“In this case, looks don’t deceive.” She glared at the expressway, which was currently empty. “I wish more people had been taught to be helpers, but I’m grateful you were. I don’t want to ruin the rest of your night, though, so if I can just make a call to get a tow, that would be fantastic, and then you can get back to your plans.”
“It’s after one in the morning. My plans were to go home and to bed.”
“Then I don’t want to get in the way of your good night’s sleep.” She held her hand out expectantly.
Duncan didn’t reach for his phone just yet. He took a step toward the side of the road and considered the trailer and truck—a double-cab Sierra 1500. It looked like an early 2000s model, so about twenty to twenty-five years old. “Getting a tow with an occupied trailer is gonna take some effort. I’m a mechanic. I work at Brian Delaney Auto Service. I’ll take a look if you want, see if I can get it running.”
Phoebe stepped over and frowned at her truck. “I don’t mind you looking, but I think it’s a loss. There was a big, loud bang, and then the whole thing just locked up. Steering went and everything. I barely got it to the shoulder. I know a little bit about cars—not like a mechanic, but enough to have a guess. My first thought was a thrown rod.”
Duncan grunted; her description lined up with a thrown rod, sadly. “No comin’ back from that. You mind if I take a look?”
Her eyes narrowed as she stared up at him. After a moment’s examination of his face, she nodded. “Sure, let’s go up and take a look.”
She led him to the front of the truck, then backtracked to the cab, opened the passenger door, climbed in and disappeared below the windshield. Then the hood release popped.
Duncan lifted the hood all the way and used the flashlight in his phone to examine the engine. It took him about fifteen seconds to find the giant hole where a rod had shot through. Yeah, this engine was completely fucked.
When Phoebe came back, he said, “You’re right. Thrown rod. Wanna see?”
She nodded and stepped up onto the bumper to lean over and get a look.
Duncan shone the light on the hole. “You see that?” Leaning farther, Phoebe pressed her body against his. Over the familiar smells of engine, Duncan smelled something cold and earthy, and also something light and fruity. Strawberries, he thought. Maybe her shampoo, coming up from the messy braids that dangled over her shoulders.
Pulling his head out of his dick, he explained, “That hole is where the rod shot straight through the engine. Yeah, this truck is terminal.”
Phoebe hopped down. “Well, that sucks tremendously. But thank you for checking. And for stopping. If I could just borrow your phone to make a call, I won’t bother you more. My phone broke tonight.”
That made him laugh as he closed the hood. “Your phone died, too? You are having a shitty night.”
“Yes, I am. Shitty enough that I’m not ready to find the funny yet.”
“Sorry.” As he was about to offer her his phone an idea occurred to him, so he didn’t hand it over yet. “I hope you don’t think I’m Buffalo Bill, but my truck has a hitch. If you’re not headed real far, we could hitch you up to me, and I could get you and Stormy here—”
“Smoky.”
“Smoky, sorry. I could get you both home. I can call to have somebody from my shop tow the truck in, and you can deal with that later.”
Again, she squinted up at him, making no pretense that she wasn’t evaluating the fuck out of him. “I can appreciate the Silence of the Lambs reference, and if you’re not a psycho serial killer who plans to make a dress out of my skin, I’m grateful for the offer. But that’s a lot of trouble to take for a total stranger. Too much trouble. So much it feels like a red flag.”
“No, it’s a green flag. I’m not looking for anything from you at all. Like I told you—I was taught to help. But here—” he held out his phone—“if a phone call is all the help you need, go ‘head.”
He was willing to help, but he had neither the will nor the need to push his help on her. Besides, it was late and fucking cold, so if she didn’t want a rescue, he wanted to get back in his warm truck and get moving.
She took the phone from him and studied it in her hand. Then she looked up at him and studied him again, like a scientist looking through a microscope. “You’ll really hitch up and take us home? No strings attached?”
Duncan grinned. “Well, let’s set some boundaries around that. How far you goin’?”
“Down around Checotah, so about an hour.”
“Hell, that’s nothin’. Sure, I’ll get you there.”
“You sure? That means an hour back here.”
“I’m sure. Let me call the tow in, and we’ll get to work on moving the trailer.”
~oOo~
The plan Duncan had sketched out in his head when he’d had the idea to offer her a ride home was to back his truck up, then get the horse off the trailer and push the empty trailer backward so he could pull his F150 in front of it, and then hitch it up and load the horse again. Phoebe laughed when he suggested he could move an empty trailer on his own, insisting that it weighed about as much as a car.
As usual, getting laughed at made him even more stubborn about it.
How heavy could an empty trailer be? As much as a car? Come on. It wasn’t one of those fancy deals with air conditioning and rooms in front for gear, and it wasn’t like he meant to pick the thing up; he simply needed to lift the coupler a little, then push and pull it—on wheels—ten feet or so.
As it turned out, a horse trailer might actually weigh as much as a small car. However, Duncan was strong, especially when he had cred on the line, and he only had to move it a few feet, so he got it done. It had helped that he had a gravity buff: they were on a slight incline, headed downward in the correct direction; once he’d got it moving, the hard part had been getting it to stop before it crashed into his truck.
He was going to ache for a few days, but he got the fucker hitched up and was rewarded with a look of total shock and a little awe on Phoebe’s pretty face.
“Told ya,” he said with a grin.
Phoebe grinned back. “Okay. I’m impressed.”
Smoky thought getting back into that trailer was a spectacularly horrible idea, and he thought Duncan was possibly Satan himself, so Phoebe had to coax him back in on her own. While she did, talking quietly to the horse, she explained that she ran a large-animal rescue called Ragamuffin Ranch, and that she’d just rescued Smoky from a bad neglect situation, and she suspected abuse as well.
“The guy I rescued him from was a real piece of work. Horses aren’t very smart, but they are self-protective. I think he’s learned that men are dangerous.”
“That really sucks,” Duncan said, standing on the shoulder, out of the horse’s sightline. “I hate people sometimes.”
“Same,” she cooed, stroking Smoky’s nose as she urged him to take one more step onto the ramp. “But then there are strangers who stop and offer to give themselves a hernia and also drive us two hours out of their way, so I don’t hate everybody all the time.”
Well, that felt pretty good. Before Duncan could think of a good way to reply, he saw the wrecker coming and hurried toward it, meaning to wave it over before it got too close and freaked the horse out all over again.