“Both.” The pulse that finally slowed down speeds right back up.
“What brand?”
“There’s only one worth having.”
His eyes narrow slightly. “I forgot bananas. Grab some when you go?”
We’re on either side of the fridge door. I take in his smug lips, and my stomach somersaults. He hasn’t shaved yet, and I bet that stubble is delightfully rough…
I’m stuck in a lust haze again.
I step back. “It’s my turn to cook, if you haven’t eaten yet.”
A line forms between his brows. “I haven’t, but you don’t have to make me anything. All I did was run a microwave.”
I dig out the eggs, ham, and cheese. “Afraid I’m going to poison you to get control of the brewery?”
He doesn’t move far away. “You’d still have to poison both my brothers, and Landry’s a wily one.”
“I’m clever. After all, I spent twenty years planning my hostile takeover.” My lighthearted attempt at humor falls flat as grief rushes over me like a river about to leap its banks. “Sorry. Too soon.”
He ignores that remark, or all of them, and doesn’t leave. When I grab a bowl and a whisk, he rummages through the fridge and pulls out onions, mushrooms, and green peppers. He establishes a station next to me with a cutting board and a knife.
I crack a few eggs and then glance at his muscles. I add six more eggs. Thoughts of Ransom and Holly run through my mind. They used to cook breakfast together before their Monday drives—until that final one.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I blurt out. “It’s senseless. How it happened.”
He pauses, chopping the green onions. “The crash?”
“Yes. Their deaths. It’s senseless.” I whisk the eggs more powerfully than usual. “I mean, they went on Mondays, when the roads are quiet and the brewery is closed, and he crashes next to a bridge he’s driven by for years? Crashes so bad he rolls more than once?”
The bridge spans a small, lazy river that swells from runoff in the spring, leaving it with wide, rocky, and often steep banks when the levels are low. We had a wet spring, but it hasn’t rained for weeks, so the banks are steeper. Ransom veered left, driving off the road as he was leaving the bridge, seemingly for no reason at all. There’s a small access road on one side that winds down to the flats where people often fish, but it’s on the opposite side from where he rolled the car.
“Sixty years,” Calder adds softly. “He used to joke that was officially how long he’d been driving, since he was tossed behind the wheel at five and his dad would run the pedals.”
“And he didn’t drive fast.”
The bridge over the Sterling River is located on a county highway that circles around Scandal and runs behind the Cross property. It’s quiet and isolated. Not many fishermen attempt to cast a line in the rocks gathering around the bridge, and the shore fishing is terrible.
“It’s just…I can’t understand it.”
“What did the sheriff tell you?” He steps back to sift through a drawer on my other side.
His warmth seeps into my back, and the fresh scent of sun and hay washes over me, blending with his citrus-and-cedar smell. I inhale discreetly. My ex never cooked with me, and this feels more intimate than anything I experienced with Tanner.
Calder returns to his station but squats to dig out a pan. When he glances up at me, my brain misfires.
Yep. More intimate.
What were we talking about?
“He said they rolled.”
“That’s what he told me. Dad swerved, ran off the road, and rolled.”
“And in the convertible, they never wore seat belts.” Grief threatens to overflow its barriers. I clear my throat. “He, uh, said there’s not much more to it.”
“Nothing about why they swerved?”
