Stranger in the Moonlight (Edilean 7)
“And I guess she doesn’t want you to tell either.”
“Precisely. I have been placed in the middle of my mother and him,” Travis said as he looked at her across the table. He’d liked being in her workroom—but he’d always enjoyed the outdoors and he wanted to see it day or night. The converted garage was too closed-in for him. “Joe has no use for that big room at the end of his store. It has windows that look out into the forest. He says Jecca will never use it and I understand why. He greatly admires her ability to reassemble electrical tools and he’d put her to work.”
Reaching over, Kim removed a foam pellet cl
inging to the back of his shirt.
“I feel like I have those things crawling all over me. Could you—?” He held out the back of the neck of his shirt.
Standing, she put her hand on his collar but she didn’t touch him. She glanced down his shirt but saw only sun-bronzed skin. And muscles. “Nothing,” she said.
“Sure? I itch in places. I should have taken a shower first, but I saw your light on and I wanted to see you.” He took her hand in his and kissed her fingertips. “Oops, sorry,” he said and released her. “You’re soon to be married so you’re a ‘no touch.’”
Frowning, Kim sat back down. “Hardly that. I haven’t been asked, much less said yes.”
“So you really like this guy?”
“He’s nice,” Kim said, but she didn’t want to talk about Dave. “What are your plans for tomorrow?”
“According to Joe, I’m to be his slave. Kim, if you want that shop that’s supposed to be Jecca’s I can get it for you. I’ll get Joe to give it to you as a wedding gift. Free rent for at least three months, and very reasonable the rest of the time.”
“My garage is fine and why would he give me a gift for his wedding?”
“Not his wedding. Yours. To Dave. He’s a man and he’ll want a place to put his car. Or one of those catering vans. He is going to move in with you, isn’t he? I can’t imagine that he earns enough to buy a house like this one. But then what you made last year was substantial. Congratulations! You are truly a success.”
What he was saying was wonderful. Truly great. But, somehow, it was upsetting her. She hadn’t thought of the fact that Dave came with a lot of equipment. He owned five big vans and he had enormous pieces of cookware. He lived in a small apartment and rented a commercial kitchen. But still, he did some cooking at his house. One Sunday afternoon she’d gone to pick him up and had ended up helping him make four gallons of tuna salad. Her clothes had smelled so bad she’d had to soak them before putting them in the washer.
“Dave and I haven’t discussed anything like that,” Kim said. “The truth is that it’s only Carla who’s saying that I’m about to receive a marriage proposal, but then she looks at all men as marriage material. She even suggested that the two of you—”
“Me?!” Travis’s eyes were wide. “Me and Carla? She is cute. Think she’d go out with me?”
Kim looked at Travis in speculation and suddenly had the feeling that she was being manipulated, but she wasn’t sure how. “Are you up to something?”
“Just trying to be your friend is all. I enjoy your company and I want to help out around here so you don’t throw me out. Edilean is scary.”
Kim couldn’t help laughing. “It will be when my brother remembers where he saw you! I couldn’t understand why you were standing there with your hand over your face. Did you really come close to killing him?”
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t know why my heart didn’t stop. There I was in Morocco, trying my best to beat Jake Jones’s time, Ernie my mechanic was with me, and he had the map out. I went around a corner and there’s this guy crossing the street with a donkey so covered in boxes the poor thing was bowlegged.”
“That sounds like Reede,” Kim said.
Travis got up and pantomimed being behind the wheel of his car. “Before I hit that curve, there were Moroccans on the sides shouting at us in Arabic. I don’t know about you, but my Arabic consists of la and shukran—no and thanks. How was I to know they were telling us that a crazy American doctor was meandering across the raceway?”
“You were the only car?”
“Hell no! I was eating Jake’s dust every two miles. He’d done something to the fuel injection system but I didn’t know what. Every time I got near him, he’d upshift and spew rocks at us. My windshield was a mass of scars.”
Travis bent forward, his hands on the wheel. “So there I am, yelling at Ernie—no sound absorption in a race car—about what the hell the Arabs were shouting at us and he’s telling me that if I don’t slow down the transmission is going to fall out when bam! There’s this man.”
“With a donkey,” Kim said.
“Which froze. The donkey had sense enough to know danger when he saw it.”
“But my brother didn’t.”
“You’re right on that! He looked at a car coming at him doing at least a hundred and twenty and—”
“You’d slowed down for the curve,” Kim said solemnly.