Page 18 of Cold Foot Revenge
He belted out a laugh and jogged to the passenger side door of his truck. It was really nice. It was a black one with big black tires and black rims and looked like he’d taken it through a car wash. It was probably loud too.
“You sound jaded,” he pointed out as he held her door open for her.
“And you look rich,” she said, scrunching up her face. “Minus ten hot points.”
“Rich guys turn you off?” he asked as she climbed up in his truck.
“Yep. They’re out of touch with the real world.”
“Oh God, you’re one of those,” he said, but there was teasing in his words. “Well, good thing for you I’m not rich.” He gave an empty smile and closed her door.
She tracked his progress around the front of his very nice, and very clean truck and when he climbed in behind the wheel, she pointed out, “This truck sure looks like a rich-boy truck.”
“I worked my ass off for it.”
“What do you do for work?”
“Dance,” he deadpanned.
She snorted. “Asshole.”
“Nah, I work on roads. I’ve done that for years. I had a work truck and everything in Darby, but I needed something to get around in when I quit, so this is new.”
“You must have a lot of savings,” she said, feeling the texture of the console that separated their seats.
“I have some. But you know, I don’t have kids, and I was just renting a house back in Darby, and my bills were pretty small, and I did well with my job, so other than beer and hot pocket money, I didn’t really have much to spend my paychecks on. This is my big spend,” he explained.
Oh. Okay. That actually sounded really nice, and a smart way to do things. “Are you one of those boys with a 401k?” she asked.
“Will it give me plus or minus hot points if I say yes?”
“It gives you plus points if you’re always honest. I can hear lies. You don’t have to answer though. It’s none of my business.”
He turned on his truck, and sure enough it was loud. “I have a 401k. I have to roll it over to my next job. I need to start looking for road crews around here. I worked for MDOT where I was living before.”
This man could build and fix stuff too? He just kept getting hotter and hotter.
Tanner’s was twenty minutes away, and they were already late for the reservation, but Dylan asked her to stay put in her seat. She thought he was going to go inside and explain her to his parents so they would be polite or something, but instead he strode around his truck to her door and opened it like one of those gentlemen on television.
She didn’t know what to do with this behavior. “Are you messing with me?” she asked him.
“Do you want me to mess with you?” he asked, looking confused.
“No.”
“Sweet, because I definitely do not think I’m messing with you. Stop overthinking. Just breathe.”
Just breathe. Right. She scanned the parking lot to make sure no one was watching them, and then she slid her hand against his offered one and allowed him to help her out of the truck.
This was a first, and truth be told, she actually enjoyed this. She would never admit to that aloud in a hundred years, but having a man cater to her was kind of…nice.
It was going to suck when he started acting like all men did and being an asshole. Or when he disappeared on her, which he needed to do. For that reason, she declined to slide her hand into the crook of his elbow when he offered. “That’s not my thing,” she told him, and was thankful he was human and couldn’t hear lies, because she herself heard the lie in her own voice, and it surprised the hell out of her.
Affection wasn’t her thing…right?
It hadn’t been for a long time.
But the memory of the pressure of his hand on the back of her neck as he kissed her in the hotel room brought another wave of that strange fluttering sensation to her stomach, and on this short walk across the parking lot, she didn’t know herself at all.
