LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 2

       Sunday p.m.

      CARDIN SERENITY WORTH had lived her entire life in Dahlia, Tennessee. She’d sold Dixie cups of lemonade and Girl Scout cookies and fund-raising candy, tchotchkes and Christmas paper to half the folks in town.

      She’d been a member of the Dahlia High School Darlings, high-kicking her way across the football field during three years of half-time shows, and a member of the local FFA, raising rabbits to show at county fairs.

      She’d worked at Headlights, her family’s ice house, since she was old enough to pay taxes and social security on her wages, but had earned her allowance busing tables and sweeping peanut hulls from the floor before that.

      She was twenty-five years old, a hometown girl known to one and all, and well aware that two decades from now, she would still be thought of as her father Eddie’s shadow, her mother Delta’s princess, and her grandpa Jeb’s pride and joy.

      It came with being a Worth, a family that was as much a local fixture as the Dahlia Speedway, the drag-racing track where in less than two weeks, the whole town would switch gears from this weekend’s NHRA race to Dahlia’s annual Moonshine Run.

      The midnight race was the only event in which Jeb still entered the car he called “White Lightning”—a nod to the years of Prohibition when her great-grandpa Orin’s moonshine had kept the folks in three counties from feeling any pain, while keeping his own family out of the poor house.

      Right now, however, the race still on everyone’s mind—Cardin’s included—had featured top fuel dragsters: long, narrow purpose-built race cars with thin front tires that tore in a straight line down a length of the quarter mile track in under five seconds and at over three hundred miles an hour.

      The Farron Fuel Spring Nationals had wrapped up earlier in the day, and the entire Corley Motors crew—”Bad Dog” Butch Corley having taken top honors again this year—was chowing down and raising hell at two of Headlights’ tables not fifteen feet from where she stood scooping crushed ice into red plastic tumblers for cokes and sweet tea.

      Except it wasn’t the whole team causing her mouth to go dry, her palms to grow damp, her nape to tingle from the heat. It was one member, one man.

      The man sitting at the far corner of the second table, the garage door style wall behind him rolled open to the early evening breeze.

      The man polishing off the last ear of corn from the platter the group had ordered to go with their burgers, hot wings and pitchers of beer.

      The man she’d thrown herself at three days ago and kissed with unheard of abandon as if she were a woman in love.

      Trey Davis was the crew chief for Corley Motors. He was also Cardin’s counterpart: a hometown Dahlia boy. Granted, he hadn’t stayed in Dahlia the way she had; though he still owned property here, he only managed to visit during the spring drag racing series.

      She liked to think his growing up here connected them. Trey knew what it was like to have sprouted from small town Tennessee roots, to be saddled with the stereotypes, the prejudices, the accent…the family that could drive a person mad.

      And then there was that woman in love thing, and the possibility that what she felt for him wasn’t an “if”. The high school crush. The continuing infatuation. The way March roared in every year, a lion bringing with it the Farron Fuels and a chance to see him.

      The way she felt like a lamb once he was gone—a victim of her own weakness because she’d been afraid to seek him out and talk to him about that night seven years ago…what they’d almost done, how the things he’d whispered had made her feel, the way she’d been unable to get him out of her mind since.

      Because of all that, and because of their families’ shared history—Trey’s great-grandfather Emmett had been her great-grandfather Orin’s partner in the moonshine biz—she trusted him, and hoped his instincts could help her put an end to the Worth family feud.

      It was obvious she couldn’t do it alone; Lord knew she’d tried to patch things up between her parents, to no avail. Eddie and Delta were now estranged. She’d tried, too, to smooth things over between her father and her grandpa Jeb, who’d stopped speaking to Eddie when he wouldn’t shut up about the fight that had nearly cost her father his life.

      For a year she’d played the part of peacemaker, insisting her mother be understanding of her father’s moods; they’d come so close to losing him, after all. Insisting her father be patient, that his recovery would be a long process, not one with the overnight results he expected from his doctors and himself.

      Insisting her grandpa cut his son a break and answer Eddie’s questions; he’d been the one to break up the fight before either of the other men got hurt…so, yes. He did have a right to know why Aubrey Davis had taken a swing at Jeb. And since that blow-up twelve months ago that sent Eddie to the hospital had involved Trey’s father, well, Cardin figured he owed her.

      Of course, he was totally unaware of her plans to use him.

      And she still wasn’t sure how to go about her…proposal.

      During her Thursday visit to the Dahlia Speedway, she’d had no time to lay out for him her thoughts. All she’d managed to do was test the waters, see if the electricity that had always crackled between them was still there.

      It was, burning as hot as the night his unyielding body pressed hers into the bedroom wall, trapping her, molded to her, an imprint she felt always and would never forget.

      She shivered, silenced a moan. This was not a good time to be remembering the bristly sensation of his beard against her cheek, or the hardness of his bare chest beneath her hands.

      But that was the direction her mind had decided to travel, following a map that took her imagination into territory that had her pulse thumping, her breath quickening, her belly growing taut…

      “Cardin?”

      “Hmm?”

      “You didn’t leave any room for the drinks.”

      “What?”

      “The drinks. The ice. Cardin!”

      Cardin pulled her attention from the hands holding the corn that she wished were holding her, and turned toward the biting voice and the woman with the teeth.

      Sandy Larabie had been working at Headlights as long as Cardin. She was six years older, had two divorces under her belt, and was both the most caustic and well-tipped of all the ice house’s serving staff.

      She nodded at the tumblers Cardin held, not a hair out of place in her big brassy ’do. “Get your head in the game. It’s hopping like hell bunnies in here.”

      Cardin’s head was in the game. Just not the game Sandy was talking about. “Sorry. I got…distracted.”

      Sandy scooped ice for her own drink order, following the direction of Cardin’s gaze. “You know he’s staying behind when the team checks out tomorrow, right?”

      She did know. She’d even heard it earlier than most; as Dahlia’s unofficial herald, Jeb had his ear to the ground. She’d been surprised by the news, as had everyone, but the lead she’d gained from her grandpa’s announcement had given her time to put together her plan.

      Too bad she’d got caught up in kissing Trey before she could explain it to him. Just seeing him again had unraveled her to the point of barely being able to think.

      She turned to Sandy. “So I’ve heard. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

      Pop,

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