Night Driving by Lori Wilde

tapped the face of his watch. “It’s almost nine. We’ve got to hit the road.”
    “You know, if you keep doing that I’m gonna have to smash that watch.”
    He narrowed his eyes, pretended to be affronted when he wasn’t. “You wouldn’t dare.”
    “It’s for your own good.” She bit into a crisp slice of bacon, her gaze hooked on his. “You don’t know how to slow down, relax and take it easy.”
    “I’ve had plenty of time to sit around. It drives me batty. Relaxing is severely overrated.”
    “Because your mindset is rush, rush, rush, go, go, go. It’s killing you to be incapacitated. That’s why you had to go back for a third surgery. Because you couldn’t sit still and just be. Now you’re having to learn the hard way that life doesn’t always turn out the way you planned.”
    “How much do I owe you for the analysis, Dr. Freud?”
    Tara grinned. “It’s on the house.”
    “And the advice is well worth every penny.”
    “Oh-ho, here come the barbs.”
    “I wanted to be on the road hours ago.”
    “And here we were getting along so well there for a split second.”
    “You’d think you’d be in a hurry, too,” Boone said. “To see your mother.”
    A shadow flickered over her face. “I’m not very good when those I love are sick.”
    “But you’re going home anyway.”
    “Of course. I love my mother.”
    “Yet here you are, over a thousand miles away.”
    She shifted uncomfortably. “It was my mom who told me to follow my bliss. She encouraged me to leave Florida.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “She got married young and started having kids, and even though she never said it, I think she regretted not getting to have adventures.”
    “What did your dad say?”
    “He’s my dad. He was dead set against it, but Mom convinced him.”
    “Could you get a to-go bag for the rest of that?” He nodded at her half-eaten breakfast.
    The waitress led a cowboy past their table. Boone pointed at Tara’s plate, silently mouthed “to-go box” to the waitress and pantomimed signing the check.
    The waitress nodded.
    “I90 East is a mess,” the cowboy told the waitress. “Eighteen-wheeler jackknifed and turned over, blocked that entire side of the freeway. Bread truck. Loaves of bread and buns strewn everywhere. You should have seen the birds flocking. I thought I was in a Hitchcock movie.”
    Tara tucked her legs underneath her, sat up higher in her seat, looked over Boone’s head to the cowboy in the booth behind him. “Excuse me, sir.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” the cowboy said.
    “Did you say a bread truck overturned on the freeway?”
    “Yep. Traffic is backed up all the way from here to the state line. It’ll be hours before they get that mess untangled. If you’re headed that direction, stay on the access road.”
    “Thank you.” She threw the cowboy a beaming smile, then slipped her feet back on the floor and was back eye-to-eye with Boone. “You owe me an apology,” she said.
    “How do you figure?”
    “If we’d been on the road like you wanted, we’d be trapped in traffic with no way out. In fact, we probably would have been right behind that bread truck. It might have turned over on us. Squashed us flat.”
    “You have a very active imagination,” Boone said because there was no way he was going to admit she was right. It was one thing to put up with her Mary Sunshine attitude. It was quite another to give her a reason to gloat.
    She gloated anyway. “And the moral of that story, Toliver, is that sometimes it’s better to be the tortoise than the hare.”

4
    Wednesday, July 1, 4:45 p.m.
    T ARA HAD A MISSION . Cheer Boone up. Whenever he smiled, he dazzled, and when he laughed, well, she melted, gooey as chocolate in the hot sun. Unfortunately, he rarely laughed.
    Why do you care? He’s not your problem. He’s not a project and you’re not chocolate.
    No, but she was stuck in the car with him and she preferred sunshine to rain. They’d been driving for hours and they