“My goodness, Michaela,” she murmured in repressive tones. The same way she’d chastised Michaela for her impatience with her family’s inability to understand every last one of her life choices only last night. They want to know these things because they love you, not because they want to annoy you. I don’t think it would hurt you to try to remember that. “If you’re not interested in having a favor done for you, I’m certain there are more gracious ways to say so.”
Feeling suitably chastened and about an inch tall, as ever, Michaela buttoned her lip and wheeled her suitcase out into the hall, where Jesse Grey was making like a column of granite. Except less approachable and far less sunny of disposition.
“Okay!” she chirped like some kind of psychotic kindergarten teacher, as if that might soften him up. “I’m ready!”
He exuded grittiness without seeming to do anything but stand there, and she felt that tugging thing low in her belly again, even more insistent today than it had been the night before.
There was human, she thought then, and then there was straight up destructive, and she wasn’t sure she could tell the difference. It had never been an issue before.
“Are you sure?” he asked in that low rumble of a voice. “Maybe you want to say goodbye to everyone down on Main Street, too? The outlying ranches? The whole of Montana while you’re at it?”
“What’s interesting about you, Jesse,” she said, and it was a bit of a fight to keep hold of her not-entirely-polite smile, “is that you’re possibly the most unfriendly man I’ve ever met. Why did anyone think you’d make a good bachelor auction item?”
“Must be you,” he replied, with an almost-smile that didn’t ease the bite of his words at all. “This is the friendliest I’ve been in years. To anyone.”
“Childhood trauma?”
His mouth went lethal then. “Something like that.”
“What fun,” she said, and beamed at him like she meant it. “And we have hours upon hours trapped in a car together! Hooray!”
He moved then, which was something a little more than surprising, or at least that was how she interpreted that liquid thing that washed through her and that jolt that catapulted from her heart to her feet and back up again.
“Be nice,” he growled. “Or I’ll make you carry your own damned bag.”
She couldn’t breathe. Or process that.
“I always carry my own bag,” she informed him, on autopilot. “I’m a liberated woman, thank you. My partner isn’t a bellhop. What does that even mean?”
He muttered something that sounded filthy, which Michaela told herself was further evidence he was terrible in every way, but that wasn’t what the swirling, heated thing inside her felt about any of this. Definitely not.
“It means your man is a douche,” he growled at her.
He reached over and hefted up her heavy, rolling suitcase as if it weighed about as much as a feather pillow, then turned and stalked out of the house, leaving Michaela no choice but to follow after him.
The air outside was razor sharp and viciously cold, a far cry from the softer wet of the Pacific Northwest winters Michaela had grown up with and even loved. She shuddered out a breath but kept going, following Jesse down her aunt’s carefully shoveled front path and out to where one of those Range Rover-type half-jeep/half-truck vehicles sat at the curb, gleaming black and powerful and as irritating as its driver. Jesse threw her bag in the far back, slammed the door shut, and then jerked his head toward the passenger side.
“Let’s go.” It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. Another order. He clearly liked issuing them.
“Did you just call my—” She couldn’t call Terrence her man. That made her sound… something. A possessive, jealous hoarder, to start. “Did you call Terrence a douche?”
Jesse managed to give the distinct impression of rolling his eyes skyward and sighing heavily without actually doing either of those things. He rounded the side of the SUV and opened the passenger door for her in a stark, annoyed manner that stripped the act of any possible chivalric content even as he did it.
“In the car,” he said. “Now.”
“Terrence is not a douche,” Michaela said stoutly, crossing her arms over her chest and wishing she were wearing several more layers beneath her winter jacket as the Marietta wind slapped at her. “And even if he was, I’m engaged to him, so your default assumption should be that I’m into that. So why would you go out of your way to insult someone’s fiancé?”
“Michaela.”
He gritted out her name and there was nothing the least bit sweet or appealing about it. It was about the furthest thing from nice she’d ever heard. And yet for a moment her legs felt as if they might go out from under her, toppling her sideways into the nearest snow bank.
Ice, she told herself sagely. Nothing but ice.
Definitely not the sound of her name, all sandpaper and whiskey, sliding over her and abrading her skin as it went—
“Look up.”
She did as he commanded because that was far preferable to policing her own distressingly wayward thoughts just then. She tipped her head back and looked up at the Montana sky, which was clouded over and swollen with portent.
“It’s going to snow,” Jesse said, very distinctly, as if he was beginning to suspect she was not very bright. She couldn’t help but agree with that assessment. He made her feel like a fool. “Soon and at great length. You can either get in the goddamned truck and try to beat the storm with me, or you can sit here for however long it takes them to dig out. Your choice, but you need to make it now.”
She felt like Little Red Riding Hood, peering at a set of sharp, gleaming fangs, telling herself it wasn’t a wolf when she knew very well that he was. Of course he was. But her other alternative was more time away from work, which was always a headache, and more time with her family meant it would really be more like a migraine. Michaela loved her family. She did. But none of them seemed to understand that she was no longer thirteen and that she was, in fact, capable of making her own decisions. She was tired of explaining what she did for Amos, just as she was tired of defending Terrence to them. Jesse Grey might be a jerk, but he was the fastest way home to her actual life, where she was highly-valued in both her professional and private arenas and no one required her to defend anything.
Michaela got in the SUV and sat there questioning her life choices while he shut her door behind her, like some dangerous remnant of an old school gentleman. She told herself she found that infantilizing and offensive—but the warmth that twisted around in her belly suggested otherwise.
Something restless and worrying snaked through her, making her shiver, as Jesse loped around the front bumper, still scowling. She thought his face might actually be stuck that way—that it might in fact be medical. And she didn’t understand why that failed to make him the slightest bit less attractive.
That restless thing kicked at her, swelling up like a high tide about to break and swallow the shoreline—
Michaela pulled out her cell phone with a hand that was absolutely not shaking, and, if it was, it was obviously because of the wind chill and nothing else, and called Terrence.
It went straight to his voicemail. Again.
“Hi sweetheart, it’s me!” she all but sang into the phone, and she could hear her voice was much too high and certainly too loud as Jesse swung into the driver’s seat next to her. It got worse when he slammed his door shut, because then they were trapped there. The two of them. In the muted quiet of the SUV’s interior.
This time, Michaela knew exactly what it was that danced over her skin, making her stiffen. Pure, unadulterated panic.
“So the strangest thing happened,” she continued, talking into the phone even as Jesse turned that scowl of his on her again, except this time he was much, much closer and she could smell him, soap and snow and man, while their eyes locked. “There’s a gigantic snowstorm coming in and everything’s shutting down, which means I could be stuck here for days
if I don’t drive out now. And luckily, there’s this guy—”
“I’m sure that’s a great comfort to your fiancé,” Jesse muttered, still holding her gaze with his, even as he swiped that hat off of his head and let his dark-blonde hair do what it would. “As it would be to anyone. Some random guy.”
“—this friend of the family—”
“I grew up in Billings. I’m not from Marietta. Your aunt knows my relatives but she doesn’t know me, personally, from a can of paint.”
“—this weird, socially awkward guy who might or might not be some kind of questionable painter,” she said tartly, and had to remind herself she was leaving a message, especially when Jesse’s hard mouth kicked up a little bit in one corner. Just the littlest bit, and yet her heart soared as if she’d won some kind of Olympic event. “He and I are going to drive home. That sounds insane but really, it’s only about ten hours or so.” Jesse’s brows lifted as if that was funny. “I looked it up,” she told Terrence. She was definitely talking to Terrence. “So I’ll see you in ten hours! Yay!”
Michaela ended the call, and she should have turned away then, clearly. She had no idea why she just sat there, practically nose to nose with this man, as if neither one of them had anything better to do. As if this was at all safe, this thing she refused to acknowledge was swirling around in what little space was between them.
“You just said ‘yay,’” he pointed out, maybe five or six thousand years later. “It was like a verbal emoticon, except scarier.”
She lifted one shoulder and dropped it in a manner someone else might have called slightly belligerent, had they been nearby. But no one was. It was only the two of them, tucked away inside this SUV while the weather turned dangerous on the other side of the dashboard and the far savvier citizens of Marietta, Montana, stayed locked away inside their warm and cozy homes.
“I’m excited.”
“You were leaving a voicemail message. At least, I hope that’s what you were doing. Or that was a pretty spectacularly lame conversation you were having.”
“Is the issue here that I said the word ‘yay’ or that you feel qualified to judge the level of my excitement, for some reason?” Michaela asked, and she could feel how edgy her smile had become. “Because guess what? You’re a guy I bought in a bar. You don’t have the slightest idea what excites me.”
Jesse Grey stopped scowling then.
Right about the time her heart stopped beating, then kicked in again, like a gong.
A loud, low gong that made the whole world seem to dance and shimmer for a moment there, as if the threat of a Montana snowstorm was the least of its problems.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, in that low, faintly rough voice of his, as if he knew. Every too hot, too liquid, too damning part of her that was still dancing, still lost in that shimmer. That low, insistent tug that was beginning to worry her just the littlest bit. That dark bloom of pure fire that was consuming her alive, right there where she sat. Every last dream she’d had about him over the course of her very long, very restless night in her aunt’s spare bedroom with her mother in the twin bed across the pink carpet. As if he could see it all like stains, marking her up and making her that obvious, that ridiculous.
That doomed.
“You can do that while you drive,” she threw back at him because if she didn’t speak, she was afraid something much, much worse would happen than the breathlessness that stole through her and threatened… everything. She couldn’t allow herself to think about it. Nothing inside of her made any sense. “I’m going to take a nap.”
Chapter Three
‡
“I know you’re not asleep,” Jesse growled an hour or so later, when traffic ground to a halt yet again on the stretch of I-90 that skated along the thrust of the Rockies, rising up off in the west past Bozeman, and then sloping down on the other side of the Continental Divide. It was getting dark and icy—or more of each, really—and they still had a ways to go before making it to Missoula, the nearest city of any size. The driving snow and bitter wind that rocked the SUV made that goal seem more precarious by the minute, even to Jesse, who’d been raised in this kind of weather. “I hate to break this to you, but it’s harder to fake it than you might think. Men can usually tell. Consider that a public service announcement from me to you.”
That right there was the problem with all of this. With this stupid drive. With Michaela Townsend herself. He opened his mouth to be appropriately dour and matter-of-fact and what came out sounded more like flirting. If he was a fifteen-year-old boy with absolutely no skills or game of any kind, that was. And meanwhile, this SUV that belonged to his uncle was filled with the scent she carried in her dark brown hair, of grapefruit and soft spice, the suggestion of the vanilla-scented warmth of her skin, and entirely too much of her tempting body within easy reach.
She shifted then, sitting up straight and thrusting her legs out in front of her as she rubbed her hands over her face. Jesse felt more than saw her toss a look his way, but she didn’t say anything. She pulled her jacket tighter around her and blinked out at the deteriorating weather conditions all around them.
“I knew you weren’t asleep,” he muttered, because he was obviously insane.
“That must be why you’re so successful,” she said, in the way someone who really didn’t know what he did or how successful he really was might, and he liked that, too. That she lived in Seattle and didn’t know who he was. That she wasn’t one of those women who came after him like so many bloodhounds on the hunt. “Your discernment.”
“What is it you do again?” he asked. “No one said. They just mentioned your man Terrence was unemployed. Has been for a while, I think your cousin told me, nine or ten times. What’s her name? The loud one.”
“Missy, who is not loud, she’s emphatic. And it’s none of her business, or yours, what Terrence does or doesn’t do, thank you.” He thought she looked at him, though when he glanced at her, she was gazing out the window, a distinct line between her brows. “Terrence calls me a glorified office manager, which is close enough to my job title, I suppose.”
He opened his mouth to make some crack, but something in the way she’d said that pricked at him. Maybe it was his deep, abiding certainty that Terrence Polk was more likely to undermine than glorify anyone. “What’s your actual job title?”
She sat up even straighter in her seat, and he knew she wasn’t going to answer him. “I solve problems,” she said.
“You can get a job doing that?”
“Apparently.”
She didn’t expand on that. And Jesse couldn’t have said why that very nearly ached, down in his bones.
“This does not look good,” she said instead, after a moment or two, still with her gaze trained on the treacherous road outside the SUV. Her voice was huskier than before, and Jesse would have had to have been a saint not to respond to that—to feel it scrape over him in a hundred inappropriate ways it was far healthier not to think of in any detail.
And Jesse was a lot of things, but a saint wasn’t one of them.
“No,” he agreed, keeping his attention on the road and the rapidly decreasing visibility. It was far safer than what was going on in this SUV. Or inside of him. “I think we’re going to have to stop for the night.”
He expected wailing, carrying on, or some passive-aggressive version of either. Hysterics, maybe. Some kind of attitude or fit, anyway, from a woman who had pretended to be asleep for hours rather than interact with him. But the SUV was quiet, except for the rhythmic thwack and swish of the windshield wipers and the crunch of the tires against the increasingly snowy road. And beside him, he heard her shift in her seat. That was the extent of her outward reaction.
“By the side of the road?” she asked. Calmly, he was surprised to note.
“I think we’re close enough to Missoula to make it,” he said gruffly. “It’s not great out there, but I don’t think it’s bad enough that we need to pull over. Yet.”
br /> “We passed Butte already?”
He’d thought he should have stopped at the former mining town when they’d passed it. But she’d been “sleeping” and he’d been irritated beyond measure and had thought if he just kept going, he could outrun the storm and have them halfway across Washington State before midnight. At the moment, that entire previous thought process seemed like nothing but hubris.
“About two hours back. Under normal conditions we would have made through Missoula already and be on our way into Idaho.”
“Then we must be close,” she said, in that same calmly enthusiastic voice she’d used on him in Grey’s the night before. Jesse didn’t know why tonight, he found it something an awful lot like soothing.
She didn’t say much more as Jesse navigated the rest of the way into the outskirts of Missoula, the roads getting more slippery and dangerous by the mile. They skidded into the first motel parking lot they found with a VACANCY sign, and Jesse figured he wasn’t the only one fending off the rush of adrenaline that they’d made it. In one piece. He shifted the SUV into PARK and blew out a long breath.
They grinned at each other then, over the kick of relief and danger narrowly averted, and Jesse was sure that was the only reason his chest felt tight. He rubbed at it, annoyed.
“I’ll go get us a couple of rooms,” she told him after a moment, as he let out another breath. She set about zipping up and pulling on her scarf and her gloves, and he felt the loss of that expansive grin of hers like something physical.
What the hell was the matter with him? He needed a hot shower and a beer. And a good night’s sleep now that he wasn’t taking up residence on the couch in his uncle’s office in the back of Grey’s. That had been his best option as far as a peaceful sleep in Marietta went. It was that or deal with his Uncle Ryan and Aunt Gracie, who were certain to ask entirely too many questions about Jesse’s relationship with his father. No thank you. Or his cousin Luce, their daughter, who was two years younger than him and possessed of three maniac kids and a deadbeat husband she’d just kicked to the curb, all of which made her way too maudlin when she’d had a few.