Chapter 2 #2
“Thanks.” She smoothed over the wobble in her voice with a cleared throat. “Seems like you did pretty well, yourself. Fancy
car, fancy clothes . . .” She gestured to his charcoal blazer and pressed black slacks. “I’m guessing you didn’t end up at
the steel mill.”
He laughed. “Nope. Real estate.”
“That’s fantastic.”
He slid the Tesla into a parking spot outside the Kroger. Glowing neon letters arced above the store’s front doors, backlit
by the fading sky. In the distance, the mill crouched like a watchful spider.
“Just tell me what you need, and I’ll grab it,” he said. “No reason to make that ankle any worse.”
Aubrey bit her lip, hesitant to indebt herself further. Gallant didn’t seem to expect anything in exchange for the ride, but
she didn’t think she’d imagined the appreciative glow in his eyes.
The corners of his mouth flicked up. “I can’t get over how incredible you look. Really.”
Nope, not imagining it at all. “Thanks,” she said crisply. “But I’d better go in myself. I have extra shoes in my suitcase,
so I’ll just change real quick. I won’t be long.”
His forehead knitted. “You sure?”
“Yep.”
He shrugged and pulled out his cell phone, settling in to wait. Aubrey limped to the trunk to swap her stilettos for ballet
flats. By the time the store’s sliding doors hissed open, the throb in her ankle had her questioning her decision, but she
straightened her spine and pushed onward.
Inside, more men in coveralls and women in jeans browsed beneath fluorescent lights. A poster soliciting donations for Henderson’s homeless pets met her front and center.
She paused and dug through her purse for a twenty, then pondered the wisdom of parting with it. Breaking her lease in New
York had also broken her bank account, but she would earn more money, eventually. Worthy causes couldn’t usually wait.
That decided, she stuffed the bill into the bucket and found a cart, letting the pushbar take most of her weight. She rolled
over to a display of firewood. If there was one thing she had missed about Henderson, it was the rambling old Victorian she’d grown up in. The majestic two-story boasted a wood-burning
fireplace, which would come in handy, given that the furnace had been switched off for years and Aubrey had no idea how to
rectify that. Tomorrow, she’d hire a handyman, but tonight, her plans involved a steaming mug of tea and a good, old-fashioned
roaring blaze.
After loading up on firewood and basic groceries, she found the first-aid aisle. Now that she was moving around, the sprain
didn’t feel as debilitating as it had initially, but a brace wouldn’t go amiss.
Aubrey was gazing down, trying to decide between the ACE wrap in one hand and the lace-up brace in the other, when the hair
on her neck lifted. A tingle flooded her skin.
And she knew. She just knew Nick Thacker hadn’t moved away. Somehow, the cadence of his footsteps still lived within her memory.
He came up behind her and stopped.
Her lungs quavered, but she stayed still, determined not to give him the satisfaction of turning around. He’d have to ask,
and even then, she might walk away without even showing her face.
Except when he rasped a single word, it dropped straight into her.
“Aubrey?”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Holy god, it was just her name, but the way he said it unzipped her skin, reached into her chest,
and rearranged the beat of her heart. The mutinous thing pattered inside her ribs, its rhythm suddenly alien.
“Jesus,” he said. “Is that really you?”
Shit, shit, shit. He sounded exactly the way she remembered, like they’d stood here just yesterday instead of decades ago.
His voice was still so husky, still filled with quiet fire, like a match struck against rough stone.
She couldn’t help it. She turned around.
The sight of him hit her like a one-two punch. Nick might have sounded the same, but he didn’t look it, not at all. He was
all grown up. Tall enough that he could look down on her now, which made her wish uselessly for her stilettos. Another five
inches would have put her on par with his eyes, at least.
Not that anything could have prepared her to meet them. The color there reminded her of something depthless, so black she
had trouble distinguishing where his irises ended and his pupils began. And while his eyes still tipped up at the corners,
that once-noble upsweep now lent him an air of lethal intensity. He looked so . . . male. So big. So mature.
Gone was the boy who’d snuck into her heart and ripped it apart with his bare hands. In his place stood a man, his face an
opus of sharp lines and hard angles.
She dropped her gaze, trying to escape the sudden flurry of her breathing, but the rest of him only compounded her problems. As a teenager, Nick had been skinny—frighteningly so—but now he’d filled out.
And then some. A gray tank top showcased the breadth of his shoulders while the sleeves of his unzipped navy coveralls knotted around a trim, muscular waist. He looked ridiculously fit, like he could punch through a concrete wall, if he wanted.
Knowing him, he probably could.
“It is you,” he said softly.
A shiver skimmed down her spine. She searched for something to say. Absolutely anything. “You cut your hair,” she blurted,
then winced.
God, of all the things she could’ve come up with after seventeen years—chief among them being how can you stand there looking so casual after you destroyed me?—that was what emerged. You cut your hair. Fan-freaking-tastic.
“Um. Yeah.” Nick scrubbed a hand across his scalp. His hair was as black as ever, but he’d shorn the unruly curls in favor
of a buzz cut no more than a quarter inch long.
She wished it made him ugly. It didn’t. If anything, it only heightened the impact of those angular features, the way they
conspired to rob her of breath. Somehow, Nick Thacker was more beautiful—more wildly dangerous—than he’d ever been.
“I get too hot at work, otherwise,” he said.
A long silence unspooled. Aubrey focused on the smudge of ash adorning his sculpted cheekbone. She wanted to break the brittle
quiet by screaming—at herself for internally falling to pieces, or maybe at that blackened smear. It looked strategic, as
if someone had painted it there, deliberate, for the express purpose of driving home how devastating he’d become.
Why couldn’t he have just gained weight? Or lost his hair, like a normal person?
Whatever. It didn’t matter. She needed to escape the suffocating buzz of the overhead lights. Now. “Well, it was nice seeing you. Or something. But Gallant’s waiting for me outside.”
“Gallant? As in, Gallant Nobel?” His shoulders tensed, the reaction seemingly unconscious, because his eyes never changed.
The impassivity there made her want to throw something.
Once, she’d understood every flash within those depths, but now his eyes were a cool dark secret, a word inked in an alphabet she’d once cherished but since forgotten.
He could’ve been pondering his grocery list or cursing her existence, and she wouldn’t have known the difference.
“Yeah.” She did her utmost to mirror his composure. “I sprained my ankle, and he’s helping me out.”
“Is he.”
God, she needed out. Away. Mustering all the dignity her injury would allow, she tossed both ACE bandage and brace into her
cart and limped off.
Just before she rounded the corner, Nick called out, “Aubrey, wait.”
She looked back. She shouldn’t have, but she seemed just as incapable of ignoring him now as she had been as a teenager.
His raven-dark brows crooked. “Seventeen years, and that’s all you’re going to say to me?”
Her breath caught at the way seventeen years rolled off his tongue as if he’d held the number in his mind already. As if it meant something to him. As if he’d kept track.
But the calculation was straightforward enough: their age now, less their age the last time they’d seen each other. Thirty-five
minus eighteen. Her calculator brain could do that in a nanosecond. She knew his could, too.
It meant nothing.
“Yes, Nick. That’s all there is to say.” Lifting her chin, she muscled her cart away and prayed this would be the last time they ever spoke.
But in a town like this, she probably wouldn’t get so lucky.