The cart was towed from the ditch and transported to my house, where the mechanic checked it over. Surprisingly, there were no new dents. It did need a new top, which he had to place an order for, but the current one was serviceable for the present. The replacement would be in the following week.
So basically, everything was fine. That didn’t mean I was okay with Bree James moving to my neighborhood. Nathan found the whole thing funny because, of course, he did. I refused to talk to him for the ride back to my house. Instead of leaving, he helped himself to my beer and then invited himself to sleep in the guest room.
I wanted to kick him out—I was so not in the mood for Nathan—but I couldn’t very well send a drunk guy out and tell him to drive back to his Airbnb forty minutes away. So I sucked it up and even made him an omelet the next morning. It always irritated me that he never showed signs of a hangover.
“So, what are you going to do?” he asked as I cleaned up the breakfast dishes.
“About what?” I kept my back to him. I always scrubbed the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Anal-retentive? Yes, at least according to everybody I’d ever met. I liked routine.
“About Bree.”
I’d assumed he was asking about my writing. It didn’t even occur to me that he was asking about Bree. “Oh, um, nothing.” I shrugged. “I’ll forward her the bill for the cart repairs. I’m assuming she’ll pay it without complaint. If she fights back, I’m not sure what I’ll do.”
“Oh, she’ll pay the bill.” Nathan was grinning when I turned to look at him. “I mean, what are you going to do about her? I thought I sensed some sparks there last night.”
He had to be joking. “There were no sparks.”
He arched an eyebrow and waited.
“There were no sparks,” I repeated, fully annoyed.
“I saw sparks.”
“You saw fury. I can’t stand that woman.”
“Are you sure?” Nathan cocked his head, doubt lining his features. “Because—and I’m not trying to get you going here—I definitely saw a spark.”
“She ran us off the road!” I exploded. “She could have killed us.”
“It was very clearly an accident.”
He was obviously more comfortable with almost dying than I was. “That doesn’t matter. She was being reckless.”
“Okay.” He held his hands up in supplication. “I’m just saying … there was a spark.”
I wanted to wipe the smug smile off his face with an ice scraper. “Stop saying that. You know how I feel about that woman.”
“Yes. You feel as if she purposely baited you two years ago.”
“Not baited.” That was ludicrous. “She knocked me into Amy Ryan’s table.”
“Yes.”
“She let me take the blame.”
“Amy isn’t still holding a grudge about that.”
“Yes, she is.”
“Okay, maybe a minor one,” he conceded. “It’s not a big deal, though.”
“She stole all the attention at the panel.”
“You didn’t want to talk anyway.”
“That’s not the point. She made fun of my readers. She called them nerds.”
“Are you mad because she called your readers nerds—something that’s debatable—or that she called you a nerd?”
