She eased the stick back into gear and felt her thumb brush against the inside of his thigh. She closed her eyes in disbelief and scorching embarrassment. “This is impossible! Can’t you scrinch into the seat a little?”

“I’m scrinched as much as I can scrinch. If you’d just get moving, you could put it into third, and we’d all feel better.”

Chris spun the wheel and peeled out into the stream of traffic.

Ken Callahan gripped the dashboard. “Holy cow, now I know how you got all those dents in your car.”

“Do you want to drive?”

“You wouldn’t want to know what I’d like to do,” he returned between clenched teeth.

Chris clutched the wheel with all the desperation of a drowning woman clinging to a leaking life preserver. She couldn’t ever remember feeling so disturbed by a man. Every move she made pressed against hard muscle and sent suspicious sensations fluttering along her nerve endings, resulting in an odd mixture of fear, annoyance, and raw physical attraction. She focused her attention on the road and took a deep breath to steady herself. It was a ridiculous situation, and she knew it was going to get worse before it got better. She was up to fifty miles an hour and still driving in third gear. The motor whined in protest. She had to put the truck into fourth gear, but that meant sliding her hand along the inside of his right leg, again. This is my punishment for neglecting my car, she agonized. I didn’t feed it oil, and I lied to it, and the Car Fairy is getting even.

Ken Callahan cleared his throat nervously. “Uh, you really should put it into fourth.”

“I know that.” She glanced at him in the rearview mirror and realized he was biting back laughter. “Something funny?”

“You’re kinda cute when you’re all flustered.”

She made a grunting sound of pure annoyance. The only thing worse than being flustered was having him know she was flustered. She wrapped her fist around the gearshift and plunged it back with a vengeance.