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after her. His lips moved, but she couldn't hear a word.
    "What?" No doubt her call was effort wasted. Surely he could hear her no better than she could hear him. Her only hope lay in mastering the controls of this renegade beast. She swiveled forward and stared at the meager display of levers and not much else. How had Jared worked this thing? Should she try this? Or that? She had to do something. It was not as if she could make things much worse.
    Cece glanced up and stared in frightened fascination. Directly before her loomed a boulder. Small as boulders went, she was still fairly certain it could devastate the carriage and anything or anyone in it. Decisively, she reached forward, grabbed the right lever with one hand, the left with the other, gritted her teeth, closed her eyes once again and pushed.
    Perhaps it was her actions, perhaps she indeed hit the oncoming rock: whatever the case, the runaway vehicle groaned and shuddered and jerked. Her hands were ripped from the levers and she flew through the air for a long, endless moment.
    With an icy splash she landed, sank hard beneath the water, smacked the bottom with her posterior and bounced back to the surface. She pulled herself to her feet, drenched and gasping for breath, grateful the pond was barely waist deep.
    "Are you injured?" Jared splashed through the water to reach her, a hint of fear shading his eyes, an oddly strained tone in his voice. On the side of the slope, Quentin ran toward them. Emily laboring to keep up.
    "Only my pride," she said, pulling the askew goggles off her dripping, sodden hair and peering sheepishly at him. There was a look of fierce panic on his face she found out of place, and she unexpectedly felt the need to reassure him as she smiled ruefully.
    He seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, his obvious concern replaced by amusement. He cocked his head and surveyed her thoughtfully. "Now, who looks like a frog?"
    Speechless, Cece stared for a long moment until she noted the twinkle in his eye and the smile tugging the corners of his lips. She shrugged. "I think it suits me."
    He laughed and she joined him until tears ran down both their faces. He had a wonderful laugh, full of life and joy. The unexpected thought flashed through her mind: What would it be like to hear his laughter often?
    He wiped his face and eyed his vehicle. Mired in mud at the edge of the pond, it tilted precariously at an odd angle. "It's extremely fortunate you swerved in time to miss that rock."
    She glanced at the boulder that had assumed the proportions of the Rock of Gibraltar when she approached it at breakneck speed but did not look nearly as large or lethal from a stationary point of view. "I'd say fortunate is something of an understatement."
    "Still, this is a minor disaster. I just hope when we get it out of the mud there's no serious damage." He circled the carriage. "It's my own fault, of course. I should never have let you drive. A woman behind the controls of an automobile." he shook his head, "it's just ridiculous."
    Cece trudged toward the edge of the pond, wet skirts trailing in the water behind her. The smile faded from her face. "Why is that so ridiculous?"
    "Why?" He stared at her as if she had just said something remarkably stupid. "Surely even you would admit women clearly have no head for things mechanical."
    She clenched her teeth and forced a note of calm to her voice. "I think I would have done quite an acceptable job if you'd only instructed me properly."
    He pulled his brows together in a manner stern and annoyingly superior. "I attempted to give you complete instruction. Apparently you were not paying as much regard to my directions as you should have."
    "Complete instruction? Hah!" Her voice rose in accompaniment to her growing irritation. "If you had paid as much attention to making sure I understood the workings of your infernal machine as you did to wrapping your arms around me—"
    "Wrapping my arms around you?" Jared stared in obvious