Author: Jill Shalvis

“How do you know my tank’s on empty?”

“Call it a hunch,” he said.

Letting out a breath, she headed toward his truck. He opened the door for her and let her in, then walked around and slid behind the wheel.

“I know what I get out of this,” she said. “But what do you get out of it?”

“Your sunny and sweet disposition?”

She laughed, which made his morning.

“Maybe I like your company, too,” he said.

She glanced over at him as if searching for sarcasm. He let her look, because for once he wasn’t feeling sarcastic.

She pulled out her list. “I need to go to the nursery.”

He headed in that direction, neither of them speaking, though the silence was easy. Five minutes later he’d pulled into the nursery parking lot.

Aubrey didn’t move to get out of the truck. “Something that has nothing to do with my list—I had a crush on you in high school.”

Surprised, he turned in his seat and looked at her. She looked at him right back. It just might have been the most real thing she’d ever said to him, right after what she’d so sweetly whispered in his ear last night—Please, Ben, please don’t stop, you feel so good…

“I know.”

She stared at him for a beat, and then, looking mortified, fumbled with the door handle.

He hit the AUTO LOCK button.

“Damn it. Let me go.”

He’d done a lot of that in his life—letting go. He didn’t feel like doing it this time.

Aubrey fought the door, but he’d been fast with the locks. When she figured out how to unlock the door, he simply hit AUTO LOCK again. He’d always been damn fast. He gave off that laid-back vibe, but he could move like lightning. His hand slid up her arm to her neck.

“Don’t,” she whispered. She didn’t want him to be nice. She couldn’t handle nice.

But of course he didn’t listen. Instead he turned her to face him, his expression dialed to confusion.

Stupid male race. They never understood. “I’m embarrassed,” she explained.

This appeared to confuse him even more. “Why?” he asked. “You were damn hot in high school. It’s just that you were a few years behind me, and I was with Hannah.”

She closed her eyes for a beat. “The way you looked at me last night? Back then, I’d have done anything to have you look at me like that.”

“Nothing about that time can be changed,” he said with a painful gentleness that made her want to run far and wide. “But we’re here now.”

“We’re here now.” She stared up at him, because suddenly she was the confused one. “What does that mean?”

“We’re…” He trailed off.

She waited, but he didn’t say more. She knew she should remain quiet and force him to fill the silence, but the suspense was killing her. “We’re what? Together?” she asked, heart pounding, pounding, pounding.

He rubbed his jaw, and the sound of his stubble seemed loud in the truck interior.

And sexy.

But the movement was a tell, a rare show of uncertainty from a man who always knew his next move. “We’re what?” she asked again, needing to know with a shocking desperation.

“We’re…” He blew out a breath. “Hell if I know.”

Fair enough, she supposed. “Wait here?” she asked, pausing while he hit unlock before sliding out of the truck. She shook the sexy Mr. McDaniel from her thoughts—as if it were that easy—and walked into the nursery, where she asked for Dusty Barren.

“He doesn’t work here anymore,” the guy at the checkout counter told her.

“Okay,” Aubrey said. “Do you know where I could reach him?”

“I’m sorry.” The clerk shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “He died last year.”

Ben was only halfway through beating Jack’s ass on Words with Friends when Aubrey came back to the truck, looking solemn.

“I need to go to the cemetery,” she said.

This surprised him. He knew this had something to do with someone on her list. Sometimes she was happy when she got through with one, sometimes she would cry—which killed him. He tried to remember who else was on the list from the few brief glimpses he’d gotten, and who might have died.

He had no idea.

So he drove her to the cemetery.

Once there, she again slid out of the truck. Ben watched her vanish over the hill to the right. When she was gone, he got out of the truck, too, and headed to the hill on the left. He walked about a quarter of a mile before he got to the right headstone.

HANNAH WALSH MCDANIEL.

He crouched down and brushed some dirt off the stone. “Hey, babe,” he said. “It’s been a while.” He blew out a sigh and waited for the usual stab of pain.

But it was only an ache. Worse, he had to strain to see her face in his mind.

Her voice had faded a long time ago.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and ran his fingers over her headstone again.

He heard the crunch of the frozen ground behind him and knew it was Aubrey. She stayed back a respectful few feet, quiet, which was unlike her.

Quiet had been Hannah’s style, but it wasn’t Aubrey’s. Aubrey was volatile. Passionate.

Hannah had never fought. Never.

And Aubrey fought for everything.

“You had a good marriage,” Aubrey said.

She hadn’t worded it as a question, but he knew she was asking. And the truth was, he’d always believed he’d had a great marriage. It’d been serene, calm. He’d liked that.

But now…now he wasn’t sure whether quiet and calm would do it for him. Since that was a path he didn’t want to go down—wondering if he and Hannah would be happy today with the man he’d become—he shrugged off the unsettled feelings the question brought and craned his neck to look at Aubrey. “We were young,” he said simply.

Staring at him, she nodded. “Life sucks.”

“Sometimes,” he agreed, and rose. He searched her face, saw that she’d made peace with whatever she’d set out to do here, which he was glad for. He offered her a hand.

They walked back to the truck in silence.

Chapter 20

Several days later, Aubrey sat at her desk, staring at her open notebook. Number seven on her list was weighing on her mind. She’d worked at the nursery for two weeks in her junior year of high school. The owner had never let her near the plants—he’d claimed to know after one look at someone if he or she had a black thumb, which Aubrey did—so instead, she’d been an all-around grunt, doing whatever had been required: sweeping, answering phones, running errands.

One of the other hired hands had been a special-needs teenager her same age. Dusty Burrows had been big as a horse, so it made sense that he’d been hired as the heavy lifter—bags of cement, manure, trees—whatever’d been needed.

He’d had a crush on Aubrey, which he’d shown by leaving flowers on her car and helping her with chores, all with a sweet smile on his silent face. He’d never spoken to her, not once. He rarely spoke to anyone, only when he had to.

Then one day he stopped smiling at her, stopped helping her, stopped leaving her flowers. He stopped being her friend entirely, and she didn’t know why.

One year later, she’d been cleaning out her car when she’d found a birthday card, lost and forgotten deep between the seats. It’d been from Dusty, confessing his love for her.

She’d been embarrassed, both for him and for herself, and she’d thrown the card away and not dealt with it.

In hindsight, she’d always known that he most likely thought she’d ignored him or, worse, laughed at him.

She hated herself for that.

The bell over the bookstore’s front door rang, and Aubrey prepared a smile. To her surprise, it was Carla. Her sister was in her usual pale blue scrubs, but looking a lot less tired than she had a week ago. “Hey,” Aubrey said.

Carla leaned against the checkout counter, her expression impossible to read.

Already becoming a doctor, Aubrey thought wryly. Carla didn’t fidget, didn’t hedge. She got right to the point. “Do you remember that time you got in trouble at the library?” she asked. “For having sex in the reference section with Anthony, the principal’s son?”

“I remember,” Aubrey said carefully. “Though I’m surprised you do.”

Carla closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and then met Aubrey’s gaze again. “I remember, because it was me.”

Aubrey blinked. “Say what?”

“It was me. I had sex with Anthony in the reference section of the high school library.”

Aubrey stared at her. “One more time.”

Carla’s smile was tight. “Yeah,” she said. “And it gets worse. I knew you got blamed. That you were suspended. I knew you got in big trouble, that Dad jumped all over Mom’s shit about how she’d raised you, and in return you then jumped all over Dad for being mean to Mom. It tore up the very tenuous peace between the four of us. But the only thing I felt at the time was this huge, overwhelming relief that it wasn’t me who got suspended.”

Aubrey was so stunned about the whole confession she could hardly speak. “Why?”

Carla looked pained and embarrassed, both new expressions for her. “I had a crush on him. I thought I loved him.”

“No: I mean why did you let everyone think it was me?”

“Yeah. Well, that’s a lot more complicated.” Carla paused. “I’m not proud of it,” she said quietly. “But the best I’ve got is that I really wanted to be brave and strong and independent—like you.”

“Me,” Aubrey repeated.

“Yes. I wanted to not care what people thought of me,” Carla said. “I wanted to be…” She smiled sadly. “Well, you, Aubrey. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t anything close to you. I could only wish I was.”

Aubrey stared at her. “Seriously?”

“Hand to heaven,” Carla said, and bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry. So sorry. I was rude when you tried to apologize to me, and that was guilt. You’re forgiven for that stupid internship thing; of course you’re forgiven.”

Aubrey felt a weight lift. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. And thanks for bringing me food and watching out for my plants. You went over and above, and I’m so grateful for you.” She drew in a deep breath. “And now…well, I’m sort of hoping you’d forgive me. For not owning up to my mistake and letting you take the fall.”

“It’s ancient history,” Aubrey said honestly. “And anyway, I did plenty of stuff in that library I shouldn’t have. Karma was bound to come around and bite me on the ass at some point.”

“You’re not mad?” Carla asked softly.

“Trust me. In the grand scheme of my life, that incident was nothing.”

“But you were grounded for three months,” Carla reminded her. “And Dad…well, he never let you forget it. You took it, though—you took everything he dished out to you, always.”

Aubrey shrugged. “I had Mom.”

Carla hesitated, and then nodded. “So we’re good?”

“We’re good,” Aubrey promised. And then the two of them shared what might have been their first genuine smile.

The next evening, right after the bookstore closed for the day, Ben went to work on paint touch-up. He’d spent the last few nights painting walls, and the place was looking brand new.

Aubrey came down the stairs from her loft. She was in her coat and boots, her purse over her arm, and he nearly opened his mouth to ask if she’d consider modeling just those boots again. Clearly the paint fumes had gone to his head. “Going out?” he asked.