Pete smiled as she laughed. “You’re just saying it wrong,” he told her, and lifted his head. He met her gaze and just held it and held it and held it until she finally stopped laughing. And when he spoke, he didn’t have to work very hard to make his voice low and rough. “I have to go down on you. Ihaveto.See?”
Shay’s laughter was now breathless. “I was definitely saying it wrong,” she agreed, and then sighed when he lowered his head and kissed her. “As far as the book goes…Jack and Loretta get there. Keep reading.”
“I will,” he murmured. “But I’m a little busy right now.”
One day at a timemeant not worrying about tomorrow—about what the future might bring.
So Pete surrendered toright now—which was pretty fucking great.
Dingo picked a national chain over one of the more quirkily named mom-and-pop-type motels. The Ride On Inn. The Desert Flower. Nope. Not going to stop there. But the chain with its bored-to-death, minimum-wage-earning night clerk behind the front desk…?
“I’ll be right out,” he told Maddie as he parked by the doors. As he got out of his car, he patted his pocket to make sure he was still carrying the wad of bills they’d taken from Fiona’s room. He was holding it for Maddie, for safety’s sake. Right.
He had to hit a buzzer—and really lean on it—to get into the motel office due to the “night lock.”
A man finally appeared behind the desk—middle-aged, balding, puffy-faced—and looked hard through the glass at Dingo and then over at Maddie, who was visible in the car. Whoops, maybe it was a mistake parking there.
She was his adopted sister; they were traveling together to meet their dad. Yeah, that would work.
The lock finally clicked open, and Dingo went inside. The scent of industrial-strength insecticide didn’t quite cover the musty blend of ancient mildew and dust. God, working here would be a living hell.
He cleared his throat and prepared his smile. If the clerk had been a woman, he would’ve automatically gone Australian. But the accent didn’t always work with men—sometimes it did, but sometimes it really backfired. So Dingo stayed silent as he approached the desk, looking at the obviously cranky man with his swollen eyes, sagging jowls, and disheveled, barely there graying hair.
“How can I help you, mate?” The man’s voice was thick with a Down-Under accent that had to be real.
Didn’t it? Or…? Wait…
Dingo’s first coherent thought was that he was encountering himself, from some terrible and depressing future. Oh, God, he looked awful.
“Well, speak up! You woke me—best make it worth it. Come on!”
“Yes,” Dingo said, in standard Southern Californian. “Sorry, dude, it’s late, and you…remind me of someone. Is your name Rick, by any chance?” Okay, that was stupid, as Maddie would say. This man was definitelynothim, from the future. That kind of technology didn’t exist. Still, morbidly curious, part of him wanted to know. “Or Richard…?”
The man sighed heavily. “You want a room, but you don’t have a credit card. Well, it’s your lucky day, we take debit cards, here at Bedbugs R Us.”
Okay,thatwasn’t good. But since they only wanted to use the shower…“I have cash.”
“That we also take,” the man said. “With two forms of ID.”
“Twoforms?” Dingo said. “I have a driver’s license, but…” Nothing else.
“Credit or debit card’ll do it.”
“Well, that’s stupid. If I had those I’d use them to pay, and I wouldn’t need a second ID,” Dingo pointed out.
“No, you’d still need your driver’s license,” the man said. “Can’t have criminals and ne’er-do-wells checking in.”
“Do I look like a criminal or a…?” Dingo stopped himself. Okay, stupid question, particularly smelling the way he did.
Future Dingo looked at him hard, then pointedly turned to look at Maddie, waiting out in the car. “How old’s your lovely little morsel out there, twelve or maybe thirteen?” He laughed. “Oh, I know, I know, she justlooksyoung, right? Or wait, she’s your sister.”
Sis-tah.His accent was awesome, but then again, with another few decades of practice, Dingo’s would be, too.
He tried straight-up bribery. There was littlehewouldn’t do for a quick fifty bucks. “Look, I’m sorry. Can we bend the rules? We’re not going to stay long—an hour, at most—”
“Hourly rental, eh? Fuck her and run?”
“Nope,” Dingo said. “Don’t want bedbugs, aren’t gonna—nope. We just want to use the shower.”
