Page 10

Right about . . . now.

He squints at me. Sideways. “You have no idea where I’m going. You’re just going to blindly offer me a lift anywhere?” The challenge in his voice is unmistakable. He’s trying to catch me in a lie, trip me up. He just finds it impossible that I would offer to do something so carelessly kind (and stupid, yes).

Come on with the no, man.

I force a nonchalant shrug. “Sure. I have time. More precisely, I just lost my job and my life as I know it and am coming home to a sixty-person family Christmas pity party, so yeah, I have time.”

“I could be two hours from here.”

“I sincerely doubt it, but again—nothing but time.”

“You could get stranded in this blizzard with me on the side of the road.”

“People with unlimited time can spend unlimited time shoveling themselves out of the sides of roads.”

As if to work out this whole “unlimited time” thing, he stares at me for the longest minute of my life.

I smile back, fighting to win this point fair and square to the bitter end. And that’s when he does something I quite honestly never anticipated. Even for all my overthinking, I never once considered this actual possibility.

A cloud of air plumes from his chest as he puts his head back and literally laughs. I’m shocked he doesn’t choke on a handful of snowflakes. Then he drops his head, eyelashes covered in snow, rubs a hand down his face, and says, to my absolute horror, in a manner of What the hey, I’ve never taken a ride in a blizzard with a wacky girl before, “Okay. Sure.”

Well.

Well. Well. Well.

He must see the expression on my face, because an amused little arch forms in his brow. “Unless you . . . didn’t really mean to offer me a ride?”

“Nope, that was me. Offering you a ride,” I say, sucking in my breath.

“All right then. Give me a second,” he chimes back with a bemused grin. He walks over to the car, and after a minute’s discussion between him and the driver, the car’s parking lights turn off and it pulls away.

James returns. Grinning. Looking actually happy and light as a feather as he waves for me to lead the way. “After you.”

I never anticipated a yes here. What does this do to my point system now?

At any rate that is precisely how, ten minutes later, I am standing next to a man named James in a snowstorm beside my dad’s old red Ford truck, questioning my life choices (a feeling, to be fair, I’m familiar with). He watches with mild humor while I silently duck beneath the truck, so completely that all he can see of me now are my boots, and sweep the tires.

For the longest time we have both been silent—to the point that it’s become a sort of challenge to see who will talk first—but at last I win when he exhales, ducks under the truck, and looks at me with his head tilted and a curious expression on his face. “What exactly are you doing?”

“What’s it look like?” I say sarcastically, rubbing my fingers over the various lines and metal pieces.

“It looks like you’re trying to escape me by burrowing under this truck.”

I grumble something about the drive train as my freezing fingers and now wet backside slide over more pieces and parts.

“Or like you’re a mechanic doing an inspection. Seriously, what are you doing?”

My fingers brush over something metal—bingo—and curl around it as I begin to shuffle out on my back. Leave it to my dad to hide the key in the most inconspicuous place possible on top of the catalytic converter.

“If I wasn’t certain before that you weren’t from around here . . .” I say, thoroughly shoveling the inside of my coat with snow as I pull myself out to stand. “This is the way you do things without fancy codes and keyless entry.”

There’s the tiniest wobble in my soggy, slippery push up, and he automatically reaches out his hand and takes hold of my wrist to steady me. He pulls me up in one sure, easy movement, and after a millisecond pause and awkward eye contact—and a rather embarrassing slop of snow falling to the ground in one heap from the inside of my coat—he releases me and I step back.

I take over the moment by raising the little silver key. “My dad dropped off the car this morning.”

There’s a twist in his smile as he looks at the beaten-up truck behind me. I can practically hear his thoughts: And he was afraid someone was going to take off with this? But he’s too polite to voice them and instead opts for a simple and completely opposite remark. “Resourceful, I see.”

I mean, he’s not wrong.