“Oh, for…” His eyes rolled skyward, and he put the truck back into gear. “Sit tight. I’ll be at your place in ten minutes.”
“You don’t have to—” she was saying as he disconnected and pulled out of the parking lot.
He found her waiting in the glass entryway of her apartment building, his coat folded over one arm. As soon as he pulled up, she practically skipped out to join him, hauling herself into his truck cab with a tiny bit of thrashing.
“You didn’t have to pick me up!” she said by way of greeting, settling the jacket between them and adjusting a fuzzy scarf around her neck.
“Such an imposition. I was all of three miles away. Just a nightmare commute.”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “I didn’t mean to hijack your whole afternoon.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Really?”
Again the surprise. It rankled. “Really. Why would I mind?”
“I mean, we’re not friends.” She studied her thumbnail as she said it, not meeting his eyes, which was just as well. It meant she didn’t see his chin jerk backward.
“We’re not?” He ignored the tiny sting her words caused.
“Come on, not really.” She sounded exasperated, which was only slightly preferable to nervous. “We say hi when we bump into each other. We chat when our mutual friends all get together. But we don’t dothis.” She gestured around his truck, he guessed to encompass “go places together” or “intentionally hang out.”
“I suppose you’ve got a point.”
The smile she gave him was a lot less perky than usual. “We rode bikes together when we were kids. Then…” Her half smile vanished, and she swallowed hard before continuing. “Then Mom and I moved, and I didn’t see you again until high school.”
He was aware that a chasm of pain lurked beneath the details she’d skipped over, but if she wasn’t going to address it, he sure as hell wasn’t going there. “You were a freshman when I was a senior. It would’ve been a little weird if we’d hung out after all that time.”
“Well that. And by then you’d turned into—” Rather than finish the thought, she waved a hand in his direction.
“Turned into…?” The smart part of him didn’t want her to keep going, but the masochistic part of him was dying to hear her description.
“You know.” Her smile was back, tart as ever. “Adonis Aiden.”
He groaned as he turned his truck in to Prospect Point. “Don’t tell me she got to you too?”
“Who, Mabel? The bestower of great nicknames?” She bounced in her seat. “She sure did, Adonis!”
“Dammit,” he muttered but without any heat. Busting-his-chops Thea was preferable to nervous Thea andfarpreferable to sad Thea. He brought the truck to a halt in front of their destination. “Friends or not, we’re here.”
Three
She was parked in front of her dream house, but Thea couldn’t tear her eyes off the man behind the wheel. Aiden’s too-long brown hair curled against his neck, and his cheeks and nose were pink from the cold. With the playful tilt of his lips and the crinkles at the corner of his eyes, he could star in a commercial promoting the healthful benefits of brisk midwestern winters. Women would move here in droves.
She’d been flustered ever since she’d heard his voice on the other end of the phone, so much so that she blurted out all that nonsense about their nonfriendship. Like he cared about any of that.Get your shit together, Blackwell.He was just a man, after all. A nice, handsome man with big, capable hands that dwarfed the steering wheel.
Okay, thinking about his hands wasn’t helping. And now she’d been sitting there silently for far longer than was normal, and her stupid brain wouldn’t cough up a single thing to say that wouldn’t make her sound like an idiot.
“Realtor’s not here yet.” See? Idiot.
Thankfully, the charisma machine next to her just grinned and slouched back in his seat, his eyes traveling past her to 201 Prospect Point with its steep pitched roof and light-colored stone-and-timber exterior. “So talk to me while we wait. Why is this the house for you?”
Herewas a topic she could warm up to. “I just… I love it so much.” She sighed. “It’s like the scrappy kid sister to all the other houses in the neighborhood.”
Prospect Point ran along the bluff overlooking the Illinois River, with the city’s grandest homes on one side and a glorious view of the river valley on the other. The majority of the houses were either intimidating palaces built a century and a half earlier by the city’s founders or they were recently constructed monuments of glass and sharp angles built after the new owners bought the less-desirable homes on the street to knock down.
Not Thea’s house though. It was located at the very end of the road and was far more modest than its showy neighbors. In fact, Thea’s house could be stowed inside the living rooms of most of the Point houses.
