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“The what?”
God. Which one of them was the idiot?
“The hotel,” she said with exaggerated patience. “The main house. The lodge. The resort. Whatever you want to call it. Is that where the guests stay? I thought it would be bigger… What?”
He was laughing. Laughing! The desire to add him to her People She Wanted To Slug list was strong, but so was her will to survive. Hitting a man driving an old truck far too fast through a snowstorm was probably not a good idea, and it showed just how far from reality she’d fallen that hitting a man who used a crutch didn’t even enter into the equation.
“What’s so funny?”
His laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t give me that ‘nothing’ routine! What were you laughing at?”
She might as well have been talking to a statue. Bannister clamped his lips together—she could see that they were firm lips, nicely shaped, which was pretty amazing when you realized that nothing else about him was nice—and stepped even harder on the gas.
The truck gave an alarming lurch. The engine coughed like Mildred Pierce’s dying daughter and really, why on earth did she watch all those old movies? The tires whined and spun before finally gripping the gravel hidden beneath what looked like several inches of snow as the cowboy, not only Insolent and Rude but also Despicable, stepped hard on the gas. The truck lunged forward, made it up the rise, through an open gate, and came to a bone-jarring stop right in front of the building.
It was a house. Just a house. Nice, but nothing remarkable about it. A house that was two stories high, a house that was made of wood, a house with a front porch…
Nick Bannister shut off the engine.
Tick, tick, tick.
Lissa took a deep breath. Held it. Then let it out.
OK. She’d misunderstood Marcia. The Triple G wasn’t a resort. It was a house people rented for long pseudo-Western weekends…
Except, why would they rent a house like this? Handsome, yes, but not spectacular. Not something out of Architectural Digest. Not something that would be featured in the Sunday real estate section of a big city newspaper.
/> Tick, tick, tick.
Lissa was ticking, too. Be cool, she told herself. There had to be a logical explanation.
“So,” she said, very calmly, “what’s this? The office?”
Mr. Despicable hobbled down from the cab of the truck, hauled his crutch from behind the seat, shoved the padded part under his arm and looked up at her.
“You getting out?”
“I asked you a question.”
“You’re good at asking questions.”
She craned her neck, her eyes following him as he made his way to the rear of the pickup. When she saw her suitcase somersault into the snow, she opened her door and climbed down.
“And you suck at answering them. I said, is this—”
“No.”
She reached for her suitcase. He brushed past her and picked it up.
“I can do that,” she said.
“Do you think I can’t?”
The question was filled with hostility. Lissa thought of half a dozen answers and discarded every one of them. Instead, she followed in his footsteps as he crabbed his way up the two steps to the porch. The man was spoiling for a fight and she’d be damned if she’d oblige.
