Muffin Top (Page 9)

She should put up a fight about it, but…red Impala. “You are way too used to getting your way.”

“It’s because I’m so charming,” he said, crossing his arms across his chest and making his poor T-shirt strain around his biceps.

Something in her head popped and fizzled as she stared at his arms. Not just his biceps, but his thick forearms. The longer she stared, the more she needed to grab her second morning Mountain Dew from the cup holder in her Prius, because she was seriously overheated in the way that sent a delicious tingle through all her most sensitive spots.

“I’ll take your silence as agreement,” Frankie said.

Rolling her eyes, she told her lady bits to chill the fuck out. “You get your way because you’re a bulldozer.”

“That, too.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Now, pop the trunk so I can get your bags.”

Lucy sighed. The man was driving halfway across the country to go to her high school reunion. She could let him win the battle of the cars. She pressed the trunk release on her key fob.

He ambled over and peeked in. “Two suitcases? We’re only going to be gone for a week.”

“Exactly, I economized to fit everything in only two.” Men never understood everything that went into packing for a week away as a woman.

“Does this one have bricks?” he asked, lifting the smaller but heavier of her two matching red suitcases.

“So funny.”

It was her shoes—lots and lots of shoes. She had a bit of a DSW problem. They loved her there—as they should, considering how much of her paycheck they now owned.

Frankie carried her bags, which she’d wobbled under the weight of when she’d loaded them into her trunk, as if they didn’t have a thing in them. Then he put her bags in his much roomier trunk and pulled the Impala out of the garage, easily maneuvering around her Prius on the driveway. She got behind the wheel of her car and drove it into his pristine garage, where all the tools hung from pegboards on a perfect line of hooks. The yard equipment was located in one corner. The trash can and recycling bin didn’t even have a speck of dirt on them. The sight soothed some of the nerves eating away at her stomach lining. She might work neck-deep in chaos thanks to her high-maintenance clients, but she was a woman who loved the sight of everything put in its place.

Still, the garage was definitely not what she’d been expecting from Frankie Hartigan. His twin must be responsible. She glanced at the man rocking out in his car—yes, there was head banging—with the windows rolled up, but the thump, thump of a hard and fast drumbeat still managed to escape the confines of the Impala. He must have spotted her watching him, because he gave her a sexy grin and a cocky wave before sliding on a pair of aviators.

The garage was definitely his brother’s domain. There was no way the giant ginger she was driving cross-country with was a neat freak. The idea of it was ludicrous. She grabbed her still mostly full Mountain Dew, her favorite red lip gloss from its designated spot in her second cupholder, and her phone charger, then walked out of the garage and over to where Frankie now stood next to the open passenger door of his Impala.

After she got in and he closed the door behind her, he walked around the front and she took in the immaculate interior of the Impala. If possible, it was even cleaner than the garage. She just might need to reevaluate her road trip partner, because it seemed there was more to Frankie Hartigan than the consummate wild man he liked to show everyone, and there was nothing she loved more than figuring out the solution to a riddle. It’s why she’d been drawn to crisis communication rather than the other marketing specialties. She liked solving puzzles.

Thinking of which, Frankie picked that moment to get behind the wheel and turn the key in the ignition. The engine didn’t purr. It roared, all pent-up power and badassery.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” she said, needing to reassert her dominance before the wave of testosterone and muscles overwhelmed her. “We’ve got eighteen hours ahead of us.”

“No way,” he said as he reversed out of the driveway. “We’ll do it in sixteen.”

“I’ve made this drive before.” Too many times to count. “And it’s definitely eighteen.”

He turned that cocky grin on her again. “But you’ve never driven it with me. Buckle up. Miss Scarlett’s about to take you on the ride of your life.”

…

And they were on track for sixteen hours to Antioch, Missouri, right up until Frankie spotted the red and blue flashing lights in his rearview mirror while they were on the interstate somewhere in the middle of nowhere west of Pittsburgh.

“Oh, Miss Scarlett,” Lucy said as she patted the tan leather on the Impala’s dash. “This stop is going to cost you and make it that much harder to make the drive in sixteen hours on the road.”

About two hours into the drive, she’d started giving him crap about naming his car and had been putting it into conversation at every opportunity. There was no way her biting sense of humor was going to miss the opportunity to get in her digs while he pulled the registration from the glove box. He couldn’t blame her. He’d have done the same thing.

“Do you know why I pulled you over today?” the cop asked as soon as Frankie had rolled down the driver’s side window.

Some people would try to finagle their way out of the ticket. Not him. He knew well and good that he had a lead foot and that for anytime he got caught laying it down, there were another dozen when he didn’t. It had been a while since he’d gotten a speeding ticket, so he knew he was due.

“Eighteen over the speed limit,” he replied, because more than twenty on the interstate always came with the possibility of getting arrested, and he liked his air fresh and his sky fully visible.

The officer didn’t even crack a smile at Frankie’s honesty. He just took his license and other information and went back to his cruiser to write up a ticket.

Lucy pivoted in her seat. “I take it this happens a lot.”

“I’m a big guy. My foot weighs a lot.”

One side of her ruby red lips curled upward. She was wearing big black sunglasses that covered her eyes completely, but he still knew there was a lot of sass in them. The woman had it in spades.

So far on the drive, she’d schooled him on Ice Knights hockey trivia, tried to win an argument on the best action movie of all time—it was the Steve McQueen classic Bullitt, no matter how much she argued for Die Hard—and had told him stories about her unnamed clients, which had him sharing stories about the people at his firehouse. When he’d told her about the prank with a snapping turtle a rookie had found in his locker after coming back from the shower, she’d almost spit out her Mountain Dew.

They’d been in the car for five hours and most of it had been spent talking. Now, he was a talker so that wasn’t weird, but he usually didn’t spend that much time talking to women he wasn’t related to, so that put this in new territory. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Sure, he’d still taken a few sly peeks at the bountiful cleavage shown off by the modest V-neck of her T-shirt—hello, he was just a dude—but he’d kept his hands to himself. That didn’t mean he hadn’t thought about what she’d look like without that shirt during the lulls in their conversation. It was hard not to. That asshole at the bar had been wrong about a lot of things, but he hadn’t been wrong about the fact that Lucy had gorgeous tits. Somehow without him meaning to, his gaze had slid back over to her, taking in the full curvy package.