Chapter Fourteen
Travis swerved, surprised, as Skylar braced the dashboard. “What? What is it?”
A truck was in the distance, barreling down the highway.
“Quick,” she breathed. “Up there. Pull over.”
“Why?”
“Trav, there’s a turtle in the road.”
He honed in on the reptile, a speck on the road that he would have mistaken for a rock. “Sky, there’s a truck coming in that lane,” he repeated her tone with exaggerated flourish.
“Pull over, Trav,” she beseeched, her voice rising with worry. “It’s gonna get hit.”
He checked his rearview mirror to make sure they wouldn’t get rear-ended, shaking his head, and slowed the truck. She’d already unstrapped herself and was thrusting open the passenger door as the truck skidded over gravelly pebbles on the side of the road to a stop.
“You’re gonna get hit. Sky, that truck ain’t slowing down—”
She was already out, racing around the hood and out onto the two-lane highway as the oncoming truck rolled closer.
Shit.He shoved open his door as her gorgeous hair swung around her back and her honest-to-God sexy-as-hell dress fluttered around her suntanned thighs. He’d been speechless when she’d stepped onto her porch, expecting her standard jeans and a tank, which he’d fantasized about as he’d rested between cases last night when he should have been trying to sleep. But that dress with those ropers… He’d needed to bite his knuckle at how powerful the image was, at the telltale stiffening he couldn’t help below the belt.
“C’mon, babe,” he groused, limp-running onto the road and waving his arms to catch the truck’s attention as she grabbed up the turtle and hurried it across to the opposite margin. “Stay over there!” he called.
She whirled around. This woman… What was with her running out into roads like she had no sense of self-preservation or had a death wish or—
“Stay!” he barked, as if commanding Yoda, as it looked like she was going to take a step toward him, and he jumped to the side with her, dragging her back into the cacti.
The truck barely hit the brakes, shouting something about getting his damn woman out of the road as it breezed by, the shifting air pressure making them list, like he was a parent and Skylar a wayward child. Heart knocking, he itched to flip off the asshole on Sky’s behalf, staying the urge by a thread as he remembered her gentle remarks about being unable to hold all the Rhetts of the world accountable.
“Seriously, Trav, you think I’d just step out in front of the truck? Check it out. A female western box turtle!” she said proudly as she thrust the turtle between them for him to see.
He flinched his face out of the way.
Really? They’d just about been flattened, and that was all she cared about? A beautiful grin lifted her mouth. Radiant. Like a fool, he couldn’t help gazing at her glossy lips, shiny and kissable with her plastered in his death grip. She extricated herself and set the turtle down in the desert scrub. He gazed at her mile-long legs, toned and lithe; smooth, rounded shoulders and arms; those badass boots and wind-tossed hair. And the way her blue eyes positively glowed in the sunlight as she stood back up and joined him, then jogged across the road was so mesmerizing, he didn’t want to look away. How had he ever gone without this woman? How had he ever thought he could survive without her?
He shook his head, folded his arms, willed his heart rate to come down a notch as he tallied up how many years of his life she’d just shaved off.
“Jesus, girl, what the hell was that? Why’re you giving me a heart attack? I don’t feel like scrubbing back in again today just to fix all your broken bones,” Travis rumbled as she glanced back at the turtle she’d safely deposited among the desert scrub.
“It would have gotten hit.” She shrugged as he welcomed her into his arms.
“Was it worth dying over, though?” He couldn’t hide the incredulous lilt to his voice as he kissed the top of her head and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, inching her farther away from the yellow painted line into the margin for good measure.
She glanced up his chest into his frowning face, her exhilarated smile still sparkling on her lips. He couldn’t stay frowning. She nodded. “Not that I was going to get hit, but yeah. I’ve done it dozens of times, and I’d do it again. And look.” She pointed. The turtle was shoving the ground, hurrying as fast as it could into the brush to get away from whatever whirlwind had just whisked it up and carried it to its destination. “The world’s just a little better now that Miss Turtle gets to live another day.”
There it was again. She could do one simple act for the most insignificant creature and thus offset one tiny bit of bad.
“Miss? How does one manage to register a turtle’s sex when they’re about to get mowed down?”
She shrugged. “The shape of the plastron, of course. Easy.”
He huffed a laugh at how seriously she’d taken his question, how brilliantly nerdy she still was, even if she laughed when she said it. She would know, of course.
“Get in the truck, Doolittle.” He spanked her ass playfully as she turned away from him.
She flashed a grin backward. Oh, he thought that proud smile across the road was radiant? No, this, eyes and smile tossed over her shoulder coyly as her hair swung around her, skirt bouncing flirtily around her legs…this was radiant. A wavering breeze hit his back as a car whizzed by. Fuck, she was making him forget himself.