Every Road to You Page 10

  Ethan closed his eyes briefly, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingertips.

  “It’s dumb, that’s what it is,” he said. “Who knows what he’s been up to over the years? He could have a backyard full of buried wives, girlfriends or hardheaded widows who think they’re in love.”

  Tia pivoted in the passenger seat until she was facing him, fist on hip. “The only one I see acting dumb right now is you. Do you really have so little faith in Carol?”

  He scrubbed a hand down his chiseled face. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  Tia rested a hand on his arm. “I know Carol to be as sharp and smart as she is kind and caring,” Tia said. “If anything, she’s leading Glenn around, not vice versa.”

  The corner of Ethan’s mouth quirked upward into a hint of a smile. “Maybe.”

  “And I’m sure Glenn is a wonderful guy.” Tia removed her hand from his arm. She’d meant it as a comforting gesture but was enjoying the feel of his forearm beneath her palm entirely too much.

  Ethan harrumphed. “We’ll see. I should know more about him soon.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I emailed an investigator friend of mine when we left the museum, and he’s checking Glenn out as we speak.”

  Tia nodded.

  “What, no argument?” Ethan asked.

  “Nope. You don’t know a thing about him, and I think investigating him is fair.”

  “Good. Glad to hear you agreeing with me for a change,” Ethan said, putting the car into gear and driving away from the gas station. “Let’s see if we can make it a habit.”

  “But...” Tia interjected.

  “And how did I know there would be a but?”

  “But,” Tia said, “since you’re checking him out anyway, is it really necessary for us to hunt them down? Besides, they got a big jump on us this morning. I’m sure they’re long gone. They’ve probably already ridden the roller coaster and left the amusement park by now.”

  Ethan answered by merging back onto the highway in the direction of Branson. “Even if he’s the greatest guy in the world, Grandma’s daredevil list is a problem. It’s downright dangerous,” he said. “Besides, they stopped by the same gas station just an hour ago. The cashier remembered because Grandma made a stink because they didn’t have MoonPies.”

  He grinned, increasing his speed. “Looks like we’re gaining on ʼem.”

  Meanwhile, Tia gnawed on the inside of her bottom lip. She truly did understand where Ethan was coming from, but it didn’t make going after Carol right.

  She glanced at the dashboard, watching as the needle on the speedometer continued to climb. Learning there was only an hour’s worth of distance between them and the runaway couple seemed to have encouraged him. Now Ethan was more eager than ever to catch up to them.

  It didn’t matter. Tia closed her eyes and settled back into the leather seat with a resolute sigh. Whether Ethan caught up to them on the road or at the amusement park, unless they were slowed down by an act of divine intervention, Carol’s happiness was on the clock.

  The car suddenly slowed and Tia opened her eyes to flashing blue lights. A police car slid up to the driver’s side. The cop inside, wearing mirrored aviator shades and a frown, signaled Ethan to pull over.

  Tia smiled and flicked her eyes skyward.

  Thank God.

  * * *

  Ethan pressed his lips together, his back molars grinding themselves to dust in his struggle to remain silent.

  “I’m telling you, a sugar-and-olive-oil scrub will work wonders on your dry skin,” Tia prattled on to the female cop leaning inside the open driver’s-side window. “It’ll exfoliate those dead skin cells and leave your skin both smooth and moisturized.”

  “Just plain old sugar and olive oil from my cupboards, nothing fancy, right?” the cop asked.

  Yes, dammit, Ethan wanted to shout. Same as the honey-lemon facial mask you two were babbling about ten minutes ago.

  Instead, he sat stoically in the driver’s seat as he had for nearly a half hour, listening to the two of them yap over him, Tia dishing out beauty advice as if he weren’t sitting between them.

  Having already been slapped with a two-hundred-dollar speeding ticket, the last thing he needed was to get on this officer’s bad side. The way his luck was running, he’d wind up stuck in a holding cell while she and Tia gave each other mani-pedis.

  “Thanks so much, Tia,” the officer said. “I’ll let you know how these treatments work for me.”

  Ethan’s ears perked up, sensing the conversation was finally winding down.

  “You do that, Ginny. You have my card, right?”

  “Sure do. You take care, hon,” she said with a warm smile that cooled the second she turned to Ethan. “And you slow your roll, Mr. Wright. Keep it under the speed limit.”

  Ethan eased the car back onto the highway, while Tia stuck her head and arm out the passenger-side window waving goodbye to her new best friend. The muscle in his jaw twitched as he watched her close the window and settle back into her seat.

  The words he’d nearly pulverized his back teeth holding back tumbled out.

  “‘Your dry hair is just begging for a deep-conditioning mask,’” Ethan mimicked in a high-pitched tone. “‘Peanut butter and jelly will hydrate those thirsty strands and make a tasty lunch afterward.’”

  Tia glared at him as if he’d been the one to waste over a half hour—talking about nothing.

  “It was avocado and coconut oil,” she said.

  “Un-freaking-believable,” he muttered.

  “What’s with the attitude?”

  Ethan spared her a quick glance before returning his attention to the road. “You would think after the mess you stirred up with my grandmother, you’d take a break from doling out advice,” he said. “But when it comes to advice, you’re like the Energizer Bunny—you just keep going and...”

  “I’m in the beauty business. How could I look at her parched skin and hair and not say anything?” Tia asked. “Would you expect a doctor to walk away from someone bleeding on the side of the road?”

  “Well, Doctor,” Ethan began, injecting each syllable with as much sarcasm as possible, “in case you hadn’t noticed, during your emergency gabfest, your patient smacked me with a two-hundred-dollar ticket.”

  He caught her wince out of the side of his eye.

  “You were speeding, which is against the law. Ginny was only doing her duty.”

  Ethan grunted before reverting to the mimicking tone. “‘Ginny was only doing her duty.’”

  Tia shook her head. “What are you, five years old?”

  “No, I’m now an additional half hour behind this Glenn character and my grandmother.”

  Silence stretched over the next few miles. Ethan turned on the cruise control to eliminate the natural inclination to try to make up for lost time. He didn’t want to risk another speeding ticket. Even worse, he didn’t want to endure another impromptu beauty consultation.

  He felt a poke at his arm and glanced down to see Tia nudging him with her elbow.

  “Pop quiz,” she said. “Who’s your favorite superhero?”

  “Huh?”

  “If given a choice, which one would you be?” she asked. “The one who flies or the one who drives around in the ultracool car with all the gadgets?”

  Ethan released a sigh along with his annoyance. He didn’t know what it was about this woman, but it was hard to remain angry around her—or with her. She had a way about her that made you see rainbows in the most turbulent of storms.

  “Neither,” he said finally. “As a kid, I was totally into the one named after a bug.”

  “Ew.” Tia frowned. “But he doesn’t fly or even have a sidekick.”

  “
Who needs those when you can leap from building to building using your web, not to mention special spider senses alerting you to danger?”

  “So I’m guessing it was your Halloween costume choice,” she said.

  “Every year,” Ethan confirmed. “My mom would make them and they got better every year. The first ones were basically just blue long underwear and a red T-shirt with a little black marker. However, by the time I was nine, they were better than the movie costumes. She’d sewn in padding for fake muscles and had figured out a way for me to shoot a Silly String web from my wrists.”

  “You must have been the envy of every kid on your street,” she said.

  He had been. Then his mother died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. She’d collapsed right in front of him. One minute she was walking him home from the school bus stop, and the next she was gone. The doctor said she was dead before she hit the ground.

  His father, unable to cope with his grief and raising a young son alone, had left him in the care of her parents.

  Ethan swallowed hard. Years had dulled the ache of his loss, and he’d thought he’d conquered his fears surrounding the most important person in his life being taken from him in a flash.

  Then my grandmother...

  He shoved the image from his mind and focused instead on the cheerful energy of Tia’s bubbly voice.

  “What about you?” Ethan asked, allowing himself to be drawn into their road game. “Pop quiz. Which comic-book superheroine did you want to be as a kid?”

  Tia shook her head. “I didn’t read comic books growing up,” she said.

  “But there were plenty of cartoons and movies, so you must have some idea,” Ethan said. This time he gave her an elbow nudge. “Come on, share.”

  “The one who dressed up like a cat,” Tia said.

  Ethan shook his head, the heaviness in his heart already lifting. “No fair. She’s a villain.”

  “But she wears a catsuit, which is by far the best costume.” Tia defended her position. “Besides, I prefer being the bad girl. Everybody knows bad girls are more fun.”

  Tia didn’t give him a chance for a rebuttal.

  “Stick with superheroes or back to music?” she asked.

  Ethan checked both his side and rearview mirrors. Although he’d been keeping it below the posted speed limit, his flashing-blue-light paranoia lingered.

  “As long as you aren’t talking about listening to Wang-It again, I’ll take music.”

  Tia giggled and rolled her eyes. “Okay, pop quiz. Best female performer, Beyoncé or Rihanna?”

  Ethan mulled over the choices. Evidently, he was taking too long.

  “You plan to answer sometime this week?” Tia asked.

  “It’s a tough one.”

  “Oh, come on. Beyoncé’s the obvious choice.”

  “Not necessarily,” Ethan said. “Give me another minute or two to decide.”

  “Ticktock, Counselor, ticktock.”

  “Okay, I’ll take Beyoncé on a CD or my iPod,” he said. “Rihanna everywhere else.”

  Ethan felt Tia’s eyes on him. He checked the open road before allowing himself a peek at those long legs sticking out of her short pink skirt.

  “I also prefer a bad girl,” he said, echoing her earlier words. “‘Everybody knows bad girls are more fun.’”

  He glimpsed at her face in time to see her tongue slide over her full, peach-glossed bottom lip, and his groin tightened.

  Ethan faced the road as it hit him, a problem more troublesome than his ever-growing attraction to Tia. He actually liked her—a lot.

  Even more alarming, he was beginning to find that damnable bubbly quirkiness of hers and tendency to stick her pert nose where it didn’t belong almost endearing.

  Shake it off, man, Ethan warned himself. He had to be simply exhausted from all the driving and not thinking straight. Falling in lust with knockout legs and a pretty face was one thing. Anything more was ridiculous.

  “You okay?” Tia asked.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You’ve been shaking your head for the last five minutes,” she said.

  Ethan shrugged and muttered he was fine.

  “Oh, mind stopping at the next rest stop? I need to stretch my legs,” she said.

  Ethan was about to answer, when a growl that sounded like a wounded animal came from the direction of her stomach.

  “Maybe we should find a restaurant instead,” he offered. “Neither of us has had a decent meal. I had a couple of protein bars to tide me over, but you must be starved.”

  “Nope.” Tia shook her head. “I already told you, I’m saving my appetite for the amusement-park concession stands. Funnel cakes, cotton candy, hot dogs, kettle corn and whatever other junk food they have.”

  Ethan raised a brow. “As a spa owner, I thought you’d be a stickler for healthier fare.”

  “Usually I am, but I’ve never been to an amusement park before, so this is my chance to indulge in all the things my childhood friends used to talk about when they’d return from summer vacation with their families.”

  “Never been to an amusement park?” Ethan stole a glance at her. “Really? I would have thought...”

  “Because of who my mom was and what Espresso Cosmetics used to be I had a privileged childhood chock-full of private schools, extravagant family vacations and other indulgences.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said. It was a logical assumption.

  Before his mom’s death, amusement parks had been a staple of their annual family getaways. He’d even gone a couple of times with his grandparents.

  “My folks may have been rich when it came to money, but not when it came to time. We never went anywhere that didn’t revolve around Espresso business,” Tia said.

  Though Ethan was surprised, he guessed he understood. Espresso Cosmetics was a true powerhouse at its pinnacle, and success always meant sacrifice.

  “And as far as the private schools go, I was kicked out of some of the best in town.”

  If he weren’t driving, Ethan would have done a double take. “Get out of here,” he said. “I was no picnic as a boy, but only landed a couple of suspensions. I find it hard to believe you were booted out of schools.”

  “Max and I got into more trouble and changed schools more than some kids changed clothes,” Tia said. Her tone wasn’t boastful, just matter-of-fact.

  “Your assistant?”

  Tia nodded. “Once we got ourselves together, we got our GEDs. He trained to become a pro wrestler, while I enrolled in both university and beauty school,” she said. “When I graduated, I went to my father with my spa idea. Initially, he rejected it, so I used the trust fund left to me by my mother to open the first spas.”

  “I see,” Ethan said.

  However, the two words were an understatement, and he found himself adding something else to his lust and fondness for the woman beside him—respect.

  “But I do have two questions, if I’m not out of line,” Ethan said.

  “Shoot.”

  “What happened to Max’s wrestling career?”

  “He injured his back in a match, ending his short stint as The Ambulance. By then his family’s real-estate business had gone belly up in the economic downturn,” she said. “Fortunately, there was still a couple thousand in his college fund. So he earned an associate’s degree in office management and started working for me.”

  “Ah, makes sense now,” Ethan said. He now also understood the giant man’s fierce loyalty to his boss. Tia was more than just his employer. They went back to childhood. “So what flipped the switch to make you get serious about your education and your life?”

  The car’s interior was quiet except for the sound of tires rolling against hot pavement. Ethan gave her time to answer or to decide she�
�d rather not. Whatever had spurred Tia to change must have had a big impact on her.

  “My mother’s illness,” she said softly. “Her death changed everything.”

  Ethan reached across the armrest and took her hand in his. He thought of how he’d lost his own mom.

  Same here.

  Ethan squeezed Tia’s hand in a comforting gesture, but when she squeezed back, he was the one who found consolation.

  “It’s why Carol means so much to me. She was more than just my mom’s nurse,” Tia said. “She was a friend to a young, troubled kid during the worst time of her life.”

  Ethan exited the highway and turned in the direction of the rest stop.

  “Same here.” He said the words aloud this time, keeping his grasp on her hand.

  Chapter 8

  Minutes after walking through the gates of Silver Dollar City, Tia made good on her vow.

  “This tastes incredible,” she said between the wads of cotton candy she continued to cram into her mouth. She clutched the mass of spun sugar in one hand and balanced what was billed as a “mountain-size” soft pretzel in the other.

  “Want a bite?” She offered both the sweet and the savory treats up to Ethan so he could take his pick.

  He gave her the look.

  The one he wore when he talked about Carol, an oh-so-familiar expression reeking of I know what’s best. What a surprise, Tia thought.

  “No, thanks,” he said predictably, the furrows deepening in his disapproving frown.

  Here we go, Tia thought, feeling pinpricks of irritation. The attractions surrounding them in the 1880s-themed Ozark Mountains amusement park paled in comparison to the thrill ride Ethan Wright had put her emotions through in the short time she’d known him.

  After an innocent brush of his hand against hers, all she could do was hold on tight as her entire being tingled with longing. His sense of humor could suddenly launch her into a fit of giggles, and then in a sudden twist, he could say something to send her plunging into the depths of annoyance.

  Like now.

  “Are you sure you want to stuff yourself with that crap?” Ethan examined the junk food in her hands.