Falling Fast (Falling Fast #1) - Tina Wainscott Page 0,42

gales of laughter as he made lips with his pepperonis and talked like Donald Duck, a spot-on imitation. Raleigh laughed, too, but he was watching Mia. The left side of her mouth pulled a little tighter because of the scarring, but her crooked smile somehow made her even more beautiful. He loved the way she laughed, always had. As though each laugh were precious. Now he understood why.

Her gaze slid to him, catching him. Something electric zinged between them, strong enough that his fingers curled in response. Her hand came up to her collarbone, and he wondered if she’d felt it, too.

Cody cleared his throat. He probably realized he’d lost their attention. “Miss Mia. I heard you were in an accident because of racing. I’m glad you’re all right now.” He winced. “I hope that was all right to say.”

She gave him a soft smile. “It’s fine. I’m a big proponent of speaking the truth and being open.” She flicked a glance at Raleigh. “You can probably tell that I was burned pretty badly.”

Cody’s shake of his head was a little too vigorous. “Hardly at all.”

“I put on a lot of makeup, and I wear clothes that cover most of the scarring. Your brother saved my life. I bet he didn’t tell you that part.”

Cody’s narrowed eyes pinned him with an accusatory look. “Noooo.”

Mia leaned forward, her arms on the table. “Raleigh will downplay it, but he reached into the flames that were all around me, with a broken shoulder yet, to pull me out of the car. That’s how his hands were burned.”

All Raleigh could think of was how she’d kissed his hands, so freaking tenderly that he’d almost lost it. And how much he’d wanted to kiss her scars, the mottled flesh that bound them forever.

“Whoa,” Cody intoned. “I’m not sure I could reach into a fire.”

“You would,” Raleigh assured him. “If someone you cared about was engulfed, you’d do whatever you could to pull them out. Even if it’s a stranger. Something comes over you, and you just do what needs to be done. People do it all the time.”

“Like firefighters,” Cody said, a big, goofy grin on his face. “If I don’t become a mechanic like you, I want to be a fireman. Then it’d be my job to reach into flames. To run into them, too.”

“Yep. You’re brave enough to do that. I considered becoming a firefighter while I was in jail. Get away from cars altogether, have an honorable profession. But my conviction would have to be factored in, and considering the firefighter who’d been at the scene had been promoted to a captain, I nixed it.”

“But that’s all right. You’re meant to work on cars. That’s what you love, and it’s honorable, too. Don’t look so skeptical. An honest, good mechanic is hard to find.” Mia tossed her crusts into the empty box. “What’s the jerk who caused the crash doing nowadays?”

“Cassidy,” Raleigh said his name, a bitter pill in his mouth. “He’s a cop now, believe it or not.”

“And a big fat bumhole,” Cody added.

“But wouldn’t a conviction hamper his ability to work in law enforcement?”

“He was sentenced as a juvenile, since he was only seventeen at the time of the crash. It’s not on his permanent record.”

“That’s not fair,” she said. “You have a record, and he doesn’t.”

A lot about the crash was unfair, but Raleigh wasn’t going to go into the hardships. Losing his car. Having his license revoked for a year. Paying a five-hundred-dollar fine. Still, it could have been worse. Mia had survived. Thrived. That was all that mattered.

“Life sucks sometimes,” Cody said with a solemn nod, his shadowed eyes meeting Raleigh’s. “And so do some people.” Their dark secret simmered like an ember, but Raleigh broke eye contact before Mia could pick up anything. He sure as hell didn’t want to get into that.

“Yeah, it does” was all he could say. “But it was most unfair to Mia.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to bring the conversation down into the dumps,” she said. “Do the kids still race around here?”

“Our crash scared them straight, but this generation only knows about it as an urban legend. I’ve heard rumors that there are races on the same strip of abandoned highway we raced on, but not on a regular basis. I occasionally have some kid bring in his four-cylinder and ask what I can do to make it race-worthy. Then I break the urban-legend thing and tell him what happened. How people