Speed Dating (14 page)

And then Kendall the risk avoider took a very big risk. “Dylan,” she said, “I want to meet your family.”

She felt him go rigid, his muscles turning into steel armor. “Well, it’s not going to happen.” He pulled away then.

Push, Carl had said, and right now she was acting pushier than she ever had in her life. Her stomach felt wobbly as she made herself stand there and look at him with a steely glare she was copying from him. “That’s my deal. If you want me to stay on as your good-luck charm until my leave is over, then I want to meet your family.”

She expected him to say, “Pack your bags. I’ll drive you to the airport.” She expected at least that he’d blow up and tell her in a much louder fashion that his family was none of her business. But he didn’t. He stuck his hands in his back pockets, took in a breath so deep she could see his chest expand with it.

“When?”

She couldn’t believe she’d made him consider introducing her to his family. Her heart sang at the implication that she was more important to him than he’d let her believe. “This week. After the race.”

“What misguided, do-gooding impulse is making you do this?”

Because we’re friends, she thought, and friends help each other. “I want to see where you come from and meet your family.”

“One dinner. One meal, that’s it. That’s my deal. Take it or leave it.” He had his warrior’s face on.

But his fierceness didn’t scare her. She’d already won. “I’ll take your deal.”

“Okay, then. After tomorrow’s race we’ll head to Wilkerton.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“That’s a mistake you won’t make twice.”

T
HE PLANE
dropped them off at an airfield that Dylan told her was about an hour’s drive away from his home. He seemed remote and a little tense, and her stomach started to tighten with sympathy nerves. The trouble with being pushy is that when you got what you wanted, you had to bear the responsibility.

They picked up a car that turned out to be his, as a short and cordial conversation with a big-bellied guy named Butch indicated.

He handed her the keys. “You drive.”

She stood there, heat from the concrete parking area radiating up into her feet. “You’re kidding me.”

“No. You have a license, don’t you?”

“You get paid millions of dollars to drive professionally. I get paid to crunch numbers.”

He tossed the keys up in the air and caught them. “You’re a terrible driver, aren’t you?”

“Certainly not. I happen to be a very good driver.”

“Prove it.”

In front of Butch, who was watching the whole drama with interest, she didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. She said, “Fine,” and snatched the keys from Dylan, walked around to the driver’s side and let herself in.

She adjusted the black leather seat. She adjusted the rearview mirror and the side mirrors. Actually, side
mirror,
since she only now noticed that there was one missing. “You’re missing a side mirror on the passenger side.”

“Huh, you’re right.”

She put on her seat belt, checked carefully and pulled out of the parking space. “It’s dangerous to drive without both side mirrors. You should get it fixed.”

He didn’t give her a hard time. “Okay.”

“Is making me drive your way of punishing me for forcing you to come home and introduce me to your family?” she asked. She’d become a lot more direct since she’d known him. Communication was much easier, she’d discovered.

“No.” He sounded surprised. “Sometimes I get tired of driving.”

“Oh.” She glanced his way. “So, you’re not going to criticize my every move and tell me I’m doing everything wrong?”

“Only if you turn out to be a terrible driver. That was a very nice three-point turn, by the way,” he said so politely she had to laugh.

“I should have warned you,” he said as they pulled out of the airfield’s parking lot onto a two-lane highway, “that whenever I come home there are a few people I have to see.”

“That’s fine,” she said, thinking that anyone who was important to Dylan was going to be important to her, too.

The area around Wilkerton didn’t look exactly booming economically.

“We’re going to visit Bessy Standish,” he said as she followed his directions and pulled off the highway and down a bumpy asphalt drive with weeds growing through the cracks. “She’s the wife of the guy who gave me my first ride. Ed passed on a couple of years ago. He was good to me. They both were.”

The white house was on the shabby side, but it was neat, with ruffled curtains hanging in the windows. The front porch dipped a little with age, but it had the same faded charm as the woman who opened the door and let out a cry of delight before pulling Dylan in for a hug that he returned with enthusiasm.

Bessy Standish was tall and big-boned and probably somewhere in her late seventies, but she had the sharp eyes and upright gait of a younger woman.

She walked them to the back of the house past formal rooms that looked dusty and unused, to the kitchen where the smell of baking filled the air. “I’m making pies for the church charity bazaar,” she announced.

A box of apples sat on the floor beside a big, planked kitchen table, and a blanket of pastry with a rolling pin beside it covered the kitchen counter.

The woman wiped her hands on her apron and went to a spotless white fridge with a bowed front that appeared to be from the fifties. She opened it, removed a jug of iced tea and poured three tumblers full, which she set on the big table.

“Hope you don’t mind if I carry on while we talk.”

“Can I help?” Kendall asked, thinking it was going to take all day to turn that box of apples into pie.

“You both can,” Bessy said, pointing them to the sink to wash up.

It was surprisingly peaceful in the big kitchen peeling apples. Dylan, Mr. Big Shot Race Car Driver, took to the homely task as though he’d peeled apples for pie hundreds of times before. She was suddenly glad she’d forced him to come home, even for this kernel of knowledge about him.

“So, Kendall,” the woman said, peeling twice as fast as either of her guests, “how’d you meet our local hero?”

“We met in Charlotte,” she said, deciding to leave the details well shrouded in mystery.

“Crazy scene in Charlotte. You don’t seem like Dy’s usual type.”

“Thank you,” she said.

That earned her a guffaw of laughter. “I like this one. She’s classy.” She turned to Kendall. “Not like some of the pretty little things I’ve seen him with. All boob, no brain.” She glanced down. “You’ve got enough boob, but you seem like you’ve got some brains to go with it.”

Kendall shot a helpless look at Dylan, but he was giving her one of his glinting smiles—the kind where he seemed to be laughing at her without being too obvious about it. Then he dropped his gaze back to the apple he was peeling.

“Thank you,” she said again.

“You finish school?”

She’d anticipated that his family might give her the third degree, but not that a former employer’s wife would be similarly interested in her qualifications to be Dylan’s partner on the road. She blinked. “I have my master’s degree. In math.”

The woman fanned herself. “Well, la-di-da.” She
glanced up at Dylan. “Did you tell her your granddaddy ran in the first race in Daytona Beach?”

“It didn’t come up.” Among all the stories of his family she hadn’t heard.

“I knew. I researched Dylan on the Internet.”

“Hah! They put his granddaddy on the Internet?”

“Yes. They did.”

“Well, I never. Wouldn’t ol’ Pete chuckle like a son of a gun if he knew that. Crazy that a bunch of guys racing on sand could start a million-dollar industry.”

Billion-dollar, but neither of them bothered to correct her.

“If the South had won the war, it would be the national sport now, I reckon.” She began slicing the peeled apples into a big, green ceramic bowl with astonishing speed. “So, Dylan, what brings you down here in the middle of the season?”

“I wanted Kendall to meet everybody,” he said.

Not exactly the way it had happened, but an interpretation she liked very much. The words certainly earned the pair of them another glance, as sharp and swift as the knife Bessy was wielding. She didn’t say anything, but once again Kendall was conscious of a nervous tightening in her belly. What wasn’t being said seemed to echo loudly in the room.

“I like this one, Dy,” the woman said.

“I like her, too. She brings me good luck.”

Another hearty guffaw answered him. “I know, honey. I watch the races. You keep kissin’ her like you do and them sportscasts are going to need an
R
rating.”

“Really,” Kendall said, feeling flustered. “It’s only a silly routine that makes the fans happy.”

In answer she received another sharp glance, but this one had a smile to go with it. “I’m not blind, child.”

“You going to give us one of the pies for all this work?” Dylan asked some time later, when the fruit box was empty and Kendall had a cramp in her apple-peeling hand.

“You want a pie, you come to the bake sale. It’ll cost you five dollars and the money will help fund the new preemie wing in the hospital.”

“I already made a donation to that,” Dylan said. He didn’t say any more, but Kendall knew he gave significant sums to charity.

Bessy, however, remained unimpressed. “Every five dollars counts,” she said.

After they’d finished pie-making and their tea and emerged into the heavy warmth of late afternoon, Kendall felt optimistic that bringing Dylan home was a good idea. Hoping to appear cool and unruffled when she met Dylan’s parents, she turned on the air-conditioning when she restarted the car. Remembering the Caesar salad she’d eaten for lunch, she dug in her bag for breath mints.

“Would you like a mint?” she asked Dylan.

“Why? You planning on kissing me?”

“No. I don’t want anchovy-and-garlic breath when I meet your family.”

“You can brush your teeth at my place.”

“You have a home in Wilkerton?”

She’d assumed he’d be staying with his family and she’d put up at a hotel. This was the first time he’d mentioned having his own place.

“Sure. I like my own space. We’ll stay there.”

This was a small town. “Will it cause trouble for you if I stay at your house?”

“Honey, it’ll cause trouble for me if you don’t. I have a reputation to keep up. Besides, I want Ashlee and Harrison hearing about how we’re inseparable. Got it?”

He directed her to the next highway turnoff and soon she found herself driving through tree-lined streets bordered by small houses and gardens, neatly kept. They passed a small shopping plaza, two churches, a war memorial, a park and then a row of stately homes that sat on acreages. There was a body of water behind them that she thought was a broad, slow-moving river. “Oh, how lovely,” she said.

“Ashlee’s living in the fancy one with the yellow trim,” he informed her. She wasn’t surprised that Harrison Bryant would have one of the best houses in town.

The antebellum mansion suited Ashlee, too, she thought.

She wondered which one belonged to Dylan, who was most likely the richest man in town. But he didn’t tell her to stop, so she kept driving. Past the mansions, past the not-quite mansions, past the minimansions that were all house and no land, past a school, another park. Then they came to a T intersection.

“Turn right,” he told her.

She discovered she’d guessed correctly that the body of water she’d glimpsed was a wide, lazy-moving river when they crossed over it on a wooden bridge.

It felt as though the river separated city from country, for as soon as they’d crossed, she noticed the now-familiar fields of tobacco and animals grazing in the distance.

Dylan’s place was about a fifteen-minute drive
outside Wilkerton. At his direction, she turned down a tree-shaded gravel lane and bumped her way down to a modern home. It was styled like a farmhouse, but she could tell it was new. There were fields of crops, a few horses grazing on a back paddock and then the dark green of trees.

“How much land do you have?” she asked.

“’Bout fifty acres.”

“And you farm it?”

“Sure. Well, obviously I hire a guy to farm it for me, but someday I can see myself setting up as a farmer.”

The lifestyle seemed so slow and tranquil she couldn’t imagine Dylan settling. But she supposed he was well able to afford as many visions of himself as he wanted. Besides, the farm must provide a bit of economic benefit to the area, even if only in creating jobs for a farmer and some hired hands.

It was clear the farmhouse had been updated when Dylan directed her to drive around the side and into a freestanding, three-car garage.

Once she entered the house, she was amazed at how it seemed like a real home. It had more character than the house he kept outside Charlotte. That was it, she realized. That was a house he owned. This was his home. She followed him into a kitchen that was bright and cheery. Pine cabinets, granite counters, steel appliances—and there were plenty of them, including an espresso machine that would have looked at home in Starbucks.

The main living area was done in a great-room style so there was no division, merely a counter bar that separated the kitchen from the eating area. The big, oval
oak table and chairs emitted the scent of lemon oil, and there was a vase of fresh tulips in the middle. Clearly, Dylan had housekeeping help. Live-in?

His living room furniture was mostly leather and she was pleased to see she hadn’t been completely wrong. Over a river-rock fireplace mantel hung a plasma TV.

There was also art on the walls. Modern pieces and a couple of metal sculptures.

“The bedrooms are this way,” Dylan said, leading the way down a hallway. They passed several doors as he led her to the last one.

The guest room at the end of the hall was decorated in soft blues with cream accents. It was a soothing, pretty room with an en suite bathroom.

“Make yourself at home,” he said. “I’m going to take a look around my land.” She didn’t miss the tiny inflection of pride when he mentioned “my land.”

She unpacked and headed to the window of her bedroom and stared out at some of the prettiest countryside she’d ever seen. There was something restful about this place, and the house seemed to exude—what? She closed her eyes for a second and decided it was peace.

Once more, she felt this odd sense of Dylan having a side to him she’d glimpsed once or twice but never truly believed. There was the crazy, restless, hard-driven, fast-driving NASCAR hero and then there was the quiet, contemplative man. It seemed this was where that other man lived.