And why did he have to be so delicious-looking? What was wrong with one of the many interchangeable gelled-up, five feet tall members of the Italian-American community? Why couldn’t this guy have been one of them?
“Or I could beg,” he continued, his dark eyes connecting with mine in a way that made my whole body shiver slightly, involuntarily. “I’m not above begging,” he murmured, the corner of his mouth crooking up. “When the situation calls for it.”
Oh, no.
The stranger standing in front of me was exactly the kind of guy who inspired hapless women to throw caution to the wind. Every lean, hard inch of him, encased in that to-die-for tuxedo, encouraged the kind of reckless behavior I had thought I was long past. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Tall, dark, and Mafioso-ed would have been in the van and I would have been scheming ways to get him into my bed, his near-marriage only adding to his bad boy mystique. After all, it was hard to get more emotionally unavailable or completely inappropriate that a man escaping his own wedding—and that was, of course, my type.
But here was the benefit of being not just in my thirties, but almost out of them: I knew better. I had been there, done that, and bored myself and everyone else in a thirty-mile radius with the fallout from every last one of my bad decisions.
“Sorry,” I told him, my fake smile edging closer to a real one. Because he really was that gorgeous. The tux just made it that much more painful to do the right thing. “I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can.” He looked over his shoulder again, then back at me, a slight frown between his eyes. “I’ll just climb up into the passenger seat, and away we go. I’ll even drive, if that helps.”
“That doesn’t really help,” I said. “And it’s not happening.”
“Come on,” he said. He grinned. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Oh, it’s here,” I assured him. “It’s raring to go. It’s just a little overshadowed by two minor little points.”
“Which are?” He was even closer now. He smelled faintly of something spicy, and more than that, no woman needed to be that close to a man who looked like he could give Daniel Craig a run for his money in the hot James Bond body department.
“Point one,” I said, tilting my chin back so I could look him in the eye, “I haven’t been paid yet. And I didn’t put up with months of Lorraine’s sh—” I remembered who I was talking to. “Excuse me.”
“It’s a fair description.”
I cleared my throat. “I want that check,” I said. I thought about the whole lily incident. “I deserve that check.”
“I’ll pay you whatever she was paying you for the flowers,” he said. “See? Problem solved. What’s point two?” He sent another glance over his shoulder, and now that he was so close, I could feel the anxiety coming off of him. It made me tense.
“Point two is the big one,” I told him, crossing my arms. “The whole runaway groom thing sounds great, sure, except for the part where Joey the Worm hunts us both down and kills us, horribly. Why would I want to get involved in that?”
Why would anyone? Why had he?
“I can’t really argue with that,” he agreed. But now he was close enough that if I wanted to, I could have reached over and laid my hands on the mouthwatering stretch of hard abdomen in front of me.
Which I could not allow myself to do.
Under any circumstances.
“Listen to me,” the stranger said, a new light in his dark eyes, snapping my attention away from his abs. “I mean this in the nicest possible way. But I’m stealing your van.”
He reached over and plucked my keys from my hand—keys I had completely forgotten I was holding. Then he yanked open the battered door to the van and swung himself inside, with a certain grace and ease that I probably would have found more attractive had he not been committing Grand Theft Auto. With my van.
“Hey!” I was frozen into place—too dumbfounded to do anything but gape while he started the engine. “Hey!”
The gorgeous stranger hit the button to roll down the window. His brown eyes looked deep into mine.
“You can either come with me,” he said, “or stay here and explain to the DiNardos that I took off. It’s entirely up to you.”
I thought about my misspent youth, and the lessons I really shouldn’t have had to learn another time. Then I thought about Lorraine the slavering pitbull, who was far less terrifying than her homicidal daddy, and who I was confident would not take the news of her groom’s defection with any kind of grace.
What else could I do?
I got in the van.
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