But Ricki wasn’t backing down. “He started it,” she said like some petulant child.
Vince couldn’t believe he was doing this. It was bad enough that Milton was over an hour beyond where he washeaded. But she was some hot-tempered, ungrateful loud mouth on top of it? What was he thinking?
But he was a man of his word if he was anything. Taking her away from that clown meant he was assuming responsibility for her. He had to take her where she needed to go. He was a giver that day, but he wasn’t a cheerful one.
He walked over to the front passenger side of his Bentley sedan, and opened the door for her.
Ricki had expected a nice car. When she first saw him in that café, she could tell he was no slouch. He had a thing or two going for him. That was why she approached him. Those other guys were looking at her as if she was a side of beef they wanted to taste. Which she hated. But he looked at her as if he wanted no parts of her. Which she loved.
But when he opened the door of that baby-blue, fancy Bentley, and she saw those magnificent red leather seats with the piping and the matching red steering wheel, she was floored by the sheer richness of it all. That same car had caught her eye when she first walked across that café parking lot. Now she was about to ride in it? Who was this guy, she wondered, that could afford a ride like this? And the way he buckled her seat belt, as if she was no slouch either, comforted her. She knew rich guys could be jerks too. Many of them were. But he was a man who looked to be around a dozen years older than she was. Like he was forty or so. And he looked so serious. Like he just wanted to get this over with. She didn’t feel the least bit of fear.
But when he closed her door and began walking around the front of the car to the driver side, she could also tell he had some swag about him. Like he could be a bastard from way back if you pushed him. And she still couldn’t get over how just a look from him caused that big, bad trucker to back off. As if he knew the type. But what was that type? What kind of man was she dealing with?
He was absolutely easy on the eyes. That was obvious. He was the kind of gorgeous she knew all the ladies went mad over. The kind she knew to keep her heart as far away from as humanly possible.
Vince got in behind the steering wheel, buckled up, and then looked at her. When he was that close to her and staring into her eyes, she could see why that trucker was intimidated. She felt some intimidation herself. “What do you plan to do with your car?” he asked her.
“I have no choice but to leave it there until I finish my business in Milton,” she said.
“In other words, it’s a hunk of junk that you aren’t worried about,” he said as if it was a fact.
“It’s not a hunk of junk.”
“Looks that way to me.”
“I don’t care what it looks like to you, that’s not what it is.”
She could see his jaw tightened as if he wanted to kick her salty ass. Already she could tell he wasn’t used to people defying him. But instead of arguing about it, he just drove away. His disgust of her wasn’t over by a long shot she could tell, but it was as if he didn’t care enough to get into it with her. Which was fine by her. She just needed to get to Milton.
He seemed like a naturally fast driver as he sped onto the interstate and headed north to Milton. They were two hours away from town and that court hearing was less than two and a half hours away. Which left her little room for error. She was glad he was a speedster.
But she kept taking glances at him. He didn’t talk to her. He wasn’t curious about her at all. The only time, for the first thirty minutes of their drive, did he show any emotion was when his phone rang. He had to turn it on before he handed it to her, and he apparently had forgotten to turn it back off. He looked at his car’s screen when the phone rang, saw that it was fromFontaine-Bachman, Inc., and he reluctantly pressed the screen’s button. “Yes?”
“Sorry to disturb you, boss,” said a male’s voice, “but we got trouble.”
“The Vice President,” the man began saying and that was when Vince immediately pressed a button on his car’s screen that muted the sound. Then he reached into a box inside his console and pulled out what appeared to be a landline type of phone. He then pressed a button inside that box. “Repeat it,” he said over the secured phone whose conversation Ricki was no longer privy to hear.
But she’d already heard the word Vice President. That she knew. What she didn’t know was if they were talking about the vice president of Fontaine-Backman, or the VP of the United States, or some other VP. For a guy to be driving a car like the one she was seated in, it wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility it was the VPOTUS. She looked at him as he spoke, mostly in code if you asked her, to the other man on the other end of that call.
She was never into white guys, but this white guy had it going on. There was no getting around that. Loads and loads of thick hair that settled around his face like messy perfection. His eyes were a hard green. Not the soft kind she saw in movies, but the hard kind she saw on men who only knew how to play hardball all the time. But the fact that he was easy on the eyes was the only thing easy about him. He seemed high maintenance to her. Like a man who had to have the best things in life, including the most beautiful car, the most beautiful woman, the most beautiful profession whatever that was. He was not the kind of man she would consider a good man.
Although he was doing her a very good deed.
When he ended the phone call, he placed that phone back in the box and closed it. Then he pulled out his cellphone,turned it off, and put it away again. It would be another several minutes of silence before Ricki spoke up. “Who are you, Mister?” she asked him.
Vince at first glanced at her as if she was annoying him, which only made her feel worse. “Now you ask that question?” he said. Then he looked back at the road. “Vincent Fontaine.”
She didn’t like his attitude, but she kept that to herself. “You prefer Vince or Vincent?”
“It matters not to me.”
“Me neither. But I’ll bet you have a preference.”
“I prefer to be on my way to my home and not bothered with you. How about that?” As soon as he said it, he looked over at her. He could tell he hurt her. She looked away from him and out of the side passenger window, as if she was trying to shield that hurt. It was as if her body language was saying that the world dumped on her all the time, why not him too?
But he regretted his harshness. “Vince is fine,” he said.
She looked at him with venom in her own eyes. “If I didn’t have to be in Milton, I’d tell you to drop me off on the side of this road right now,Vince. But I can’t do that.”
