just turned the same color as your red flannel.”
“I’m fine. Just, you know, exertion.”
Kell’s eyes shifted away from direct contact.
Instantly alert, pride being stripped away with each degree the air dropped, she felt every layer of restraint and control being stolen away, all under the watchful eye of a man who still didn’t believe her.
Plus, her bladder was screaming.
His comment about her working for Big Oil with Alissa stung like hell.
And made her need to put as much distance between herself and Kell Luview as she possibly could, as fast as she could.
“You can drive,” she conceded, gesturing toward the truck.
He averted his eyes again.
“Yep.” He sighed and lifted their joined hands. “You think this through?”
“Think what through? I want to get to the ER. Let’s do it.”
“You think for a minute about how we have to do it. Do the mental geometry.”
“Geometry? What does geometry have to do with this? It’s a truck. You climb in, turn the key, and drive.” Throwing a bit of his own sarcasm right back felt good.
Sort of.
“I mean the logistics of how to drive when our hands are stuck to this.” He pointed to the hose.
“What?”
“I see I have to paint a picture for you.” Kell pulled his left hand, the one attached to her right hand, and gently tugged her until they were standing behind the truck.
Positioning their bodies, he aligned her behind the driver’s seat, and himself behind the passenger’s seat. Their arms stretched between them.
“I told you I can’t drive a stick!”
“Right. So, Rachel, how do we need to move our bodies to get in the truck and make it into town?”
“You just–” She moved to change places with him and instantly saw what he was alluding to. If they turned around, he was facing away from the dashboard, and you can’t drive a car that way.
If he was in the driver’s seat, she could be in one of two places:
In the road, with the driver’s door or window open, or…
In his lap, facing him.
“Oh, no!” she groaned. “This just went from bad to way worse.”
“Hmph.”
“I cannot believe this. I didn’t want to work on this project. At all. Not one little bit. But my boss said the connections I had to Luview via my mother and her stupid little reality show were going to help me. And you!”
“What about me?”
“You weren’t supposed to be here!”
“I’m from here, Rachel. If anyone’s out of place, it’s you.”
“But you loved living in D.C.! You said you never wanted to move back. You were a city guy, converted to urban life. My mom said she never saw you when she worked on her show here! I assumed you were in L.A. or Chicago or some other big city!”
“Assumed, or hoped?”
“Does it matter?”
“People change.”
A plume of pure rage warmed her, making her bladder ache even more.
“You know,” Rachel said, struggling to control her voice, looking down at the state route below them, “we could flag down a car. I’m sure plenty will drive by. Or you could call a friend to come get us and we can ride in the back seat!”
She didn’t mean to sound so cheery at the end, but the idea suddenly came to her and it was a relief, compared to the alternative.
He huffed. “I don’t have magic cell service any more than you do, Rachel.”
“Don’t you have a CB?”
“A what?”
“You know.” She waved toward his truck dashboard with her free hand. “The kind truckers use. From before cell phones.”
“You think I have some super-secret lumberjack forest radio I can use to call for a rescue when some city girl glues herself to me?”
“That’s not what I said, and you know it.”
“Do you purse your lips and whistle to get the woodland creatures to clean your apartment for you in L.A.?”
“Stop it.”
A buzz shot through her, one she detested, her bladder ready to secede, but it wasn’t just the tension between them or his cutting, sarcastic remarks that made her feel bad.
It was that Kell really had changed.
One of the most refreshing parts of their friendship in D.C.
had been his nonjudgmental kindness. Never a pushover, Kell had a way of being a strong man without needing to use negativity to reinforce it.
And unlike at home, she never felt like she had to prove herself around him.
Never felt cut down, sized up, or on edge.
Five years had changed her, for sure, especially after what happened at EEC, but it appeared to have fundamentally altered Kell’s personality.
The man standing before her was an entirely different human being, and that filled her with a sick, bitter feeling that was quickly turning into tears, because she really, really missed the old Kell.
No.
No.
She was not going to let Kell make her cry.
Rachel wasn’t twenty-three anymore, duped by Alissa and in way over her head in a cutthroat environment she only saw clearly in hindsight. When she moved on to her MBA program at Stanford, the dynamics she’d experienced at EEC gave her a thick skin and a low tolerance for being a sucker.
After graduation, she’d left environmental concerns behind and taken the most prestigious, ambitious job she could get, with a large international chocolate company.
And now she’d landed here.
In Luview, Maine, staring at a Luview who most definitely didn’t love her.
The silence that stretched between them felt like an eternity, a hollow pull inside that tunneled deep down. Her warm coat wasn’t warm enough. A shiver started again, beginning with her heart.
“There is no way I’m straddling you so we can get into town. We’ll just have to wait it out until a car drives by down there.”
“Best way to do that is to actually go down and wait on Route 33.” He eyed her boots like they were rattlesnakes.
“I tried that and you saw how it turned out.”
“I could carry you down the hill.”
“What if you slipped? We’d slide into traffic like marbles on this ice.”
He peered down the hill. “Might go under the guardrail, too, and hit that gully. It’s a good sixty-foot drop, with rocks.”
“I have sneakers in my luggage. Let me change my shoes and we can go down there.”
“It’s not a well-traveled road, Rachel. I’ve been here with you for the last half hour, and no one’s driven by. There’s a weather advisory, too.”
“Like, snow?”
Booming laughter, coupled with a denigrating headshake, made him seriously feel like a grumpy Paul Bunyan to her.
“‘Like, snow?’” he mimicked. “More like a Nor’easter.”
“I've heard that term, but what does it mean?”
As if on cue, tiny snowflakes began to dot their clothes.
“Means that.” He pointed up. “Those tiny snowflakes are going to turn into very big ones, and that means accumulation. Big storm coming. Predicted to get up to ten inches. Plenty of people are off the road already.”
“Then why are you driving? What made you come up here anyhow?”
“This is an old logging road. I was driving by and saw your car. No one drives up here, ever, but some dumb programmers for a GPS company got the roads wrong and every so often, it tells tourists like you take this route. If your car hadn’t broken down, you’d have gone a good mile in and gotten stuck.
You need a chainsaw and a winch to make it through that road. Even four-wheel drive won’t cut it.”
“Why on earth would GPS not know that?”
“Because algorithms are smarter than people,” he said cynically. “Didn’t you know? The smart thing to do would be to send a human to observe the roads and document it, but I don’t make the rules.” He looked at their glued hands and sighed. “I just fix the messes.”
She wasn’t touching that comment with a ten-foot pole.
“Look. I like my idea about my sneakers. Let me–”
A howl pierced the air and she lost her grip on the truck, sliding down and colliding with Kell. He caught her, their faces inches from each other.
“What’s that?” she whispered.
“Coyote. Likely not a wolf, but who knows.”
“You’re kidding.” She leaned back and Kell dropped his arms from her.
“Bears, fisher cats, coyotes, bobcats–you name it. All of them could come out if we stay here long enough.”
“You’re trying to scare me.”
“No. I’m stating reality. You’re in backwoods Maine.”
“You mean backwater Maine. This place is unbelievably, painfully backward.”
“Backwoods doesn’t mean backward.”
A huff was all she could muster, hating how her body responded to his suggestion, but the mechanics of their predicament meant he was right. The only way he could drive his truck was if he sat in the driver’s seat and she straddled him. Then his right hand would be free to use the stick shift.
And then she realized there was another way.
“What if you sit in the driver’s seat, and we hold our hands through the window? You just drive three miles per hour and I walk the trip back to town.”
One bushy eyebrow went up. “We’re eleven miles from town, and you’d be walking down the middle of the road, as a snowstorm starts.
And how are you going to get your arm through the window when our hands are glued together?
Climb through it first?” His chuckle made her fury ratchet up a notch.
“Don’t think I’m going to enjoy having you in my lap, Rachel, but it’s the only way out of this. ”
“I can’t believe you did this to me!”
“Did this to you? I didn’t do this. You did!”
“I’m not the one who used superglue!”
“You didn’t listen when I told you not to touch it!”
“How was I supposed to know you were serious?”
“Because I’m a human being with a brain and you should respect me!”
“As if that’s a good reason,” she shot back.
“Look. There’s no other choice. You have to ride me so we can ride into town.” The wolfish smile he gave her was nothing but pure mockery, but the gleam in his eye and the red blush were something else.
“That’s puerile!”
“That’s the truth.”
“You don’t have to say it that way!”
“I’ll be a gentleman. Promise.” He frowned. “You sure you don’t want to pee before we do this? Because…”