Page 44

Inside, the store is warm and crowded. Everyone’s stocking up before the storm gets worse. I navigate through the chaos with Anna’s list open on my phone. Chicken breasts. Heavy cream. Garlic. I find the parmesan in the refrigerated section and grab a wedge of the good stuff instead of the pre-shredded garbage. Pasta. Spinach. Lemon. Butter.

Wine takes longer. I stand in the aisle longer than necessary, reading labels I don’t actually care about, before settling on something decent. Not trying to impress her. Just not giving her trash to cook with.

I’m heading to checkout when I decide to detour into the snack aisle.

Anna’s had a shit few days, and she’s stuck at my house because flights are grounded and her family’s expectations are what she has to look forward to.

She could use something that isn’t about manners or propriety or anyone’s agenda.

I grab a pint of salted caramel ice cream. Emergency emotional-support supplies. Then a bag of fancy kettle-cooked chips, sea salt and cracked pepper. A bar of dark chocolate with almonds catches my eye, so I toss that in too.

I smirk at my cart by the time I reach the register. Comfort food for a woman who’s probably been taught her whole life that asking for warmth makes her weak. She’ll probably give me hell for it. Or eat the entire pint in one sitting and pretend she didn’t.

Either way, I want to see her face when she finds it.

Checkout moves fast. I load everything into bags, haul them to the SUV, and pull back onto the highway. Snow’s coming down harder now, visibility shit, but I’ve driven through worse. I settle into the slow crawl toward Lake Geneva, letting muscle memory handle the steering while my mind drifts.

Four o’clock felt reasonable earlier. But now, at two thirty in the afternoon, I’m annoyed it's taken this long. I could be there already, checking whether she actually rested or spent the whole time in her head. I'd be able to see if she's staying because she wants to or because she has to. And I'd be doing all of those things while sporting a hard-on. I've always taken great pride in that; even as a teenage boy, when I thought a woman was good-looking, I could control those urges. But now with her, I jerked off to her in the shower for fuck's sake.

My phone rings through the truck’s speakers. Gabe’s name flashes on the screen.

I accept the call. “What’s up?”

“Coach let you all leave practice early? We've had worse weather than this before and⁠—"

“Roads are garbage.”

“Right. Roads.” He pauses. “So, I'm gonna guess that instead of coming and chilling at the penthouse with your best friend who has a concussion, you're going back to the lake house. Probably got a whole vehicle full of groceries.”

I glance at the bags. “How the fuck would you know that?”

“Either I'm psychic, or I watch the weather and know all international flights have been grounded, so I'm gonna venture to guess that you have company, still.”

“Maybe I ran out of food.”

Gabe laughs. “You meal prep like you’re feeding an entire fucking army. You’ve got enough food in that freezer to survive the apocalypse. Try again.”

I say nothing, which is a mistake.

“Oh, this is good.” He chuckles.

“This is none of your business.”

I exhale through my nose, debating how much to say. He knew she was there, and he knows she's still there, so why bother playing games? “Anna Winterfield’s staying at the lake house.”

Silence. Then Gabe whistles low and sighs. “Faulker’s girl.”

“She’s not Faulker’s girl. They’re friends.”

“So, you, out of the kindness of your heart, offered your private lake house to a beautiful woman, and the ex-fiancé of a man who just days ago you were throwing hands with on the ice.”

He laughs now. “Last night was charity; now it’s interest.”

I merge onto the exit toward Lake Geneva, wipers slapping snow aside. “Assume what you must.”

“Thank you for the permission, much appreciated.”

“You’re enjoying this,” I say.