she whispered.
“What?” said Kirk.
“Val was nudging you.”
“Yes. And?”
“And…” Bree swallowed, hard. “He may have nudged things out of your pocket and…”
“And…what?”
“And…snacked on them.”
Kirk stared at her, realization dawning in his eyes. “You mean…your bull…might have eaten what was in my back pocket?” Kirk shook his head slowly, back and forth. “My wallet, my credit cards, my cash…”
Bree blinked rapidly. “I’m sorry. Really, really, sorry.”
Kirk held up a hand, palm out. “Let’s look at the problem, put together the pieces.” He stared into the distance for a moment. “We can coast into town because the road is downhill into Nederland, but I’ll have to call Alicia and ask her to wire money or maybe contact one of her wealthy friends in the area who can give us a loan…”
“Sounds like a plan,” Bree said encouragingly.
“Yes, a plan that includes Alicia getting royally…” He groaned again. “If Alicia finds out I spent the night with…” He flashed Bree a look.
“Are you upset because Alicia will think we slept together?”
He nodded.
“So it’s in your better interest if we can get money without Alicia knowing,” said Bree. She mulled it over for a moment. “Would thirty, maybe forty dollars be enough to fill that gas tank?”
“To get to Denver, we could maybe do it on fifteen, twenty.”
“Great!” Bree’s eyes twinkled. “I have the solution!” She rolled back her shoulders, a big proud smile creasing her face. “We’ll coast into town, find a bar and…”
Kirk waited. “And…what?”
Bree grinned gleefully. “I’ll strip!”
5
“STRIP?”
It was the first word Kirk had said after his and Bree’s trek, with Val in tow, down the road from the Sundance Lodge to where they’d left the van the night before. He hadn’t talked the entire time, not even as they helped Val into the back of the van. But now that he and Bree were again sitting in the front seat, about to coast into Nederland, he was ready again to broach the subject of stripping.
“Yes, strip,” Bree said sweetly, as though she were talking about butterflies fluttering about flowers and not naked bodies gyrating on tabletops. “Heck, my best girlfriend did it in a coffee shop outside Butte, Montana, last summer and made a fast twenty dollars…enough to buy a bus ticket home.”
“Coffee shop? I thought places like that served coffee and doughnuts, not naked bodies.”
Naked. He shouldn’t have gone there. His mind started reeling with the sneak peek he’d gotten through those overstretched, ultrasheer pink undies.
Bree made an exasperated sound. “You know, being naked is not a big deal, not to a country girl anyway. When you think about it, we all strip every single night of our lives. So, that’s all I’m going to do. Strip like I would for bed. Well, with a little dancing thrown in.”
“Stripping,” he said, his voice cracking, “is a…sexual act.”
“Sexual?” She mulled that over. “Yeah, under the right circumstances, you’re correct. But nobody’s going to touch me. Well, except to shove money down my—”
“This conversation is officially over.” Kirk thrust the gearshift into neutral. Avoiding eye contact with Bree, he more or less announced to Val, whose head hung partially over the front seat, “I’m going to jump out, get this baby rolling, then we’ll coast into Nederland and figure out…”
Hell, he didn’t know what to figure out. He had a wanna-be stripper, a buddy bull and a de-gassed van on his hands and no time to properly disassemble and analyze this problem to see the big picture.
This was a Tarl Cabot moment. Time for action, not thoughts and words.
He opened his door, hopped out, and holding onto the door, jogged a few feet to give the van some momentum. As the vehicle began rolling downhill, Kirk leaped back inside, slammed shut his door, and held the thought that at least the humans in the van were still clothed, for the time being…
Ten minutes later, after a very silent ride downhill on the narrow mountain highway 119, the van slowly coasted into a gas station in Nederland.
Kirk glided across the asphalt to a phone booth and stepped on the brakes. The van stopped. There was no way they’d start again without a tow truck or gasoline…and at the moment, he had no means to obtain either.
“Well,” he said, shoving the gear into Park, “time to call the princess.” He started to open his door when Bree grabbed his arm.
“Look,” she said, not sure exactly what to say, but his calling Alicia didn’t seem the better of any options. “Let’s talk for just a minute, okay?”
Kirk shot her a glum look. “One minute.”
“Remember last night when I walked in front of you in my undies and T-shirt?”
He made a strangled sound, his face turning a ruddy color.
“Well,” continued Bree, talking faster, not wanting to waste even a second of her minute. “That’s more than I wear when I go swimming at Mr. Connors’s lake.”
Kirk made another strangled sound.
“I’m not hung up on being natural.”
“Stripping isn’t natural,” he said in a strained voice.
“It isn’t? Then what do you call it when you take off your clothes at night?”
He cleared his throat. “We’ve already had this discussion.”
“Humor me. What do you call it?”
“I call it taking off my clothes.”
“Same thing.”
Kirk released a tormented breath. “No, it’s not. When I take off my clothes at night, I don’t do it to entice women.”
“Not even Alicia?”
He shot Bree a look. “That’s personal, but for the sake of argument, I don’t strip to entice my fiancée.”
“What a shame…”
“Minute’s up!” Kirk started to get out.
“Wait!”
He
