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To Joel.
Because…I was a glutton for punishment.
His face was thunderous and beautiful and—
Time to go.
Timeto go.
Spinning on my heel, I started to hightail it for the trailer. Work. My couch. Forget that there were hockey players—a certain hockey player—within shouting distance.
A hand on my arm, staying me.
“Harpy.”
Pain through my middle, that nickname slicing deep.
I closed my eyes, closed out the burnt trees in the distance, the proof that all I’d worked for was gone, closed out the man at my back.
Then I opened them again, huffed out a silent sigh, summoned my mayor-ness, and turned back to Joel, tugging myself free of his grip at the same time.
“Something I can help you with?”
Eleven
Joel
“Something I can help you with?”
Yup.
Thatwas seriously what she led with.
A question spoken in an icy, businesslike tone after she’d just flirted with Fox.
Now there wasn’t any fire in her eyes.
No spark to make me want to bicker with her, to push her buttons, just to see how her eyes changed.
Darkening to cobalt with sparks of bronze when she was furious (something I saw a lot from her).
Almost as pale blue as the sky on a hot summer day when she was like this—cold and frosty and distant.
Settling somewhere in between—a baby blue shot through with veins of gold—when she was hanging with her friends in Monroe’s, nursing a beer.
I wanted the baby blue, the veins of gold.
To sit next to her without any hackles lifting, without bickering.
Just her and me and—
I stopped that line of thinking right in its tracks and switched to another one.
“Who’s that?” I asked, doing it while not engaging with all her frosty business, nodding to the older man talking loudly on his cell phone—barking out questions and making it clear he wasn’t happy with the answers he was receiving from whoever was on the other end.
She jerked her head to the right but didn’t actually look where I nodded.
But she also didn’t pretend to not know who I was talking about.
