Terese Ramin - A Drive-By Wedding

Nuts. He didn’t even have a car seat for Sasha, nor much in the way of clothing for either himself or the baby. Grabbing opportunities when they arose didn’t leave a lot of time for the kind of planning traveling cross-country with a toddler required. He needed this blasted woman he’d stuck himself with—a trace of something soft and elusive swirled around his senses, and he felt himself tighten suddenly—in more ways than he cared to admit.

A lot more ways.

He couldn’t go with her to meet her family. He knew nothing about her, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be expecting their darling Allyn to turn up with a strange man and a sick baby in tow. Not unless they hadn’t seen her in a while, which he doubted, because that wasn’t the way his luck was running today.

But he couldn’t exactly just avoid the issue, either, now, could he?

Damn. You’re tired, but no falling apart. Sort it out, he ordered himself. Take it one thing at a time. You’ve bought a few hours, at least, before anybody figures anything out. Stop for food, clothes and a phone book with a list of free clinics. Make the rest of your plans from there.

He drew a breath. “There any place we can get clothes, food, diapers and a car seat all in one stop?” he asked.

Allyn rocked the beginning-to-whimper Sasha and shook her head. “This is your temporary stomping grounds. I’m just passing through.”

“Pig whistles,” he muttered.

Allyn swallowed the beginnings of a grin. She didn’t think she’d ever heard that particular expression before. “Excuse me?”

“Had to pick a damned out-of-towner. No use whatsoever.”

“I didn’t ask to be picked, you know.”

He grimaced. “True.”

She waited a few beats. “Where have you shopped while you’ve lived here?”

“Corner liquor store, corner grocery store, corner pharmacy.”

Allyn cleared her throat, trying hard not to laugh at how disgruntled he sounded. “I see.”

“I doubt it,” he assured her darkly. Then he sighed, checked the Saturn’s side mirrors and switched lanes, zigzagging through the city toward the expressway where he hoped to find an exit labeled Shopping.

They stopped fourteen miles from Baltimore at a super-store in Ellicott City.

After a fair amount of negotiation over who would go in, Allyn bundled Sasha into the smallest zip-front sweatshirt she had with her. Then all three of them went into the store.

This was what he’d wanted when he’d started out this morning, wasn’t it? Jeth thought. A woman whose mother tiger instincts would come straight to the fore once she took a look at Sasha? He simply hadn’t bargained on finding one who was quite so…uniquely qualified to hand him his head and stir up his senses at the same time.

Or quite so enthusiastic about helping him shop.

As Jeth watched, Allyn spent a fair amount of his cash on hand with a certain flair he found both impressive and frightening—as though she’d been trained by a take-no-prisoners master in the art of procurement. Other than for staples, he shopped as infrequently as possible.

But when she headed into the men’s department, Jeth had the most disturbing sense that he was doomed.

In the parking lot, she’d ransacked his duffel bag, then her suitcases in search of something to diaper Sasha in. What she found had made her roll her eyes and tsk disgustedly at him.

“What?” he’d asked, feeling a certain impatience and paranoia to be moving—and also feeling suddenly daunted by the fact that she found his wardrobe wanting.

She’d blinked at him. He looked at her eyes and was suddenly more afraid of her than of the people from whom he’d retrieved Sasha. Because what he saw there told him better than anything she’d yet done that she was not some timid flower he’d plucked on a whim; she was the wind that blew the flower.

“These all the clothes you’ve got with you?”

“Yeah. You got a problem with it?” Oh, good, be belligerent. Show her the tough guy. Intimidate the hell out of her.

Yeah, right. As if. Instead of being either intimidated or impressed, she’d offered him exaggerated patience.

“How far do you plan to travel with me ’n’ Sasha?” A two-beat pause, then she did a little fishing. “Or at least since you’ve already said you don’t trust me, I presume you’re not planning to let me go until this thing of yours comes to some sort of resolution?”

He bit down on his temper, at once wanting to strangle her and, surprisingly enough, kiss her until she couldn’t speak.

He gritted his teeth against the unwanted impulse. Blast, in one way or another this entire trip was going to be hell, he just knew it. “As far as it takes to make sure I can keep him safe. And no, even though you’re the most annoying woman I’ve ever car jacked, I’m not letting you go any time soon.”

“You’ve car jacked other women?” Innocent. Unremittingly interested.

God save him, he was definitely going to kill her. “No.” The patience he had to exert in order to say it calmly was galling. “You’re my first and my only.”

“Oh.” Clearly, if cheekily, charmed. “What a nice thing to tell a girl.”

Understanding for the first time that the only way to win here was to remain silent, Jeth crossed his arms and stared at her.

She pursed her lips and stared back, giving him a look that stated as clearly as words, You’re behaving like a child. Cut it out. You’re the one who kidnapped me so I could help you—now don’t give me dense. “You do have a destination in mind?”

“Yes.” The paranoia of his experiences of the past several weeks caused him to glance about, looking for enemies, to not want to tell her more than he had to. He hadn’t really intended to tell her anything at all; she was simply to have been a tool. Not to mention that the less she knew, the safer she’d be.

“Jethro,” she said patiently, mildly.

“Jeth,” he snapped. “I don’t care how much my mother liked Max Baer. I’m neither a Beverly Hillbilly nor a Clampett.”

Her turn to stare at him somewhat nonplussed but waiting, tapping her fingers on the car door. As though he was the one wasting the time here, not her.

“Fine.” He shut his eyes, unwillingly granting her another win. “I’m taking him home.”

“Tucson?” she asked.

“Close enough.”

“Family on vacation?” she guessed, taking his plan a step further than he’d taken it himself.

Surprised at how easily she made it fall into place, he’d nodded cautiously.

“Okay.” She’d pursed her lips and nodded. “Okay. Now we know you’ll need stuff, too, and I know how to shop.”

And that had been that. They had two shopping carts full of toddler supplies that were certain to deplete his hastily scraped together escape fund, and she was off to buy him clothes, too. When he tried to talk her out of the extra purchases, she canted her head and eyed him with more of that apparently trademark patience.

“We’re a family on vacation?” she’d repeated, automatically rearranging the sweatshirt around Sasha while she looked at Jeth.

Just somebody’s mom discussing something mildly irritating with somebody’s dad.

Jeth’s jaw tightened with the unsought observation. No, hell, no. He was playing a role, and she’d done stage work in college maybe, understood theater, too. And yet…

Deliberately he ignored the sensation of rightness that scurried through him with the mom-dad-baby image, instead gladly noting that Sasha seemed to be responding to whatever it was Allyn was doing for him and was more with it than before. Marcy would have liked her. If Marcy could have met her. “That’s the idea.”