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’sleaving 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 lookedbehind 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, andpossibly 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.
