Page 86 of Rising Heat

“Traitor,” I mutter, and go outside anyway.

The air is sharp enough to make my eyes water, but the sun catches the fresh snow so everything glows brighter than it has any right to. I pick my way down the shoveled path and stop halfway to the curb when I notice that my car is already cleared.

Roof fully brushed off, windows scraped clean of ice, tires dug out. The dirty ridge the plows pushed up still sits against the bumper, but the hard part is done.

I laugh, because the alternative is standing in the middle of a frozen sidewalk admitting that this is affecting me a lot more than a defrosted windshield probably should.

It means nothing. They’re just being nice.

I stand there for another second, staring at my car like it’s about to offer a second opinion.

The storm. The tea. The notes. Now this. Maybe they’re just thoughtful people. The kind of men who notice things, remember them, and take care of the people around them without expecting anything in return.

I let out a slow breath that disappears into the cold.

Back upstairs, the shower steam chases the chill from my bones. I change into loose cotton pajamas, plop on my couch and put on a movie with a hydrating clay mask painted on my face.

Kate Hudson appears on screen just as my phone vibrates.

“Well?” Bex says by way of greeting. “Did you survive Snowmageddon or are you answering from the afterlife?”

“I’m alive,” I say with a smile.

“Okay, but how did you fare on your own?”

My eyes drift to the mug from downstairs, now rinsed and drying on the dish rack, and for a second I seriously consider telling her everything. Tyler cooking breakfast. Waking up in Mack’s bed with a handwritten note on the pillow beside me. Finding my car already dug out. Mack carrying me upstairs while I apparently trusted him with my full unconscious dead weight. Tyler’s knee brushing mine every time we reached for the cards. The way Mack’s voice had dropped when he said trust, like it was something solid enough to build a life on. The threesome card.

“I survived the storm,” I say instead.

Bex goes quiet in that particular way she only does when she knows I’m editing.

“That sounds suspiciously uneventful.”

“Maybe I just had a nice, quiet night.”

She groans.

“You’re the worst.”

“Debatable.”

After we hang up, I leave the movie on anyway. The face mask dries until it starts pulling at my skin, and somewhere around Matthew McConaughey’s third smile I realize I haven’t absorbed a single line of dialogue. No matter what I put on, my thoughts keep wandering back downstairs, replaying the day over and over like maybe, if I look at them from enough different angles, they’ll finally start making sense.

The thing is, none of it was overt. Nobody said anything they couldn’t walk back.

I know better than to build something out of one snow day and whatever chemistry I’ve probably been misreading since the first week. I’ve done that before, and I have the scars to prove it. But the part that I keep coming back to isn’t whether I want them—that question answered itself somewhere around Tyler’s lips almost touching mine and Mack’s voice rumbling through me as I waved a wooden spoon at him.

That part isn’t up for debate anymore.

What I don’t know is whether any of this is real or whether I’m just a woman who got snowed in with two hot men, a stocked bar, and an overactive imagination that’s reading into everything. I mean, Tyler flirts the way other people make small talk. Mack says less, but somehow every time he does, it gets under my skin. And between the two of them, I keep ending up feeling like the center of the room. I have to remind myself that feeling seen isn’t the same thing as being chosen.

But it doesn’t help. Once I let my mind go there, I can’t quite pull it back.

I close my eyes intending to take a nap, but it turns out my imagination has other plans. Every X-rated fantasy I’ve been shoving aside since breakfast comes rushing back at once.

Mack’s broad, calloused hands gripping my hips hard enough that I’d feel them the next day. His mouth finding my throat, teeth grazing my shoulder before he takes his time with me, the same patient confidence he seems to bring to everything. I can practically hear him telling me to stop overthinking, to look at him, to trust him, knowing full well I’d argue just to make him say it again.

And Tyler. God. The heat of him. The way all that easy laughter melts into something intent the second things turn serious, like he’s been waiting for me to catch up all along. His hands sliding beneath my shirt, his grin never quite disappearing as he watches every reaction cross my face, clearly enjoying the fact that he knows exactly which buttons to push before I do.