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CHAPTER THREE
Nervous as hell being alone with Tim in the truck, Valerie gripped her purse tightly against her chest. She watched Carine walked up the path to her mother’s house.
Beneath the illumination so of a pole light, Carine turned and waved to them—evidently her signal that they could go.
Valerie wished Tim had dropped her off first, but Carine’s place was closer to Clay’s. Valerie generally didn’t get nervous being around men—she was used to being the only lady at her construction sites—but something about Tim made her unusually timid.
He threw the huge truck into reverse and backed skillfully out of the narrow parking space he’d wedged the mammoth vehicle into. “All right. Where are you staying?”
“I live on-site in Shora in the first house we finished. The temporary office is downstairs. I have the rooms upstairs. Carine’s going to move in when the current phase of the project is done.”
Not that he needs to know all that.
Valerie let out a silent groan. She was rambling. She always rambled when men made her nervous. She despised him for knocking her so far off her usual even keel.
“Shora it is.” He slung the truck onto the road. Given that it was well after ten o’clock, traffic was blessedly light.
“Thank you, again, for going out of your way to drive us home.”
“You assume I don’t have ulterior motives.”
“I don’t assume that at all.” She simply hadn’t wanted to invite discussion about things she had no plans on following through on. The guy was brazen as all get-out. Though she was used to dealing with confident men like him on job sites, none had ever told her in such explicit verbiage that he wanted to get her into bed.
Such a Leah situation, Valerie mused. The woman had such a knack for finding new scandals to hop gleefully into. At that thought, Valerie rooted her phone out of her purse and cringed at the backlog of text messages. She scrolled up and read them from earliest to latest.
Are you still there?
Answer me.
What are the men like?
Answer me.
Carine said some guy is giving you a ride home.
AN.SWER.ME.
—One missed call.—
BITCH.
—One missed call.—
Carine says he’s rich. Wouldn’t that be a nice change from your ordinary?
—One missed call.—
Carine says you’re being a stuck-up snot. She’s my sister now instead of you. Snot.
That insult had been Leah’s last message. Valerie rolled her eyes and dropped the phone back into the bottomless void of her purse. Carineprobablyhadn’t called Valerie a stuck-up snot—in those words, anyway—but she’d probably hinted at it. Valerie couldn’t argue with them without having to share truths she’d never intended for anyone else to know.
What Carine and Leah didn’t know about Valerie’s past sexual indiscretions wouldn’t kill them, and she planned to keep them in the dark.
“Your phone seems to give you as much angst as mine does me.” Tim spared a glance at Valerie before fixing his gaze back on the road.
“Probably for different reasons. A little monster lives inside mine and it likes to display emotionally manipulative text messages.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely not my problem.” He rolled to a stop at a light and motored down his window. Slinging his arm onto the sill in a way that marked him as a country boy through-and-through, he tapped the radio on with his free hand.
