Tikka Chance on Me Read online

  Fuck. It took everything he had to stay in the rental car. To keep doing his little tour of Greatest Hits instead of running into the Taj and blowing years of painstaking undercover work with some sort of Graduate-esque desperate gesture. Eventually he made it out to the Royal—the first place he’d actually seen The Graduate, because Old Man Kennedy never could resist the classics. He’d spent so many afternoons and evenings in this old lot with its ancient speakers. Holed up in some older kid’s car, clutching cheap snacks and contraband booze and new comics from the drugstore. Whatever was on the screen and whatever was on the pages had occupied him pretty thoroughly, until he’d learned you could hole up with girls in the backseat, too.

  He’d eventually given up drinking 40s and smoking cigarettes. Nowadays, he bought all of his comic books in trade instead of as single issues. But he hadn’t quite lost the knack for hooking up in cramped vehicles.

  Or for running into Pinky Grover in the strangest places.

  Because there was one other car idling in front of the Royal Drive-In Cinema’s giant white screen. Hers.

  The man formerly known as Trucker Carrigan needed to reverse, U-turn, and get the fuck out of there. But the man who’d been balls-deep inside her three days ago—who’d fucked her and held her and fallen just a little bit in love with her—he had no choice but to stay.

  Chapter Ten

  After around ten minutes parked at the drive-in, I felt pretty silly. I didn’t know what I’d expected. A lightning strike? The voice of Vishnu? An overwhelming sense of peace? None of that settled upon me. I was just aware that people were probably going to start showing up soon for the Royal’s Friday night double-feature, so I couldn’t hold my Trucker Carrigan vigil for much longer. Just the latest in a long line of brilliant ideas, Pinky.

  I shook my head and put the key back in the ignition of my trusty Civic just as another vehicle pulled onto the lot. A generic sedan that didn’t look much different than my own, except for the color. A nondescript bronze-y shade. It screamed “teenager on a date in their mom’s car” or “aging creeper.” I didn’t really feel like encountering either archetype at the moment.

  The car parked just behind mine. At the next set of speakers. A largely unnecessary move, since Old Man Kennedy had upgraded five or six years ago and you could now just tune your radio to a film’s audio. But it did serve one purpose. It kept me from reversing out of my spot. And made me twist to look through the back windshield at the driver. What the fuck?

  The dark-haired man was getting out. He was tall, broad-shouldered. Wearing a white shirt and khakis. Throw in a Tiki torch, and I was two seconds away from putting my foot on the gas and speeding the fuck out of there, even if it meant driving straight through the movie screen. But then I noticed his gait. That slow, rolling swagger. Only one man in Eastville walked with that calm assurance that his dick was just damn big enough to suit.

  My keys hit the floor in my efforts to shut off the car’s engine. My fingers fumbled on the door handle. Somehow, I managed to get it open and spill out onto the pavement without landing face first. Oh, God. OhGodohGodohGod.

  And there he was. Trucker. But not Trucker. No, this was supposed to be a totally different man. One with neatly combed brown hair. Completely clean-shaven. The bare skin of his chin and jaw was still pink in places—and it would take a few days to catch up with the rest of his suntanned face.

  “You look like a sexy insurance adjuster,” I blurted out before I could think of something more appropriate. Something like “Thank God you’re okay.”

  He’d stopped just a few inches away. At my words, he rocked back on his heels, his eyebrows furrowed. “I’m not sure how to take that. Is the insurance sexy, or am I?”

  A laugh bubbled up from my gut, the sound of it a little hysterical to my own ears. So, we were going to engage in some flirty banter before discussing his miraculous survival? Okay. “It’s like you’re...freakishly attractive middle management,” I huffed out, dragging both hands through my hair. “The kind of man who has probably had mind-blowing sex on the copier while working late one night.”

  Trucker’s chuckle sounded as jagged as my own amusement. He reached out, smoothing some of the wavy locks I’d messed up. His fingers lingered, tracing down from my temple to my cheek. “Have you had sex on a copier?” he wondered, his voice measured, as if he really was the mild-mannered office drone I’d described. “It doesn’t seem at all comfortable. Not to mention the risk of your butt prints ending up in the paper tray. What if your coworkers find them in the morning?”

  Butt prints were hilarious, coworkers be damned. My tear ducts disagreed, though. So did the wobble in my tone. “I-I thought you liked taking r-risks, Mr. Presumed Dead Biker.”

  “Touché,” he murmured before enfolding me in his arms.

  I clung to him. Digging my fingertips into his shoulders. Breathing in the sharp scents of motel soap and hair dye and that warm, comforting, arousing thing beneath that was still inherently Trucker Carrigan. The scent of musk and man, like the romance novels said.

  He’s fine, I told myself. He’s okay, I repeated. He still has to leave you, I remembered.

  And I held on even tighter.

  ***

  It was amazing. Realizing just how much he’d missed holding her only after she was back in his arms. He was floored by it. By Pinky. The smell of her hair and her skin. Her soft curves. And how he could crave her and need her so much when they’d barely been together and barely been apart. Jesus, he wanted to kiss every part of her. He started with the top of her head. Then the shell of her ear. The apple of her cheek. The corner of her gorgeous glossy lips.

  “Trucker,” she sighed, arching into him with a hungry little moan.

  Trucker. Hearing those two syllables was like being dunked into an ice bath in the middle of winter. Everything froze. A few things shriveled. Oh, right. He couldn’t have any of this anymore. This name. This woman.

  It took a massive act of will to push back from her. To gently break her embrace. To quietly say, “Trucker Carrigan’s still dead.”

  She went utterly still, her brown skin taking on an ashen cast. “What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

  “That he’ll be cremated in a day or two without fanfare. Maybe somebody will shell out for a headstone to put in the Eastville Cemetery, maybe he won’t be memorialized at all. Just remembered occasionally as a punk kid who came to a bad end.”

  Confusion knitted her brows together. They were alone on the lot, but he didn’t want to say the words again. Partly because he was breaking so many rules by doing so, and partly because talking about his unceremonious demise in the third person was just fucking creepy.

  Pinky wrapped her arms around herself, a pale echo of the hug they’d just shared. “Then who are you, huh?” It wasn’t a demand or an interrogation so much as it was a bewildered plea. “Who is standing right here in front of me? How does that work?”

  Hell if he knew the answers.

  “Maybe I am an insurance adjuster,” he suggested. “Maybe you met me in an accounting class at Mercer. Maybe we hit it off and I drove out here to see you. Date Night at the drive-in?”

  Ha. It didn’t even sound believable to him. Had he ever been that normal? He’d skipped every single high school dance. Gone to football games only because he was playing. Even in the Army, he hadn’t really dated. Made a few beneficial friends while he was deployed in Iraq for a year? Yes. Had hookups while he was on base? Sure. One of those hookups had been Meadow the infamous vegan, and they’d kind of fallen into being boyfriend and girlfriend for six months. But once he’d joined the ATF and started prepping for undercover work, there’d been no question of getting close to anyone. He and his left hand had managed fine for years—and his hand didn’t require shelling out for unlimited breadsticks or movie-theater popcorn.

  Pinky, however, required so much more than that. She needed as much honesty as he could give her—and he couldn’t give her half of wh
at he wanted to.

  She didn’t respond to his what-if scenario. No, instead she just stared up at him like she was trying to memorize his face. She was wearing heels, he realized belatedly, and while they didn’t remotely put her eye-to-eye with him, the few extra inches and her serious expression were enough to nudge him off-kilter. Like she was an Amazon warrior in jeans and a T-shirt. Wonder Woman facing off with an exiled Captain America in the world’s most awkward and ill-advised crossover event.

  “Are you allowed to tell me your new name?” she wondered.

  “I doubt it.” He rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand, still weirded out by the lack of stubble, and then kicked uneasily at the ground. “But I really wish I could.”

  She made a soft noise of disbelief. “Am I ever going to see you again after today?”

  “Probably not,” he hedged. And then followed it up with a more solid “no.”

  “Then why did you get out of your car? Why did you walk over here to me? Jesus, Tr—” Pinky caught herself just in time, clipped off the syllable that would lead to his old ID, and exhaled. A huge sigh of frustration. “Jesus,” she repeated, vehemently. “Why didn’t you just let me believe you were dead?”

  This bit of truth was easy to share. Easy to put into words. It compromised nothing...except maybe his heart. “Because you’re the only person I know who makes me feel alive.”

  A tear-choked “fuck you” was her completely justified reply. “Fuck you, you fucking asshole. You’re just going to make me bury you twice. That is completely unfair,” she spat, reaching out to shove at his chest and hit his shoulder.

  And then she closed the distance he’d put between them and kissed him full on the mouth.

  Chapter Eleven

  I was angry. And relieved. And aggravated. And totally out of my depth. Kissing the man formerly known as Trucker Carrigan was the only thing that made sense. So, I committed to it. Sliding my arms behind his neck. Burying one hand in his stupid dyed hair. Demanding his tongue and taking it. At some point in the future, when he was long gone and I was questioning my life choices, I would wonder why blacktop lots and the threat of discovery seemed to be Our Thing. Right now, in this moment, I didn’t care if the entire damn Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau descended upon us, because this kiss was everything.

  Everything I couldn’t say. Everything I wanted to say. Everything I felt inside. Hot and wild and thrilled and spinning. I tasted it on his lips. Drank it up.

  “Because you’re the only person I know who makes me feel alive.”

  The words were echoing through my brain, sizzling beneath my skin, pulsing in my veins. Making me feel alive. I’d known him for years, but only known him for weeks. How could it be so serious so fast? How could I be so desperate to hold on to something—someone—I’d never really had?

  “Pink.” He groaned into my mouth, his palm sliding up the line of my spine. “Pink, we can’t.”

  It was too late for “we can’t.” We’d already done too much, and there was no going back. But the rational part of my mind took over, forcing me to pull away. To breathe. To look into his big blue eyes—he was going to have to get colored contacts if he really wanted to alter his appearance, because they were a dead giveaway. A window to the man he really was. The man he’d always been beneath the leather patches and the teenage attitude. Someone funny. Someone warm. Someone who’d walked toward me when he was supposed to be running away.

  “Tell me your name,” I murmured, knowing full well it was unfair. “Please just give me that.”

  He leaned down, into me, enough so that our foreheads bumped and he could turn and bury his face in my hair if he wanted to. “I’d give you the world if I could,” he said quietly. “But I can’t. I won’t. It’s too dangerous.”

  He hadn’t considered the danger when he flirted with me at the Taj Mahal. Or when we climbed all over each other at Walmart. Maybe if he had, we wouldn’t be in this place now. Standing entirely too close at the Royal as cars started to creep in for the Friday night double feature.

  I curled my hands into fists, digging my nails into my palms, so I wouldn’t touch him. There was no point in prolonging the inevitable, right? “So, now what?” I asked him as rationally and calmly as possible. “You just say goodbye? Get back in your car and go off wherever off-duty government agents go?”

  He chuckled at that. “You make it sound like a specific place. Like Asgard or Wakanda or Tahiti. Like I’m a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and I can just pack up between issues or TV episodes. I have no idea what’s next,” he admitted. “There will be a debriefing. And then a period of downtime. And then I’ll be reassigned. None of that involves me ever returning to Indiana.”

  Okay. Okay. That was the bottom line. He was telling me as much as he could. But I still couldn’t wrap my mind around any of it. Why he’d started this between us if he couldn’t finish it. Why he’d made me care. How he could be here one second and then be nothing but a memory the next.

  I knew what it was to leave your life behind. I’d done that when I dropped out of grad school. But I hadn’t died. I still kept in touch with people through Facebook and Twitter and text messages. I could always go back and visit. Chicago wasn’t off-limits. My exes weren’t off limits.

  “Does the vegan know what you do for a living?” It was a completely ridiculous question. One I had no right to ask. But it was better than bursting into tears again, right?

  “‘The Vegan.’ You make Meadow sound like a food activism superhero. She’d probably love that.” He shook his head. “No. No, she just thought I was your average Army grunt. And our relationship was over long before I went into undercover work.”

  “There is absolutely nothing average about you,” I assured, stepping back, putting a little bit of space between us.

  “There’s nothing average about you either.” He stepped forward. Like we were engaging in some weird old Regency romance dance. For someone who was supposed to be cutting ties with me, he was doing a damn poor job. “You made me want to break the rules, Pinky. All that discipline...everything that tamed me after the stupid shit I pulled as a kid...it flew right out of my head the first time I saw you behind the bar at the Taj Mahal.”

  Oh my God. Was this part of what they taught in boot camp? Or in ATF training or whatever? How to disarm your opponent? Trucker, Tyson...whoever he was...was tearing down every single one of my defenses. He stared at me like I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life. Like he might die if he didn’t have me. The world’s horniest insurance adjuster.

  I knew I was pretty. I didn’t suffer from low self-esteem and had no shortage of attention from men and women alike. But I’d never considered myself the kind of person who inspired devotion at first sight. That was the stuff of movies. Of epic comic-book relationships like Cyclops and Jean or Gambit and Rogue or Steve and Bucky—shut up, I was allowed to ‘ship what I wanted, okay? Even if the pairing was doomed. Like me and the man in front of me.

  “Why?” I figured this was the least of what I was owed if I was going to be left with nothing but the memory of a few hookups that I could never speak of to anyone. “Why me?”

  He shook his head like I’d amazed him with those two simple syllables. “Why not you?” Amazed and frustrated. “Jesus, I should be the one asking the questions. Why would you even look at me, knowing about the Eagles?” he demanded, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Because you’re hot.” And wasn’t that embarrassing? It wasn’t like I went around routinely finding white supremacist criminals sexy. Frankly, they were pretty barf-worthy. And incredibly punchable. But not the person I gotten to know as Trucker. He’d never inspired fear or loathing. Only suspicion because of the company he kept. Deep inside, in my gut, I’d always known he was...safe.

  Until now.

  Now, this man was going to tear me apart.

  ***

  He was absurdly thrilled to hear that Pinky Grover thought he was hot. And painfully awar
e that this was not the time or the place to dwell on that kind of confession. Afternoon had rolled into evening. People were coming into the drive-in for the first show. Any minute now, Old Man Kennedy was going to come out and demand they buy tickets or get out. They couldn’t keep standing here like this. In the open.

  He couldn’t keep standing here. Because if he did, he was never going to leave. And Tyler Barnes had places he was expected to be. Paperwork to fill out. Reports to write—which was rich, given how much he’d hated doing homework when he was a kid. It turned out that being a federal agent involved way more writing than it did big-screen action sequences. He’d already had more than his fill of both.

  He hadn’t had his fill of the woman in front of him. She was blushing now, ducking her head and half-hiding her face behind her hand.

  “God,” she moaned, sounding totally mortified. “Let’s just end this now. Go away. We’ll pretend I never saw you.”

  “Is that really what you want?” His stomach clenched at the thought. She couldn’t be serious...

  “No!” Pinky was quick to assure, much to his relief. And then she sighed, shifting on those ridiculous block-y high heels before stamping her feet. “Ugh! I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what you want. Besides the obvious, I mean.”

  Then they were on the same page. Because the obvious was the only thing he could cling to. The one thing that hadn’t changed since last night. That he’d lost his head over this woman and still craved her like oxygen, like food, like water. That he’d give anything for another night—another week, another month—with her.

  “What do suggest we do about this?” she demanded. “Running off together into the sunset is clearly not an option. I actually like my parents and don’t want to abandon them. And I’m pretty sure you didn’t go through all of this shit with the Eagles just to throw it away and become a fugitive.”