Infinity + One by Amy Harmon Page B

several sightings of the star with an unknown male have been reported. One sighting resulted in an assault against a salon worker, another sighting led to an altercation outside a Motel 6 just east of Buffalo, New York, where Shelby attempted to use a credit card that had been reported as stolen and was later seen arguing outside the establishment with the same, still unidentified, man. The desk clerk at the motel was concerned for Shelby’s safety after the man grabbed Miss Shelby, at which point the desk clerk called the police. The clerk, in an interview with police, said she had talked to the singer before the altercation and claimed Miss Shelby seemed frightened and under duress. The singer asked to make a phone call when her credit card was declined but was unable to reach whomever she was trying to call. Shelby’s family has issued a statement that they are very concerned for Bonnie Rae and will cooperate with police to ensure her safe return.
     
     

     
     
    IT WASN’T SUNLIGHT that woke him. It was brighter than that. The world around the Blazer was so white he wouldn’t have been surprised if a chorus of angels had surrounded the partially buried vehicle and pointed him toward the pearly gates. But heaven couldn’t possibly be this cold. And the girl in his arms was no angel, though she looked pretty damn sweet with her short brown hair sticking up at her crown and her bow-shaped lips parted on a soft snore. Her hat had come off in the night, and her face was buried where his armpit met his chest.
    Finn looked down into her face and waited for the dread and disbelief he’d been feeling, in varying degrees, since becoming shackled with Bonnie Rae Shelby. Instead, he remembered the way she’d looked after he’d kissed her, her lips all pink and swollen. He thought about her diving over the seat to claim the pillow with the case, the way she’d returned her gran’s phone by chucking it out the window, how she’d sung “Bohemian Rhapsody” and fallen asleep to his mathematical mumblings, all in the middle of a crisis. It made him curious as to how she would behave when she wasn’t overcome with grief, when her world wasn’t coming down around her ears, when she wasn’t stranded in a snowstorm with someone she’d only known three days—two and a half, actually.
    He grinned and laid his head back down.
    “You’re scaring me. Grinning like that, at nothing,” Bonnie mumbled.
    “It wasn’t nothing. It was something.”
    “Ha ha. Are we going to die in this Blazer?”
    “No. But I can’t feel my left arm, and that place where you drooled on my chest has frozen solid, freezing my nipple in the process.”
    Bonnie started to laugh and rolled away from him, sitting up and throwing blankets this way and that, looking for her hat. Finding it, she pulled it over her bedhead, yanked her boots on her feet and threw herself back over the front seat, like she’d done it a thousand times.
    “Ladies first, and it’s not dark anymore, so no peeking out the windows. I’m going to test you on the color of my panties, and you better not know that they’re red with black skulls.” Bonnie pushed the passenger door open, snow falling from the roof onto the seat as she climbed out.
    An immediate image of Bonnie in red panties decorated in black skulls filled Finn’s mind and he half laughed, half groaned.
    “Skulls are not sexy,” he said out loud. “Skulls are not sexy.” He pulled on his boots, taking the time to lace them tightly, his eyes on his hands, keeping his focus from wandering outside. “Skulls are sexy, dammit, and my boots are still wet.”
    He ran his hands through the strands of his hair and pulled it off his face with an elastic band he’d shoved into his pocket the day before. He folded up the blankets and the sleeping bag, righted the seat, and moved their gear from the front seat. Then he pulled on his beanie and climbed out of the Blazer after Bonnie.
    An hour later, after a bit of