I sighed, not seeing how there could ever be good news when your house had completely burned down with all your worldly possessions in it.
“The good news is, your truck was what started it.”
That stupid truck.
I couldn’t believe we’d paid that exorbitant fee to get it towed here last night and it’d caught my freakin’ house on fire.
I looked at him in shock. “Could you repeat that?”
But he didn’t need to.
I’d heard completely fine.
“And there is still more good news,” he continued.
I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “What?”
“Now, you have no reason not to move to Forney for that job,” he pointed out. “You’re going to get a pretty good penny back from the insurance for the house. You’ll be able to pay off the mortgage that’s left. Oh, and once I’m done with that dealership, they’ll be paying you a hefty sum for constantly ignoring your concerns. Apparently, the reason your gas was always going low was because there’s a small leak in the fuel line. It’s been leaking onto the driveway, and into the bushes by your house. But since it’s been so cold over the last week, it’s just been building up on top of the frozen solid ice, for at least three of those days. The car sparked at some point, and the whole truck went up in flames. Then the side of the house where all that gas had leaked. The big bang and whoosh we heard that woke us up was the gas igniting.”
“I don’t…” I hesitated. “But I don’t want to move to Forney.”
He was already talking again, pulling me up into his arms and walking me backward so that I could sit on the counter.
He made sure to tuck the ends of the blanket in close to my body before he leaned both of his hands on either side of my knees and said, “You’ll live with me. We’ll rent you an apartment in Forney.”
He had it all planned out.
But still…
“We’re so new, Jas,” I pointed out. “What if you find out that you hate me?”
“I don’t think anything you could do could make me hate you,” he admitted. “And I think you know that. You’re just scared right now, and that’s okay.”
My phone rang, and I absently picked it up and stared at the screen. “My sister.”
“You didn’t call her?” he asked, quirking his brow at me.
I shook my head. “Why would I call her? It was too early in the morning, on Christmas for that matter, for me to call and tell her that. It’s not like I was inside it or anything. I was over here, with you.”
He pulled the phone from my hand and answered it with, “She’s okay.”
There was some high-pitched screeching on the other end, but I pushed away and walked back to the window, staring at the wreckage.
Yeah, my house was definitely unsalvageable.
There would be nothing salvaged from the mess that was left. No clothes. No momentos. No nothing.
The one good thing I could say about it all was that I’d left my purse in Jasper’s truck last night, which luckily had been parked behind mine and only received minimal damage.
“What’s with that look on your face?” Jasper came up to lean on the doorjamb beside me, not facing the smoldering remains of my house, but me.
I turned from the peeling paint on his front bumper to him. “I was looking at your truck.”
“What about it?”
“I left my purse in it last night,” I said. “I was just thinking that was lucky.”
“Very lucky,” he conceded. “Though, Apollo could’ve had some forgeries for you in an hour. It’s much easier to actually do real identities than fake.”
