whump. “Shit,” he muttered and jerked the truck back into the lane.
Smooth, real smooth, he thought with self-disgust.
At the motion of his truck swerving, Rory nearly slid into his lap.
“Sorry,” she gasped, bracing one hand on his shoulder, the other high up on his thigh, using them to shove clear of him.
He could still feel the heat of her hands on him as she flopped back in her seat, hair in her face. She shoved it clear and then bent over and started rifling through the huge purse at her feet.
The movement slid her sweater north and her jeans south, revealing a two-inch strip of the creamy white skin of her lower back.
And two matching dimples that made his mouth water again.
“What the hell are you doing?” he managed to ask.
“Nothing.” She straightened, coming up with a dog biscuit, which she tossed back to Carl. The dog snapped it out of thin air, practically swallowing it whole, and then licked his chops.
“You carry bones with you?” he asked in surprise.
“Of course,” she said, like didn’t everyone?
His phone buzzed an incoming call. He answered it via speaker but before he could say a word, his elder, know-it-all sister Cass spoke.
“I know you’re on your way,” she said, her voice blaring out from his truck’s speakers. “So I’ll be quick. Two things. One, the weather is atrocious and the roads up here are an epic disaster already so please be careful, and two, don’t forget that we’ve got a promise between us.”
“Cass—”
“No excuses,” she said. “The next girl you feel something for, anything at all, you have to go for it, no exceptions. That’s my Christmas present and I just wanted to remind you of that. And since I’m assuming you’re going to say you’ve felt nothing, you should know I’ve got you covered.”
Max didn’t bother to groan. Nor did he look at Rory, who he could sense straightening in her seat with interest. “What have you done, Cass?”
“Me?” she asked innocently. “Nothing.”
Yeah, and he was Santa Claus. “Cass.”
Her sigh echoed in the truck interior. “Okay, fine, I might have invited a friend—”
“No,” he said.
“Come on. Kendall’s cute, smart, gainfully employed, and she has a crush on your dog.”
“How the hell does she know Carl?”
“Honestly, Max? Are you seriously not reading my Facebook messages?”
No. He wasn’t.
“I started a Facebook page for Carl weeks ago,” Cass said. “He’s already got a thousand likes.”
If he hadn’t been driving into a downpour with hurricane-force winds, he might’ve taken his hands off the wheel to rub his temples where a headache was forming. “I’m disconnecting you now,” he warned, ignoring Rory’s snort.
“So that’s a yes on Kendall, right?”
“It’s a firm hell no,” he said.
Cass was silent a beat, thinking. Never a good thing for Max. “So . . . there is someone you’re feeling something for,” she said.
He nearly laughed. Yes. Yes, he was feeling something for the woman sitting next to him but it sure as hell wasn’t what Cass was hoping for.
“Even a little spark of attraction counts,” Cass warned. “You promised, Max. And you never break promises.”
True story. He never broke promises.
“Max? Is there someone, then?”
Max slid a gaze across the console and found Rory staring at him, her dark brown eyes swirling with emotions that he couldn’t possible put a finger on without a full set of directions. She was beautiful in the girl-next-door way, meaning she had absolutely zero idea of her own power. In fact, Rory had always seemed completely oblivious of her looks. In high school, she’d been thin but had worn clothes that had tended toward shapeless, which had allowed her to be invisible as she’d clearly liked to be. She was still thin but had acquired curves in all the right places now, shown off by clothes that actually fit her. Her long hair was wavy and had its own mind. She hadn’t tried to tame it, letting it flow in dark brown waves to her breasts. If she was wearing makeup, he couldn’t see any.
What he had no problem seeing was her interest in his response to his sister.
Okay, yes, so he felt a physical attraction to her. And he’d felt that response more than once. A lot more, if he was being honest with himself, but he’d hidden it. Or so he hoped, telling himself it was nothing more than a natural male response to a female form. That was it. Because he wasn’t attracted to Rory—unless you count the attraction of strangling her.
He shifted, knowing he was lying to himself.
“Max?” Cass asked.
“Bad reception,” he said and disconnected the call, understanding damn well he’d pay for that later.
Rory snorted, amused.
He ignored that and her, and concentrated on the roads. Which were indeed shit.
“You could’ve told her about Santa’s Helper, your girlfriend from the convenience store,” Rory said casually.
He slid her a quick look. “Tabby’s not my girlfriend,” he said.
“So you kiss all the store clerks then?”
He rolled his eyes. He and Tabby weren’t complicated. They were friends, with the very occasional added “benefits,” but neither of them were interested in more. “Tabby’s not in the picture.”
“Does she know that?”
“Here’s an idea,” he said. “How about you make it my Christmas present to stop with the twenty questions?”
She turned to the window, shoulders squared.
Ah, hell. Now he felt like an asshole, but he had to admit, he did appreciate the silence.
About an hour up the highway, the rain turned to slush. He knew it wouldn’t be much longer before they hit snow, which didn’t bother him any. He’d grown up driving off-road vehicles and boats, and his dad often proudly said Max could drive a semi into an asscrack. And it was true, he could drive anything anywhere under any conditions. Where the danger and unknown came in was from the other idiots on the road.
Luckily tonight there was a shortage of them. They had the roads to themselves, probably because only the hearty would even dare try to be out in this insanity.
At the halfway mark, he stopped for fuel. Before he pumped gas, he tried to take Carl out, wanting him to do his business now so they wouldn’t have to make another stop. “Let’s go.”
Carl curled up tight on his seat, eyes closed, playing possum. Carl didn’t like snow very much. Max looked at Rory.
Rory shrugged.
“Come on,” he said to Carl. “This’ll be your last chance for a few hours.”
Nothing from Carl.
“Now,” Max said.
Carl, still not opening his eyes, only growled low in his throat.
From the passenger seat, Rory chuckled. “Is it like looking in a mirror?” she asked.
“Funny.” Except not. He lowered his face to the dog’s. “If you get up right this minute, I’ve got a doggie cookie—”
Before he’d even finished the sentence, Carl jumped up and out of the truck without a backward glance. “How about you?” he asked Rory. “You need a pit stop?”
She looked out the window into the snowy mess. “I’m good.”
“Not even for a doggie cookie?”
She smiled but shook her head.
Whatever. Not his problem.
She did, however, try to give him cash for gas when he came back with Carl, which Max flatly refused. He knew she was strapped, that she barely made ends meet. He also knew he was lucky as hell to have a great job with great pay, and yeah, that great pay was because his job could be dangerous, but he was good at what he did. And even if he hadn’t landed a great job that he loved, he had his family. The entire nosy bunch would do anything for him and he knew it.
Rory didn’t have that kind of support. She’d had it rough growing up. Her dad ha
d never been around and her mom had remarried when Rory had been young. Her stepdad was a good guy, but 100 percent no-nonsense. He could be a real hard-ass, a stickler for obedience and all that. Rory had three half sisters, all sweet kids but quiet and meek.
Rory was the opposite of quiet and meek, and she hadn’t fit in. As far as he knew, she’d left school after their junior year and had never been back. And after what she’d done to him, he’d told himself he’d been more than fine with that.
But it didn’t mean that he hadn’t worried more than a little bit. Or that he wasn’t aware of how hard it was for her to make it on her own, in San Francisco no less, a very expensive city. She worked at South Bark Mutt Shop and she also went to night school, and he knew she lived with a couple of roommates and still barely made ends meet. He didn’t like to think about how she must struggle just to keep food in her belly. So no, he wasn’t about to take her damn gas money.
He’d just started pumping the gas when his phone buzzed an incoming call. Willa ran South Bark and was Rory’s boss. She was also the one who’d asked him to give Rory a ride to Tahoe, clearly having no idea that Max and Rory had gone to school together and had history. A bad history.
“How’s the ride going?” Willa asked.
Max leaned against his truck. “Well, we haven’t killed each other yet.”
Willa didn’t laugh.
“You know I’m kidding, right?” Sort of . . .
“Max.” Willa’s voice was quiet. Serious. “There are things I probably should’ve told you about Rory.”
“You mean about the chip on her shoulder?” he asked wryly. “Yeah, I’m aware.”
“She’s earned that chip, Max. The hard way.”
“And let me guess. You’re going to fill me in.”
“She’s smart, so smart, Max. She’ll fool you if you let her.”
He shook his head and hunkered beneath the overhang, trying to avoid getting snow in his face while he waited for his gas tank to fill. “What does that even mean?”
“She’s been with me for six years—”
“Working in your shop, I know,” he said, impatient to get out of the snow, back in the truck and on the road.
“But what you don’t know is how she came to me.”
Actually, he did. Rory had pretty much ran away from home and—
“It was late one night,” Willa said. “I was on a walk through the Marina Green when I found a girl in the park, sick as a dog from a drug someone had dumped in her drink.”
Max froze. This was something he didn’t know, although he wished he had because he’d have gladly hunted down the asshole who’d drugged her and he’d have—
“I’m not telling you this to make you mad,” Willa said quietly. “I just want you to understand the chip.”
He let out a long, purposeful breath. “What happened?”
“I took her to the hospital, helped her recover from events that she can’t remember to this day, and gave her a job. But it wasn’t easy. It took her a long time to learn to trust me.”
Imagining what she must’ve suffered and reeling from that, Max couldn’t even speak.
“Basically, I bullied her back to life,” Willa said. “And lately she’s been really . . . okay. Even happy.”
Max knew this to be true. He’d seen Rory in the courtyard of their building, smiling and laughing with friends. He’d seen her with the animals in Willa’s shop, specifically with Carl, who loved and adored her. And the reason he kept seeing her was because in spite of himself, he’d been drawn to her and he’d made sure their paths crossed. Often.
Shit.
He peered inside his truck, expecting to see Rory hunched over her phone, but there was no phone in sight. Instead she had her head bent to his dog, who was in her lap. All 100 plus pounds of him, big head on her shoulder.
He went back to the overhang. “Why are you telling me all this?” he asked Willa.
“Because I know there’s something between you. A chemistry. We’ve all seen it, Max, the way you come by the shop with Carl for more groomings than you need, making sure to do it when Rory is there.”
“Maybe I just love my stupid dog,” he said, not happy to hear that he’d been that transparent when it came to his uncomfortable and complicated feelings for Rory.
“Oh, I know that’s also true,” Willa said smugly. “But that’s not why you tip her so much. Look, I can tell by your tone I’m annoying you, so let me make it count. I know that you’re trustworthy or you wouldn’t be working for Archer. I guess I’m just hoping you can also be . . . gentle.”
Max pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. “Willa—”
“I know. You’re big and badass and tough, and I get it, you don’t do gentle. But maybe, for Rory, you could try.”
Once again he looked in the truck. Rory was talking to Carl, smiling while she was at it. But once upon a time, not so long ago, she’d been hurt. Badly. And that killed him. Fuck. “Yeah. I guess I could try.”
He heard Willa suck in a breath clogged with emotion. “Merry Christmas, Max,” she said softly. “You deserve it.”
Actually, there was someone who deserved it far more and the hell of it was, it was the last person he’d expected it to be, and she was sitting in his truck hugging his big, silly dog.
Chapter Three
WHEN MAX OPENED the truck door a few minutes later and found Carl in his seat, he gave the dog a long look.
Carl hefted out a huge sigh and got into the back.
“Thank you, Carl,” Rory said pointedly with a glance at Max that said he was clearly an idiot.
Max was an indeed an idiot, but not for not thanking his dog.
He was going to do as Willa had asked. He was going to be . . . Christ . . . gentle, even if it killed him. And it might. He was also going to get his own emotions under control, because at the moment he was filled with a cold fury over what Rory had suffered and he had nowhere to vent it.
“You were on the phone,” Rory said.
“I was.”
She looked at him, clearly waiting for more, her pretty eyes not giving much away. She was so petite a good wind could blow her away, but that analogy implied she was fragile.
Rory was anything but fragile, and in fact her inner strength was even more attractive to him than her beauty.
“It was Willa,” he said, willing to give her that. Besides she was more curious than a cat and he wanted to appease that curiosity and fast, before she figured out the rest.
She looked at him, surprised. “What did she want?”
Shit. On top of curious as a cat, she was like Carl with a damn bone. He twisted around to buckle Carl back in and then put on his own seatbelt. He turned the engine over and cranked up the radio.
Rory turned it off. “She already made you drive me, so what now?”
“Nothing.”
Rory turned in her seat to fully face him. “Was she checking to see if we’d killed each other?”
He smiled at that, a thought that had been so close to his own, but she narrowed her eyes, not amused. “What did she want, Max?”
He went to put the truck in gear but she leaned into him to turn off the engine and grab his keys. Her breast brushed against his arm, giving him another zap of awareness.
“Come on,” she said. “This is Willa we’re talking about. I love her, but she’s incapable of not sticking her nose in where it doesn’t belong, especially when it comes to me. What did she want?”
Shit, it’d been two minutes and he was already regretting his