The Perils of Paulie (A Matchmaker in Wonderland) Read online

  “Don’t do this, Paulie,” Dixon said wearily, and, taking my hand, escorted me to our room. He dropped his bag of essentials and made a circle gesture. I spun around and waited while he unhooked the white pearl buttons on the back of my champagne-colored blouse and unlaced the corset.

  I scratched my belly and back with sighs of happiness and unhooked my pale pink skirt with darker pink pinstripes. “I’m not trying to be obnoxious,” I told him.

  He headed for the bathroom, peeling off bits of his suit as he went. “I’m too tired to point out that a woman sleeping alone in a car is more vulnerable than a man, not to mention I wouldn’t allow you to put yourself in danger like that while I lolled about in comfort.”

  “But it’s OK for me to be lolling?” I called after him, shucking the last of my clothes and slipping into a pair of sleeping shorts and T-shirt. “We can both sleep in the car.”

  He poked his head out and gave me a stern look that, for some reason, made me want to giggle. I blamed lack of sleep. That and the fact that he was so endearingly adorable. “Stop being noble. You’ll get better sleep in the bed, and that will allow you to drive more. I’ll be fine on the backseat.”

  “I have fond memories of that backseat,” I said loudly over the sound of the water he’d turned on. I thought about arguing the fact with him but decided in the end that he was right—I would be more vulnerable alone in the car, and if I got a better quality of sleep, I could take on the bulk of the driving. And we were close, so very close to reaching Paris . . .

  I didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep until a buzzing noise sounded next to my head. I rolled over and saw that Dixon had set the alarm on my phone. It was almost ten in the morning.

  “Holy shitsnacks!” I leaped up, made speedy ablutions, and tried to stuff myself back into my skirt and shirt but couldn’t get the corset closed properly. Hurriedly, I texted Dixon to come back to the room to tighten me, then sent a wake-up text to Tabby.

  Less than half an hour later we were on the road.

  “We’re going to push for Paris,” I told Tabby when she loaded her luggage into their little blue car. Sam was busy stowing the video equipment he’d charged up during our brief break. “It should be about ten hours, plus time for stops. We figure twelve hours ought to do it. Will you guys be OK with that?”

  “We’ll be dead tired at the end, but yes, that’s all right,” Tabby said, then gave me one of her arm punches. “I think you have a good shot at winning.”

  I flashed her a grin and, with my eyes on Sam, asked quietly, “Does that mean you know something about the location of the Essex boys?”

  “Only that Anton is with them again, and Roger knows where we are,” she said cryptically, but her eyes were smiling.

  I fought back the urge to do a little song and dance right there, instead taking my place behind the wheel while Dixon went around the car, doing his usual pre-setoff check. Sam filmed us waving as we headed out of the parking lot, but he didn’t see me throw up my arms and let out a big “Woo-hoo!”

  “What’s that for?” Dixon asked, looking mildly startled. “Was the bed really that good?”

  “It felt like baby bottoms and fluffy clouds, but that’s not why I was celebrating. Tabby didn’t say so much, but the Esses are behind us. It’s sunny, we have good roads between here and Paris, and I feel like I could drive for hours and hours!”

  “I’m glad to hear all of that.” He gave me a warm smile that I wanted to investigate further, but I was driving, so instead I asked him how he slept.

  “Moderately well. I think my body is getting used to the backseat.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m a little stiff but, like you, feel like I can drive without killing us.”

  “That’s good, because—”

  I never finished that sentence. At the moment I was speaking, we’d left Prague proper and were on the road that would take us near Pilsen, when a sleek black Mercedes passed us. As there were two lanes, I didn’t think anything about it, but the minivan in front of us evidently didn’t see them and made a left turn directly ahead of the Mercedes. The van and Mercedes, locked together, veered off into the barrier with a horrible scream of brakes and tearing metal. They slammed into a sign, sending it first careening into the van, then rebounding back toward us. I had hit the brakes as soon as I’d seen the Mercedes hit the van, but wasn’t able to avoid the sign crashing onto the Flyer’s hood and bouncing up to smash into the windscreen, which shattered into a billion pieces. The Flyer spun out to the side as I wrenched the wheel, while ahead of us the van finally came to a halt on the shoulder. Brakes behind us squealed as traffic came to a stop.

  “Holy— Are you all right?” I asked Dixon at the same time he unsnapped his seat belt and asked me, “Are you hurt?”

  “No,” I said, looking down at my lap. My lovely skirt was covered with little squares of glass. “Although I’m thankful they used safety glass in the windscreen, because we could have been shish-kebabed by glass otherwise.”

  Dixon was out of the car before I finished speaking, running toward the van. A few people behind us pulled over onto the shoulder to see if they could help, but there was a lane left open and many drivers simply crept by and proceeded on their way.

  It took me a minute to get my shaking hands under control, but I could see Dixon up at the crumpled wreck of a van, pulling people out. A couple of other people ran to the Mercedes, but from the looks on their faces, I feared the worst. I got out of the car, shook off all the little squares of glass, and hurried over to where two children were sitting on the side of the road, their heads bloody, but apparently all right otherwise. The driver looked like she was in worse shape.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I asked Dixon when he helped a third child out. “Should I get a blanket? Water?”

  “Blankets would probably be good. These kids are pretty shaken up.”

  I ran back to the car and fetched our backseat blanket, then wrapped it around two of the children who were sitting together, clutching each other and sobbing. In the distance, sirens began to grow louder. Coming from the other direction, a police car suddenly pulled onto the shoulder and the cop darted across traffic to climb the barrier.

  “Can we help?” Tabby asked breathlessly when she and Sam made it through the crawl of traffic. I could see that she’d pulled over behind the Flyer.

  “I don’t think so. There’s a cop here now, and it sounds like the EMTs are on their way.” I turned to speak and felt my jaw drop at the sight of the car that slowly made its way past us.

  Sanders was at the wheel of the Zust, shaking his head and tsk-ing. He didn’t say anything, just drove on. In the backseat, Anton gave us an apologetic smile.

  “What’s—” Tabby turned and saw the back of the Zust. “What the hell? How did they get here? Roger said they were spending the night in Berlin!”

  “They left early,” I said. “Probably at the crack of dawn. No doubt they wanted to put more distance between us. Dammit all to hell and back again. Dixon!”

  I ran back to Dixon, who was standing with the policeman, speaking in flawless German, telling him what we saw and who we were.

  “I hate to interrupt, but our competition just drove past,” I said in his ear. “If you think we need to stay and help out, I won’t complain, but if we aren’t needed, we really should get a move on.”

  “We aren’t needed, but we can’t drive without a windscreen,” he said, glancing back at the Flyer. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Life is dangerous,” I told him, grabbing him by the wrist and pulling him with me toward the Flyer. Sam, who was filming us, followed. “But a life lived in fear is a life half lived. Come on. We have cheaters to catch up to!”

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as easy as jumping in the car and zooming off. First we had to clean out all the glass from the windscreen. Then Dixon used a wrench to knock out th
e remaining snaggly shards that clung to the frame. He insisted I text Roger about the accident.

  August 12

  From: Roger

  You can’t drive without a windscreen! It’s illegal!!! You’ll have to get it replaced.

  August 12

  To: Roger

  Come on! The Esses just passed us! We have to go now.

  August 12

  From: Roger

  You cannot proceed without a windscreen. Rules say so.

  August 12

  From: Roger

  Go to nearest repair shop. Then you can continue.

  —

  “Goddammit!” I snarled, then pulled up a list of windscreen replacement businesses around us. “OK, there’s one half a mile from here, just off the highway.”

  “One what?” Dixon asked, brushing out the last of the glass. Tabby and Sam exchanged glances.

  “Car repair. I don’t know that they have windscreens for 1908 cars in stock, but they will have to give us something.”

  “Oh dear,” Tabby said softly.

  I pointed a finger at her and got behind the wheel. “None of that, missy. That’s disparaging talk, and I won’t have any of it.”

  She saluted and ran for their car when I started up the Flyer.

  “You are aware that it will take hours for them to replace the windscreen,” Dixon said quietly when I waved at someone who’d let us into the stream of traffic.

  “Normally, yes, but we’re going to put the full pressure of a reality TV show on this place and hope for the best.” I took a quick glance at him. His face was grim. “It’s not over until it’s over, Dixon. Anything can happen in the next twelve hours.”

  “That is most certainly true,” he agreed, but I had a feeling it wasn’t in a good way.

  The windscreen business we found was run by young, enthusiastic car aficionados who greeted the arrival of the Flyer with cries of delight. When Dixon requested a new windscreen, they pointed out they would have to custom shape the glass to fit the frame.

  “Can you replace the existing frame with a new one?” Dixon asked the most excited of the men.

  “No,” one of the other men said, but was quickly drowned out by the other two.

  I asked Dixon what the men said, my German being scant enough that I didn’t catch much of the conversation.

  “The first one said they can do a new windscreen, but it won’t look right, and the second man said that it won’t match.”

  “Tell them we care about function, not appearance.”

  “I have done so.”

  The second man whipped out a tape measure to measure the existing frame and gestured to his buddies. It didn’t take them long to unbolt the existing frame, but they had to weld parts of the new one onto the car.

  “I’m telling Roger that we’re getting the windscreen replaced,” I told Dixon a while later, when he asked me who I was texting. “But I am not telling him that we’re welding it to the car. He might freak out about that.”

  “He’s bound to notice,” Dixon said when I sent the text. “We’ll have to pay for putting the car back to its previous state.”

  I grinned at him and thought to myself what an astonishingly nice man he was. “Yeah, but he won’t see until we’re in Paris, and I’m fine with paying to have the original window put back on. We can toss the frame into the back, so they can reglass it. Oh, good. Roger says he’s leaving the film crew with the Esses and taking a train to make sure he’s in Paris before we get there.”

  Dixon took a long breath and gave me a curious look before pulling me up against his chest. He kissed my forehead. “You know we’re going to end up well behind them. We will give it our best attempt, because to do anything else would be the sheerest folly, but I don’t want you upset by the fact that we were held up by an accident and they weren’t.”

  I bit his chin. “I’m not going to be upset if we do our best and lose. I will be upset if we give up, though. You don’t want to stop, do you?”

  “Hell, no!” The little laugh lines around his eyes crinkled delightfully, and he pinched my butt while adding, “We’re going to give those blaggards a run for their money, as you Yanks say.”

  “I love it when you go all British on me.”

  “Then you’re going to love tonight, my adorable one, because I plan on Britishing all over you.”

  “Oooh. Deal.”

  One of the men came up to report to Dixon at that point, so I had to stop flirting, but I sat in a warm glow of happiness until the car was ready to go.

  Two hours later, we hit the road with a makeshift windscreen in place. It was big—poking out at awkward angles and reinforced by a couple of bars welded onto the side of the car in the role of support struts—but it was a windscreen, and we had Roger’s blessing to resume the race.

  “Floor it,” I told Dixon when we left the parking lot.

  “I will drive as fast as I safely can,” he answered, giving the windscreen a dubious look. “I want to see how this holds up before I go our max speed.”

  “Caution is good, but catching up is also— What on earth is the matter with Sam and Tabby?” I looked behind us to where they were driving, Sam tapping on his horn to sound out a tattoo of warning.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps something is wrong with the car.” Dixon pulled over into the parking lot of another shop and got out of the car, looking at the rear of it when Sam parked behind him. Tabby leaned out of the window, waving her phone at him. Dixon went over, spoke to her for a minute, then returned to the car.

  “Can you pull up your GPS?” he asked, climbing in behind the wheel.

  “Sure, but we stay on this road for a couple of hours.”

  He gave a look that a cat might have given after having eaten a small, particularly tasty bird. “It appears there’s been an overturned lorry carrying toxic refuse just before the border, and the road is closed for a few hours while they clean up. Traffic is backed up for miles. We are to look for a detour.”

  “Oh. All right.” I pulled up the GPS and told it to look for alternate routes, since it hadn’t updated with the road closure. “How did Tabby hear about it?”

  Dixon was silent. I glanced up at him, a bit startled by the warmth in his eyes. “Roger told her.”

  I narrowed my eyes on him. “OK, why are you looking at me like that?”

  He started the car and tipped my phone so he could see the alternate route. “Perhaps it’s because I like looking at you. Or that I like watching your face, which is charming on its own, but it also displays what you’re thinking. Or it might be that Roger mentioned the holdup because he and the Essex team are stuck right in the middle of it.”

  Chills rippled down my spine as I yelled a hooray. “Holy guacamole! They’re stuck? In a traffic jam?”

  “One that is expected to take at least two hours, and possibly three, before the traffic is routed off the contaminated area.”

  “Hoobah!” I shouted. “Karma’s a bitch, eh, Essex boys?”

  Dixon laughed, and we headed out, taking it easy for a few miles until his confidence in the replaced windscreen grew. We ended up taking a route that headed us farther south than we needed, but when we crossed the border back into Germany, Tabby reported that Roger had only just made it to the train station.

  “We’ve got them,” I told Dixon when he read Tabby’s text to me. “This race is ours.”

  “Don’t get cocky now,” he warned, and nodded toward the road. “Stay focused, and we’ll see. It’s going to be close, since they are farther north than we are, but it’s entirely possible that, if nothing else hits us, we will make Paris before them.”

  We had six hours of driving ahead of us at that point, and I swear we felt every single second of it. We started counting down the miles on the last one hundred, and by the time we were seeing signs that gave
the distance to Paris, we were nervous wrecks. We knew from Tabby that the Essex team was also in France but, because of our detour, on a different route than ours.

  “Ten kilometers,” I said, reading the sign that flashed by us. Dixon had the Flyer pushed to its limits now, the engine and wind roaring away at us, bugs and dirt splattering not only the car and window but our goggles, faces, and clothing. Every now and again, when it was safe to do so, Tabby drove alongside us and Sam hung out of their car and filmed us.

  “Five kilometers.” I gripped the logbook with nervous, sweaty hands and checked the clock on my phone. It was dark now, the night air cooling down with a hint of rain, and the lights of the suburbs and oncoming traffic started blurring. Neither one of us had rested since we crossed into France, and I felt slightly nauseous. I realized with a start that we hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  “You know where we’re going?” Dixon asked for the third time.

  I would have pointed out that fact, but knew he was just as nervous as me, so instead I pulled open the logbook to the printed map of Paris and instructions on the building where we were to meet. “The automobile museum on rue Béarnaise, yes. I have GPS ready once we hit our exit.”

  “Three kilometers now,” he said, and flashed a grin at me. “We gave it a good shot even if we didn’t do it.”

  “Do you think Roger would tell us if they got there before us?” I asked, breathing deeply to keep the nausea at bay.

  “No. That’s why Sam is sticking so close on our tail—they want to film us arriving, and our surprise at winning . . . or losing.”

  “Can I punch the Esses if we lose?”

  “No, but you can write rude things in your journal about them,” he said, laughter rich in his voice. “I certainly plan on doing so. One kilometer. Which exit?”

  I reminded him for the fifth time of the exit, and then gave him the next couple of turns he needed to make after that as we came into Paris proper.