Texas! Chase #2 Read Online Free PDF Page B

was indeed naked except for the white swathe of bandaging around his rib cage.
    "What about my truck?"
    Marcie kept her eyes on the road. Pellets of ice were falling intermittently with the rain.
    "I took care of it."
    "Are we towing it or what?"

    He had refused to lie down in the backseat of her car as she had suggested. But ever since leaving the hospital, his head had been reclining on the headrest. Her car was roomy and plush because she used it to drive clients around in. Soft music' was playing on the stereo radio. The heater was controlled by a thermostat. Chase was surrounded with as
    much comfortable luxury as possible. His eyes had remained closed, though he wasn't asleep.
    They were only half an hour into a two-and a half-hour car trip. Morning rush hour was over, but the weather, deteriorating by the minute, was making driving hazardous.
    Precipitation had increased, a nasty mix of rain and sleet that frequently plagued north Texas during January and February. The Fort
    Worth Livestock Show and Rodeo always seemed to herald it in.
    Marcie had her eyes glued to the pavement just beyond her hood ornament and kept a death grip on the steering wheel while maintaining minimum speed as she navigated the labyrinth of freeways that encircled downtown
    Dallas. Unfortunately it fell directly in the path between their starting point and their destination.
    "I hired someone to drive your pickup to
    Milton Point later this week," she said in answer to Chase's question. "By the time you're able to drive, it'll be there."
    "You hired someone to drive my truck?"
    "Uh-huh," she replied, concentrating on the eighteen-wheeler whizzing past her at a speed that set her teeth on edge.
    "Still competent, aren't you?"
    "The way you said that leads me to believe you don't mean it as a compliment."
    "Oh, I commend your competency. It's just that most men are intimidated by self-sufficient, overachieving women." He rolled his head against the cushion so he could look at her.
    "Is that why you never got married? Never could meet your match in the brains department?"
    She didn't feel inclined to discuss her private life with him, especially since she detected a derisive quality to his seemingly harmless question.
    "You ought to try to sleep, Chase. You're fighting the pain medication they gave you before we left."
    "What do they call that?"
    "Demerol."
    "No, I mean when a woman wants to be a man. Some kind of envy. Oh, yeah, penis envy."

    Despite the traffic and glazed highway, she looked across at him. His smug expression was intolerable.
    She longed to come back with the swift and sure retort.
    Marcie turned her full attention back to the road. She swallowed with difficulty. "Actually, Chase, I was engaged to be married once."
    His snide smile faltered. "Really? When?"
    "Several years ago, while I was living in
    Houston. He was a realtor, too. We worked out of the same office, although he was in commercial real estate and I was in residential."
    "What happened? Who broke it off, you or him?"
    She evaded the direct question. "We had dated for several months before becoming engaged.
    He was very nice, intelligent, had a good sense of humor."
    "But you weren't compatible in the sack."
    "On the contrary. We were very compatible."
    He tilted his head to one side. "It's hard for me to imagine you in the sack."
    "What a nice thing to say," she remarked, her tone implying just the opposite.
    "I guess because you didn't date much in high school."
    "It wasn't because I didn't want to. Nobody asked me."
    "All you were interested in was getting straight A's."
    "Hardly."
    "That's what it looked like."
    "Looks can be deceiving. I wanted to be beautiful and popular and go steady with a super jock just like every high school girl."
    "Hmm. Back to the guy in Houston, why didn't you marry him?"
    She smiled sadly. "I didn't love him. A week before the wedding I was trying on my gown for a final fitting. My mother and the seamstress who was doing the