As if he read her thoughts he pulled a little away.
She grabbed his neck. “Wait. I’m not saying no. We just need time. This is huge.” She smiled. “We need ordinary days.”
He nodded. “Yeah. We have a way of complicating our lives to the max.”
She let her fingers curl more tightly into the column of his neck. “But we can share now.”
His smile was slow to catch fire. The dimples hollowed out in glacial timing. But, finally, they came into view. “Yeah. We’ve got now.”
“There’s even a bed here that’s never been used.” She leaned into him, bringing them nose to nose. “So don’t waste it, Lucca.”
His confident male grin made craters in his cheeks as he pulled her close. “I never need to be asked twice.”
She took his hand and led him to her bed and sat down. “We have yet to make love in a bed.”
He followed her down, pushing her back onto the bedding as he covered her with his body. “The missionary position. Sounds kinky.”
*
An hour later, Scott was still thinking. Mostly because his brain was the only part of him that was not thoroughly sated and exhausted. Something, maybe something huge, had just occurred to him.
“Cole? What kind of mileage would you say a motor home gets?”
“Very little, down to next to nothing.” Her voice came from under her pillow.
“How much do you think it would cost to drive a motor home up from Florida to Maine?”
Groaning in reluctance, Cole leaned up on an elbow and reached for her phone. She punched a few things into it. “Okay, quick and dirty. It’s seventeen hundred miles from Miami to Bangor, Maine.” She punched in a few more words. “The average motor home gets six to eight miles per gallon. Split the difference. That comes to … about eight hundred dollars, one way.”
Scott sat up. “No shit. Where do two retirees get sixteen hundred dollars, give or take, plus meals and entrance fees and so forth, to drive a Winnebago up the coast and back? Lorene’s got medical bills and is buying medical marijuana, or so she says.”
“How do you know that?”
“Jennifer told me after Izzy signed on Lorene vaping. It comes in vials.”
Cole yawned. “That stuff’s not legal in every state. Could be they are buying when and where they can, legal or not.”
“True.” Scott was silent for several moments. “How much does a fairly new but used Winnebago Sightseer cost?”
Cole made an unhappy noise but punched a few more words into her cell phone. “The first one that pops up, used, is a 35J for $82,500 or best offer. Here’s one for $57,000 but it’s smaller and has got lots of mileage. New ones begin well over a hundred thousand.”
Scott whistled. “Do you see a disconnect here?”
“Maybe.” Cole rolled over and climbed up and onto him, wiggling her naked hips against his equally naked groin. “But it’s not our problem anymore, is it?”
He took her face between his hands even though his body was reacting predictably to her very intimate stimulation. “I know you’ve been through a lot of shit lately. But isn’t that even more of a reason to want to be the ones who catch the bad guys?”
Cole shook her head. “I don’t think I’m cut out for detective work. Can’t we just have this night to ourselves? Nothing is going to change before morning.”
The wistfulness in the tone reminded him of how desperately she wanted normal days with him. Now here he was pushing her. “You’re right. We’ve got the night and each other.” He leaned up and kissed her softly. “Tomorrow can take care of itself until we get there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Scott peered through the rain of the sudden summer downpour that had turned Gambrill Park Road near Frederick, Maryland, into a flowing stream.
“Yes. There should be a trailer park sign coming up soon.”
Cole glanced up from studying her GPS. After a few days of planning, they had decided to pursue Scott’s hunch about Jennifer and Lorene. “I still can’t believe you remembered that Jennifer said something about coming back to Maryland for the CPE Agility trials in Frederick tomorrow.”
“It’s only because Frederick is in the county next to Montgomery, where you’re a police officer. I remember thinking at the time that that was one competition we should skip. The way police departments advertise themselves to the public these days someone at the competition might have recognized you or Hugo. That would have given away our U/C operation.”
Cole sighed. “That worry is long gone.”
She was still smarting from the public humiliation. She was staying with Scott in D.C. to hide from the media. She avoided all calls except from her sister, Becca, and her parents. Her boss, too, thought it was a good idea for her to lie low. “Until the shit blows through.” How could she have thought U/C would be easy?