Hot Wheels and High Heels (28 page)

The most delicious little thrill raced through Darcy. She’d been so careful all day not to be one of those clingy women who thought she had a relationship with a man just because they had sex, even though it had just about killed her to keep her feelings to herself. Instinctively she knew if she assumed anything, a man like John would run for the hills. She had to wait for him to make the first move. But never in her wildest dreams had she imagined he’d make a move like this.

“I can’t believe the bullheaded way he charged out here,” Amy said with a grin. “That was unprecedented, even for him. He must really be a goner.”

A goner? Darcy wondered what Amy meant by that. Their relationship might be more than sex, but it was a far cry from anything else. Someday Darcy intended to get married again, and it wouldn’t be to a man like John.

At least, she didn’t think it would.

Would it?

“What are you two chatting about over there?” Tony asked.

“None of your business,” Amy said.

“John was quite the lunatic there, wasn’t he?”

“Yep.”

“Shall I tell him you’re talking about him behind his back?”

“You do,” Amy said, “and I’ll tell all the women you’re seeing about all the other women you’re seeing. Pretty soon you’ll be out in the cold, buster.”

Tony grinned. “Well, then. By all means, talk away.”

Chapter 17

A
my told Darcy that dealing with John was like feeding pigeons in the park. Even though the bread crumbs were good for them, if you threw them at them and demanded they eat, they’d run like crazy. But if you pretended you didn’t care if they ate or not, pretty soon they’d come begging. John, she said, was the big, cranky bird in the middle of the flock who was starving and didn’t even know it.

After Amy’s insight into her brother’s psyche, Darcy had planned on playing hard to get for at least a little while longer. Trouble was, playing hard to get was harder than it sounded. Every day Darcy told herself that this would be the evening when she’d say,
No, sorry, can’t get together. I have other plans,
but every time the words were on the tip of her tongue, she’d think about his hands and his mouth and his big, strong body and the way he always knew what made her crazy with desire.

But it wasn’t just the sex. It was the way he insinuated himself into her life as if he’d always been there. She knew it was merely his ever-present need to command any environment he found himself in, but Amy said it had to be a miracle straight from God that her brother had spent two whole weeks with a woman and he wasn’t making up excuses not to see her.

This evening John sat on her sofa with his shoes kicked off and his gigantic feet on her coffee table, looking at the movie ads. Pepé was sprawled out beside him on the sofa. It had taken the dog no time at all to warm up to him, once he realized John wasn’t going to yell at him and would pet him as long as he wanted the attention.

“Okay,” John said. “Here’s a movie we can see.”

He rattled off the name of a new action-adventure flick. Darcy turned up her nose. “You’re kidding, right?”

“What do you want to see?”

“That one with Julia Roberts.”

“It’s a chick flick.”

“So?”

“So I hate chick flicks. We’ll flip a coin.”

Darcy knew better than to gamble. After all, look what had happened to Warren. And her gene pool didn’t exactly produce the luckiest of people—her mother had never come home from Vegas with a dime to her name. So when Darcy called tails and it was heads, could she really be surprised?

“Oh, boy,” she said with a sigh. “Two hours of gratuitous violence. I can’t wait.”

“Hey, I have to deal with weepy women the next time we go. You think I’m just dying to be subjected to that?”

“Why do I put up with you? You’re the most insensitive man I’ve ever met.”

He grabbed her arm and pulled her to the sofa beside him. Pepé scurried away, and in the next second, John had Darcy flat on her back, kissing that one spot at the junction of her neck and shoulder that drove her absolutely wild.

“No sensitivity?” he said, his lips tickling her ear. “I think you know better than that.” He slid his hand beneath her shirt and closed it around her waist, kissing her at the same time.

Yes. She did know better.

“Thought you wanted to see a movie,” she murmured.

“I do. As long as we can make out in the back row.”

“You might miss an explosion or two.”

“Oh. Good point.” He stood up from the sofa and pulled her to her feet. “Then never mind on the making out. A man has to have his priorities.”

Darcy took that as a challenge, and half an hour later, when they were sitting in the deserted back row of theater number six at Tinseltown, she managed to hold his attention significantly better than the movie did, even though it was filled with more guns and explosives per capita than any movie she’d seen in the past ten years. She decided when it was her turn to choose the next movie, she was going to pick the girliest, most estrogen-enhanced tear-jerker possible just so she could watch John squirm.

“Good movie,” John said as they left the theater.

“You’re kidding, right? A man’s head actually exploded.”

John grinned. “Yeah, that was great, wasn’t it? You don’t see something like that every day.”

Thank God
.

Just then the door to another theater opened, and half a dozen preschool boys swarmed out, followed by a momlike woman with a chocolate smear on the arm of her blouse and a harried look on her face. One of the boys wore a paper crown and a big button on his shirt that said, “It’s My Birthday!”

The mom murmured an apology and took the birthday boy by the hand, but before she could get a good hold on him, he jerked away from her and took off down the hall with the other five boys in screaming pursuit. She blew out a breath that puffed her bangs away from her forehead and took off after them.

Darcy shook her head. “That poor, poor woman.”

“Why did you never have kids?” John said as they walked toward the lobby.

“Are you kidding? You just saw why not.”

“All kids are like that.”

“Exactly.”

“So you never even thought about having any of your own?”

Darcy tossed her soda cup in a nearby trash can. “Oh, sure. I guess every woman thinks about it. But Warren thought he was too old. And now I am, too.”

“I don’t know. A lot of forty-year-old women are having babies.”

Darcy grabbed his arm and pulled him to a halt. She looked left and right, then whispered, “I’m
not
forty!”

“But you’re almost there, right?”

“
God,
you’re infuriating.”

She stalked off and John followed. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him smiling, which irritated her even more. They left the building and went into the parking lot, where the evening air felt like a blast furnace compared to the cool air inside the theater.

John strode alongside her. “So when’s your birthday?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“You and that age thing. Will you cut it out? People are living to ninety these days, so you’re not even middle-aged. And age is just a number, anyway.”

“
Age
is just a
number?
” She rolled her eyes. “You’ve been reading
Redbook,
haven’t you?”

“Seriously. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“Well, let’s see. For one thing, if I don’t color my hair on a regular basis, you’ll see just how gray it really is.”

“So what? Look here.” He pointed to his temple, where a few gray hairs were showing through.

“Gray makes men look distinguished. It makes women look old.”

“That’s crap.”

“No, it isn’t. And if I don’t get back in for more Botox, my forehead is going to look like a cotton shirt that got balled up in the dryer.”

“Botox?” John said as they approached his SUV. “I don’t know anyone who’s actually done that.”

“I don’t know anyone who hasn’t.”

“Doesn’t that wear off in six months or so?”

“Yes.”

“Let it.”

They reached the car, and Darcy faced him, laughing humorlessly. “You wouldn’t like the result.”

“What? A normal face? What’s wrong with that?”

“You don’t understand. In a matter of months, I’m going to look like a Shar-Pei.”

He shrugged. “So what? I like dogs.”

She smacked him on the arm. He grabbed her wrist, pulled her up next to him, and kissed her. “Wrinkles are no big deal. They give a person character.”

“Wrinkles give
men
character. They give women hives.”

“Some women worry too much about things like that. You’re one of them.”

“That’s easy for men to say. Men only seem to get better. Women fall apart.”

“Maybe if they didn’t use all that crap to build themselves up so much, there wouldn’t be so far to fall.”

Darcy had to admit that was probably true. But since she was used to looking fabulous, taking it down several notches was a blow to her senses. And when she turned forty this Saturday, it was going to be the biggest blow of all.

A few minutes later they were driving back to her apartment. John had taken a route through west Plano that Darcy wished he hadn’t, because it took them only blocks away from her old house. As they drove past the places she used to frequent—the Shops at Legacy, the Victorian Tea Room, her favorite Starbucks—she couldn’t help imagining what her upcoming birthday would be like if her life hadn’t taken such a drastic turn. Warren would undoubtedly “surprise” her with whatever lavish item she’d been hinting about for the past month, then take her out to the obligatory dinner at some overpriced restaurant, where she would have basked in all the opulence and reveled in the fact that even though she was a year older, she had enough money that she didn’t have to look like it.

John pulled up to a stoplight at the corner of Legacy and Forest Glen, and suddenly insult was heaped on top of injury when Darcy found herself looking up a long, tree-shaded lane that led to one of the most familiar places of all to her: the clubhouse at Forest Glen Golf and Country Club.

With a silent sigh, she stared at the white-pillared, neo-Colonial brick mansion. The fountain out front was lit by floodlights and circled by pristine landscaping, accented by a collage of flowers lining the front walk that led to a pair of massive oak doors. In the distance, the rolling hills of the golf course were bathed in the bright orange hues of the setting sun.

At least twice a week for the past fourteen years, Darcy had crossed the threshold into that clubhouse, and as she looked at it now, it was almost inconceivable that it wasn’t part of her life anymore.

“Warren and I had a membership there,” Darcy murmured, nodding toward the clubhouse.

John glanced at it, then stared straight ahead, tapping his fingertips on the steering wheel as he waited for the light to change. “Pretty pretentious, if you ask me.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “It is.”

“You miss it, don’t you?”

“Hard not to. It was an easy life.”

“Sometimes easy isn’t best.”

Still, she couldn’t help the longing that overtook her, the sensation of being on the outside looking in. She hadn’t been back to the club since her life turned upside down. She didn’t even know if their membership was still paid up or whether Warren had jerked that out from under her, too. Not that she wanted to go there with the girls for Saturday lunch and martinis these days. A single meal would cost almost a whole day’s salary, and did she really need all those catty eyes staring at her, thanking God her misfortune wasn’t theirs?

Darcy felt the oddest kind of longing. It wasn’t as if she wanted the life back that she’d lived with Warren. She didn’t need that lavish lifestyle. She just wanted to know she had a comfortable little cushion between her and destitution. But there was no way that was ever going to happen on the salary she made right now.

She thought about asking John one more time if he would
please
make her a repossession agent in training, but she knew what the answer was going to be. If only she could come up with another way to grab Larry’s car, she might get that ball rolling in the right direction. It was still her best bet for her first repossession. She was pretty sure Larry wouldn’t pull out a gun and blow her head off, but she couldn’t say that about a stranger whose car she was going after. Later, once she got John on board, he could teach her the subtleties of dealing with irate deadbeats.

But other than waiting for Larry to leave his house and then hoping she could follow him, she didn’t know how to catch him with that Corvette outside his garage.

Then she had a thought.

She froze, her hand tightening on the console, and glanced back at the clubhouse. She knew where Larry went every Monday evening. The same place Warren used to go—to the club for their male bonding ritual of Scotch and cigars, a tradition that the men would miss only if the world came to an end. A plan started forming in Darcy’s mind of a way to grab his keys, then his car. In no time that Corvette would be in the impound of Lone Star Repossessions where it belonged.

“Darcy?” John said. “What’s the matter?”

Darcy whipped around. “What?”

“You have a funny look on your face.”

“I do?”

John glanced over, narrowing his eyes. “Yeah. Like you’re plotting something, and I’m not sure I’m going to like it.”

She let a lazy smile come to her lips as she inched her hand over to rest against his thigh. “Oh, you’ll like it. Trust me.”

The light turned green, and John hit the gas. In seconds, he was driving just a little bit faster than the law allowed.

Darcy decided that first thing in the morning, she was going to research repossession law on the Internet so she’d know what she could and couldn’t do so she wouldn’t slip up again. As long as she was sure she’d be breaking no laws, and as long as she could talk Carolyn into helping her, and as long as Larry wasn’t so down on his luck that he’d lost his country club membership, Monday evening she was going to put her plan into action.