Part 43 (2/2)
”You keep saying that,” she answered, although she wondered if it was really true. He had grown up with these things. She was as lost as he would have been in the slave quarters of a great house.
Suddenly the car began to move, and she sucked in a breath.
”How are you doing that?”
”With my foot. I press on a pedal to give it fuel.”
”Electricity?”
”In this case, liquid fuel called gasoline. Something like the oil you burn in a lamp. But different.”
She had almost succeeded in relaxing when Logan drove from the narrow dirt lane into a wider road with a smooth surface like the one from last night. Immediately he speeded up, faster than any carriage could go.
She held on, being careful to touch where he'd showed her.
”It's fast.”
”Some guys go faster.”
She tried to imagine that. ”When I was in school, some of the highborn children brought sleds to school for the winter months. A few times they let me slide down a hill in the snow.”
”Did you like it?”
”Yes. It was fast. And the wind whipped past my head. This is like that, but the gla.s.s keeps the wind away.”
”We can have a little wind effect.” He reached to press a b.u.t.ton, and the gla.s.s panel above her head slid back.
She dragged in a sharp breath, and he closed it again.
To distract herself, she asked, ”Is your house like the place where we spent the night?”
”No. That was kitschy colonial. Mine is werewolf modern.”
”What does that mean?”
”We tend to like the rustic look. One of my brothers is a builder, and he constructed it for me.”
She wasn't sure what rustic meant, so she tried to relax in the seat as he talked.
Maybe because he saw she was nervous, he kept up a flow of words, telling her about the native plants that he was cultivating and about the work he did designing gardens for people who wanted the ground around their house to look natural but artful.
He had said he was in a hurry to get home, so when he pulled to the gravel at the side of the blacktop road in the middle of nowhere, she looked up in alarm.
”Sorry. Just a second,” he apologized as he climbed out and picked up several large rocks that had fallen from a cliff above them. After putting them on the floor behind them, he drove away again.
”What are you doing?”
<script>