“
Those are awfully pretty sandals you have on,” he said.
“Thank you. I just bought them. They’re made by Børn and I love the soles. They’re—” She broke off. “Oh right. They’d be destroyed walking through that.”
“Kim . . .” he said slowly as he looked into her eyes.
She could almost read his mind. He wanted to drive down that old road. If they went slowly and carefully, they might be able to do it. If it got to be too much for him to drive, they could walk—and maybe Travis would give her a piggyback ride. She checked her seat belt to see if it was securely fastened.
“Once I get going, I can’t stop,” he said in warning. “This car isn’t four-wheel drive, so if I slow down we’ll get stuck.”
“Then you’d have to call a Frazier to get you out.”
“A Frazier?”
“The sheriff’s family. They know about cars.”
“Do they?” From Travis’s perspective, the road was easy. It would do some damage to the undercarriage of the car, but he might be able to avoid that. The question was whether or not a girl like Kim could stand it. “The sheriff would drive over that?”
“Colin? Are you kidding? He’d drive up the mountainside. He’s nearly always the first person to arrive if someone needs rescuing. I keep telling him what a great team he and Reede would be. My brother goes down on helicopter cables to save people. He—”
Travis was looking at her in such an odd way that she stopped talking.
“This is like the bicycle, isn’t it? You need to do it even if you fall on your face.”
He smiled at her because she understood so completely. On the other hand, her talk of what other men could do was crushing his ego.
“I’m game if you are,” she said.
“If we do this, you have to trust me,” he said, his face serious.
“Didn’t I ride on your handlebars when you rode up that dirt hill?”
He smiled at her in such a way that Kim wanted to kiss him. There was gratitude as well as pleasure in his eyes.
“All right,” he said as he glanced out the windshield, his hand on the gearshift. “Put one hand on the armrest and one here and hold on. And don’t scream. Screaming distracts me.”
At that last, Kim’s eyes widened and part of her wanted to say, Let me out of here! But she didn’t. She put her hands where he told her, braced her feet on the floor, then nodded. She was ready.
With a grin, Travis put the car in low and took off. To her shock, he started out going fast and he didn’t slow down for anything. With lightning reflexes, he went around potholes, or straddled them precisely. When a fallen tree blocked the way, Travis went up onto the side of the road. The car banked left at what Kim was sure was a forty-five-degree angle, and he was heading straight for a giant oak. Kim wanted to scream. She wanted to warn him that they were about to crash, but she held her breath—and kept her eyes open.
Travis swerved to the left and missed the tree by no more than an inch. It was so close that Kim’s intake of breath sounded like a mouse’s squeak.
He never let up speed as he put the clutch to the floor and upshifted. When he hit a hillock made by years of overgrown weeds and a rotten tree trunk, all four wheels left the ground.
As they sailed through the air, Kim thought it could be the end of her life. She glanced at Travis, the last person she’d ever see alive.
He turned his head a bit, his dark eyes wildly alight—and he winked at her.
If Kim hadn’t been terrified, she would have laughed.
When the car hit the ground, her body jolted hard—but he kept going at what seemed to be warp speed.
Travis took the car to the side again, riding on the bank, then twisting hard to the left, then to the right and back again.
Finally, before them loomed the back of the huge building that used to be a brick factory. But Travis didn’t slow down. He went around, over, and across three more big holes.
The solid wall of the brick building was straight ahead and Travis was flying toward it.