Anything but Minor - Kate Stewart Page 0,9
massive blue truck and put on my seatbelt.
Andy looked at Rafe in the rearview and chuckled as Rafe tried to silently clear his throat and then turned his attention to me.
“So...?”
“Alice,” I said as I pulled his passenger mirror down and pushed the plastic wrap off of my head along with my hat. I fisted my hair in a ponytail and pulled it through the elastic on my wrist.
“Alice,” Andy said as if his friend fuming in the back seat made no difference to him at all. “Ignore Rafe. He was already half-cocked because the game was canceled.” He grinned back at Rafe before he took off. His truck plowed easily through the rising water. “So how do you know Dutch?” I caught Rafe’s curious glance and pushed the mirror back up.
“I just met her last night,” I said as the two shared a confused look in the rearview.
“She let you sit in Herb’s chair,” Andy said in slight shock.
“Yes, she told me her husband died, and I could have his seat.”
“That woman has occupied those two chairs since the stadium opened and never sat with anyone, let alone gave away his seat,” Andy remarked.
Still soaked and terrified for my Toyota, I shrugged. “She let me.”
“Huh...” This seemed like a mystery to both men in my company. A brief silence followed before Andy spoke up. “So what do you do?”
“I’m a flight instructor at Boeing.”
Andy winked at Rafe again in the rearview as I rolled my eyes. “So you’re a pilot?”
“Yes, I studied aeronautics and got my masters at Cornell. I just moved here last week.”
“Cornell,” Andy said again with a smug smirk. “Hear that, Rafe?”
“Impressive,” he said in an uninterested tone.
I snapped my head back and faced him head on. “I use my brains instead of my brawn to make a living. How do you see that working out for you?”
Rafe smiled then, and not just any smile, one that said he’d seen me naked. “Brawn’s working out just fine for me.”
I rolled my eyes and faced forward.
I had to fuck her.
It’s all I thought about on the way to the bar. The woman was tiny but had just the right amount of everything from what I’d gathered at the bar last night, including the sexiest brown eyes I’d ever seen. But it was the fire in them that I wanted to feed off of.
Andy made small talk as I studied her profile. She was covered in plastic and still appealed more to me than half the ass I’d bedded in the last few months.
“So you go in and teach a bunch of pilots to fly every day?” Andy asked with interest.
“Yeah, pretty much. There’s a newly built plane, so I’m getting them ready to pilot it.”
“Like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun,” he said with a wink.
She turned to him and gave him a full smile. “And you’re like Sam Malone from Cheers.”
As if on cue, they fist bumped, and she...giggled.
“So, are you single?” Andy said as he looked her over.
Wait. A. Fucking. Minute.
I glared at Andy in the rearview, and he gave me a deviant smile.
“I am,” she said with a nod. “I’ve been flying for the last two years since I graduated. I haven’t had much time for anything else.”
“Well, welcome to Charleston,” Andy said with a hint of pure southern bullshit. I had no idea what angle he was playing, but I knew he wasn’t interested in Alice. He’d been in love with Kristina for two damned years.
“Does it always flood this badly?” she asked warily.
“When the tide comes in, and it rains this hard, yes. This town becomes soup, but it’s mostly downtown.”
“I missed that in my research,” she said as if she was disappointed.
“King tides came this year. They only come around every hundred years or so. Gotta keep up with the rain and tides if you go anywhere downtown,” Andy said as we pulled up to his bar. “Come on, pilot Alice, I’ll buy you a beer.”
“No thanks,” she said with another giggle as the two completely ignored me. “And no special treatment. You are the ball star.”
“Then I’ll buy you a drink for throat punching Rafe,” he said as he gave me a quick wink before he slammed his door, but not before I heard Alice say, “Well, in that case.”
“What’s your fucking angle,” I hissed to Andy as Alice excused herself to use the restroom an hour later. I cracked open a peanut and tossed the pods back in my mouth