Driving Her Crazy

It was just that Sadie’s curves were uncontainable.

Dressed like this, still absent of any bling, it was easy to believe she was only the twenty-four years Tabitha had informed him of yesterday.

Which made her precisely twelve years younger than him.

She was a baby, for crying out loud.

‘What’s in here?’ Kent asked as he grabbed the fridge bag off her and lifted her pack. An hour ago he’d been whistling as he’d loaded the vehicle for the trip, a buzz he hadn’t felt in a long time coursing through his veins.

The buzz was still there.

He just wasn’t sure, in the presence of Sadie, if it was one hundred per cent related to the drive any more.

‘Ginger ale,’ she said, watching how the muscles in his tanned forearms bunched.

Before yesterday she would have admired the delineation, the symmetry, the beauty of the fluid movement. Today they just made her insides feel funny.

And that was the last thing she needed.

Her insides would feel funny enough the minute they hit the first bend in the road.

‘I don’t expect you to carry my stuff,’ she said testily.

She wasn’t some delicate elfin thing that would shatter if she picked up anything heavier than her handbag. One look would have told him that. But he was already striding away despite a rather intriguing limp.

From the crash, she assumed.

She followed at a more sedate pace, glancing at the sturdy-looking Land Rover parked on the road with trepidation. With its functional metal cab, sturdily constructed roof railings and massive bull bar it looked like something the Australian army had engineered for land and amphibious combat. And had been test driven in a pigsty if the sludge-and-muck-encrusted paint job was any indication.

Staring at the tank on wheels, Sadie absently wondered whether Kent Nelson was compensating for something.

‘I didn’t know you could get mud masks for cars,’ she murmured as she joined him at the open back doors.

Kent grunted as he rearranged the supplies to accommodate her backpack. ‘She’s not young, she’s not very pretty but she’ll do the job.’

Sadie preferred pretty.

And men who didn’t talk about cars as if they were female. Especially this car. This car was one hundred per cent male.

‘Does she have air conditioning?’

Kent nodded. He held up the cool bag. ‘You want this up front?’ he asked.

‘Thanks.’

She took it from him as he shut the doors and noticed a muddy sticker supporting a Sydney football team near the handle and another for an Australian brewery. He looked like a man who knew his way around a ball. And a beer.

Leo had drunk gin.

Kent looked down on her. The morning sun fell on the pale skin of her throat and he noticed the pulse beating there. ‘Got your pills?’ he asked gruffly.

She patted her bag. ‘At the ready.’

‘Should you take one now? I’m not going to stop every two minutes for you to throw up.’

Sadie ignored his warning. Stopping every two minutes didn’t exactly sound like a picnic to her either. ‘I’ll wait till we get out of the city. Save my performance for the windy bits.’

Kent narrowed his eyes as he took the opportunity to study her face some more. She had dark rings surrounding the deep grey of her irises, which seemed to lure him in even further. ‘Just how trippy is trippy?’

Sadie realised his mouth was quite near and she had to wonder what it would look like kicked up a little, those creases becoming deep grooves, because it looked pretty damn perfect as it was. As if some old master with an eye for masculine perfection had sculpted it just for him, and the artist in her, never far from the surface, appreciated its flawlessness.

The woman, on the other hand, was just plain jealous.

Her own ridiculously plump mouth, devoid of collagen despite what every catty woman she’d ever met had implied, seemed garish by comparison. It was why she rarely wore lipstick or gloss.

Her mouth did not need any more attention.

Kent felt her gaze on his mouth and the pull of those incredible eyes as she studied him. ‘Sadie?’ he prompted.

Sadie blinked as she realised he was frowning and she was staring. Not only that, but she’d lost her place in the conversation. Her brain scrambled to catch up. She took a step back from him. What had they been talking about?

Pills. Right. ‘I sing,’ she said. ‘Loudly. And not very well.’

Kent grimaced. Great. Stuck in a car with karaoke Barbie. ‘Try to refrain.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘Let’s go.’

Sadie took a deep breath as she headed to the passenger seat. Her heart thudded in her chest on a surge of adrenaline. The call of the wild? The excitement of a new adventure? The beginnings of an illustrious career?

She hoped so because the alternatives weren’t palatable. Dread at the oncoming nausea. Or, worse, being alone in a confined space with an unimpressed man whose mouth had her wishing she’d paid more attention in sculpting classes.

She’d climbed up into the high-clearance, all-wheel drive. At five eight, she wasn’t exactly short, but Sadie still felt as if pole-vaulting lessons would have been handy. The sturdy cab felt like a cocoon of armour around her, even if the ground seemed a long way down.

As soon as she buckled up Kent thrust a folded up map at her. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ve marked the journey in red.’

Sadie looked at him as the mere thought of having to read and travel made her feel ill. ‘You don’t have a GPS?’

Kent shot her an impatient look. ‘We’re doing this the old-fashioned way,’ he said and started the engine.

Fabulous. ‘And what happens if we lose the map?’ she enquired sweetly. ‘Do we use the stars?’

Kent suppressed a smile at her derision. He held her gaze. ‘Unfortunately I didn’t bring my sextant.’

That look—intense, focused—fanned over her like a sticky web, doing strange things to her pulse and causing heat to bloom in her belly and other places further south.

Oh, he’d brought his sextant all right...

TWO

Even though she was looking out of the window, Sadie didn’t notice the city streets of Sydney giving way to the red rooves of suburbia or to the greenery of semi-rural market gardens. She was too busy puzzling over her reaction to the man sitting an arm’s length away.