17. The Threshold Rule #3
He pauses at the driver's door. Turns his head just enough to give me the side of that maddening grin.
"When we both have time," he says.
"That is not an answer."
"It's the most honest one I've got, Blooming Apricot. Ask me again when there isn't a government deadline with your name on it in nine hours, and I'll consider giving you a real one." He pulls the door open. "Go inside. Lock up behind you. Text me if the road's empty at eight."
He folds himself back into the cab. I cross my arms over his shirt and plant myself at the bottom of my steps and refuse, on sheer principle, to be the one who goes in first. I've lost enough ground to this man in one day.
A woman has to hold a line, even a petty one, even one made entirely of stubbornness and cold feet.
Through the windshield I can see him settle in and catch the shape of him laughing at me — at the mulish set of me, rooted in my own dark garden like I mean to overwinter there — and lift one hand in a small wave that says go on, then. I see you. I'm not looking away.
Drive off, Devereaux. It is midnight and I have embarrassed myself enough for one full lunar cycle.
He turns the key.
The engine turns over, coughs once, and dies.
I'm already mid-pivot toward my door, one hand on the cold rail, when the sound stops me. That ugly mechanical failure-to-catch — unmistakable, even to a woman whose entire relationship with engines consists of the word please. I look back.
He tries again. The starter grinds. Nothing. A third time, and the truck only wheezes at him, dead and stubborn, the headlights guttering a shade dimmer with each attempt.
"Try it again," I call from the safety of my steps, arms crossed.
"I've tried it three times, Boss."
"Try it with feeling."
He turns the key with, I can only assume, tremendous feeling. The truck makes the sound of a man clearing his throat to say something important, then thinking the better of it. Nothing.
"She's gone," he informs the empty street, with the grim finality of a coroner. "Battery, alternator, or the universe. My money's on the universe."
"The universe does not strand men outside my house at midnight," I say. "It has genuinely better things to do."
"Does it, though?" He looks at me through the dark. "Because from where I'm sitting, it has been remarkably invested in your love life all week."
The night goes very quiet. Even the water at the end of the street seems to be leaning in to listen.
Sawyer sits with his hand still on the key.
Then, slowly — so slowly I get to watch him arrive at the exact conclusion I've already reached — he turns his head and looks at me through the open window.
No smirk on him now. Just a flat, disbelieving, faintly helpless expression: the face of a man who spends his entire life engineering flawless outcomes for other people and cannot, at this precise moment, engineer himself a working alternator.
I arch a single eyebrow at him. He arches one right back, and it says, plain as speech, I swear on my grandmother's grave I did not plan this.
The terrible thing is, I believe him. I watched him try. I watched the confusion cross his face, honest as weather. Whatever this is, he didn't build it — and I have spent my whole career learning to tell a real disaster from a staged one.
Which leaves exactly one architect. She has never once returned my calls.
"You have got to be joking," I inform the sky.
The sky declines to comment.
I could fix this. That's the thing. I could call Marlowe, who would arrive blessedly furious in her salvage van and drive this man to the inn with no commentary beyond a single raised eyebrow I'd be answering for at brunch for a decade.
I could call a car. I could make him wait for it out here, on the correct side of my threshold, and keep my oldest rule intact and my night uncomplicated and mine.
I run every option in the two seconds I've got, the way I run a seating chart, the way I run everything.
Then I stop running options, which is not a thing I do.
I look at the dead truck. I look at the man inside it — the one who ran a mile in ruined shoes to reach me, hid me beneath his own steering wheel, asked permission before every single thing he did tonight, and is now marooned outside my house at the stroke of midnight through no fault of his that I can prove.
I look at my own front door. My threshold.
My oldest, firmest rule, written in the one currency I swore I'd never spend again.
Then I let out a long breath that fogs white in the cold. I climb my three crooked steps. I turn the deadbolt. I push the door open into the warm dark of the home I built, entirely by myself, for an occupancy of exactly one.
"I'll keep it unlocked," I say, not looking back at him — because if I look back at him now, I will lose whatever's left of my composure in the rosebushes.
Behind me I hear his door creak open. I hear him laugh — soft, stunned, indecently pleased — into the midnight hush of my street.
Guess fate wants me to have an Alpha in my house tonight.