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It made me think of how else I could get him to smile. If I couldn’t sleep with him, then I wanted to improve his life in some other way. With the mates thing making things awkward yet again, I didn’t want either of us getting hung up over something we couldn’t control—like our alphas.
So, humor would be the theme for the weekend.
“We could always do soup, salad, and breadsticks,” he suggested, “provided you’re into that sort of thing.”
“Are they endless?”
He cocked his right brow in my direction. “More than my patience.”
I laughed. “That’s probably something KiKi would say.”
His eyes narrowed for a brief moment until they returned to the road. After taking the exit for the next ramp and pausing at a stop sign, he pointed to a sign across from us. “Chicken or waffles?”
“How about chicken and waffles?”
He flipped the blinker to turn right with an excited smirk. “Woman, you are speaking my language.”
***
Four hours of country music and leftover waffles later, signs for Athens appeared ahead of us. Relief washed through my muscles as I stretched my arms in front of me and popped my elbows. Eric slowed the truck at a stoplight, searching the corner stores, signs, and vehicles for something I couldn’t quite determine.
He gave an exasperated sigh. “Any hotels around here?”
I pulled my Android from my pocket. “Let me find a B and B.”
He made a choking sound. “You and Kiki with those B things. What’s the point of them? A motel does just fine.”
“Well, you said hotel, which is different than a motel. And I’d rather have a place to myself that has a full kitchen with a hot tub.”
“Plenty of hotels have hot tubs.”
I chortled. “I can’t believe you’re complaining about me finding us a place to stay.”
“We should have done that before we left.”
“Someone was eager to get out the door this morning.”
I didn’t look up from my phone. I could feel the judgment in his stare, the way it drove to my core in one glance. Enough tension to burst a volcano bubbled in my solar plexus. Yet I kept it quiet, still, controlled. He wasn’t about to find one of my weak spots.
Not before I found more of his.
The way he had frozen up at the meeting yesterday afternoon gave me a better understanding of how he processed things. He hadn’t reacted much to my father’s death when I told him in person. Yet grief slammed into him just like it would have anybody—like it had me—after the news finally set in. I knew because I felt it in his arms, shoulders, and hands.
That made him a mushy beast, no matter how grouchy he appeared on the surface.
When the light turned green, the truck jerked forward, making a sound I didn’t enjoy hearing from the same vehicle that we needed to get back to South Carolina. I focused on my phone to find a nice cottage for us to rent for the weekend. Within a few minutes, I booked one that looked great—and had two separate sleeping areas—to keep us cozy.
I held up the phone. “Do you know where that is?”
“Sorta.”
“I’ll turn on the GPS.”
He sniffed indignantly. “You won’t let me try, will you?”
“And get us lost in one of the bloodiest counties in the south? No, sir.”
“At least tell me what kind of motel you got us.”
