Josie gave an appreciative smack of her lips that was interrupted by the squawk of an intercom announcement. “Oh, that’s my flight! Better make sure they don’t give my seat away. Love you, byeeeee!”
Leave it to Josie to be bouncy in the middle of an airport hellscape. Shaking her head, Finn flipped on the radio so the increasingly dire weather reports could keep her company during dinner prep. She’d dumped the last of the ingredients into the slow cooker when something scuffed on the kitchen tile behind her.
“Josie?”
Finn whirled around to see a disheveled brown-haired man standing six feet away, and as she opened her mouth to shriek, one thought floated through her mind:Mom’s going to carve “I told you so” on my tombstone.
Two
Tom Castle had woken up disoriented and hungover as hell, and the screaming woman wasn’t helping. He squinted in the bright light of the kitchen, so harsh compared to the dark cave he’d just left, and addressed the blur in front of him.
“Whoa, sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
As his eyes adjusted, he realized the blur was short, skinny, and brandishing a knife in his direction. He took two quick steps back.
“You’re not Josie.”
“No!”
He held his hands out in front of him in what he hoped was a soothing gesture and kept his voice calm and even. “Okay, listen, this is a misunderstanding. I just woke up, but give me a second, and I’ll get out of—”
“Tom Castle?”
If anything, the blur sounded even more hostile. But this time the hostility sounded… familiar. He risked a shuffle step forward and forced his bloodshot eyes to focus on the woman in front of him.
“Huckleberry?” he asked in amazement.
Huckleberry Finn.His lips shaped the old nickname without conscious thought, but the reminder of their high school American lit class did nothing to relax her guard. Instead, she spun around to grab a second knife with her free hand.
“What the fuck, Tom? Why are you in my apartment?”
Holy shit, Finn Carey was finally going to finish the job she’d wanted to do since the end of their senior year. They’d be finding pieces of him all over Cook County when the thaw hit.
Then his brain lurched to life and jangled a warning about how this must look to her. “Hey, I’m really sorry I scared you. I had no idea…” He cast his eyes around the small apartment, looking for any clues he’d missed the night before. Come to think of it, itwasoppressively tidy enough to belong to an uptight control freak like Finn. “Josie’s your roommate, I take it?”
Comprehension dawned, and the fear on Finn’s face twisted into the narrow-eyed loathing he remembered from eight years ago. At least she set the edged weapons back on the counter. “And you’re one of Josie’s hookups.”
Even though she hadn’t asked a question, he scrubbed a hand down his face and answered anyway. “No, I’m not.” After a lifetime of shitty luck, he’d come to expect the worst, but ending up in Finn Carey’s apartment by pure happenstance might be the biggest fuck-you Fate had ever dealt him. “I walked her home from the bar last night. That’s it.”
She scoffed. “Oh, so you ‘chivalrously’”—Tom felt as though her air quotes were unnecessarily sarcastic—“escorted my drunk roommate home and, with no ulterior motives, ended up sleeping in her bed for hours and hours after she packed a bag and left the apartment that I happen to share with her?”
Even though it did all sound ridiculous, an echo of that old hurt roared to life in his chest.Of fucking courseshe didn’t trust that he had good intentions.
“That’s exactly what happened,” he snapped. “I passed out and woke up just now with my virtue intact.”
“So you had no idea she and I live together? This is all some cosmic coincidence?”
God, he was too undercaffeinated for this. “Don’t flatter yourself, Huck. I haven’t exactly been monitoring your whereabouts since high school.” True, mostly. “I was trying to be a good guy last night and apparently picked the wrong person to do it with.”
The skepticism on her face tipped his own hurt into anger, and he was suddenly desperate to leave before it morphed into sadness. He’d had enough of that already when it came to her. “Well, this has been fun. Give me five minutes and I’ll get out of your life.” Again.
Finn laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. “Good luck with that.”
She pointed to the windows, and he crossed the room to pull back a curtain.
“Shit,” he breathed. The snow they’d been predicting yesterday had hit hard. The street between the tall apartment buildings lining the block was untouched by a plow, and the sidewalks weren’t any better. The cars parked in front were little more than fluffy white mounds. Just his luck to heinously oversleep on the one day the meteorologists’ dire predictions didn’t turn out to be exaggerations.
“I just need to get home from… wherever we are. Any chance this is near Evanston?” He was grasping at straws, praying to the god of deeply unlucky graduate students that he’d somehow ended up miraculously close to his apartment.
