of sweat on her neck, and the green sweater had to be hot. Judging from the way it was clinging to her curves, the Hell-Car didn’t have air-conditioning. He didn’t like that she was sweating for him. He didn’t like the way his one good eye kept locking on her chest, like some reconnaissance tracking system doped up on Viagra.
“I don’t mind,” she told him, then put the can to the bars, as if she expected the can to slip through. Nope. Jason could have told her that metal didn’t work that way. It took five hundred pounds of force to dislodge metal, or eight hundred degrees of heat. Sometimes both.
However, Jason stayed silent because he had learned that people never liked to work too hard at a conversation. Eventually, they always gave up.
“Are you going to open the gate, or should I toss this sucker over the top?”
His instinctive response was to instruct her to go ahead and throw, but two things kept him from going with the default. The knowledge that he would have crossed the crazy-lonely-man line in his head, and the beat-up sedan. Frankly, that car out-crazied his crazy-line anyway, so while she might not notice, he would.
Those were his reasons. That, and he liked her breasts.
He typed in the combination on the keypad and the gate creaked open. He’d gone through a lot of trouble to get the creak exactly right. A haunted house creak. At the sound, the woman’s eyes grew wide, but not in fear. No, she liked it.
“I bet the kids love this place at Halloween.”
“People don’t drive out this far for a stick of gum.” People didn’t drive out this far for peas, either, but he left that part out.
“If they don’t, they don’t know what they’re missing.” While she talked, her eyes surveyed the yard, the seventy-year-old house, the mountains of scrap, the piles of engines.
Before she could trespass farther, he took the can of peas. “Thank you.” Then he nodded once, held the gate open and politely waited for her to leave.
Leaving didn’t seem to be part of her strategy. She ducked under his arm and wandered inside, looking at one pile, then the next. “What do you do with this stuff?”
Jason shrugged, not about to explain his hobbies to her, and not sure he could. Not that anyone would understand, anyway. Hell, he didn’t even know why.
His gaze followed her as she walked around, moving from one mound to the next, drawing precariously close to the house.
His pulse rate kicked up. Anxiety or lust? She was cute, short, stacked and curious. The clothes were out of place in the September heat, but he was grateful she was covered up, cause he didn’t think his pulse rate could handle any more. He liked her hair though. It was long, dark silk that hung down her back.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing to a modified bicycle. “Wait, wait, don’t tell me.”
Not that he would have told her anyway, so he stayed quiet while her fingers traced over the twisted metal hump with the leather seat mounted on top. Crouching down, she inspected the spring-loaded frame with the four iron-spoke wheels. It’d taken him three months to find the wheels, and eventually he’d bought them on eBay. They were perfect.
“It’s an animal?”
Still he waited.
She rose, studied the thing. “First, there are four legs, or wheels. Second, the elongated back is almost like a hill…a hump…” Her finger crept to her mouth, chewing absently. She had a nice mouth. Red lips that spent most of their time open. His mind, always running in a tangential yet somewhat practical direction, began to think of all the uses for an open mouth: eating, breathing, kissing, sucking.
Her mouth opened wider. “A camel!”
And now that twenty questions were over, Jason needed to send her on her way. As he headed to the metal gate, he thanked her for coming. There was very little sincerity in the words, but he didn’t think she would notice.
Her dark eyes flickered once. Okay, she noticed. He kicked a