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“Why?” She rose also. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would willingly subject themselves to Geraldine Brown.
“Well . . . she’s sick with a leaky pancreas. That sounds . . . debilitating. I could help out and . . . make some soup.”
Soup wasn’t going to cure his mother’s hypochondria.
“I am an excellent nurse and I have people skills.”
“No. Thank you.”
She grabbed his forearm and dropped the pretense of a soup-making nurse with people skills. “I’m bored to death, but I can’t exactly walk around town. I might get recognized.” He ran his gaze from the top of her head, down the fish hat and shirt, to the baggy sweats tucked into a pair of ugly boots. Sean wasn’t an expert in women’s fashion, but he hated baggy sweats and fucking Uggs. “If I have to spend all my time cooped up in my room, I’ll go crazy.”
He didn’t owe her anything. Hell, he’d already given her his shirt and paid for her breakfast. The thought of her chatting it up with his mother made his brows pinch together.
Her eyes widened and her grasp on him tightened. “I’ll go all Bates Motel.”
For a few seconds, he gave it some thought as he lowered his gaze to her hand wrapped around his
forearm. She was fresh meat for his mother’s deathbed stories, the ones she told repeatedly to anyone within hearing or shouting distance of her. If he threw Lexie to his mother, she’d refocus her attention away from him.
When he didn’t answer right away, Lexie took that for a yes, and a big smile curved her lips and lit up her eyes. She released him and grabbed a worn bomber jacket that had to belong to Jimmy. She shoved her arms through the sleeves, then followed him out of the waffle house. Fresh snow crunched beneath their boots, and puffs of their breath hung in the air as they walked to his mother’s Subaru. Sean opened the passenger door as Lexie shoved a hand down the front of her shirt. His breath caught in his lungs, leaving only her little puffs to hang between them.
“Chap Stick,” she said, as if that explained anything. Her hand fished around between her breasts before she pulled out a tube of Burt’s Bees. “I don’t have a purse or pockets in my sweats. This jacket has huge holes instead of pockets.” She coated her lips with honey-scented balm.
“What else do you have in there?” He was tempted to look for himself.
“The phone Jimmy bought for me.” She shoved the yellow tube back down her shirt. “Don’t freak out if you hear ‘Crazy Train’ coming from my bra. That’s my ringtone. It seemed appropriate.” She got into the car and said, “Thanks for letting me tag along. I won’t cause problems. I promise.”
She broke that promise before he drove from the parking lot. “Can we stop somewhere so I can get some bottles of water?”
“I thought you weren’t going to cause problems.” They stopped at a drugstore, where she hung a blue plastic basket from her elbow. She filled it with two bottles of water, a bag of pretzels, breath mints, mascara, and a “zit stick.”
“Thanks, Sean.” She grinned as they pulled away from the store. “I won’t cause you any trouble now.”
He doubted it. From the top of her fish hat to the bottoms of her ugly boots, Lexie Kowalsky was all kinds of trouble. The kind that—All aboard! Ozzy Osbourne yelled from Lexie’s boobs. Sean accidentally jerked the wheel and nearly drove off the road. Ozzy laughed like a lunatic as she dug into her shirt. I, I, I, I . . .
Lexie pulled out a TracFone and glanced at it before answering. “Hi, Marie. Oh yeah? Did Jimmy give you this number?” She listened for several moments, then said, “Sandspit, British Columbia.” There was a brief pause, then she said slowly, “Sandspit . . . British Columbia . . . No. Sand—spit.” She spelled it out, then laughed. “I know, right?”
Sean drove up the two-lane road and gathered from the one-sided conversation that the driver of the silver clown car was on the other end of the line. Lexie scratched her head beneath the fish hat.
“I’ll be home day after tomorrow,” she said as he turned up a gravel drive. “Come over and we’ll open a bottle of wine and order takeout . . . Okay. Love you, too.” She ended the call, and the phone went back down her shirt. Then she placed her hands on the outside of her T-shirt, cupping the undersides of her breasts, and adjusted herself.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She pushed one side and then the other.
Sean forced his gaze from her shirt as he drove around a weathered A-frame house that had once been the main lodge at a KOA. He pulled to a stop and glanced at Lexie adjusting herself one last time. “Do you need help?”
She looked across at him, blinked as if she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone, then said, “I got it.”
“What you got down there beside a phone and Chap Stick?” And big breasts.
“A couple of toonies, some sawbucks, and a Borden.” She dropped her hands. “My driver’s license and hotel key.”
Money and a hotel key. “You have a lamp in there like Mary Poppins?”
“I wish I had a magic carpetbag, right about now.” She didn’t wait for him to walk to her side to open her door. “I’d pull out my makeup bag, good shampoo, and black cloche.”
Sean had no idea what a cloche was, and didn’t think he wanted to find out.
