The Perils of Paulie (A Matchmaker in Wonderland) Page 23

  “Yes. Thank god we don’t have to crank these cars to get them started.”

  “Meet me here,” I said, taking up a stand at the entrance of the underground car park.

  She glanced over her back, pausing to shout back at me, “What are you doing?”

  “Making sure we aren’t followed.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I have no bloody idea,” I said softly, and shouted for her to go on and fetch the car.

  She disappeared into the darkness, and I looked around for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing other than a kiosk where a bored-looking teenager sat with a cigarette clinging to his lower lip, the yellow-and-black-striped barrier that rose when cars were allowed to leave, another trash barrel, and a couple of orange traffic cones.

  “Why didn’t I watch that MacGyver show that Elliott loved?” I growled to myself as I picked up the cones and wondered if they could be considered lethal weapons. “I bet he’d have no trouble making nuclear warheads out of these.”

  The teen, a boy of probably seventeen or eighteen, watched me with an unmoving expression, his cigarette never wavering from where it hung off his lip.

  “I don’t suppose you have a gun?” I asked him.

  He didn’t even blink, just watched me with a look that said he was utterly bored by me, the parking lot, and probably everything in the world. A tiny bit of ash fell off the end of his cigarette.

  Footsteps sounded loudly right ahead of the thug, who skidded to a halt at the sight of me. He was breathing heavily, his mouth, chin, and shirt bloody, and he still held that damned knife. I waved my cones at him. “Now, see here. We are not your enemies. Yes, I disabled you, but that is because you and your friend tried to kidnap us. Or pretended to. So really, you have no one but yourself to bla—”

  He lunged before I finished speaking, and I swung first one cone, then the other, and finished up with a kick to his left knee.

  “Well, what do you know?” I asked, eyeing him when he rolled around on the pavement, alternately clutching his knee and his shoulder. “They are weapons.”

  A roar sounded from within the garage. The Thomas Flyer raced up the incline to the exit, like some great white beast surging forward to consume its prey. Paulie was at the wheel, her hat jammed on her head crookedly, her goggles glinting in the dull yellow sodium lights, and her white veil streaming backward a good fifteen feet.

  “Get in!” she yelled, waving one arm frantically.

  “You’d better open it up,” I said loudly to the parking lot attendant, but he stared dully first at me, then at the man on the ground, then finally to the Thomas Flyer as she roared up to me.

  “Jump!” Paulie shouted, clearly not intending on waiting for the barrier to be raised. I thought of pointing that out to her, realized there was no time, and swung myself up onto the sideboard when she passed me, throwing myself into the backseat just as she hit the barrier and drove off into the night.

  The last sight I had of the parking lot attendant was him leaning out of his window, watching us, the cigarette still dangling from his lip.

  Paulina Rostakova’s Adventures

  AUGUST 9

  5:55 a.m.

  Warsaw, Poland

  There are times when I’m surprised we’re still alive. Then there are times when I’m convinced we’re immortal. Fortunately, the latter isn’t my normal state of mind. Although I did have to admit that I was filled with nothing but admiration for Dixon after he’d disabled the men Dad had engaged to put the fear of god in me.

  “That man was on the ground again!” I yelled when we bounced over the edge of the curb and onto the street outside the Moscow hotel. “You beat the crap out of him, didn’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Dixon answered, popping up from the floor of the backseat, where he’d been thrown when I gunned the car and crashed through the parking lot barrier. He looked back, his hair ruffled in the breeze. “We’re going to have to pay for that, you know?”

  “For the guys who attacked us? I don’t see why. They must have some sort of insurance.”

  “No, for the barrier.” He climbed over into the front seat, sliding down into it, swearing, rising up, and pulling his goggles out from where he’d sat on them. He donned them, then turned to look at me.

  I giggled.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s the goggles. They’re bad enough with your driving hat on, but by themselves they’re kind of . . .”

  “Roguishly handsome?” he asked, lifting his chin.

  “Steampunky.”

  “Yes, well, I can’t help that. My cap is back in the hotel room.”

  “I told you to leave it in the car like I did with my hat. Would you gather up some of my veil, please? It’s choking me.”

  He obliged, pulling it from where it was streaming the length of the car and wadding it up onto the seat, sitting on it to keep it from billowing out again. “I suppose we’re going to drive all night.”

  “We shouldn’t. We only had a few hours’ sleep, and we were sorely in sleep deficit before that, but I have to admit, this escape was super exciting! I kind of got my adrenaline going, and now I’m all Rawr! Let’s take on the world!”

  He flexed his fingers and examined his knuckles. A couple of them were scraped. “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind, although I admit the scene did wake me up fully. Roger won’t be pleased with our change of plans, though.”

  “Probably not, especially since I saw Tabby and Sam’s car in the garage, which means they made it to Moscow and were probably sleeping.”

  “I’ll text him and update him as to recent events,” Dixon said, and pulled his phone out of his pocket. A half hour later, he showed me the response.

  WTH? the text read. Why are you trying to sauber the program?

  “Sauber?” I asked, glancing quickly at the phone.

  “Sabotage, I expect, is what he meant. Ah. Another one. Will you stop trying to drive me insane and wait for the film crew? Hmm. He seems to have disregarded the part of the explanation where I pointed out we were in danger of our lives.”

  “Did you tell him you went James Bond all over those goons’ asses?” I asked, flashing him an admiring glance.

  “Of course not. I’m British. We don’t talk about our James Bond episodes,” he said in a very correct voice, his expression prim.

  I laughed, aware of a sensation deep in my stomach that was warm and squidgy and wonderfully exciting. “Dixon,” I said, not realizing I was speaking until I heard the words, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  He said nothing for a minute. A very uncomfortable minute.

  I slid him a glance out of the corners of my eyes.

  “Well?” I asked at the end of the minute. “You’ve got to have some sort of a reaction to that statement. You can’t just brush off an ‘I might be falling in love with you’ comment. It’s a law that you have to reply. Please do so now.”

  “Ah,” he said, and didn’t look at me.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror and managed to get us to the side of the road without accident.

  “Why are we stopping?” he asked.

  “Because an ‘ah’ is not a proper response to what I just said. Dammit, Dixon! I said I was falling in love with you!”

  “You said you thought you were falling in love with me. That’s not the same as actually doing the act,” he pointed out.

  “Stop being pedantic,” I said, frowning a little.

  “I’m sorry if you feel that pointing out the obvious is pedantic, but there is a difference between thinking you’re falling in love and actually doing so.”

  “And this is what I get for trying to have an adult relationship where I speak my mind and am honest and aboveboard with my thoughts and feelings and yearnings for your naked flesh
on my naked flesh. Particularly my female bits. They miss your male bits. A lot.”

  “Are your female bits perhaps confusing a perfectly normal and healthy lust for the more substantial and long-term love?” he asked.

  “No!” I punched him lightly on the arm. “Dammit, Dixon. Is it your fiancée? Is it too soon? Not that I think nine years can in any way be considered soon, but still, people grieve at different rates. Is it because of her?”

  He sighed, about to deny it, but stopped and finally said, “Yes. But not in the way you think.”

  “Oh? In what way, then?”

  He toyed with the material covering his knees for a few seconds. “I told you about this, but you were asleep. I didn’t love Rose. I’m not sure I ever truly did, even at the beginning when we first met and were together. She always seemed to take charge of the relationship, leaving me feeling as if my thoughts and preferences didn’t matter. I was more or less without a say in the way our future was planned.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you,” I said with a little frown, and pulled out into traffic again.

  “It isn’t. Or rather, it wasn’t then, but I lacked the confidence in myself to recognize what was wrong with our interactions. It’s easy to see now that I allowed myself to be swept along with her visions, but that was not the case at the time. There was also a little oppositional defiance issue in that my parents disliked Rose intensely, and I was going through a rebellious stage.”

  “I tried to have one of those,” I said with a little sigh at the memory of the time I tried to live on my own with only the money I made waitressing. I was a horrible waitress. “Not only was I a failure at it—my father made himself so sick with worry that I decided it wasn’t worth it. It’s hard to be defiant when the people who love you are so unhappy.”

  “You’re luckier than me, then, because I clung to my defiance until I realized the situation was too complicated to bow out of with any sort of dignity. And then Rose became ill, and I couldn’t leave then because . . . well, I just couldn’t.”

  “You’re a really nice guy—do you know that?” I kept my eyes on the road, but was very aware of Dixon’s small movements next to me. He was making little “I’m embarrassed by your praise” twitches of his fingers. “I think it’s admirable that you were there for your fiancée when she needed you most.”

  “She didn’t need me. She hated me by the end, and I didn’t blame her one bit. I wasn’t any too fond of myself.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up because you made mistakes,” I told him from the wisdom of many years of therapy. “You can’t control what other people think or do, and you certainly aren’t responsible for either.”

  “No, but if I had backed out earlier . . . if she had met someone she really should have been with . . .”

  “Bah. The world is full of ifs, and none of them are worth a damned thing. So how does the fact that you’re not grieving for your lost love mean that you can’t tell me that you’ve fallen for me just like I’ve fallen for you? And keep in mind if you tell me you haven’t fallen for me, I am in control of this vehicle and I can easily see to it that you tumble out of it. While I’m driving. Fast.”

  He laughed, relieving the sense of worry that had filled me ever since I had made my declaration. “And I know you would never accept a profession of love made under the threat of death or dismemberment.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “And . . . ?”

  “And?” He looked somewhat surprised. “And I believe that you know what my feelings are.”

  I wanted to stop the car again just so I could look at him, but I’d be damned if I’d appear desperate after just telling him I loved him. I pondered what he’d said, gnawing my lower lip as I tried to determine if I was missing something. Should I know what he felt for me? Oh, I knew he was fond of me and enjoyed our sexual escapades, and he liked talking to me, but did he feel the same sense of burgeoning love that gripped me with painful fingers every time I clapped eyes on him? Did he think of me at all hours of the day, like I did of him? Did he mentally store up things to discuss with me, just as I did?

  Dammit, why couldn’t he answer my question the way I wanted him to?

  “So . . .” I hesitated, fighting my pride with the need to get some clarity. “So you’re not closed to the idea of a romantic relationship beyond that of a purely physical nature?”

  “No. When the time is right.”

  “Huh?” Now I really was confused.

  “I won’t make the mistakes I did in the past. I will do things properly. I will declare myself and my affections. I will propose on one knee. I will be married in a ceremony where both families are in attendance, and it will be a celebration of our commitment to each other, and not a showcase bereft of good taste and emotions beyond greed and one-upmanship.”

  A sick feeling gripped my stomach. Was he saying I wasn’t the woman of his choice? In my tired state, I didn’t have enough brainpower to figure out just what it was he was trying to say. Was he gently letting me down? Or was he indicating that, at some point, he would follow his strategy and we’d live happily ever after?

  I glanced at him, unsure how to respond.

  He sat back easily, his fingers relaxed on his knees, his hair blown back from his brow by the wind.

  Dear god, he was handsome. That straight nose, the bluish gray eyes that could go from pretty to steamy with just a bat of his lashes. And his jaw—oh, that jaw. I loved his jaw, almost as much as his chest. And his legs. And butt. And pretty much every other part of him.

  Dammit, I loved him. There was no denying the fact—I wanted to wake up next to him every morning. I wanted to argue with him, and make up, and laugh and sing and dance with him. I wanted to hold him in the night and see his eyes light up with laughter when I teased him.

  I just wanted him.

  We drove on in silence. Dixon didn’t seem to be bothered at all by our conversation, but I was badly confused and worried. And since I’m not a person who does either in silence for long, I finally blurted out, “Do you want to see me after the race? Or is this just a fling?”

  The face he turned to me expressed utmost surprise. “What?”

  “You heard me.” I gritted my teeth and glared out the windscreen. The weather was starting to turn chilly for August, with cloud cover over the moon, leaving the night dark and uninspiring.

  Pretty much like my life at that moment.

  “Yes, I did, but my question was aimed more for why you would ask that than what your question meant.”

  “Man, you’re going to make me ask it right out, aren’t you?” I sighed, figuring my dignity didn’t stand a chance against my raging curiosity. “The person you’re talking about, the one you want to propose to—are you saying that’s someone you’ve yet to meet, or someone you know now?”

  The look he gave me was chiding. “Do you really have to ask?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. That’s why I’m asking it,” I said through clenched teeth.

  His lips twitched. “Do I strike you as a Lothario?”

  “Dammit, Dixon, answer the question!”

  “Which one?”

  “Gah! So help me, I will pull this car over and . . . and . . .”

  “And what?” he asked, tipping his head to the side.

  “Something you’ll be very sorry about!” I finished, almost sputtering, so annoyed was I.

  “Pull over,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Pull over.”

  I glared at him for a second, then did as he asked and pulled onto the shoulder. “Look,” I started to say, but got no further. Dixon was out of the car and coming around to my side, holding open the door for me.

  “Are you kicking me out of my own car?” I asked, slowly climbing out.

  “You have a very odd picture of me if you can declare your love and admiration for m
e in one breath and then suspect me of trying to get rid of you in the next.” He pulled me forward into an embrace, his arms solid around me and the feel of his body so perfectly right for mine.

  He squeezed my butt and gave me a quick peck before pushing me into the passenger seat. “You’re tired and overwrought. Why don’t you rest, and I will drive for a few hours?”

  “I’m not overwrought! I’m a bit murderous, but not overwrought, and you only have yourself to thank for that state of mind,” I growled.

  “I’m sorry if you’re so unhappy right now.” He reached into the back for the lap blanket we kept there, mostly to take naps on. “Here, you cover up and rest, and I’ll drive for a few hours.”

  I gave up at that point. I don’t like to think of myself as a quitter, but I’d asked him point-blank several times, and if he didn’t want to answer the question, then so be it.

  The big idiot. “Roger will be pissed if we don’t go find a hotel and park ourselves so they can find us.”

  “To hell with Roger,” he said with blithe abandon.

  I bit back some rather scathing comments and settled back, confused, emotionally vulnerable, and fearing a future of unrequited love, but realized that now was clearly not the time to discuss the future, so I tried to put the matter from my mind.

  In the end, we did find a hotel, but only after we had crossed the border into Latvia.

  I had hoped for some rompy time once we were snuggled into bed, even if the man refused to talk relationship. Dixon, however, had other ideas. When I emerged from a soak in the tub to warm up all my extremities (the misty rain had turned into a heavy drizzle that seemed to seep through my clothes to my skin), he was sound asleep, snoring up a storm. I stood looking down at him, wondering how I had started this adventure determined to find my wings at last and go my own way without ties to any family, and now here was a man who was so much a part of me, I couldn’t even imagine life without him. And I had no idea if he reciprocated those feelings.

  “You are just going to have to see reason,” I said, snuggling into Dixon. He mumbled in his sleep and rolled on his side, his leg and arm over me protectively. I scooted in even closer to his chest, enjoying the scent and feel of him. “That’s all there is to it.”