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Bam!
Paul McCartney’s voice was drowned out as she hit a pothole, and the car shuddered, a loud thud sounding from the rear end of the Caddy.
Oh, puh-leez.
She couldn’t break down. Not now. Not when she’d finally screwed up her courage and set her plan in motion. Fearing that one of the car seats was too loose, that the strap securing it might have failed in this old car, she glanced over her shoulder. Nothing seemed out of place. And the car was running well, no popped tire, no bent axle. The babies were still safely bound in their car seats.
For now.
“It was nothing,” she said aloud. Maybe something had shifted in the trunk or a prop had gotten away from its bindings in the specialized cargo space she’d had retrofitted into the big car so that she could use it in her act. God, how she loved to pop out of the “empty” white Caddy, in a scanty outfit . . . well, those days were gone, at least temporarily, until she got rid of the remaining fat and sagging skin from her latest pregnancy with the twins. So far, she’d lost a lot of that weight, but things had shifted, and her skin was not as taut as it used to be when she’d been a nubile teenager, and tonight she’d had to wiggle into some damned tight undergarments to even slip into her current outfit—her favorite pink Marilyn Monroe dress.
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The jeweled gown’s seams were straining, but scarcely being able to breathe was well worth the trouble. Didi knew she looked spectacular.
Cutting the radio, she kept the pedal to the metal, all the while listening for that disturbing noise again. She detected nothing more than the thrum of the engine, the whine of the tires, and the rush of wind through the partially opened window. Since the clunk had stopped, and there didn’t appear to be anything mechanically wrong with the car, thank God, she clicked on the radio again, this time to a current pop station. She squashed her cigarette on the tab in the ashtray, adjusted her sunglasses to fight the glare of those last eyeball-searing minutes before the sun sank over the ragged mountaintops, and told herself she was ready.
Tonight, her bad luck was going to change.
Forever.
* * *
Remmi hardly dared breathe in the tight cargo space of her mother’s ancient Cadillac. She rubbed the back of her head where it had bumped against the inside of the wall when Didi, at the wheel, had hit something and Remmi had bounced enough to slam the back of her head against the metal roof. Ouch! She was surprised her mother hadn’t heard the thud, stopped the car, and discovered her oldest daughter stowed away in the area where Didi usually hid the props for her stage act, a part of the voluminous trunk sectioned off in this boat of a white Cadillac.
Fortunately, Remmi had bit back a scream despite the radiating pain.
Now, she was sweating. A lot. Drops drizzled down her forehead and off her chin, and covered her back. The space she was wedged into was tight. Claustrophobic. But she didn’t want to think about how she could so easily be trapped inside. There was a latch of course, but it could jam. She didn’t want to think about it and swiped at the beads of sweat on her chin.
For a split second, as the huge car’s speed increased and she felt as if Didi were being intentionally reckless, Remmi considered calling out, letting her mom know she was hiding in the space, but she held back. Didi would kill Remmi if she found out her teenager had stowed away in the car. Well, actually, Remmi hadn’t intended to stow away at all. She’d been hiding. From her mom.
And it had backfired.
Big-time.
Cautiously, Remmi peered through a small slit between the cargo area and the back seat, a tiny peephole Didi had installed. The scent of cigarette smoke reached her nostrils, and she heard music from the radio. The twins, her half siblings, were silent for once, not crying, but Remmi couldn’t see them. From her vantage point, she saw little more than the back of her mother’s head, Didi’s blond “Marilyn” wig securely in place.
Why the costume?
Remmi hazarded a quick glance toward the wide rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of her mom’s face, sunglasses over the bridge of her nose, lips pouty and colored a glossy pink, even a signature mole drawn near the corner of her mouth.
Oh, Mom, what’re you doing?
Remmi wished to high heaven that she hadn’t decided at the last possible second to hide in the cargo space. She’d thought Didi was working, and Seneca, the twins’ nanny, had retired to her room for the night as the babies had fallen asleep in their shared crib. Remmi, whose room was part of the converted garage on the far end of the house, had thought she was safe, that no one would check on her until her mother returned sometime after her last show, usually after 2:00 AM. She’d planned to sneak out her bedroom window, and with the keys she’d already lifted out of the drawer in the kitchen, she’d intended to drive her mother’s crappy old Toyota into the night. The windows of her room were mounted high, slanted panes near the apex of the sloped ceiling, accessible by climbing onto the headboard of her bed and scrambling over, impossible to reach from the outside without a ladder.
But she’d done it.
She’d slid through the narrow opening, hung by her fingers from the sill, then softly dropped to the dusty ground below, the heat of the desert still simmering, the sun beginning to sink in the western sky.
All to meet a boy.
A boy who was probably bad news. Or worse. But there was something about him, something that caught her attention and made the blood pound a little in her ears when his dark eyes found hers. Even now, stuck in the sweltering cargo space, her heart trip-hammered and the back of her throat went dry at the thought of Noah Scott. Older, with a bad-boy reputation, he was definitely not Didi-approved. Which made him all the more attractive, she decided. But she couldn’t help herself. God, he was sexy. She had dreams about his hands on her body and how kissing him made her tingle all over, even in places she hadn’t realized were meant to tingle.
Stop it!
She couldn’t think about him—fantasize about him. Not when she was trapped in Didi’s Cadillac, going to God-only-knew-where.
Earlier, she’d snagged the keys to the Toyota, just after dinner, waited for Seneca to close her door, gave it another ten minutes, then slid out of the window and dropped lithely to the ground. She’d just settled behind the wheel of the Camry (she’d taught herself to drive on the sly and was fairly adept, even though she was still only fifteen) when she spied her mother’s Caddy rounding the corner of the street leading to their driveway in this crummy part of town.
