“The thing about you rolling your car, Nance.”
Oops, she thought, and stopped what she was doing so she could at least attempt to say something more sensible and well thought out. “That wasn’t a big deal. He got me out of it easily.”
“He got you out of it. As in, he rescued you from it. With his bare hands.”
“Well, I think he felt obliged to. Because he got angry when I saw him nude.”
“Wait,what?” Cassie gasped, at which point Nancy had to face facts:
No amount of concentrating was going to make her case.
Now it was all just damage control.
“That doesn’t sound like what it was, Cass. I didn’t mean to do it.”
“It doesn’t matter if you did or not. What matters is all the things you’re leaving out. You crashed your car, he saved you, and he possibly did all of that while naked? How naked? The whole thing? Just from the waist up? Are those shoulders as hot as they look? I bet they are, right.”
“Hey, now,” she heard Seth, Cassie’s boyfriend, protest in the background. And loudly enough that it almost felt like being saved. Until Cassie put her hand over the phone, and whispered to him, “Like you don’t think the same thing.” After which Seth grumbled, but eventually gave in.
He gave in.
She had two people now talking to her about how sexy Jack’s shoulders were.
And the worst part? They were both right. They were very right. She was thinking way too much now about how right they were. Even though he was practically a spoken-for man, who undoubtedly thought she was annoying.
“You guys aren’t helping me at all here,” she protested, just as the muffled hand-over-phone sounds stopped, and Cassie returned, full of irritation.
“It’s hard to help when I feel like youwantme to say something untrue.”
“But it’s not untrue. He doesn’t like me at all, and he doesn’t want to be my friend, and even if he did want to be at some point, I said so many embarrassing things yesterday that I amdefinitelynever going to see him agai—” she said. Then she happened to look up, just as she was finishing the last word, and the sight she saw sliced it in two.
Because it was Jack Jackson.
Standing outside her store, a whole half hour before opening.
He practically had his face pressed against the glass. He caught her gaze and had to straighten, and make himself look a little less like someone who definitelydidwant to see her again, for whatever weird reason he had.
Suddenly something across the street looked very interesting to him. He needed to check a watch he didn’t have on. There were crumbs on his rumpled shirt that he had to swipe off, eventhough she knew his shirt never had crumbs down it at all. He might have looked like he had gotten dressed inside a dryer as it ran, but he was always, always clean. She even remembered that hint of freshly washed laundry under that struck-match scent. The softness of his hair at the nape of his neck. The glisten of the water all over his half-nude body, from the shower.
“I gotta go, Cass,” she managed to get out.
Then hitend calljust as Cassie started to say, “He’s there now, isn’t he.”
Because what was she going to say, no? He still hadn’t moved on. He was now studying her Halloween window display strewn with pumpkins and witch hats like his life depended on it. Like he couldn’t leave, but also didn’t know how to stay. He didn’t know how to admit that he had something he wanted to say.
And it was this idea that forced her to the door.
But casually, as if she was just opening up. As if she didn’t even know he was there. She just had to unlock the door, turn over theOPENsign, and haul her sandwich board out onto the sidewalk—that was all.Nice and casual, no big deal, she thought. Though of course she couldn’t resist peeping at him a little. Just from under the veil of her curly hair, so he wouldn’t notice.
And he didn’t.
He was too busy watching her struggle with the sandwich board. She managed to heave it out and saw him glance her way, before hurriedly looking away. Then the rusted hinge wouldn’t let her open it, and he couldn’t seem to resist looking again. Jaw clenched now. Hands bunched into fists.
And when she trapped her hand and let out a little sound, he just couldn’t seem to take it anymore. He broke. “For shit’s sake, kid, why have you got a sign that’s half as big as you are? And apparently busted to fuck? Here, lemme get it,” he said, as he stormed over and grabbed the thing.
One-handed, too.
He tossed it in the air and gave it a single snapping shake and it was open and ready to be set on the sidewalk.God, he’s strong, she found herself thinking. But she couldn’t let herself linger on that idea. They were facing each other now. More words needed to be said. And she didn’t want any of those words to sound breathless or awestruck.
