She gave me a look I couldn’t interpret, then jumped to her feet.
“I’ve got an emergency kit in my truck that includes a blanket. I’ll go get it before it gets dark.”
“Great.”
While she did that, I poked around the kitchen. We wouldn’t starve, that was for sure. I’d had Chinese food brought in for lunch today, and there were still leftovers in the fridge, as well as various snacks and a case of water.
If I said I was sad we were trapped here overnight I’d be lying. In fact, I was delighted. There were only so many places in this house where Sam could run away from me. I knew instinctively that this was my chance. I either would convince her to give me a chance, or I’d finish up my last couple of weeks of community service and move on with my life.
How I could move on with my life without the woman I loved I couldn’t say.
“Will your kitty be okay while you’re gone?” I asked Sam when she returned to the kitchen holding a large plastic tub with a lid.
“Oh yeah, I filled up Leo’s bowl this morning, although I’m sure he’ll be a little concerned when I don’t come home.”
“Because he loves you?”
Sam shook her head. “Because he’ll have binge ate all his food during the day and when I don’t come home on time, he’ll be sure that he’s going to starve to death. Food is way more important to him than I am.”
We shared a smile.
“What made you get a cat?” I asked. “For some reason you don’t seem like a pet person to me.”
“I’m not really, but I found Leo hanging out in a house we were remodeling years ago. I put up flyers in the neighborhood and checked with Animal Control, but no one claimed him. I didn’t just want to leave him to fend for himself, so I brought him home while I looked for a new home for him.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
“Ten years ago,” she laughed. “I guess I didn’t try too hard.”
The windows rattled as another particularly strong gust of wind tore through.
“We might as well get settled if we’re going to spend the night here,” she said. “At least we’ve got food and a blanket.”
“What should we do to pass the time?” I asked.
Sam paused, and her eyes dropped to my lip for a few seconds longer than they should have for a casual glance. I purposely licked my lips, and she made a soft choking sound.
“Cards.”
“What?” I asked in confusion.
“I have a deck of cards in the emergency kit. We can play cards.”
Sam
God, I was such an idiot. I was trapped alone with a beautiful, sexy woman whom I’d been crushing on for weeks, a woman who clearly was as attracted to me as I was to her, and I was mentioning cards?
As soon as I realized that we were trapped here I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist Livi. I’d read enough forced proximity romances to know how this would end. But I needed some time to process.
The tree thing was unexpected. Livi’s complete unconcern for the loss of her car wasn’t surprising though. I was sure that she could go out and buy a new one tomorrow – for cash. But her reaction was more than that. She understood that her car wasn’t important in the grand scheme of things. If the guys had left a few minutes later or we’d left a few minutes earlier, one of us could have gotten hurt. Killed even.
And the woman who drove up that first day looking like some rich princess who’d cry if she broke a nail didn’t even bat an eye at the idea that we’d be sleeping on the floor in a dark and dusty house.
Well, it wouldn’t be that dark. I had some battery operated lanterns here that we used in the rooms where we hadn’t reconnected the electricity yet. And we had running water and a refrigerator full of leftovers. We were definitely roughing it, but not too rough.
“What do you want to play?” Livi asked as we settled on a couple of folding chairs across from each other at a makeshift table where the crew set buckets of paint and other things we didn’t want to put on the floor. It was just a long piece of plywood spread across two sawhorses, but it worked for our purposes.
“Gin rummy?” she asked.
