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I shudder a third time, struggling with the barbed thoughts.
He breaks his stare away, reaches for a button on the dashboard, jabs at it several times, and hot air fills the inside of the SUV.
“What about my car?” I ask as he shoves the gearshift into drive, eases off the brake and we start to roll forward.
“I’m not the fucking Hulk,” he mutters, gaze pointed at the windshield.
Even from his profile, I can see he’s scowling.
I wonder if he has any other expressions.
Given the lines between his brows, around his eyes, probably not.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say when he doesn’t expand on his superpower abilities, and I mean, I get that he’s big, but it’s not like I’m going to confuse him with the giant green guy.
“Join the crowd,” he mutters, wiping his sleeve on the steering wheel before slowly maneuvering around the snow piling up on the side of the road.
I frown. “I’mnot the one talking about the Hulk.”
“Your car is buried in the snowbank,” he clips out, slowly and steadily leaving my car behind us. “I don’t have superhero strength, so it’s going to stay there.” A beat. Another flash of those hazel eyes on mine before he looks out the windshield again, jerks his chin forward, as though indicating the ever-thickening blanket of snow around us. “Same as this storm. It isn’t going anywhere any time soon.”
“Because it’s Snowmageddon,” I say softly.
“Yup,” he mutters on a sigh. “The storm of the century and I’m stuck out in it, rescuing your ass when we’re supposed to be bracing and buckling down at home.”
Hurt coils through me, but only for a moment.
Because then my anger is back.
It’s a weird sensation.
I’m not a woman who gets angry. Not much bothers me. In my life, I couldn’t survive if I let all of the small things pile up and weigh me down. They have to skate down my back like water, wash away and not impact me.
But this man…
Oh man, does he grind my gears.
And I’ve known him for all of ten minutes. Tops.
“I didn’ttryto get stuck on the side of the road, you know,” I mutter, crossing my arms around Steve and drawing him tight against my chest.
He licks my chin, snuffles against my skin in the typical pug way.
A flick of those hazel eyes toward mine again, judgment in golden green depths. “Regardless,” he says the words, sharp spikes of ice hurling through the air, “I’m not the Hulk and I can’t singlehandedly rescue your car. We’re going to have to wait for help to dig you out”—he turns right onto Forest Bend, navigating the snow and ice like a professional (and maybe he is)—“and you’re going to have to deal because that’s going to take at least a couple of days.”
I blink once.
Then again.
Not hours, but “Days?” I exclaim.
Steve woofs.
The man just says, “Snowmageddon.”
And look, I’m not a woman prone to violence, but I very much want to reach across the console and throttle him.
Of course, that would probably cause us to end up inanothersnowbank.
