One Snowy Night Read online

  She shrugged, unimpressed. “We’ve both seen worse.”

  True enough. But she was also deflecting and trying to change the subject. “You left home hard and fast years ago and never looked back. So I don’t get it, Rory. What’s your sudden rush?”

  She looked away. “It’s a long story.”

  “And?”

  “And trust me, we don’t have enough time.”

  Before he could react to that, he saw the blockades ahead. “Shit,” he said. “Highway’s closed.”

  The flashing sign said there’d been an accident ahead and to please be patient. Ha. Easy enough for the damn sign to say; it wasn’t stuck in a car with a woman he couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to strangle or kiss.

  “Looks like we’ve suddenly got plenty of time,” he said, wondering if she’d talk to him now, surprised at how much he wanted her to. Because in spite of himself, he was fascinated and drawn to this Rory, the sexy, smart, resourceful woman sitting next to him. When she didn’t respond, he glanced over at her, startled to find her pale, her eyes suspiciously wet. “What?” he asked, whipping his head around to see what had happened, where the big bad was coming from, but he couldn’t see a problem. “What is it?”

  She just shook her head and began to rifle through her bag, keeping her face averted.

  Tears? What had caused such a strong emotion? Clueless and hating that, Max reached down and pulled out a few napkins he kept shoved into the door pouch for those days when he was chowing down a burger and driving at the same time. “Here,” he said, and thrust them at her.

  She took them without a word and blew her nose. “Thanks,” she finally said. “I, um, had something in my eye.”

  She was talking to her passenger window. Reaching out, he touched her to get her to turn toward him, finding himself stunned when he connected with the bare skin of her arm and felt a zip of electrical current that wasn’t electricity at all, but sheer chemistry. “Rory,” he said, hardly recognizing his own voice, it was so low and rough.

  She stared at him and then her gaze dropped to his mouth and he had one thought—­ah, hell, he was in trouble. Deep trouble.

  The next girl you feel something for, anything at all, you have to go for it, no exceptions . . .

  He had laughed at Cass’s words, secure in the knowledge there wasn’t anyone in his life to feel something for right now. Or at least no one he wanted to feel something for.

  But that was starting to change, right before his very eyes.

  Chapter Four

  RORY COULDN’T BELIEVE how difficult it was to stop staring at Max’s mouth, or to force herself to lift her gaze to his eyes.

  Eyes that were dark. Deep. Unfathomable.

  He was waiting on an answer. But there was no way she would admit the truth to him, that she felt compelled to get home with her stepdad’s gift for her mom by dawn when they opened presents or she wouldn’t be forgiven. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “It’s not a story I’m willing to tell no matter how much time we have.”

  “Because it makes you cry?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t crying,” she said. “I don’t cry.”

  He arched a brow her way. “Ever?”

  “Ever.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why, do you?”

  “Sure,” he said with an easy shrug of his wide shoulders.

  Sure. Like it was the most natural thing in the world to feel so strongly about something that it made you cry. She let out a low, disbelieving laugh. “When?” she asked. “When was the last time you cried?”

  Max appeared to give this some serious thought. “When I watched The Good Dinosaur with my niece last month,” he said. “Bawled like a baby.” He smiled. “She did too.”

  Huh. Maybe he was human after all. “Was it the scene where Disney slayed us all through the heart by killing the dad?” she asked. “Or when Spot showed us how he lost his family?”

  “Neither,” he said. “It happened when my niece ate my ice cream.”

  She rolled her eyes and turned back to the window.

  “Hey,” he said, “it was traumatic.”

  She snorted. “Do you even know the definition of traumatic?”

  He slid her a look and then gave his attention back to the road, even though they were at a dead stop. “I do,” he said.

  “Really? You of the perfect family and college basketball scholarship to Michigan State and—­”

  His head whipped back to hers, his expression dark and incredulous.

  Accusatory.

  “You know what that thing with Cindy cost me,” he finally said. “And I’m over it, long over it, but you can add it to the list of things we’re not discussing. Not that and not your part in it, because back then I had no choice but to believe you were the kind of person willing to hurt whoever you had to in order to win. I can concede that maybe you’ve changed, but history can’t be rewritten.”

  She stared at him, stunned. Cindy had been a classmate who’d taken great pleasure in being as cruel and horrible to Rory as possible. She’d been popular, a great athlete, a great student, and the daughter of the basketball coach. Every guy in the school had crushed on her and she could’ve had any one of them.

  So of course she’d taken the only guy Rory had ever wanted.

  Max.

  Cindy had been one of those sweet on the outside, toxic on the inside ­people who were so scary to Rory. It’d been Cindy who in their junior year had lied to their teacher and gotten Rory suspended for cheating when it had been Cindy who’d cheated. Then she’d stolen Rory’s clothes from her locker during PE class and had sneakily taken a pic of Rory in her underwear. Cindy had texted it to everyone in school—­from Rory’s own phone. Just remembering it had her cheeks heating. Her mom and stepdad had been furious at her for all of it, the supposed cheating and the picture. Rory had been devastated and needing sympathy on that in a very bad way, but instead they’d grounded her because they’d actually believed she’d sent that pic herself.

  When someone had begun letting themselves into the coach’s office to have sex, Cindy started a rumor that it was Rory, all to deflect blame from herself. After all, it wouldn’t look good for the sweet, wonderful, lovable coach’s daughter to be caught doing it in daddy’s office.

  Facing expulsion only a week before finals, Rory had finally resorted to taping Cindy leaving her dad’s office with a guy in hand. The guy had been in shadow, but there’d been no doubt, at least to her, that it’d been Max.

  Yeah, her bad, but she’d had to prove herself innocent. And besides, no one else had seemed to know it was him so she had no idea why he was so pissed. She would ask him but the truth was that she was embarrassed. Deeply embarrassed. She wasn’t proud of what she’d done. In her mind, the minute she’d turned the tape into the school proving she hadn’t been the one breaking into the coach’s office, she’d gone from being The Bullied to The Bullier, and she’d hated herself for that.

  So much so that she’d left town.

  She’d been planning on leaving for a long time anyway. With her mom remarried and having three new kids, it’d been one less mouth to feed, so she’d taken a bus to San Francisco.

  Relatively speaking, she’d been one of the lucky runaways. After an admittedly very rough start, she’d taken a part-­time job at South Bark, where Willa had tucked her under her wing, teaching her the business and making her take her GED, and in the process had given her back a life that could so easily have gone wrong.

  In any case, she was no longer that same Rory she’d once been. When Max had started working in the same building as her last year, she’d been so nervous he’d want to talk about that time in their lives, the time she’d been so very miserable and unhappy.

  She had been so relieved when he hadn’t seemed to want to talk at all.

  But now she realized they should have. Because he was over there on his side of the truck emitting animosity in waves and insinuating that she’d cost him something big.