Chapter 10
Hunter
D ammit, woman! Just how many times, exactly, were you gonna make me honk before you pulled over?”
“At least you’re acknowledging I’m a woman now.” She sighs with an air of snobbery that I want to cover with my mouth.
I knew it was her the minute I got behind her car, and not because it looks like Pepto-Bismol on wheels. Because only Devyn Lynn would spend thousands making her car match her nails just to drive around with her muffler dangling by less than a shred of metal.
This girl makes me so mad sometimes. Doesn’t she know how dangerous that could have been for her? I suck my teeth because I don’t think she does. She’s certainly not acting like I’ve done her any favors, cocking her hip to the side and crossing her arms defensively as if I’m inconveniencing her .
Somehow, I’m obsessed with this woman.
“Last time I checked, pulling over for crazy jerks in pickup trucks who won’t stop honking at you was dangerous for girls like me, so you’re lucky I stopped at all.”
“Oh, dangerous, is it? Kinda like driving around with your muffler two seconds short of falling off?”
She furrows her brows and looks to the side at the pink monstrosity she calls a Jeep, then huffs at me like a horse that finally got broke.
“The muffler?”
I scrub my hand down my face. “For Christ’s sake, Devyn, you don’t know where the muffler is, do you?”
She scrunches her nose, and it’s annoying how cute it looks. “Um, no?”
“Fuck…all right, let me just—” I’m halfway through taking my shirt off when her sass stops me in my tracks.
“Um, excuse you! We are not messing around, if that’s what you think’s gonna happen while I’m in town. I hope you’re aware of this.”
“Are you kidding me?” I peer at her through the neck hole. “I’m gonna get under your car, baby, not attack you with my glorious muscles. Don’t get your panties all twisted. Unless you like that sorta thing.”
“Ew! Glorious muscles? I can’t even with you.”
“No, I guess you can’t, can you?”
Well, shit. I don’t know why the hell I said that to her. Fuckin’ stupid.
She backs away, and she has every right to. It was a dick thing to say to her, considering everything between us.
“I’m sorry.”
She nods, casting her gaze away from mine and slicing little cuts in my heart.
That’s my own damn fault.
I move past her to get the ramps from the back of my truck. I don’t normally have these in here, but I feel a smile tug at my mouth thinking about how Aunt Sarah used to say, God knows when you need intervenin g.
Last week, my pal Bobby’s car needed some work, and I loaned him these ramps. I picked ‘em back up a few days ago, just hadn’t gotten ‘em back out of the truck yet.
Aunt Sarah would say it was divine intervention, God putting us back in the same place together like this. To face our issues and…then what? Come together again?
I’m a God-fearin’ man and all, but I’m not like…I don’t believe he’s got an individual plan for each of us like some do. What about choice? Devyn didn’t choose me. She couldn’t choose me.
But she could now.
If she wanted.
We’re not the same people we were as kids. Could it be that simple?
I wish Aunt Sarah were here to answer that for me, and I feel that painful tug in my chest being reminded that she isn’t. Even if she were, she’d give me some rhetorical or metaphorical bullshit, anyway.
You’ll know what’s in your heart when you start paying more mind to it , that’s what she’d say.
Right now, my heart’s outside of my chest, Aunt Sarah. It’s five-foot-seven with blonde hair, a spattering of pink everything, and eyes that shine like emeralds when she’s mad.
Yeah, she’s what’s in my heart, all right. I just need to unfreeze hers . And who better to unfreeze it than the asshole who put the ice there in the first place? If I can just convince her to give us another chance.
I toss the shirt at Devyn, and she catches it. A smile pulls across my lips and warmth floods me with that one action of hers. She doesn’t totally hate me. She watches my body while I get down under the Jeep and check why the muffler’s come detached. I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m making a show of working just for her, but I might flex my arms more than necessary. Just a little.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing down there?”
“Do you?” I ask from under the Barbie-mobile. Seriously, even the metal on the undercarriage is rose gold. I smirk at how simultaneously stupid and cute that is, but I give her shit all the same because I can. “For a girl who spends money on a ride to be custom made just to match her life aesthetic, you sure don’t take very good care of it.”
“First of all, not a girl . I’m a woman, as we’ve already established on more than one occasion. I’d prefer not to see you regress, thank you very much. And okay, so I didn’t know about mufflers. Most people don’t! How do you even know? Is that something else you film in your undies for your little page?”
She might think it stings, but it doesn’t.
She’s always been a tease, and I’ve always liked it.
I roll out from the Jeep and meet her stare with a lick of my lips and a onceover of her sassy little body just to make her squirm like I know it does.
“You’re suddenly so concerned with the amount of clothes I wear on the Internet. Jealous, baby?” I wink at her, snag my screwdriver, and roll back under the Jeep before she can reply. “It’s not my real job, by the way,” I shout from under the carriage. “It’s just a side hustle. I learned to work on cars and tractors on my farm.”
“Your farm?”
And that, right there, puts our situation into perspective. She’s been out of my life so long she doesn’t even know about my life’s work. Shit, the whole town knows about Friendly Farms. It practically is the town these days.
“Yeah, I, uh…have my own little stretch of land now, just past the Presley ranch. You know the one, that bend by Piper Creek?”
I can’t see her, but I hear the gasp, the wonder in her voice, and that wonder pulls at every bit of hope I have for us, for every bit of hope I’ve had this whole time she’s been away.
“That old farmhouse that was back there. From when we were kids…is that…you actually bought it?”
I roll out with the muffler in hand and rise to my feet to look at her, really look at how fucking beautiful Devyn Lynn is.
“I did.”
I turn away from her. I can’t see her face. I don’t want to be disappointed by her reaction to something so important to me. Those are memories and feelings I won’t give up even if she does want them back.
“What are you doing with the muffler?” she says from behind me. I walk to the bed of my truck and place the muffler into it. She follows me and pokes at my shoulder.
“Earth to Hunter! Helloooo. The muffler? Will my car be okay without it attached?” She eyes her Jeep with concern, and it’s cute that she thinks I’m letting her ride away in that, so I give her a few minutes to live in that fantasy before I burst her bubble.
“Nope.”
“Nope?”
“You heard me.”
“Well, how am I supposed to get home, then?”
I stop and turn to her.
“Home?”
It seems like we stay locked in each other’s gazes for a full sixty seconds while we both muse over the word home …and its possible meaning.
“Yeah, um.” She fiddles with the balled-up T-shirt I’m pretty sure she forgot was mine. I can’t help but smirk at that. She can keep it, for all I care. I wish she would. “I’m staying at Dustin’s, I guess.”
“What happened to Shana’s?”
It’s kind of cruel that I ask because I already know. When she initially mentioned Shana’s as the place she’d be staying, I realized she didn’t know about Shana’s dad. I have no idea why she wouldn’t tell her best friend about Randall’s stage four pancreatic cancer, but it seems Shana has some secrets she’s been keeping.
And it’s not my job to spill them. So, since I don’t know how much Devyn knows, I tread carefully with the information I have.
“It seems Shana’s spare room is occupied. I don’t know. I’m catching up with her later at Cowboy’s Paradise. Anyway, is my car okay to drive, or do I need to call an Uber?”
I whistle through my teeth at this little princess. She never ceases to amaze me with her bullshit. “You musta been gone way longer than anyone realized. You know better than to think there’s a ride share within fifty miles of this town.”
“I just assumed you guys had risen to levels of advanced civilization by now.” She puts her hands on her hips and lets out a groan as she looks to the sky. “Whyyyyy?”
I swing the passenger door of my truck wide open and nod at my girl. “Get in, drama queen.”
“You wish. My days of climbing in your truck are long gone.”
Is that so? “Well, go on, then, take your chances hitchhiking out here so far from town. Sure hope you don’t end up abducted and put in a box under some creeper’s bed.”
“Oh, fuck off, Hunter.” She stares down at her phone. “Google says it is fine to drive within thirty miles, but to get the vehicle serviced at the soonest possible time thereafter. Looks like I’ll be driving myself to my brother’s. Not in a box.”
I stomp ahead of her and block her way to the Jeep, because there is no way in hell she’s driving that thing all the way to town with the emissions blowing back at her.
“Seriously, Dev, you could get carbon-monoxide poisoning. You’re not driving it.”
“Really?” she asks, nose scrunched as she scrolls through her phone to confirm the validity of my statement. “I don’t see that here in the article. It just says—”
“Cut the shit, babygirl. You and I both know there ain’t a chance in hell of me lettin’ you drive yourself away in that poison pumping gob of bubble gum, and there isn’t a chance in Heaven that God didn’t put me here in the same place to help you out, so just pop your trunk so I can get your bags and get in my damn truck.”
She looks mad as hell, but damn, it’s sexy.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Fine.