“You’ve got spunk, Duvall. I like that about you.”
“Wow. Another compliment. I’m stunned.” She was teasing, but her heart gave a little hop.
“I’ve got a few more,” he mumbled.
“How lucky can a girl get? What else do you like about me?”
“Your smart mouth. That’s another thing.”
“You like my smart mouth?”
“Oh, yeah.” His gaze was fixed on her lips.
Her gaze was fixed on his eyes fixed on her lips. She wasn’t watching where she was going, didn’t see the board lying in the middle of the road, but she heard it.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
Felt a jolt.
Followed by a rapid-fire popping sound. Once. Twice. Three times.
The car lurched, swerved. Startled, it took a moment for Tara to figure out what had happened.
Blowout.
Fudge crackers! She’d had a blowout.
Boone swore under his breath and he was already unbuckling his seatbelt.
Tara pulled over as far as she could on a one-lane dirt road with cornfields on either side. Simultaneously, she and Boone opened their car doors, but she was out before he was. He had the metal knee brace to contend with.
She walked to the rear of the car. Not one blown-out tire. Not two. But three flats. Both back tires of the Honda and one of the tires on the U-Haul were swiftly going flat. Hands on her hips, she went to investigate the heavy board lying behind the trailer and discovered a heavy two-by-four studded with nails.
Boone swore. He’d come around the opposite side of the trailer looking completely disgruntled. “Is the whole damned world against me?”
Tara shrugged.
He held up a finger. “Don’t say it. Don’t tell me Jupiter is in retrograde or—”
“Mercury,” she said. “It’s Mercury.”
“I don’t give a damn if it’s Pluto. The planets did not cause this.”
“Then what did?”
“A board with nails in it.”
“That’s small-picture thinking.”
“What?” He shoved angry fingers through his hair, managing to appear both disgruntled and devastatingly sexy.
“On the surface, it appears that a board with nails caused our misfortune, but how did that board get here? On this particular one-lane road, just when we happened along? I mean, what are the odds?” She argued. “Bigger forces are afoot.”
“You really believe in this zodiac stuff?”
“I do.”
“What the hell does retrograde even mean?”
“Moving backward.”
“So Mercury is moving backward?”
“Exactly.”
“I fail to see how that can affect us.”
“The moon affects the tides, right?”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“It’s because the Earth and the moon are attracted to each other like magnets.”
“If that’s possible, why not Mercury? When Mercury is in retrograde, it can force fate upon us, usually in regard to something in the past that we need to resolve. Like your relationship with your sister.”
“Let me get this straight. We have three flat tires because I have unresolved issues with my sister?”
Tara shrugged. “In a nutshell.”
“Whacked.” Boone shook his head, pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “The lemonade lady is whacked.”
“Your cell’s not going to work.”
He glowered. “And why not?”
“One, because we’re in the middle of nowhere and I haven’t seen a cell phone tower in a long while. Two, Mercury is in retrograde and it affects travel plans and communications.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.” She swept an expansive hand at him. “Be my guest.”
Boone punched in a number, put the phone to his ear. A few fleeting seconds passed. He swore under his breath. Checked for bars. “Zero,” he spat.
Tara pressed her lips together to keep from saying “I told you so.”
He turned away from her. Limped out of her line of sight behind the U-Haul.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Detour,” he called out.
Puzzled, she frowned, and then realized he was probably going to relieve himself, but didn’t want to tell her that. The man had a skewed sense of pride. “Everybody needs a bathroom,” she hollered after him. “It’s okay to say the word.”
A long moment passed. She leaned against the side of the U-Haul, crossed her arms over her chest and stared west out over the cornfield at the setting sun.
Reality sank in.
It was going to be dark before long. They only had one spare tire, and even if they’d only had one flat, Boone was in no shape to change a tire. There was no cell phone reception and it was a very long walk back to the freeway. Not a trek Boone could make. They were stuck here until someone came along. No telling how long that might be.
The sun slipped a little lower. The air smelled loamy. Somewhere in the distance, a cow mooed. Tara drew a circle in the sand with the toe of her sandal, clutched her arms behind her back and swayed, waited.
Boone sure was taking his time. Honestly, no one needed that much time to do what he was doing. Tara nibbled her bottom lip, edged toward the cornrow. “Boone?”
He didn’t answer.
The cornstalks threw eerie shadows across the road. She rounded the other side of the U-Haul, but he was nowhere in sight. Where had he gone?
“Boone? You there?”
Nothing. It was as if he’d simply vanished.
She thought of all the horror movies she’d seen. In horror movies, bad things always happened in cornfields.
“Boone?” she called again, surprised to hear her voice come out shaky. She wasn’t a scaredy-cat by nature, but what if something had happened to him? He could have fallen in a gopher hole. He could be out there in the field, alone in the gathering dark, his knee wrenched, in terrible pain.
Throwing caution to the wind, she plowed through the field. Cornstalks slapped against her shoulders. The setting sun blinded her. Panic built a dam in her chest. Why wasn’t he answering?
“Boone!”
“What is it, Tara?” His deep voice sliced through the shivery cool twilight.
She spun around. Spied him standing behind her. Relief spilled into her bloodstream. “I thought…” She paused to catch her breath. “I thought you got lost. You’re awfully stealthy for a big guy.”
“Military training.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I was looking for a place to set up camp.”
“Set up camp?”
“Clearly