“What?” he asked, and Willow noticed she was staring at him.
She shook her head and let out a nervous laugh. “I feel like there’s a lyric in there somewhere.Didn’t feel like the right time to unpack…”
“With the whole damned world cracking a whip at my back?” he asked but didn’t wait for her to answer. “So I hopped on a horse and rode until dark…”
“Knowing with each step I’d never recapture the spark!” Willow bounced on her heels, a grin spreading across her face. “Holy shit, Murphy. This might actually work!”
She pulled her phone out of her pocket and sang the words with a random melody into her voice recorder before she forgot them.
The song might work, she meant, of course. Living together for two months without killing each other? The jury was still out on that one.
Chapter 4
Ash raised his hand to knock on the bedroom door, but it flew open before he made contact so that he was face-to-face with his new roommate who was wearing nothing but a white cotton robe, a towel dangling from one hand, and her dark-brown hair now wet and soaking the fabric on her shoulders.
“Oh!” Willow said, taking a step back. “I mean, hi. Did you need something?”
They’d ridden back to the barn together after deciding a couple lines of a song were good enough for day one. Once inside the house, Willow had disappeared into her room while Ash decided to make the front hall closet his, stashing his boxed belongings in the small space. He had an entire house worth of possessions in Nashville, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent more than a week there, let alone called the place home. So he traveled with the barest of essentials and bought what he needed along the way.
Right now, he needed a shower.
“So, here’s the thing,” he told her. “The bathroom out here has a toilet and sink, which is great. Love me a good toilet and sink.” Inside, he cringedat himself. “But if I’m going to live here, I’m going to need to shower here too.”
She stared blankly at him for several seconds before exclaiming, “Oh!” Again.
“Oh,” he repeated, then raised his brows. “I can wait for you to get dressed if you want. Or…”
“Right,” Willow replied. “No… I mean…”
“There you go with that favorite word again, Morgan. Are you saying I should find somewhere else to shower for eight whole weeks?”
She rolled her eyes. “Have you always been this impossible?”
“Since the day I left the womb.” He winked. “So you’renotsaying that Ican’tshower? Because last time I checked, that there is a double negative, which translates to a positive, which means you better have left me some hot water.”
She lifted the towel she was still holding, squeezed the ends of her dripping hair into it, and then tossed it on the bed.
He could smell her shampoo again, that familiar, intoxicating scent, and he hoped to hell he could find another brand of shampoo in the bathroom because how the hell was he supposed to walk around day to day smelling like her? Or more to the point…smellingheronhimself.
She gently poked her finger against his chest for the second time today, urging him out of the doorway so she could slip past.
“The ‘no’ was for not needing to get dressed before letting you borrow the shower. I was going to grab a snack and have a seat on the back porch, let what’s left of the sun air-dry my hair.”
Ash swallowed as she sauntered past him, bare feet padding toward the kitchen.
“It’sourshower now, Morgan,” he called after her. “Which means I’m not borrowing anything other than some time in your room.”
She waved him off, not bothering to turn around, and he shook his head and laughed.
Then he made his way into the room, kicking the door shut behind him and glancing at the still-unpacked suitcase sitting open atop the giant bed, at her jeans, T-shirt, and undergarments lying in a heap on the floor. In the bathroom, another towel hung on the doorknob. Bottles of lotion and face wash along with a tube of toothpaste and her toothbrush were scattered across the counter.
He laughed again. He might still be an asshole, but four years later, Willow Morgan still lived like a frat boy.
He hung the wet towel on a hook on the back of the bathroom door and then lined up her few toiletries against the backsplash below the mirror. Then he turned on the shower and peeled off his clothes, stepping into the hot spray in the hope of washing himself clean of the night before—not only the hotel, his arrest, and the surprise publicityof his divorce, but also of reuniting with Willow the way he did, drunk off his ass and scaring her like that.
Not that this was any sort of true reunion. It was a tolerance at best. Ashton Murphy knew resentment when he saw it, and he knew he deserved it.
So he rested his head against the cool ceramic tile of the shower wall, hot water and steam allowing him to start fresh, at least in the physical sense.
