Blue Twilight Read Free

for you.”
    He eyed her, maybe seeing a little beyond the words she said out loud, so she averted her eyes. She hadn’t meant to sound petulant or pouty. Childish was the last way she wanted him to think of her.
    â€œI’ll visit, I promise.”
    She shot her eyes back to his. “When?”
    â€œWhen? Well…I don’t know.”
    â€œHow about now?”
    â€œNow?”
    â€œToday.”
    â€œMaxie, sometimes I don’t even know how to follow your conversations.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Hell, you’re going to make me admit it, aren’t you?”
    He held up both hands, shaking his head, as if she’d lost him.
    â€œI’m not sure I can drive that…thing.” She nodded toward the van. “It’s huge, and I can hardly see over the steering wheel. It steers like a truck, shifts like a tank, catches every breeze like a sailboat. It wobblesand rocks, and I can’t see behind me with those stupid mirrors.”
    He looked again at the van, then at her. Stormy said, “I’m going back inside, make sure everything’s locked up, shut down, turned off, you know.”
    â€œYou drove it here from the rental place,” Lou said, as if he hadn’t even heard Stormy’s announcement. Stormy shook her head, sent Max a surreptitious thumbs-up and hurried back into the house.
    â€œOf course I did,” Max admitted. “How do you think I know how hard it is to drive?”
    â€œI think you’re trying to twist my arm to get me up there.”
    â€œI can think of a lot of men whose arms wouldn’t require any twisting at all,” she said.
    â€œThen have one of them drive you.”
    â€œI don’t want one of them. I want you.” She let the double entendre hang there.
    He pretended not to notice. It was damned infuriating. He responded to all her flirting that way, either pretending it sailed over his head—when she knew damn well it hadn’t by the flash of fire it sometimes evoked in his eyes—or by changing the subject. She was beginning to think he didn’t take her efforts at all seriously.
    â€œI’m going fishing for the weekend,” he said. “Leaving from here, in fact. Got my bag all packed in the car, and a friend with a big boat waiting for me at the pier.”
    â€œGod forbid I interfere with that,” she said.
    â€œYou’ll do fine on your own, Maxie. You’re the most capable woman I know.”
    She drew a breath, sighed. “Fine. Just fine. Will you at least hang around until I get the beast backed out of the driveway? You can pretend you’re a traffic cop again.”
    â€œAah, the good old days.” He looked toward the house. “You gonna wait for Stormy?”
    â€œShe’s driving her car up. And she knows the way.” She dug in her jeans pocket for the key, then climbed up into the van and cranked the engine. Through the windshield, she saw Stormy step out of the house and close the door. She sent her friend a secret smile. Stormy frowned, looking worried.
    Max shifted the van into Reverse and looked in the side mirrors. She saw Lou standing in the road, making hand motions at her, probably to tell her to back out. She popped the clutch. The van bucked and then stalled.
    She started it again, and this time backed up a little before the bucking and heaving began. She kept that up—start, stop, start, stop, jerk, cough, sputter, start—until a car came along the road and Lou changed his hands to a “stop” position. Then and only then did she back up smoothly and quickly, over the mailbox, aiming dead into the path of the oncoming car.
    A horn blasted. Tires squealed. Stormy shrieked, and Lou shouted.
    Max stalled the van again and got out, leaving it sitting there, with its ass-end poking out into the road. The car had skidded to a stop five feet short of the van, andthe driver, a neighbor she recognized, got out,