Free Driving Chloe Wild: A Smoke Jumper Short Story by Anne Marsh Page B

the cat carrier parked on the cab’s narrow backseat. Her
rescuer apparently travelled with a momma cat with two small orange kittens.
Any man with cats couldn’t possibly be all bad and even partially bad was an
improvement on the men currently in her life.
    “Uh-huh.”
He didn’t step on the gas, didn’t get them moving. She risked a backwards
glance over her shoulder at the wedding chapel. The building was missing a few
pink Spanish tiles from the roof, but the painted palm trees on the white
stucco were defiantly cheerful and the strings of white Christmas lights
twinkled absurdly in the afternoon sun. There were no other signs of life yet,
but her luck would run out soon enough. That was just how her life had gone so
far. Except, she reminded herself, she was changing that. She’d make her own
luck, thank you very much.
    “You expectin’
company?”
    She
ignored his question, because, duh, her dress should have been his first clue.
Brides didn’t fly solo. “Try the left pedal,” she suggested sweetly.
    He
scrubbed a hand over his head. “Last time I checked, my truck was missing a taxi sign.”
    She
sighed. “You’re not terribly flexible, are you?”
    Flexibility
was important.  Marrying (or almost marrying) Big Timmy would have been a
mistake, because he’d been every bit as unbending as her own daddy. Big Timmy
had ideas about how his wife should behave and she was pretty certain she’d
have been a disappointment on that front. He wouldn’t have been a
hitter—she’d learned how to avoid that , thanks to her
daddy—but words could hurt almost as much as actual blows and she had no
desire to live out the rest of her life in a disapproving deep freeze. It was
just as well Big Timmy had failed to show up at the chapel today. She wondered
briefly who had talked some sense into him, but it didn’t matter.
    “You don’
know me,” he pointed out, which was true.
    “You can
drive and tell me all about yourself.” She’d listen, too. She was perfectly
happy for this man to talk and talk, as long as he kept on driving. She needed
to shake the dust of Spotlight, population 347, from her feet. A population
minus one, she promised herself, because she wasn’t staying here. She’d sworn
she’d do whatever it took to move on and start over. Now, it looked like God
had heard her prayers and sent her this man. He wasn’t precisely what she’d
hoped for, but she’d make do. She always did. Plus, she had every stitch she
owned in the world crammed into her suitcase and just two hundred bucks to her
name. Waitressing was not a lucrative gig and rent, even in Spotlight’s trailer
park, had eaten up most of her income.
    He looked
at the wedding chapel, then back at her. She sighed. He was going to make her
explain and she hated explanations. Explanations always got her into hot water.
    “Did you
lose your beau ?”
    Beau sounded exotic and downright lovely coming from this man’s mouth. He probably could
have read her the phone book, and she would have drunk in the caramel-colored
words, his soft burr exotic and downright decadent. It was like offering
hummingbird cake to a woman on a diet. What else could he say? Pretty words.
Lover words. No . She was done with the male of the species. All she
needed right now was a driver and a way out.
    “Yes,”
she said, shoving down the mountain of tulle. “Do you think you could drive
now?”
    ”You’re
just goin’ to get in a truck with a total stranger? Do you have any idea what
could happen to you?” Now her mystery white knight definitely sounded more
grumpy than suave.
    She
wrestled her skirts down while her stranger methodically ticked off a list of
horror stories. Throat slit, body tossed in a ravine. Deader than a doornail
and no coming back. She got it.
    She
stopped him mid-description of a serial killer who had hunted Vegas prostitutes
for eighteen months before he’d been arrested. Hopefully, her new ride hadn’t
mistaken her for a hooker.