They’d be looking for her? Her mom would cover for her? What?
“It ain’t like he’s got any proof. The only thing I dropped was the ski mask, and it was a cheapo I bought at the Goodwill a couple of Halloweens ago. Not something he can trace back to me.”
I slowed the Porsche down as her words started sinking in. I hadn’t just saved a girl from being attacked. If I understood this babbling correctly, I had just become the getaway car driver.
“Why’re you slowing down? I need to get to my momma, like, now. She’s just two miles from here. You go up to County Road Thirty-Four and turn right, and then you take it about three-fourths of a mile to Orange Street and take a left. It’s the third house on the right.”
Shaking my head, I pulled over to the side of the road. “I’m not going any farther until you tell me exactly what it is I’m helping you escape from.” I glanced down at her baseball bat tucked between her legs, then up at her face. Even in the darkness I could tell she was one of those ridiculously gorgeous southern blondes. It was like the South had some special ingredient to raise them like that down here.
She let out a frustrated sigh and blinked rapidly, causing tears to fill her eyes. She was good. Real good. Those pretty tears were almost believable.
“It’s a really long story. By the time I explain everything, we’ll have been caught and I’ll be spending the night in jail. Please, please, please just take me to my house. We’re so close,” she pleaded. Yeah, she was a major looker. Too bad she was also bad news.
“Tell me one thing: Why do you have a baseball bat?” I needed something. If she’d knocked someone unconscious back there, then I couldn’t help her get away. They could be injured or dead.
She ran her hand through her hair and grumbled. “Okay, okay, fine. But understand that he deserved it.”
Shit. She had knocked someone out.
“I smashed all the windows in my ex-boyfriend’s truck.”
“You did what?” I couldn’t have heard her correctly. That did not happen in real life. Country songs, yes. Real life, no way.
“He’s a cheating bastard. He deserved it. He hurt me, so I hurt him. Now please believe me and get me out of here.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. This was the funniest damn thing I’d ever heard.
“Why’re you laughing?” she asked.
I shook my head and pulled back onto the road. “Because that’s not what I was expecting to hear.”
“What did you expect me to say? I’m carrying a bat.”
Glancing over at her. I grinned. “I thought you’d taken someone out with the bat.”
Her eyes went wide, and then she laughed. “I wouldn’t have knocked someone out with a bat! That’s crazy.”
I wanted to point out that smashing your ex-boyfriend’s truck windows and then running through the woods in escape at night was crazy. But I didn’t. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t agree.
“Right here, turn right.” She pointed up ahead of us. I didn’t bother putting on my blinker since no one was around us. “So, what’s your name? You look familiar for some reason, but no one I know around here drives a Porsche.”
Did I tell her who I was? I liked the privacy that Sea Breeze, Alabama, afforded me. I had a lot to think about over the next month, and making friends with the locals wasn’t on my agenda. Even if she was smoking hot.
“I’m not from around here. Just visiting,” I explained. That was the truth. I was here staying at my brother’s beach house while deciding on my next move.
“But I’ve seen you before. I know I have,” she said, tilting her head and studying me.
She’d figure it out soon enough. My brother was Jax Stone. He had become a teen rock star, but now that he was twenty-two he was a rock god. We looked similar. And the media loved to follow me around when they couldn’t get to Jax. While I loved my brother, I hated getting the attention. Everyone saw me as an extension of Jax. No one, not even my parents, cared about who I was as a person. They all wanted me to be who they expected.
“This is a Porsche, isn’t it? I’ve never seen one in real life.”
It was also one of my brother’s toys. I didn’t have a car here, so I just used the five he had in his garage. The house in Sea Breeze was where our parents used to make us spend our summers while Jax was juggling fame at a young age. But Jax was no longer a teenager and the house was his now. He’d turned twenty-two last month. And I’d turned twenty the month before that.
“Yes, it is a Porsche,” I replied.
“Turn here.” She pointed again toward the road ahead of us. I took the left and then came to the third house on the left. “This is it. Thank God no one is here yet. I gotta go. You need to get out of here so no one comes questioning you. But thank you so much.”
She opened the door and then glanced back at me one last time. “I’m Jess, by the way, and tonight you saved my ass.” She winked and closed the door before running off toward her front door. Her ass in those tight black jeans was worth saving. It was the nicest ass I’d ever seen.