“So how long you been stalked?” he asked as he shoved his phone away.
Her startle was the kind that couldn’t be camo’d. But she gave it a shot: “Stalked—what do you mean? I’m not—”
“I’m a stranger. You can be honest with me. Ex-boyfriend? Current lover?” He frowned and thought of the women who’d clamored for pics of her earlier. “Or wait, are you famous?”
“No, I’m not—well, kind of, but not really—” She reached out and put her hand on his arm. “Listen, you really should go.”
Mimicking her, he leaned down and laid his palm on her shoulder. “Listen, I’m going nowhere.” When she exhaled in frustration, he shrugged. “You honestly think I’d leave a woman here alone, especially when she’s looking around like she’s expecting to be jumped? I wasn’t raised that way.”
“I don’t need your protection.”
“Fine.” He pushed his hands into the front pockets of his blue jeans and rocked back and forth in his boots. “I’ll just hang out and enjoy this bracing wind—which just so happened to cheat me out of five hours of pay. Two years in construction and this is the first night the foreman’s had to call us off shift because of the weather. So, how ’bout those Mets.”
The wind roared as if he’d offended the shit, and as the inside of his ears burned from the cold, he muttered, “Okay, wrong season for baseball. Who you got in the Super Bowl.”
When she didn’t reply, he took a moment to appreciate the sight of her in all his Carhartt. Having her in his big, shitty coat was like wrapping a beauty queen in Tyvek, but she didn’t seem to mind—and the RCG virus he’d clearly come down with made him feel like that reflected well on her character.
Rose Colored Glasses, that was.
“I’m not budging until you’re safely in a car.” Hell, she was lucky he wasn’t going to insist on riding along with her. “And talk to me about what kind of famous you are. If you want. Or we can just stand here awkwardly.”
“I guess you’d call me an influencer.” She glanced at the entrance to Bathe for the hundredth time. “But I’m getting out of that line of work.”
“To do what.”
“I don’t know.” She turned back to him. “Please—”
“Ask you more? Love to.” He wished he’d brought his cigarettes with him. “What are you going to do if you leave the ‘influencer’ thing.”
As he motioned to encourage her response, he felt like he was trying to start an old engine, and had to wonder if this was what people felt like when they were around him.
“Ah… I want to do something that matters.” She huddled into his coat and stamped her high heels as if she was trying to get feeling backin her bare toes. “And I know that’s the kind of thing somebody says when they’re trying to look like a good person.”
“Depends on whether you mean it. Do you? Mean it.”
“We aren’t here forever,” she said hoarsely. “On my deathbed, I don’t want my greatest accomplishment to be that I took a lot of pictures of myself and carpet-bombed the internet with them.”
“Well, that’s noble.” Dev pointed at the center of his own chest. “?’Course you’re looking at a guy who jackhammers concrete and pulls up carpeting for a living. So I’m not exactly a Nobel Prize winner over here. Takes all kinds.”
“That’s honest work, though. A good, hard day’s work. When you’re finished, you’ve made a building look better, function better—why are you staring at me like that?”
“I’m not.” Fuck, what was he saying… “Looking at you like anything.”
The last thing he wanted to admit—to either of them—was that she was showing serious signs of being more than just a beauty queen. Meanwhile, the wind caught her hair again, pulling a blond wave out of his jacket collar as if to mock him.
Yeah, whatever, he already knew the shit was silky and gleamed like gold.
“Here’s your car,” he said gruffly.
As a Tesla auto-driver pulled up in front of them, he got his phone back out and offered her a hand over the snowbank. On the far side, he flashed the barcode that had been texted next to the door, and the passenger panel lifted.
“Your carriage awaits,” he said as he went to help her in.
“You didn’t need to do this.” But at least she slid into the seat as she spoke.
“It’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
Her eyes, those incredible, mismatched eyes, lifted to meet his—and he could have sworn they glowed with unshed tears. “What if I programmed it to go to Washington, D.C. Or Seattle?”
