2
MASON
An hour.
I had an hour alone with Gabby, and I couldn’t think of a single damn thing to say.
The radio sat silent on the console between us. Conner’s voice still echoed in my head—keep each other warm—and I wanted to reach through the airwaves and strangle him. He knew exactly what he was doing. They all did.
I risked a glance at Gabby. She was staring out the passenger window, her arms crossed tight over her chest. The fog on the glass made it impossible to see anything outside, but she was looking anyway. Probably trying to avoid looking at me.
I didn’t blame her. I’d barely said ten words to her since we got in the truck. Before that, I’d spent days pretending I didn’t notice her while having almost every meal at the honky-tonk where she worked.
Real smooth, Mason. No wonder the guys called it my tragic love life.
The thing was, I wasn’t like this with other women. I could talk to women just fine. I could even flirt when the situation called for it. But put me in front of someone I actuallywanted?Someone who made my chest tight and my brain short-circuit? I turned into a mute idiot.
And Gabby… God, Gabby. She’d been wrecking me since the first night we walked into the Wildwood Ridge Roadhouse. Bright eyes, quick smile, the way she moved between tables like she was dancing. She remembered everyone’s orders without writing them down. She laughed at Conner’s terrible jokes. She always smelled of vanilla and something warm—like fresh-baked cookies.
I was a thirty-five-year-old firefighter who’d run into burning buildings without flinching, and this twenty-three-year-old server had me tongue-tied like a teenager.
Pathetic.
“So.”
Her voice made me jump. I turned to find her looking at me now, her expression unreadable.
“So,” I echoed, like the eloquent conversationalist I was.
“An hour, huh?”
“Looks like it.”
She nodded slowly, then turned back to the window. A few seconds passed.
“You know, you could just tell me,” she said.
My heart stuttered. “Tell you what?”
“What I did.” She was still facing the window, but I could see her reflection in the fogged glass—the tight set of her jaw, the furrow between her brows. “To make you hate me.”
“What?” The word came out sharper than I intended. “I don’t—Gabby, I don’t hate you.”
“Could’ve fooled me.” Now she did turn, and her eyes were bright—not with tears, but with frustration. “You’ve been coming into the roadhouse for days. You talk to everyone. Elsa, Kameron, even the cook. But me? You won’t even look at me.You asked my name three times the first week, like you couldn’t be bothered to remember it.”
Oh, fuck.
She thought I was asking because I didn’t care enough to remember. The truth was so much more embarrassing than that.
“I knew your name,” I said quietly.
She blinked. “What?”
“The first time I asked.” I forced myself to meet her eyes, even though every instinct screamed at me to look away. “I already knew your name. Elsa told me the night before.”
Confusion flickered across her face. “Then why?—”
“Because I wanted to talk to you.” The words felt like they were being dragged out of me with a fishhook. “And that was all I could come up with. Your name. I asked you your name because I’m a fucking idiot who can’t string a sentence together around a woman I actually…”
