Page 70 of Love on Deck

“Stupid thing is totally fine,” Jack grumbled.

“You’d rather it wasn’t?”

“That’s not what I said.” He groaned, turning back to face his car again, the front light crushed, nose-down in a ditch. Then he looked back, reaching a hand toward me.

I took it, letting Jack pull me in and wrap his arms tightly around my back, my breath shuddering onto his shoulder. “That was scary,” I murmured.

“Yeah.” He kissed my temple in a sweetly reassuring way. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault. No one got hurt.” I looked back at his car, the angle and the jolt not boding well for it.

“Except my car, maybe.”

I pulled away and started back for the ditch to retrieve my phone. “I have AAA. I’ll get my card and give them a call. Do you know where we are?”

Jack followed me to the car. “There’s no need.”

“You have it too?”

“I have a cousin,” he said, flashing me a small smile. He pulled his phone from the center console and made a call, putting it to his ear. “Hey, man.”

Jack kind of spun away from me but kept talking. “Yeah, I’m good. Listen... no, actually, Annie told me about it. I was coming to surprise Tuck... yeah, I was coming. But a deer ran out in front of us. My car’s in a ditch.”

I walked down the road a few steps. Fields went out in every direction, disappearing into a thicket of trees. The two-lane road spread forward both ways, with no sign of cars coming either way.

“Like twenty-five minutes east. You’ll see us from a mile away... thanks, man. Okay, bye.” He hung up the phone and looked at me. “Looks like we might not be getting any of the good cake.”

“It’s going to take a while for the tow truck to get out here?”

“Not the tow truck. Just Wyatt with a truck that tows. He should be here soon, but I don’t know how long it’ll take to get the car out of the ditch.” Jack took a few steps closer, gripping me by the shoulders. He ducked his head a little to see into my eyes. “I’m really sorry.”

“When I told you to distract me, I didn’t mean like that.”

He relaxed a little at my joke. “This is not how I imagined rolling up at my brother’s party.”

“In a truck that tows?”

“With no car. I don’t know how we’ll get home tonight, but I’ll figure it out.”

The idea of not being back at my computer by ten so I could keep working through Jerry’s emails and my proposal for the MediCorp conference sent a sizzle of stress through my chest. “Will anyone be heading toward Dallas tonight?”

“It’s unlikely, but we can probably figure something out.” He looked over my shoulder. “Maybe my car will run perfectly fine. I’ll have Wyatt take a look at it when we get to town.”

* * *

Jack’s cousin, Wyatt, shook his head. He looked at Jack over the hood of the car. “One glance at that radiator tells me you aren’t driving this home anytime soon.” He’d towed us into Arcadia Creek, where we were now huddled around the front end of the car in his garage. His actual, attached-to-the-house garage, not an official mechanic situation. Apparently, they had nothing like that in town. Just a few hobby guys who knew a lot. If you needed something beyond their expertise, you had to drive to the next town over.

“That’s not ideal,” Jack muttered.

Talk about an understatement.

“Is anyone else up from Dallas?” he asked.

Wyatt leaned forward to look at something else under the hood. “No one else lives in Dallas.”

“Okay.” Jack ran a hand over his face. “I have an idea. But we need to get to the party first.”

Wyatt pulled an orange degreasing wipe from the shelf and wiped his hands. “Hop in the truck. I’m heading over myself.”

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