And, of course, the towel he’d had wrapped around his hips had been deliciously small.
So that meant, of course, she’d just spent her entire shower weighing the benefit of masturbating and releasing all that totally inappropriate tension versus the just-her-luck likelihood that she’d slip at exactly the wrong moment and would be found—by Will—knocked out cold on the shower floor with her fingers on her clit.
In her moment of shower indecision this morning, she’d opted for imagined dignity over orgasmic relief. Regrets? Oh yeah, she had lots. All of which added up to her being overwhelmingly horny and stuck in a car for three hours with the man she totally hated all while she couldn’t help thinking about all the ways she’d climb him like a tree if given the chance.
But lucky her, she only had an hour and a half left of the three-hour drive with a guy who—she glanced over from the corner of her vision—was starting to turn green and had a white-knuckle grip on the can of ginger ale he’d grabbed from her mom’s fridge. Good. He was her nemesis and he could stand to be as miserable as he’d made her after the incident.
So Hadley kept her mouth shut, just as it had been since they got into the car and she turned on her playlist. Still… Guilt started to pluck at her resolve. Still… Yes, he was an asshole; everyone who met him would probably agree to that. Still… She started to scan the highway signs for just how many miles were left until The Stop Inn so Will could get out of the car for a few minutes and his stomach could settle.
Why? Because she was still salty about what had happened after the incident—and she had every right to be.
Seriously, she had former coworkers who were no doubt repeating what Will had said about what a loser she was to potential clients, which meant when she started her own consulting firm—and damn it, she was going to do that—there was no way she’d ever land their accounts.
If being single in the city didn’t already have her mom worried, being unemployed and single in the city would send the woman into a flurry of criticizing-out-of-love activity. That was exactly why she gave her mom and everyone else in her family a very curated idea of what was going on in her life. Everything was fine. Always. No complaints. No whining. Absolutely no failure.
“Hadley,” Will said, sounding less like a multimillionaire from birth and more like someone on the verge of losing his breakfast. “Can you stop for a minute?”
“Are you going to puke?”
“No.” The denial would have come across more believable if he hadn’t said it while wincing in misery.
“You look like you’re going to puke.” Did she have to poke him at this moment? Probably not, but she needed to distract him until she got to the next exit.
He flexed his jaw and stared up at the car’s ceiling with an intensity that bordered on desperation. “I do not do a damn thing I don’t want to.”
Bypassing her blinker—there wasn’t a car around for miles—she turned right onto the main street of the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Myrtle. “Spoken with the determination someone would expect from the likes of Will Percival Holt, the youngest CEO of Holt Enterprises in five generations and the wonder of the stock market.”
“How do you know my middle name?” he asked, sitting up straighter and pivoting in his seat to look at her.
“I told Web he had the dorkiest middle name ever, and he corrected me.”
“That really hurts, Trigger.” A half smile curled one side of his mouth upward. “I’m not going to puke.”
He sounded more confident that time—maybe because she’d pulled into the parking lot of a gas station / grocery / diner called The Stop Inn.
“Whatever you say, Percival. Let’s get you some fresh air and after I pick up my sister’s wedding gift, we can get you another ginger ale.” She cut the engine and took a better look at him. The man was definitely close to the color of day-old guacamole. “And maybe some Dramamine.”
He looked around and then stared back at her, total confusion making his forehead wrinkle. “You’re buying a wedding present at a gas station?”
“This isn’t just any gas station. It’s The Stop Inn.” Not that she expected him to understand what that meant, but for her entire high school life, this place had been about as close to magic as it got.
When a person grew up in the sticks, there were limited entertainment options. They could cruise up and down Main Street. They could have beers and a bonfire in someone’s back pasture. They could come to The Stop Inn for coffee that was more non-dairy creamer than java and make detailed plans of exactly how they were going to escape their small town. She didn’t have to glance over at Will to know he didn’t get it. How could he? He grew up rich in the big city where his every want was granted.
“And The Stop Inn means?” he asked, following her inside.
The smile that broke out on her face started in her heart. “Stacey and Kristine.”
…
Maybe Will should have been more worried when he heard the chain saw, but he was so damn glad to be out of the car that not even the fact that he was walking through an aisle of cinnamon-scented car air fresheners located right next to porcelain figurines of semis being driven by reindeer while Santa’s sleigh was on the roof made him think twice. Plus, there was the fact that he couldn’t stop sneaking looks at Hadley’s perfect round ass as he followed her through the gift shop part of the building that also contained a small diner complete with bright-yellow Formica tables. It wasn’t until they were past the novelty T-shirts that said things like Country Built and Farm Tough that the unmistakable revving he’d only heard in horror movies sounded. And when Hadley walked through a glass door hidden behind the sign labeled Trucker Shower Only, the noise hit him in the face loud enough to make his teeth rattle.
A rangy woman with a military-grade short haircut was wielding the chain saw, going at a large log that looked like a half-carved bear. She wore a band T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the kind of safety goggles he hadn’t seen since he’d done chemistry experiments in boarding school. As soon as they cleared the doorway into what seemed to be a courtyard with a huge steel building on one end, he and Hadley walked around so she was in the other woman’s line of sight.
A slow smile curled the woman’s mouth upward and she turned off the chain saw, laid it down, and raised her safety goggles onto her forehead. “Trigger?”
“Stacey!” Hadley crossed over and gave the other woman a hug. “It’s been forever.”
“Too long for sure. Hey, Kristine,” the woman yelled in the general direction of the big outbuilding. “Come look what the cat dragged in.”
A second woman, hair pulled into a tight ponytail, came out of the building and took one look at Hadley before breaking into a quick jog and joining in on the hug. After that, it was the kind of rush of talking only old friends had, a sort of coded language like he had with Web—except with these three, it was punctuated by giggles, hugs, and something about getting caught breaking curfew. Hadley showed off a few pictures on her phone of Harbor City while the other women held hands and oohed and ahhed at the appropriate intervals.
Once the three of them finally took a breath, Kristine turned around and gave him an assessing look. “So are you going to introduce us?”
Hadley stepped closer to him, pulling him into the trio’s gravitational pull. “This is my friend Will Holt. He came with me for Adalyn’s wedding. Will, these are two of my oldest friends, Stacey and Kristine Van Camp.”
He shook the other women’s hands, and then they all went over to a porch outside the huge building, where there was a pitcher of tea and a cooler filled with ice and sodas.
“You reliving old high school memories coming all the way out here?” Stacey asked after they’d all caught up.
“Actually, we were on our way to get PawPaw, and I was hoping to buy the perfect wedding present for Adalyn. She’s been searching for just the right hope chest for a while, and I figured you two might have something in stock.”
Kristine nodded. “We picked up a few in an estate auction out in Central Kansas. They’d be over in the furniture section. Go on and look your fill. You know we’ll give you the family discount.”
Will followed Hadley past the huge dragons, wolves, and deer carved out of wood and into a building roughly the size of the big barn on her parents’ ranch. It took him a second for his eyes to adjust after coming in from the bright sunshine. Once he did, though, his jaw fell open. The place was huge and filled with what had to be half a million dollars’ worth of oddities and antiques, all in various states of refinishing.
“What is this place?” he asked. “Is that an iron lung?”
Hadley followed his gaze to the big metal tube. “I think it is.”
Of all the things he’d expected to see in flyover country, he never pictured a collection like this. There were wagons, Victorian-era furniture, what looked like an actual buckskin suit, and family photographs that had to date back from the pioneer days.
“Who are these people?”
Hadley started off toward the far corner of the building to the area that had furniture. “Stacey and Kristine ended up at an estate auction by accident on their honeymoon and they got hooked on finding unique pieces. They got so much good stuff that they opened up an online shop and ship their finds out to places around the world. It’s the perfect place to get something unique for Adalyn. Help me look through the hope chests and see if you can find one that doesn’t top a hundred dollars.”