Driving Her Crazy

She was excruciatingly aware now she was not the woman he had sent away. That he had loved.

And she had a lot to prove.

So there was one upside to this proposed nightmare road trip. Between starvation and puking up constantly she could lose a stone or two before seeing him again.

‘No. It’s fine,’ she said, briskly pulling herself out of the food-obsessing habits of a past life. ‘I can do it. I just can’t promise the upholstery of the hire car will ever be the same again.’

‘No hire car,’ Kent said. ‘We’ll be using my all-terrain vehicle.’

Sadie nodded at him. Of course. An all-terrain vehicle. Mr Intense-and-rugged probably also had the Batmobile tucked away somewhere.

‘When do we leave?’ She sighed.

‘I’ll pick you up in the morning. Pack light. No places serving drinks with umbrellas where we’re going.’

‘Gee,’ she said sweetly, ‘imagine my surprise.’

Sadie’s fallback position had always been sarcasm—a defence mechanism against a world that constantly misjudged her because of the size of her chest. As an adult she tried her best to contain it but, sadly, it was too ingrained in her nature to be completely stifled.

And if Kent Nelson insisted on this ridiculous road trip, on spending days in a car alone together, then he could consider this a heads up.

Tabitha might have forced her hand, but she didn’t have to like it.

Sadie was ready when Kent rang the doorbell the next morning. She was wearing loose denim cut-offs and a modest polo shirt, her hair fell freely around her shoulders and a pair of ballet flats completed the ensemble. Her medium-sized backpack and a small insulated bag were waiting at the door.

Kent blinked at the transformation from serious city career girl in a power suit to girl-next-door. Again, her clothes did nothing to emphasise the curves—if anything they were on the baggy side.

It was just that Sadie’s curves were uncontainable.

Dressed like this, still absent of any bling, it was easy to believe she was only the twenty-four years Tabitha had informed him of yesterday.

Which made her precisely twelve years younger than him.

She was a baby, for crying out loud.

‘What’s in here?’ Kent asked as he grabbed the fridge bag off her and lifted her pack. An hour ago he’d been whistling as he’d loaded the vehicle for the trip, a buzz he hadn’t felt in a long time coursing through his veins.

The buzz was still there.

He just wasn’t sure, in the presence of Sadie, if it was one hundred per cent related to the drive any more.

‘Ginger ale,’ she said, watching how the muscles in his tanned forearms bunched.

Before yesterday she would have admired the delineation, the symmetry, the beauty of the fluid movement. Today they just made her insides feel funny.

And that was the last thing she needed.

Her insides would feel funny enough the minute they hit the first bend in the road.

‘I don’t expect you to carry my stuff,’ she said testily.

She wasn’t some delicate elfin thing that would shatter if she picked up anything heavier than her handbag. One look would have told him that. But he was already striding away despite a rather intriguing limp.

From the crash, she assumed.

She followed at a more sedate pace, glancing at the sturdy-looking Land Rover parked on the road with trepidation. With its functional metal cab, sturdily constructed roof railings and massive bull bar it looked like something the Australian army had engineered for land and amphibious combat. And had been test driven in a pigsty if the sludge-and-muck-encrusted paint job was any indication.

Staring at the tank on wheels, Sadie absently wondered whether Kent Nelson was compensating for something.

‘I didn’t know you could get mud masks for cars,’ she murmured as she joined him at the open back doors.

Kent grunted as he rearranged the supplies to accommodate her backpack. ‘She’s not young, she’s not very pretty but she’ll do the job.’

Sadie preferred pretty.

And men who didn’t talk about cars as if they were female. Especially this car. This car was one hundred per cent male.

‘Does she have air conditioning?’

Kent nodded. He held up the cool bag. ‘You want this up front?’ he asked.

‘Thanks.’

She took it from him as he shut the doors and noticed a muddy sticker supporting a Sydney football team near the handle and another for an Australian brewery. He looked like a man who knew his way around a ball. And a beer.

Leo had drunk gin.

Kent looked down on her. The morning sun fell on the pale skin of her throat and he noticed the pulse beating there. ‘Got your pills?’ he asked gruffly.

She patted her bag. ‘At the ready.’

‘Should you take one now? I’m not going to stop every two minutes for you to throw up.’

Sadie ignored his warning. Stopping every two minutes didn’t exactly sound like a picnic to her either. ‘I’ll wait till we get out of the city. Save my performance for the windy bits.’

Kent narrowed his eyes as he took the opportunity to study her face some more. She had dark rings surrounding the deep grey of her irises, which seemed to lure him in even further. ‘Just how trippy is trippy?’

Sadie realised his mouth was quite near and she had to wonder what it would look like kicked up a little, those creases becoming deep grooves, because it looked pretty damn perfect as it was. As if some old master with an eye for masculine perfection had sculpted it just for him, and the artist in her, never far from the surface, appreciated its flawlessness.

The woman, on the other hand, was just plain jealous.

Her own ridiculously plump mouth, devoid of collagen despite what every catty woman she’d ever met had implied, seemed garish by comparison. It was why she rarely wore lipstick or gloss.

Her mouth did not need any more attention.

Kent felt her gaze on his mouth and the pull of those incredible eyes as she studied him. ‘Sadie?’ he prompted.

Sadie blinked as she realised he was frowning and she was staring. Not only that, but she’d lost her place in the conversation. Her brain scrambled to catch up. She took a step back from him. What had they been talking about?

Pills. Right. ‘I sing,’ she said. ‘Loudly. And not very well.’

Kent grimaced. Great. Stuck in a car with karaoke Barbie. ‘Try to refrain.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘Let’s go.’

Sadie took a deep breath as she headed to the passenger seat. Her heart thudded in her chest on a surge of adrenaline. The call of the wild? The excitement of a new adventure? The beginnings of an illustrious career?

She hoped so because the alternatives weren’t palatable. Dread at the oncoming nausea. Or, worse, being alone in a confined space with an unimpressed man whose mouth had her wishing she’d paid more attention in sculpting classes.

She’d climbed up into the high-clearance, all-wheel drive. At five eight, she wasn’t exactly short, but Sadie still felt as if pole-vaulting lessons would have been handy. The sturdy cab felt like a cocoon of armour around her, even if the ground seemed a long way down.

As soon as she buckled up Kent thrust a folded up map at her. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ve marked the journey in red.’

Sadie looked at him as the mere thought of having to read and travel made her feel ill. ‘You don’t have a GPS?’

Kent shot her an impatient look. ‘We’re doing this the old-fashioned way,’ he said and started the engine.

Fabulous. ‘And what happens if we lose the map?’ she enquired sweetly. ‘Do we use the stars?’

Kent suppressed a smile at her derision. He held her gaze. ‘Unfortunately I didn’t bring my sextant.’

That look—intense, focused—fanned over her like a sticky web, doing strange things to her pulse and causing heat to bloom in her belly and other places further south.

Oh, he’d brought his sextant all right...

TWO

Even though she was looking out of the window, Sadie didn’t notice the city streets of Sydney giving way to the red rooves of suburbia or to the greenery of semi-rural market gardens. She was too busy puzzling over her reaction to the man sitting an arm’s length away.

On the surface, he was everything she didn’t usually go for. Physically impressive. Outdoorsy. A beer and football kind of a guy.

But then there was his age.

Through some online investigation last night she’d discovered he was thirty-six and she did have a track record with older men.

Leo had been twenty years her senior.

She supposed a psychologist would say she had a Daddy Complex. Her father had left when she was twelve and got himself a new family, including a set of twins who’d turned into sports-mad little boys.

She’d always felt the fact that she was a girl and had been more arty than sporty had been a huge let-down for her father. And after years of trying to win his attention and affection she’d finally conceded defeat as she’d headed off to college.

So, maybe his abandonment had spread invisible tentacles into her life.

Whatever.

It didn’t change the facts. Nothing else about Kent Nelson should have appealed.

Yet somehow it did.

She studied his profile as he drove, his eyes fixed on the road. His buzz cut melded into the stubble of his sideburns, which flowed into that covering his jaw, hugging the spare planes of his face, emphasising cheekbones that stood out like railings. It made him look...severe. A far cry from the bearded guy who had been laughing at the camera in the snap from the gallery.

It made him look intense.

Guarded.

It made him look haunted.

As a journalist, and a huge fan of his work, it was exceedingly intriguing.

As a woman—it scared the hell out of her.

Kent gripped the steering wheel as Sadie’s speculative gaze seemed to burn a hole at the angle of his jaw. After almost eighteen months in and out of hospitals and another six months of physical therapy, it had been a while since he’d had any kind of constant company—female or otherwise—and her concentration was unnerving.

He turned to look at her and almost rolled his eyes as she quickly pretended she hadn’t been staring at him by feigning interest in the scenery outside her window.

Very mature.

His gaze fell to her legs, the denim riding well and truly up above her knees and pulling taut across thighs as lush and round as the rest of her. Rubenesque slipped into his brain and he flicked his gaze back to the road.

‘I hope you brought something warmer—it’s going to get cold out at night.’

Sadie blinked. They’d been in the car for over an hour and this was the first thing he said to her? She really, really hoped he wasn’t one of those men who thought there was a direct correlation between her cup size and her IQ.

She slapped her forehead theatrically. ‘And I only packed bikinis and a frilly negligee.’

Kent gripped the steering wheel as images of her in a bikini screwed with his concentration. ‘A lot of people think of the outback as hot,’ he quantified, still not looking at her. ‘But it cools down really quickly at night.’

Sadie shot him an impatient look. ‘Thank you. But how about we assume from now on I’m a reasonably intelligent person who wouldn’t go on any trip without having thoroughly researched it first?’

Kent turned his head at the note in her voice. It was more than sarcasm. It was...touchy. As if she’d had to prove her intelligence one too many times. He guessed with her assets people didn’t often see beyond them.

He looked back at the road. ‘Fair enough.’

Sadie groaned as they passed a sign indicating their ascent through the Blue Mountains was about to begin. It came with a warning of sharp corners and hairpin bends.

The nausea kicked in at the thought of what lay ahead. ‘Fabulous,’ she muttered as she searched through her bag for her pills. ‘Dangerous curves.’

Kent wished there were a pill he could take for the ones inside the car, but her look of abject misery kept his brain off her treacherous curves. He could practically hear her teeth grinding as she pawed through the contents of a handbag big enough to fit an entire pharmacy full of motion sickness tablets.

For crying out loud! ‘Do you get sick if you’re the driver?’ he asked.

Sadie shook her head absently, missing the exasperation in his tone as she read the back of the medication box. It was a new brand to her, one supposedly with reduced side effects. ‘Nope.’

‘Well, that’s easy, then, isn’t it?’ he said as he indicated and pulled the car into one of the regular truck laybys that lined the route.

‘What are you doing?’ Sadie frowned as he unbuckled.

‘Letting you drive.’

Sadie didn’t move for a moment. ‘You want me to drive your car?’

He nodded. ‘You do have a licence, right?’

Sadie looked around at the behemoth in which she was sitting. She drove a second-hand Prius. ‘Not a tank licence.’

Kent’s mouth pressed into an impatient line. ‘You’ll be fine.’ He stepped out and strode around to her side.

Sadie had the ridiculous urge to lock her door before he reached her, but then it was open and he was filling the space along with the whoosh of traffic and the acrid aroma of exhaust fumes.

She looked at Kent, surprised at her elevated height to find she was looking him straight in the eye. They were brown, she noticed, now she was focused on something other than his mouth. She was close enough to see flecks of copper and amber shimmering there too, throwing a hue into the darker brown. They reminded her of something—a memory—she couldn’t quite recall.

Kent watched her watching him as if she was trying to figure something out. ‘Don’t they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?’ he prompted.

Sadie suddenly remembered. The tiger-eye marble she’d had in her collection as a kid. One of her father’s many attempts to get her interested in something other than reading and drawing.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked, looking around the vehicle again, absently pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. If it had been a hire car she wouldn’t have hesitated. ‘I’ve never driven anything quite so...big. I’d hate to crash it.’

Kent did not drop his gaze to her mouth. The fact that he even noticed her lip being ravished by her teeth was irritating enough. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you make a habit of crashing cars?’

She shook her head, releasing her lip. ‘No, never.’ She looked back at him and frowned. She’d have thought a he-man like Kent would never have relinquished the wheel.

‘What?’ he asked warily.

Sadie shook her head. ‘I’ve never met a man yet who’d give up the driver’s seat for a woman.’ Her father had never let her mother drive when they were in the car together. ‘Doesn’t it emasculate you or something?’

Kent blinked. That hadn’t been a question he’d expected. What kind of Neanderthals did she hang out with? ‘I think I’m secure enough in my masculinity to not be threatened by a woman in the driver’s seat.’

Sadie’s gaze dropped from the spiky stubble of his angular jaw to the breadth of his shoulders. She had to admit if this man’s masculinity could be threatened then no man’s was safe!

‘Look,’ he said impatiently as she continued to sit. ‘It’s win-win. You don’t get to throw up every two minutes and I get to spot photo opps. I also don’t get to see you all trippy, which, given that we hardly know each other, is a good thing.’

Sadie couldn’t dispute his logic. The last thing she needed was to lose her inhibitions around a man who looked as if he kept his well and truly in check.

If he had any.

‘Fine.’

Sadie undid her belt and twisted in her seat to get out. She glanced at him, waiting for him to shift, her gaze snagging on his mouth. He didn’t for a moment and there was a split second when neither of them moved. When his beautiful mouth filled her entire vision and she found herself wishing he would say something just so she could admire how it moved. Then he stepped back and she half slid, half jumped to the ground on legs that seemed suddenly wobbly.

After giving Sadie a quick tutorial on the various idiosyncrasies of his vehicle, Kent left her to it, making no comment as she lurched it out onto the highway. Her grip on the steering wheel was turning her knuckles white and he was afraid she might split all the skin there if she didn’t ease up.

‘Relax,’ he ordered. ‘You’re doing fine.’

Strangely his command did not help Sadie relax. Her gaze flicked between the rear view and side mirrors as her heartbeat pelted along in time to the engine. She wasn’t sure if it was from nervousness about driving a strange car/tank that belonged to someone else or the weird moment she and Kent had shared as she’d exited the vehicle.

‘Relax,’ he said again.

‘Believe it or not,’ Sadie said, gritting her teeth as she eyeballed the road, ‘you telling me to relax is not helping.’

Kent held up his hands in surrender. ‘Okay.’

‘I just need to get used it,’ she quantified. ‘It’s not normal to be so high up. I feel like I’m driving a truck.’

Kent grimaced. It was hardly a semi-trailer. ‘I said okay.’

He turned then and dragged his camera case out of the back passenger floor well. Sadie was obviously stressed about driving the big, bad vehicle and he had little patience with princesses. Best to keep himself occupied and his lip zipped. And one more equipment check before they got too far away from civilisation wouldn’t go astray.

About ten minutes later he noticed her grip slacken and her shoulders relax back into the seat. Ten minutes after that she even started multitasking.

‘So. What’s the plan?’ Sadie asked, more comfortable now with how the car handled. ‘Where are our scheduled stops?’

Kent looked up from his disassembled camera. ‘Scheduled stops?’

Sadie nodded. ‘You know? Of a night time? When we’re tired?’

‘I hadn’t scheduled any stops. We’re driving all the way through.’

Sadie looked briefly away from the road to blast him with a you-have-to-be-kidding me look. A non-stop journey would probably take two full days.

Without a single break?

‘Don’t we have to sleep some time?’

He speared her with a direct look. ‘Do you really want to make this journey any longer than it has to be? We can pull over and catch some kip along the way. Either in the car or I have a couple of swags.’

Sadie supressed a shudder. Oh, goody. Maybe they’d find a jolly jumbuck to stuff inside. She flicked a quick glance towards him. ‘I don’t camp.’

Kent blinked at the way she said camp—as if she’d said prison. ‘What do you mean, you don’t camp?’

‘It’s simple,’ she said, returning her eyes to the road. ‘You don’t fly. I don’t camp.’

Great. Car sick. Didn’t camp. Sadie Bliss was stacking up the black marks against her name and truly pushing his patience. ‘What on earth have you got against sleeping under the stars?’

‘Nothing,’ Sadie assured him. ‘Give me five of them and I’m happy as a pig in mud.’

Kent shook his head. ‘You haven’t lived, city girl.’

‘I guess we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on that one,’ she said sweetly.

Kent’s mouth took on a grim line. ‘I have a feeling there may be a bit of that this trip.’

Sadie did too. ‘So? Where should we stop tonight, do you think?’ she prompted.

Kent pulled the map out of the glovebox, where Sadie had thrown it in disgust earlier, and did some calculations. ‘It’s about another ten hours to Cunnamulla,’ he said, looking at the digital clock display on the dash. It was just gone nine-thirty. ‘That’ll put us there after seven tonight. It’ll also put us over the Queensland border.’

‘Okay.’ Sadie nodded.

‘Doubt there’s any five-star accommodation there though,’ he mused. ‘We could go another couple hours on to Charleville. It’s twice the size. Still don’t think they run to five star.’

Sadie shot him a sarcastic smile. ‘Thanks, I’ll settle for a shower, a flushing toilet and a bed.’

‘Cunnamulla it is.’

With that sorted, silence reigned as they wended their way through the beautiful Blue Mountains, and down the other side of the Great Dividing Range. Kent went back to his camera bag, soothed by the familiarity of the routine. It had been a while since he’d lugged this stuff around, lived with it every day, and it was comforting to know it still felt good.

He occasionally shot a glance Sadie’s way. He had to admit, after her initial misgivings she was handling the vehicle with great competence. He’d been afraid she was going to whine about the heavy steering or the engine noise or the lack of a stereo system all the way to Borroloola, but she’d got on with the job with no complaints.

No chatter whatsoever.

His kind of travelling companion.

Until it all went to hell two minutes later.

‘So are we going to sit in silence or are we going to get to know each other?’ she asked.

Now she was out of the worst of the windy roads Sadie was free to concentrate on other things. And it had occurred to her that she was sitting next to a man who was pretty hot property, especially since he’d gone underground. How far would a feature on the Kent Nelson get her career? If she had to spend days on end in a car with his particular brand of he-man, she might as well get something for it.

And truly, the way he kept breaking down that camera and reassembling it, as if it were a gun, was slightly unnerving.

Kent sighed. He should have known it was too good to be true. ‘Silence is golden.’

Sadie quirked an eyebrow at his terse reply. ‘Silence is loud.’

He clicked a lens in place, then looked at her. ‘Listen to me, Sadie Bliss. Let’s not pretend that either of us is too thrilled by being stuck in this car together. I know women feel the need to chat and fill up all the empty spaces, but I’m okay with the empty spaces.’ It sure as hell beat the crowding in his head. ‘I like the empty spaces.’

‘I don’t feel the need,’ she dismissed irritably. ‘It’s just, you know...conversational. Polite.’

Kent shoved the camera back in its soft-sided bag. ‘I can handle rude.’

That she could believe. But she doubted she could. ‘So...we’re just going to...not talk? For three thousand kilometres?’

‘Well, I’m sure we’ll need to say the odd word or two. Like, “We need petrol,” and, “How about here for lunch?” But let’s try and keep it to a minimum, huh?’

Sadie blinked at his hard profile. His arrogance that she’d just fall in with his imperious command irked. He might be used to women falling over themselves to do as he said, but she just wasn’t built that way.

And his insistence on silence only piqued her curiosity. The shadows in his eyes told her there was stuff he didn’t want to talk about. And she was pretty sure his refusal to fly was just scratching the surface. Just looking at his guarded exterior made her want to know more.

She wanted to ask about the picture. She wanted to know about that day.

Probably best not to start there though...

She waited a few minutes to lull him into a false sense of security. They were heading for Mudgee on a relatively straight stretch of highway, the scenery fairly standard Australian bush fare. Lots of gums and low, scrubby vegetation.

Fairly uninspiring really.

Especially compared to the story she knew he must be harbouring deep down where the shadows lived.

He’d just opened the map when she said, ‘It could be fun.’ She waited a beat. ‘Getting to know each other.’

Kent didn’t look up from the map. ‘I doubt it.’

He already knew too much about her. Curves that wouldn’t quit. A mouth that was made to be kissed. A weak constitution and a penchant for five-star living.

Trouble.

A real pain in his butt.

Sadie took his blunt rejection on the chin and was pleased she didn’t insult easily. Nor did she dissuade. ‘Oh, come on,’ Sadie goaded. ‘It’s really easy when you try. See, I ask something about you. We discuss it. Then you ask something about me.’