After a beat, Mari buckled her seatbelt. “Yeah, I think I am.” Then she turned to him with narrowed eyes. “Don’t make me regret this, Bishop.”
Those green eyes twinkled. “I’ll do my best to make sure you have the adventure of your life, Smith.”
Chapter Four
Three days later, Mari decided that saying yes had been the best decision ever. She’d wanted fun, and boy, had she gotten it. Austin was so easy to talk to, and each town they visited was more idyllic than the last. She was even enjoying the constant driving, when normally she didn’t like being cooped up in a car for too long. But Austin made the long drives entertaining—he didn’t mind listening to her cheesy playlists or indulging her by participating in the silly car games she invented on the spot. Today she’d been too lazy to think of a game off the top of her head, so they’d settled for an app on her phone, which was proving to be ridiculously frustrating.
“Name an animal you might find on a safari,” she ordered.
He instantly answered with, “Hyena.”
“Name a kitchen appliance that’s expensive to fix.”
“Toaster.”
Mari groaned. “Oh, for the love of Jeebus! What kind of answers are those? At this rate, we’ll never win Fast Money.”
Sure enough, after she’d entered Austin’s responses, his total score came up to thirty-eight. She needed to get a hundred and sixty-two points if they wanted to win the game.
“You are terrible at Family Feud,” she muttered.
“I told you, I’m not good at coming up with shit on the spot,” he protested.
“No kidding. Hyena for safari animal? What about lion or tiger or giraffe? And why on earth would you say a toaster is expensive to fix? You can pick up a new one for ten bucks at fricking Walmart!”
“What are you complaining about? At least we beat the Chang Family!”
“Yeah but I want to win the twenty thousand dollars! At least one time.”
Unfortunately, she didn’t get her wish. Thanks to Austin’s disastrous round, she couldn’t make up the points, even though four of her five answers were the number one responses. Sighing, Mari closed the game app and crossed her arms.
“You’re hopeless,” she announced. “I’m going to give you the silent treatment for a while.”
Austin just laughed and turned his attention back to the road. “Fine, be that way,” he taunted.
Mari hid a smile, focusing on the scenery whizzing by the car window. Well, if you counted never-ending cornfields as scenery. All she saw were endless stretches of yellow and green, with a farmhouse or barn nestled in the landscape every mile or so. They’d just crossed the Iowa-Missouri border, headed for a small town called Virgil. It was a dumb name for a town, but Mari had insisted Austin not skip it because according to Virgil’s website, the town sold the world’s best maple fudge.
Sadly, the way to Virgil was blander than ever, and Mari wasn’t tempted even once to pick up her sketchbook and capture the sights.
The sultry temperature probably added to her lack of desire to draw. It was so hot out, the sun a relentless presence in the clear blue sky, the air drifting in through the open windows muggy as hell.
Mari had just closed her eyes to take a quick catnap when Austin suddenly yanked on the steering wheel and veered off the road.
Yelping, she braced a hand on the dash to keep herself from flying out of her seat. “What are you doing?” she squeaked in surprise.
“Didn’t you see the sign back there?” He turned to her with a big grin. “The one that said ‘swimming hole’ and had a big arrow on it?”
The SUV bounced on the bumpy dirt road, making Mari grimace. “I thought we were planning on driving straight to Virgil.”
“Marigold, when you see a sign advertising a swimming hole, you follow it.”
He said her full name in a mocking tone, which made her regret ever telling him about it. She’d been named after a however-many-greats grandmother, a moniker her parents hated but had been forced to call her at the request of Mari’s grandparents. Even though they’d capitulated, Jerry and Patricia had shortened the name to Mari the second she was born, a fact she greatly appreciated because what twenty-four-year-old woman wanted to be named Marigold?
“Think how nice the water will feel,” Austin said invitingly.
He was right. The temperature must have been in the high nineties, and Mari had to wonder if that was normal for June in Missouri, or just a result of the crazy climate changes happening around the globe. Either way, she was sweating like crazy, and she’d given up on trying to tame her wavy hair, which tended to frizz when it was humid out.
A swim actually sounded heavenly, now that she thought about it.
“Wait,” she realized. “I didn’t pack my bathing suit.”