Crossover scene between Wildstone & Heartbreaker Bay Series Read online

  Crossover scene between Wildstone & Heartbreaker Bay Series

  Jill Shalvis

  Wildstone, California

  “We’re lost.”

  “We’re not lost,” Archer said in his usual calm, firm voice.

  Elle slid him an annoyed look, which was wasted on him because it was pitch dark, storming, and the only lights were from the dashboard of his truck. She was tired and hangry, and oh yeah, they were in a fight. At the thought, some of her anger turned to anxiety because he was the first and only man who’d ever loved her and she was pretty sure her heart would wither up and die if he stopped.

  And given what she’d done, it was a good bet he would stop loving her now. She swallowed back the fear and said, “you could pull over and ask for directions.”

  Archer didn’t even bother responding to this, but his disdain at the thought was clear, even in the dark.

  “What was I thinking?” she asked dryly, aka pissily. “You’d rather die than have to stop and ask for directions.”

  “We’re not lost,” he repeated.

  She tossed up her hands and tried to peer out into the night. They were on their way home to San Francisco from Los Angeles, where they’d been on a job together for his company Hunt Investigations. Somewhere around the halfway point, they’d been detoured off Hwy 5 due to a very large fire, rerouted to Hwy 101 along the coast, and if it’d been daylight, they could’ve seen the green rolling hills on their right and the Pacific Ocean on their left.

  They’d had to get off the highway at a town called Wildstone for gas and new windshield wipers, and apparently both their GPS and Archer’s usually impeccable sense of direction had failed them because they were on a narrow, windy, two-laned road in the middle of nowhere.

  As it was, Elle could barely hear her own thoughts over the storm pelting them, which given the situation was definitely for the best. It was hailing, the golf-ball size bits of ice hitting the truck hard enough to rattle her teeth. The windshield wipers were getting less and less effective. She had no idea how Archer could see because she sure couldn’t. She was gripping her own hands tight in her lap, her heart pounding when the truck’s tires slipped and nearly carried them into a ditch.

  Archer swore, managed to control the truck, and pulled off into the first place them came to. He turned to her. “You okay?”

  Her heart swelled and her throat tightened as she nodded. His first thought was always for her.

  In unison, they peered through the storm and the truck’s headlights to what looked like an old inn. The hanging sign read:

  Wild West B&B, only slightly haunted

  Archer turned and gave Elle a brow’s up, and for the first time all week, he smiled at her. It was his mischievous ruffian smile too and she reacted with just about every part of her body.

  She couldn’t help it. She’d loved this tough and rough and rumble-ready badass since she’d been a teenager. They’d then gone on to pretend the other didn’t exist for a whole bunch of years, but thanks to karma or destiny or fate or whoever was in charge of such things, they’d finally managed to get on the same page. So much so that Archer had asked her to marry him.

  But then she’d had a pregnancy scare a week ago and he’d done the shockingly unthinkable and been over the moon about it. She’d freaked and … had reacted badly. She knew it. She’d even known it at the time but had been unable to stop herself.

  He reached for her hand and ran the pad of his thumb over her now ringless ring finger. She met his gaze, but his own was once again hooded from her. That weighed every bit as heavily on her mind as the diamond he’d given her weighed down her jeans pocket.

  Which is where she’d put it after their fight and her realization that they wanted different things from life. Very different things.

  He stared at the slightly paler skin where her ring had been and let out a long exhale. “Let’s go get a room,” he said. “We’ll get up early and make the rest of the trip then.”

  There was a kid behind the front desk watching a video on his phone and cracking up. He waited until it ended before looking up. “Dude. Dudette. Welcome to the Wild West B&B. Um … Crap,” he said. “Hang on.” He pulled an index card from his desk and read directly from it. “We’re haunted, but only by friendly ghosts. How can I help you this morning?” He frowned and glanced out the dark window. “I mean this evening.”

  Elle turned to Archer, who looked pained. “We need a room,” he said.

  “Not two?” Elle asked.

  “Not two,” Archer said firmly.

  The kid checked them in. “Oh and just ignore any activity from our resident ghost,” he said. “She don’t mean no harm.”

  Elle exchanged another look with Archer as they walked down the hallway toward their room. He didn’t look concerned in the least. And why should he, the six foot plus man was made of lean, hard muscle and had faced much worse in his life than a gimmicky B&B. “Are we seriously staying here tonight?” she asked. “Together? In the same room?”

  He slid her a look. “Are we no longer sleeping together then?”

  “We haven’t, not since—“

  Again he looked at her ringless finger and his jaw tightened as they stopped outside their room. “Elle,” he said with a whisper of exasperation. “You spent months encouraging me to get a life and I did. With you. And now you’re running scared because we had a near miss with an even bigger life than either of us had ever dared to imagine or hope for. You can take the bed, I’ll take the floor, but only until you get your head out of your ass.”

  Her eyes began to twitch. “I was just about to say that this whole thing is my fault, so I’ll take the damn truck but if my head’s up my ass, I can’t speak, so—“

  “No one’s sleeping in the damn truck.” Archer unlocked the room and shoved the door open. “You were going to be my wife, I’m not letting the woman who nearly shared my life sleep out there in this crazy storm.”

  “Maybe I want to!” She had no idea why she was pushing the issue. She didn’t want to sleep in the truck. She didn’t want to sleep without him at all, dammit. But his eyes were glittering with temper and they were fuming, nose to nose — or rather, she was nose to his chest because he was taller than her — but the air crackled around them. Her heart felt so tight she could scarcely breath. She’d gotten them to this point, the breaking point, and she had no idea how to get them back to where they belonged — together.

  “Excuse me.”

  Elle nearly jumped out of her own skin at the soft woman’s voice. Not Archer though. Nothing startled Archer. They both turned to face a young woman sitting cross-legged on the bed eating straight out of an ice cream container. “Why are you in my room?” she asked them.

  “Because it’s our room,” Elle said and took the key from Archer’s hand to hold up to show her. “We just rented it for the night.”

  At the ‘our’, Archer’s dark frown lifted a little bit and the look he gave her was one she’d missed. Warmth. Affection.

  But the wariness lingered. She’d done that, she’d put that there, and her heart hurt. Slipping her hand into her pocket, she played with the gorgeous diamond ring he’d given her. It had been fear that’d had her taking it off. Debilitating fear, and she was deeply ashamed of that, of how her first instinct had been to self destruct her first ever genuine happiness.

  The truth was, she loved Archer more than life itself. She knew that. Through thick and thin, through getting lost in storms, through silly arguments and serious arguments. Through a pregnancy scare. She was stronger than this and he deserved more. And so