She shrugged, unimpressed. “We’ve both seen worse.”
True enough. But she was also deflecting and trying to change the subject. “You left home hard and fast years ago and never looked back. So I don’t get it, Rory. What’s your sudden rush?”
She looked away. “It’s a long story.”
“And?”
“And trust me, we don’t have enough time.”
Before he could react to that, he saw the blockades ahead. “Shit,” he said. “Highway’s closed.”
The flashing sign said there’d been an accident ahead and to please be patient. Ha. Easy enough for the damn sign to say; it wasn’t stuck in a car with a woman he couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to strangle or kiss.
“Looks like we’ve suddenly got plenty of time,” he said, wondering if she’d talk to him now, surprised at how much he wanted her to. Because in spite of himself, he was fascinated and drawn to this Rory, the sexy, smart, resourceful woman sitting next to him. When she didn’t respond, he glanced over at her, startled to find her pale, her eyes suspiciously wet. “What?” he asked, whipping his head around to see what had happened, where the big bad was coming from, but he couldn’t see a problem. “What is it?”
She just shook her head and began to rifle through her bag, keeping her face averted.
Tears? What had caused such a strong emotion? Clueless and hating that, Max reached down and pulled out a few napkins he kept shoved into the door pouch for those days when he was chowing down a burger and driving at the same time. “Here,” he said, and thrust them at her.
She took them without a word and blew her nose. “Thanks,” she finally said. “I, um, had something in my eye.”
She was talking to her passenger window. Reaching out, he touched her to get her to turn toward him, finding himself stunned when he connected with the bare skin of her arm and felt a zip of electrical current that wasn’t electricity at all, but sheer chemistry. “Rory,” he said, hardly recognizing his own voice, it was so low and rough.
She stared at him and then her gaze dropped to his mouth and he had one thought—ah, hell, he was in trouble. Deep trouble.
The next girl you feel something for, anything at all, you have to go for it, no exceptions . . .
He had laughed at Cass’s words, secure in the knowledge there wasn’t anyone in his life to feel something for right now. Or at least no one he wanted to feel something for.
But that was starting to change, right before his very eyes.
Chapter Four
RORY COULDN’T BELIEVE how difficult it was to stop staring at Max’s mouth, or to force herself to lift her gaze to his eyes.
Eyes that were dark. Deep. Unfathomable.
He was waiting on an answer. But there was no way she would admit the truth to him, that she felt compelled to get home with her stepdad’s gift for her mom by dawn when they opened presents or she wouldn’t be forgiven. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “It’s not a story I’m willing to tell no matter how much time we have.”
“Because it makes you cry?” he asked.
“I wasn’t crying,” she said. “I don’t cry.”
He arched a brow her way. “Ever?”
“Ever.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why, do you?”
“Sure,” he said with an easy shrug of his wide shoulders.
Sure. Like it was the most natural thing in the world to feel so strongly about something that it made you cry. She let out a low, disbelieving laugh. “When?” she asked. “When was the last time you cried?”
Max appeared to give this some serious thought. “When I watched The Good Dinosaur with my niece last month,” he said. “Bawled like a baby.” He smiled. “She did too.”
Huh. Maybe he was human after all. “Was it the scene where Disney slayed us all through the heart by killing the dad?” she asked. “Or when Spot showed us how he lost his family?”
“Neither,” he said. “It happened when my niece ate my ice cream.”
She rolled her eyes and turned back to the window.
“Hey,” he said, “it was traumatic.”
She snorted. “Do you even know the definition of traumatic?”
He slid her a look and then gave his attention back to the road, even though they were at a dead stop. “I do,” he said.
“Really? You of the perfect family and college basketball scholarship to Michigan State and—”
His head whipped back to hers, his expression dark and incredulous.
Accusatory.
“You know what that thing with Cindy cost me,” he finally said. “And I’m over it, long over it, but you can add it to the list of things we’re not discussing. Not that and not your part in it, because back then I had no choice but to believe you were the kind of person willing to hurt whoever you had to in order to win. I can concede that maybe you’ve changed, but history can’t be rewritten.”
She stared at him, stunned. Cindy had been a classmate who’d taken great pleasure in being as cruel and horrible to Rory as possible. She’d been popular, a great athlete, a great student, and the daughter of the basketball coach. Every guy in the school had crushed on her and she could’ve had any one of them.
So of course she’d taken the only guy Rory had ever wanted.
Max.
Cindy had been one of those sweet on the outside, toxic on the inside people who were so scary to Rory. It’d been Cindy who in their junior year had lied to their teacher and gotten Rory suspended for cheating when it had been Cindy who’d cheated. Then she’d stolen Rory’s clothes from her locker during PE class and had sneakily taken a pic of Rory in her underwear. Cindy had texted it to everyone in school—from Rory’s own phone. Just remembering it had her cheeks heating. Her mom and stepdad had been furious at her for all of it, the supposed cheating and the picture. Rory had been devastated and needing sympathy on that in a very bad way, but instead they’d grounded her because they’d actually believed she’d sent that pic herself.
When someone had begun letting themselves into the coach’s office to have sex, Cindy started a rumor that it was Rory, all to deflect blame from herself. After all, it wouldn’t look good for the sweet, wonderful, lovable coach’s daughter to be caught doing it in daddy’s office.
Facing expulsion only a week before finals, Rory had finally resorted to taping Cindy leaving her dad’s office with a guy in hand. The guy had been in shadow, but there’d been no doubt, at least to her, that it’d been Max.
Yeah, her bad, but she’d had to prove herself innocent. And besides, no one else had seemed to know it was him so she had no idea why he was so pissed. She would ask him but the truth was that she was embarrassed. Deeply embarrassed. She wasn’t proud of what she’d done. In her mind, the minute she’d turned the tape into the school proving she hadn’t been the one breaking into the coach’s office, she’d gone from being The Bullied to The Bullier, and she’d hated herself for that.
So much so that she’d left town.
She’d been planning on leaving for a long time anyway. With her mom remarried and having three new kids, it’d been one less mouth to feed, so she’d taken a bus to San Francisco.
Relatively speaking, she’d been one of the lucky runaways. After an admittedly very rough start, she’d taken a part-time job at South Bark, where Willa had tucked her under her wing, teaching her the business and making her take her GED, and in the process had given her back a life that could so easily have gone wrong.
In any case, she was no longer that same Rory she’d once been. When Max had started working in the same building as her last year, she’d been so nervous he’d want to talk about that time in their lives, the time she’d been so very miserable and unhappy.
She had been so relieved when he hadn’t seemed to want to talk at all.
But now she realized they should have. Because he was over there on his side of the truck emitting animosity in waves and insinuating that she’d cost him something big.
Not that he appeared at all interested in enlightening her on what.
Fine. She could read between the lines somewhat and she’d get to the bottom of this in her usual way—on her own. For now, he’d turned off the engine to preserve gas, and now it was cold and quickly getting colder. She pulled a blanket from her bag.
He snorted but when she looked at him, he was staring out the windshield, jaw tight, eyes hard, one hand draped over the wheel, the other fisted on a thigh. She figured he was made of stone but she lifted up one end of her blanket in offer. “Cold?” she asked.
“No.”
Sensing the thick tension, Carl whined softly.
Rory reached out to test-touch Max’s hand.
Cold.
“Seriously?” she asked him and spread half the blanket over his legs.
He didn’t help her but when she was finished, she found him staring at her like she was a puzzle and he was missing half the pieces.
But she was the one who didn’t understand. And she was done not knowing. “So,” she said tentatively. “You didn’t take your scholarship?”
He closed his eyes for a beat and shook his head. “Why do you keep saying things like that when you know damn well what happened?”
Okay so no, he hadn’t taken the scholarship, and she got a feeling in the pit of her stomach that she’d been the direct cause.
Carl whined again.
“Forget it,” Max told him. “I’m not letting you out again.”
“Max,” she said. “I—”
“Finally.” He pointed ahead, where the blockades were being removed.
Max cranked over the engine and rolled his window down when a CHP officer came close.
“Don’t know how long we’ll have the roads open,” the guy told them. “It’s looking grim.”
“Thanks,” Max said. “We’ll be careful.”
And he was. So careful it felt like they were going backward. Rory looked at her phone.
No reception, which meant she couldn’t call her stepdad and warn him she’d be late. It was still snowing, it was tense, there was no one else on the road . . . All that, along with the rhythmic slashing of the windshield wipers and the soft blast of the heater left her feeling exhausted. She closed her eyes.
And then jerked upright when the truck slowed and then came to a stop off the side of the road.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. The snow had been steadily gathering, over a foot now, she saw with some alarm. They’d pulled up behind a small SUV that was leaning awkwardly due to a blown tire.
“Stay here,” Max said.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He spared her a look as he pulled up his hoodie. “Going to help them out.”
He said it like it was his problem the SUV was in trouble. Like he could no more pass another car in need of assistance than he could stop inhaling and exhaling air for his lungs.
“But—” she started. But nothing, because he was already gone. She watched him trudge through the snow, lit by his high beams, toward the other SUV.
Two people got out to greet him, an older couple by the looks of them. They spoke to Max, who nodded. Even smiled. He said something to the older man, patted the woman reassuringly on the arm and . . . went to the back of his truck, probably for tools.
“He’s going to say he doesn’t need anything from me,” she said to Carl. “But we’re going to offer to help anyway.” She pulled her wet sweater and jacket back on and slid out of the truck, smiling at the couple. She moved toward Max, on his knees in the snow now, wrenching off the bad tire with easy strength and ability.
He could be such an ass. But he was also selfless. Kind. Funny. Well, at least with everyone else anyway.
The older woman smiled and shook her head at Rory. “We’re so grateful that you stopped. We’ve been here for an hour with no cell service. We couldn’t call for help. Our kids and grandkids will be so worried.”
Rory managed a smile around a suddenly tight throat. Would her family be worried? Or would they just assume she’d flaked yet again? “You have a big family?”
“You might say so.” The woman laughed. “Six kids. Twelve grandkids.” She laughed again at the look on Rory’s face. “We’ve been together since the dawn of time, you see.” She looked toward the men, shaking hands now since Max was already finished, and beamed. “And after all these years, he still makes my heart flutter.”
“That’s incredibly sweet,” Rory said.
The older woman squeezed her hand. “Whatever you two are arguing about, my dear, you can work it out.”
Rory looked at her, startled. “How do you know we’re arguing?”
“Since the dawn of time, remember? I know the signs.” She smiled. “Would you like a hint on how to fix it?”
Rory looked into her kind eyes. “Yes, please.”
“You use the past to fix the now,” she said. “You make your mistakes—which is allowed, by the way. After all, you’re only human, but you learn from them. Grow from them. Things can’t always be forgotten, but they can be forgiven.”
Rory turned to look at Max. She’d most definitely learned from her mistakes. Grown from them. But . . . had she been forgiven for them?
The old couple got into their SUV and drove off. Rory helped Max gather the few tools he’d used.
“Get in the truck,” he said. “I’ve got this.”
She stubbornly went to the back of the truck with him to put the tools away. They both leaned in, reaching out to close the toolbox at the same time, their faces close, their hands colliding. She took in the scent of him, some sort of innately sexy guy soap. He hadn’t shaved that morning and the sight of the stubble on his strong jaw had a funny slide going through her belly.
Suddenly he appeared to realize how close their faces were and jerked back. “Get out of the snow,” he said.
He was just as covered in it as she. In fact, every inch of his jacket was layered in fresh powder. “Right back at you,” she said.
Reaching out, he ran a hand over her head and shoulders, brushing snow from her, an action that had the quiver in her belly heading south.
She didn’t want to feel anything for him, she really didn’t, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. A low sound that came horrifying close to a moan escaped her and Max stilled.
God. He’d heard and now her humiliation was complete—
“Get in the truck and out of this weather,” he repeated, his voice still low and rough but somehow softer. “Please.”
She drew in a surprised breath at that. She wasn’t used to the “please,” not from him anyway. She nodded and left him alone.
Two minutes later he’d joined her and Carl in the truck and . . .
The engine wouldn’t start.
Chapter Five
“SHIT,” MAX SAID after a few more tries. He leaned back, frustration in every line of his body.
“What’s wrong?” Rory asked, afraid she already knew.
“Dead battery.” He shook his head. “I was going to give the truck an overhaul this week with my dad and that’s one of the things I was going to replace. I think the frigid temps finished her off.”
Rory looked at the time. Eleven thirty. On Christmas Eve, no less. Not good, not good at all, but she tried not to panic.
And failed miserably.
“So . . . what now?” she asked in what she hoped was a casual voice.
He glanced over at her as if maybe she’d given away her panic regardless. He pulled out his phone and looked at the screen. “Still no cell service,” he said in disgust. “I’m going to have to flag someone down for a jump-start.”
She had no idea how long that would take but it surely wasn’t going to be quick and her heart sank. Getting home by dawn wasn’t looking good, but surely someone would stop. She looked out into the night.
Not another vehicle in sight.
It was like they were on Mars.