Chapter 2
A truck to the boobs
Gage
It was the kind of spring day that made the long, gray Pennsylvania winter worth tolerating.
My truck windows were down, my coffee was hot, and the April sun flashed through still-skeletal trees as I steered north on Lake Drive.
For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was back on track, and the goals I’d had to set aside a few years ago suddenly seemed attainable again. And I was ready to take aim.
“I’ll see you in my office at three, Mrs. Babcock,” I promised my client through the truck’s speaker.
I was in the middle of my favorite kind of day: busy. A full morning spent with my brothers on contracting jobs would lead right into a neatly stacked afternoon of appointments at my law office.
“I’ll bring my famous banana muffins and my granddaughter. The single straight one, not the married lesbian,” she clarified.
Since Story Lake’s population had experienced an over-sixty-five bump with the opening of the new assisted living facility, I’d had a string of clients trying to set me up with their single relatives.
It didn’t matter if I was swinging a hammer or preparing a will.
To the retiree crowd, apparently I was a hot commodity as a bachelor.
I didn’t mind it, seeing as how the dating apps I’d recently joined hadn’t exactly been delivering what I was looking for.
Was it really this hard to meet someone who was ready to get serious?
My brother Cam—one of the grumpiest people in the universe—had managed to do it just driving around town.
I was one hundred percent more charming and in a better mood most of the time. It should have been even easier for me.
“Looking forward to it,” I said before disconnecting the call and glancing over at my passenger.
She had her head out the window and was busy painting the side of the vehicle with a steady stream of slobber.
Nana—short for Banana Stand, thanks to my niece and nephews’ recent binge watch of Arrested Development—was a high-maintenance, low-IQ golden retriever rescued by my mother from a puppy mill.
Mom had billed Nana as a “temporary foster” when she dumped the four-legged roommate on me a few months ago.
But no one had gotten around to trying to get her adopted, and Nana and I had gotten used to each other.
So now I had a dog.
“Text message from Cammy,” my truck’s text-to-voice announced flatly. “‘Hey, dumbass. Don’t bother showing up if you forgot the spray foam.’ Would you like to reply?”
“Yeah. I’m going to spray-foam your face shut, dick,” I said.
“Text message from Livvy,” the truck announced. “‘Bring me a sandwich, Gigi. I’ll eat it while you suffocate, dickface.’”
My brothers were assholes. Lovable, sometimes even entertaining, assholes. I often wondered how our parents hadn’t murdered us during our teen years.
Nana flashed me a look of pure joy like she was having the best day of her life. I ruffled her reddish-gold ears and turned my attention back to the road, where another reddish-gold flash in the road caught my eye.
“Shit!”
I spun the wheel hard to the right while arm-barring Nana against the seat. The truck slid to a hard stop halfway into the ditch a split second before I heard rather than felt a faint thunk.
I released my seat belt and jumped out from behind the wheel. My heart stopped doing its job when I spotted her.
“Zoey!”
Behind me, Nana whimpered in the truck.
The woman I’d spent the last several months trying to forget about was lying on the road, having run into and bounced off my fender. Her curls were spread out above her like a fiery halo, and those mossy green eyes were squeezed shut.
Christ. I’d taken my eyes off the road for a split second. She’d come out of nowhere, and now she wasn’t moving. I knelt next to her and grabbed her wrist to check for a pulse. “Zoey!” I barked again, dread icing my entire body.
Her chest rose as she sucked in a breath and moaned. My heart restarted.
She let out a groan. “I hit your stupid truck with my body.”
Fucking hell.
“Yeah, you did,” I said grimly as I ran my hands over her limbs, checking for injuries. “The fuck, Zo? You could have gotten yourself killed. What the hell were you doing running into the middle of the damn road?”
This was exactly why I’d argued myself out of any attraction since she’d come to town. The woman was a natural disaster who failed to take anything seriously. She was impulsive and careless, too busy having a good time to bother with things like safety and responsibility.
“Yeah. Yelling at me is exactly what I need right now,” she grumbled.
My heart was still trying to pound its way out of my chest as my brain raced through every way this could have been catastrophic. And Zoey was cracking jokes.
“Shut up and tell me if you can move,” I ordered.
She had a scrape on her forearm and smudges of dirt everywhere, but nothing else seemed to be bleeding or broken.
She cracked open her eyes. They flashed green fire at me. Much as I tried not to notice them, she had the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen. “Which is it, smartass? Shut up or tell you if I can move?”
I leaned over her and gripped her chin in my hand to check her pupils. The panic receded by a few more degrees, but the adrenaline remained. “Your mouth appears to be working.”
“If I didn’t have the wind knocked out of me right now, I’d show you just how well it’s working…and not in the sexy way,” she amended quickly.
“Lucky me.”
My truck horn gave a long, aggressive blare, startling us both.
I turned around to find Nana in the driver’s seat, front paws on the wheel.
It was a trick she’d learned in the Wawa parking lot.
Every time she thought I’d been inside too long, she blew the horn like a complete asshole.
Cam thought it was hilarious. I was 90 percent sure he’d been the one to teach her the trick.
The dog leaned on the horn again, tongue lolling with joy.
“Nana! Get over here,” I ordered.
She hopped out of the truck, dragging her leash behind her, and nudged me nervously in the back. I put an arm around the dog’s neck to hold her back from the still-prone Zoey.
“Oh my God, Zoey! Are you okay?” Hazel sprinted up out of breath, dragging the scraggly, overexcited Meetcute. The little dog decided to add insult to injury and dropped the stick he was carrying on Zoey’s forehead.
Zoey shrugged off the stick and sat up. “Ow! That better not be another snake.”
“Snake? Did you hit your head when you threw yourself into my truck?” I asked, gripping her shoulder with one hand and trying to control the increasingly frantic Nana with the other. Humans at her eye level usually only meant one thing: playtime.
“A snake hit me in the head. You know, slithery, hissy, reptilian thing? And I didn’t throw myself into your truck. My boobs smashed into it. Why are you so pissed, by the way? Everyone always says you’re the nice brother, but you’ve been nothing but snarly for the past six months,” Zoey said.
“I believe I already pointed out the fact that you could have been killed playing around in the road. You need to be more fucking careful.” There was a bite of anger to my words that I couldn’t quite control.
My family knew all too well what carelessness behind the wheel could lead to. How quickly everything could change.
“Now you’re yelling? Great bedside manner, Dr. Asshole.”
“That’s Attorney Asshole,” I corrected snidely. There was something about this woman that kept pushing me off-kilter over and over again until I didn’t know which way was up, which was why I avoided her like a kid with lice.
“She wasn’t playing around, Gage,” Hazel insisted loyally. “Goose dropped a live snake on her back there, and she panicked.”
“I wasn’t panicking,” Zoey insisted as she brushed her hair out of her face, making the overall aesthetic worse without damaging the general punch-in-the-gut beauty.
I didn’t enjoy admitting it, but she certainly put the hot in hot mess.
“I was running and flailing in a perfectly controlled and appropriate manner,” Zoey continued.
“Like a fucking tornado,” I added.
“Why are you always arguing with me?” she demanded.
“He’s a lawyer. He can’t help being argumentative,” Hazel said.
“I’m not argumentative,” I argued.
Hazel and Zoey both pinned me with twin “you poor, stupid man” looks.
I started an internal countdown from ten.
I was halfway through when I noticed a small scrape on Zoey’s jawline and was just reaching out to examine it when Nana slipped out of my grip and joyfully slammed Zoey back to the ground.
The damn dog finished her attack with a swipe of long pink tongue to the face.
“Oooph!” Zoey screeched as she fought off Nana’s aggressive affection and sat back up. “Seriously? Animals are such jerks.”
Heaving a sigh, I wrestled the dog off her and shoved the leash in Hazel’s direction before reaching for Zoey again. “Give me your hands.”
“Why? So you can yell at them separately from the rest of my body?” Zoey asked.
That smart mouth was another prime reason why I had no interest in exploring any potential physical attraction. I wanted a reasonable, responsible partner, not a woman who drove me nuts thirty seconds into every conversation.
Irritated, I slid my hands under her arms and pulled her to her feet.
She was short and curvy. Everything about her, from the wild green of her eyes to the riotous red curls, seemed like it was designed specifically to catch my eye.
Like some kind of personal purgatory. I held her forearms to keep her steady and credited the electric feeling that coursed through me to the leftover adrenaline and the permanent annoyance she inspired in me.
“You okay?” I asked.
Turns out this was a stupid question.