A Fare To Remember_ Just Whistle_Driven - Vicki Lewis Thompson [48]
“What are you doing?”
He glanced around the side of the cart. Roman quickly surveyed the street, probably looking for Mario’s perennially parked-at-the-end-of-the-block cab, then took off toward Avenue of the Americas, right to the corner where he’d positioned his co-conspirator, Sam.
Mario leaned forward and without giving himself a moment to think, kissed Iris soundly. Knowing he had only a few moments before Rachel came down looking for him, he forced himself to break the lip-lock and ignore the fire surging through his veins. “I’m asking you to dinner.”
She stuttered. “W-when?”
“Tonight. Five o’clock?”
Good enough time as any, especially since he knew that Iris went to bed early so she could open her stand before dawn.
“Where?”
Mario stood and, as gentlemanly as he could, helped Iris back to her feet. “You pick!”
He started down the block to his cab. With traffic light, he’d be able to spin around the nearby side street and reach Rachel before they lost sight of Roman’s ride.
RACHEL SLID INTO MARIO’S waiting cab, out of breath and unable to speak. Luckily, she didn’t have to say “follow that car.” Mario had torn away from the curb before she could grab the door handle and yank it shut.
“You’re flushed,” Mario said.
She gulped in air, forcing the oxygen into her lungs. “I ran down the backstairs and out through the alley. I didn’t want to run into him in the lobby.”
Closing her eyes, Rachel counted backward from one hundred, her heartbeat slowly calming to as close to normal as she was going to get until this was over. For a split second, she wondered why she had come up with such a sneaky plan. Why couldn’t she just ask the man what, if anything, he was hiding? Because he won’t answer. She could always give him an ultimatum. Yeah, right. Somehow, she couldn’t see a man like Roman reacting well to her laying down the law. He’d walk out. And damn it, if anyone ended things, it was going to be her.
“There!” Mario shouted, his finger jabbing his windshield. “There’s Sam.”
“Wasn’t it dark when Roman went out? Are you sure he got in with your friend?”
Mario glanced at her sideways. He picked up his radio and, after contacting the dispatcher, was patched in to Sam’s car. He asked some questions in Italian. Rachel understood, and she’d bet big bucks Roman would, too. But the conversation was innocuous enough that unless he was suspicious of his driver, he’d never realize he’d been scammed.
“Satisfied?”
Rachel smirked. “You’re awfully good at all this covert stuff. Why is that?”
Mario turned his attention back on driving. “Natural talent.”
They headed toward the Upper East Side, where Mario had dropped Roman off before. Did he have a home there? A wife or lover or family she knew nothing about? His nomadic lifestyle appealed to her own sense of wanderlust so much at the beginning, she’d never questioned how a man could go from place to place with no real home. In fact, she’d envied him. He seemed to feed on the spontaneity of his job, just the way he seemed to revel in the unpredictability of their so-called relationship.
Hadn’t she been attracted to the same life? Her spontaneous trips fulfilled her desire to travel and her career as a freelance artist paid the bills. In Roman, she’d seen a kindred spirit—a career-focused professional at one moment; a free-wheeling vagabond at another. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t just let him go. He was too perfect for her. He understood her like no other man ever could.
And yet, she was practicing the ultimate deception to find out more about him. Would he forgive her if he found out?
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” she suggested as Mario followed the other yellow cab onto a quiet street with tall, thick elms in decorative iron planters embedded in the sidewalk.
Mario kept his expression blank. “Tell me now, Rachel. You don’t want to know what the man is hiding, we go home.”
She pressed her eyelids shut. She was so close. Would