I clamp my mouth shut so fast my teeth click.
“You’re shaking,” he says. “You’re gonna freeze out here. Let’s get you to the house, okay? We’ll worry about the car later.
His house.
The word hits me a second after it leaves his mouth. I drag my gaze past his shoulder, up through the dark toward the silhouette of buildings. There it is. The outline of the McCoy ranch house against the sky, the porch light beaming, wreath on the front door casting a round shadow.
Of all the places for my car to give up, it picked the curve in the road right above the McCoys’ driveway.
I laugh. It comes out wrong. High and shaky.
“Of course,” I mutter. “Of course I hit the ditch in front of your place.”
His mouth does something that might, in another life, have been the beginning of a smile. It doesn’t make it very far.
“Some of us think of it as a ranch, not a ‘place,’” he says. “You got shoes on under all that?”
I blink. “What?”
“Shoes.” He nods at the dress. “Or are you about to get frostbite on your princess toes?”
I look down. My heels are still on, straps digging into my ankles, the satin now streaked with gray where I slid through slush. My toes are already numb.
“I… yeah. I mean, for certain values of ‘shoes.’”
He huffs out a breath that might be a quiet swear and steps closer, letting go of my elbow to crouch at my feet.
“What are you… Dallas, no, don’t?—”
“Faith.” He glances up at me. “You’re not walking uphill in icicle stilts. Hold onto the car.”
He slips one big hand around my ankle, careful, and works the buckle of my heel open with the other. Warm fingers, cold air. My breath catches somewhere in my throat.
I grip the edge of the door and the top of the frame as he told me to, trying not to wobble as he frees one foot and then the other.
The second foot hits the snow, my body shrieks.
“Oh,” I gasp, pain shooting up from my arches. “Oh, no, that’s?—”
“Cold,” he finishes. “Yeah. Sorry. Only way through it is through it. Got a bag in there?” he asks, nodding toward the car interior.
“My bag?” My brain takes a second to switch tracks. “Oh. Um. Yeah.”
He leans in, flashlight beam swinging wildly across the seat, grabs it, hooks it over his wrist, then reaches for my jacket and hands it to me. I throw it over my shoulders.
“I’ll come back and see if I can get the hood up later,” he says, more to himself than to me. “See if it’s just the radiator or something worse. For now, we need to get you warm.”
Warm. Right.
The adrenaline that got me out of the car is starting to ebb, leaving everything buzzy and far away. The jacket doesn’t really help.
I nod, because that seems like the right response, and let him tug me gently toward the road.
The climb up out of the ditch is embarrassingly hard. My feet slip on the icy slope, and my dress catches on a dead branch. Dallas curses under his breath as he braces an arm under my knees and another behind my back.
“Wait, what?—”
He lifts me.
