The Angels' Share (The Bourbon Kings #2) - J. R. Ward Page 0,101
you have some bottled water with you.”
“I think so—hold on.”
Waving his arms, he cleared away the clouds of hot, oil-smelling vapor while, overhead, thunder rolled through the sky like a bowling ball.
“Here,” Beth said. “Got it.”
Taking off his jacket, he covered his hand with a sleeve and bent down to the radiator. “Stand back.”
“No, wait! You’ll ruin your—”
As he loosened the cap, the pressure exploded and he got nailed with a razor-sharp burn on the bottom of his arm. “Sonofabitch!”
“Mack, are you crazy?”
Trying to be a man about having been stupid, he dropped the damn jacket and flapped things around. “Give me the water,” he gritted when he wasn’t seeing double anymore.
A flash of lightning provided him with a first-class view under the hood, and the clap of thunder that immediately followed meant the storm was coming in fast and had good aim.
“Get back in the car, okay?”
“What about your arm?”
“We’ll look at it when this thing isn’t overheating. G’on.”
A deluge of rain cut the argument off, and Beth ran around and got behind the wheel again. The wet rush was cool, which helped on a lot of levels, especially as a stiff gust threw a wash of the stuff onto the engine. And what do you know, filling up the radiator went better than the captastrophe—and then he was shutting the hood and heading back for shotgun.
“Well, that was fun.” He yanked his door shut and pushed his wet hair back. “You want to give the ignition a shot?”
“How’s your arm?”
“Still attached. Let’s see if we can get going.”
Beth was muttering and shaking her head as she cranked the key. “I don’t know anything about cars, and after this, I’m really looking to keeping things that way.”
But the engine started up like a champ, and as she looked over with a smile, Mack almost forgot the pain in his arm.
“Don’t be too impressed,” he robin-breasted. “All men with names like Mack or Joe are constitutionally required to be able to fix situations like this.”
Unfortunately, the respite didn’t last. As rain pelted the front windshield and more lightning disco-balled the sky, the pain from the burn got back to business and he found himself cursing and not wanting to look at the damage.
Grinding his teeth, he started to take off his tie because of the nausea.
“I think we should go to the emergency room,” she said.
“Let me see how bad it is.”
When all he could do was fumble, Beth pushed his hands out of the way. “I’ll do it.”
The tie knot she had done for him dissolved under her deft fingertips, and then he tilted his head back so she could get at the top button of his collar.
From his vantage point, he could see her in the rearview mirror, her brows down in concentration, her lips parted.
He got hard.
He didn’t mean to. He didn’t want to. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything about it. But here it was—the adult equivalent of a high school boy’s come-up-and-solve-this-math-problem nightmare.
Man, this trip kept getting any better, the pair of them were going to be struck by a bajillion joules of wake-up juice.
With a jerk, he made sure his blazer was covering his lap, and then Beth was working her way down his shirt and pulling the tails out as she went. Which meant a whole lot of him was getting airtime.
Well, at least he wasn’t as preoccupied with his Freddy Krueger.
“I’ll take it from here,” he said gruffly.
“You’re not going to manage. Lean toward me.”
Mack slowly shifted off the back of the seat, bringing them close together. She was talking about something, God only knew what, going on and on as if nothing particularly notable was happening … while she stripped his chest and shoulders.
“… butter, you know? Right from the fridge. I don’t know if it worked on my neck burn necessarily, but I smelled like I had breakfast for perfume when I went to the dance. The boys were crazy for me.”
Laugh, you idiot, he told himself.
“That’s funny,” he said.
“Oh … Mack.”
As she looked down and shook her head, he thought for a cringing moment she had noticed his erection, but no, his wet blazer was still covering up everything.
Actually, she had managed to get the shirt completely off where he’d been burned, the thing now hanging damply from his “good” arm. Like it was depressed it wasn’t going to get to go to a party.
“You’re going to need a doctor,” she said at the horrible