Crazy Hot by Tara Janzen Read Free Book Online

his smile made her glance down at herself. One look was all it took for her to close her eyes and groan. Her lavender silk shirt was sodden, plastered to her breasts and nearly transparent in its delicacy. Between the sweat and the melting ice cubes and the time spent cozying up to her bag of ice, she looked like the first runner-up in a wet T-shirt contest.
    She automatically crossed her arms over her breasts, hoping the action wasn't too obvious. Then he turned the key in the ignition, and all thoughts of modesty were drowned out in the rumbling roar of the Camaro's engine.
    Her eyes flew open, and her arms shot out to either side, her hands clinging to whatever she could find to hold on to—the door panel on her right, and the gear console on the left. The whole freaking car was shaking and grumbling and growling. He pressed down on the gas, revving the engine, and the growling turned into an out-and-out roar.
    Holy Mother of God. Wilson's Dodge hadn't sounded or felt anything like this.
    Eyes wide, knuckles white, she looked at Quinn and wasn't the least bit reassured to find him frowning at a gauge. Something was wrong. He revved the engine again, and the resulting surge of power poured through her from the tips of her toes up the length of her spine.
    She felt like she was riding a rocket. Jeanette was a beast—all ugly on the outside and pure animal from the rims up.
    He gave the gauge a tap, and when it didn't budge, bent his head down to peer into the maze of wires snaking around where the other half of the dashboard should have been. A few seconds of fiddling and a startling shower of sparks later, the needle on the gauge swung into action, responding with a smooth swinging arc to every ounce of pressure he put on the gas pedal.
    Satisfied with the working of the gauge, he began inching the car out of the barn. Like a prowling tiger, the Camaro crawled across the dusty floor. A whole new fear took hold of her.
    “W-wait . . . Kid said those guys are still out there. What if they're just waiting for us?”
    “Oh, they're waiting for us all right,” he assured her, “but they'll never catch us. We're going to outrun them.”
    Regan braced herself, remembering how Kid had taken off in his Porsche. But Quinn held them to a crawl, making the mighty Jeanette shoulder her way through every rut and over every ridge in the dirt road. Ahead of them, the highway out of Cisco stretched to the horizon with no Kid in sight. She twisted around in her seat. The road behind them was clear, except for the blue nose of the SUV peeking out from behind a low hill and a flash of sunlight glinting off something in the window.
    “They've got binoculars.” Her heart was racing, her palms sweating. “They've seen us and . . . and they're heading this way.”
    “And they're too late.”
    Or so he said, but even once they made it onto the asphalt, he kept the car in first, growling and rumbling and crawling along. Regan's stomach started tying itself into knots, and she quickly revised her estimate of their travel time. At the rate they were going, they'd be lucky to make Denver by next week, if ever.
    She looked behind them again and felt sick. The SUV was on the road, accelerating.
    Then Quinn shifted into second gear. Third, fourth, fifth, and sixth came in smooth, rapid succession, each gear change forcing a quantum leap in their acceleration. Her heart jamming in her throat, she watched the speedometer with growing alarm.
    Sixty miles an hour had been a mere heartbeat from first gear. She missed seventy, the number went by so fast.
    Eighty was smooth.
    Ninety, and she started digging her fingers into Jeanette's hide.
    One hundred.
    She glanced up, and he flashed her a grin, the wind whipping at his hair, one hand easy on the steering wheel, the other on the shifter.
    One hundred and ten.
    One hundred and twenty and oh, shit . . . they were flying, Jeanette low to the road, roaring, the beast unleashed.

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