Page 6 of Can't Stop
More questions pop into my mind, but I’m too afraid of the answers. Glad our detour will force us to miss out, I take another side road and pull through a strip of souvenir shops. This isn’t exactly tourist season for the beach town, but the steady supply of locals must keep them in business.
Rayna sits up taller and focuses on something ahead. I follow her gaze to a man on the side of the road. Unlike the locals, he sticks out. He wears a tattered brown backpack, and road dust covers his clothes. He holds his thumb high in the air, begging for a ride out of here.
“We have to stop and pick him up!” Rayna says, her enthusiasm seeping out of every pore.
“We absolutely do not have to do that.”
“Come on, Dalton. Please!” She adjusts in her seat so that she can face me. “We don’t even have to kill him.”
“Then what’s the point of picking him up?”
She doesn’t even need to consider her answer. “We can make him as uncomfortable as possible and see how long it takes him to ask to be let out. Please? For me?”
Her hand slides over my thigh and lands on the crotch of my jeans. Her begging does something to me. It always has. It’s how I ended up in my first ever three-way . . . with a corpse. It’s how I ended up wearing another man’s sausage casing. She begs, and I’m so stupidly in love that I give in.
She’s a bad influence.
I pull over and turn to Rayna. “Okay. We can pick him up. But we are not killing him, understood?”
Rayna lets out a joyful squeal and kicks her feet with the cutest show of excitement I’ve ever seen. It’s as if picking up a dirty man on the side of the road is the greatest gift I could have given her.
I wave to the man, and he approaches the car as I lower the window. “Where you headed?”
As he draws closer, I regret the decision to stop. Despite being grimy from the road, he’s incredibly handsome. Hell, the grit might be adding to the allure. When he smiles at me, I want to punch him in the teeth to make them just a little less straight, but then I might slip and cut my fist on that razor-sharp jawline.
He leans down and places his thick forearms on my window, tossing his head to get the quiff of blond hair out of his face. “Florida, but if you’re headed south, I’ll ride as far as you can take me.”
“What a coincidence!” Rayna squeals. “We’re headed to Florida too!”
My brain screams to come up with a reason, any reason, to change my mind right now and drive away, but it’s too late. He’s already opening the back door and settling his pack on the seat. A strange and slightly familiar scent reaches my nose when he sits down and closes the door. I can’t quite put my finger on it . . . but I know that odd, leather-like aroma.
“How long have you been hitchhiking?” I ask, trying to beat back the awkward silence with some idle conversation.
“All day.” He shuffles around in the back seat.
Rayna turns to see what he’s doing, and her eyes go wide. Panic immediately sets in as her mouth falls open. She’s never without something to say. I need to keep my eyes on the road, but I’m dying to know what he’s revealed that has her so shocked. It better not be his fucking dick. If he so much as looks at Rayna sideways, I’m breaking my one rule and making the kill my damn self.
Finally, Rayna finds her voice. “Is that a cinnamon? I’ve never seen one in person.”
Cinnamon?
“I see you know your raccoons,” the man says.
Raccoon? Did he bring a wild animal into my car?
“And it’s a soft mount too? It looks so lifelike.” Rayna is practically beaming, and that’s when it hits me. The man must have seen her squirrel and pulled out his own bit of taxidermy. But what she says next nearly has me swerving off the road. “Did we just become best friends?”
Did I just pick up the man who will steal the love of my life away from me?
“Why do you carry around a dead raccoon?” I ask, trying to prevent him from answering that question.
“Probably the same reason I carry a dead squirrel around,” Rayna quips.
“I just love taxidermy,” the man says before sitting back in his seat with the animal draped across his lap. If I lean just right, I can see him in the rearview mirror. And he’s still so fucking handsome.
Regret grips my throat in a chokehold. I fucked up. I let the man of Rayna’s dreams inside my fucking car. He’s the psycho to her pathic, the in to her sane. I’m outside looking in, firmly seated beyond their inner circle as they play a gruesome game of show and tell. Where is Raul when I need him?
If he thinks he’ll steal her from me, he’s lost it. I’ll kill him myself before I let him have her, and I’ll burn his stupid raccoon in front of him first.
