But then his face lights up, which instantly transforms him from surly woodsman to… well, let’s just say he’s not at all unattractive and he’s got a great smile and my ex-boyfriend is ten feet away, albeit semi-conscious.
“Jesus,” he says. “This is really damn good.”
I smile. “Thank you.”
“No, I mean, really good.”
“Glad you like it.”
He takes another bite, more eagerly this time. I wonder when the last time he’s had a decent meal was. Jake isn’t exactly a guy who won’t eat at a restaurant that doesn’t have at least one Michelin star. (Not naming names, but Chase, I’m looking at you.)
“When is the last time you ate something you didn’t make yourself?” I ask.
He grins crookedly. “It’s been… a while. Years since I’ve been to a restaurant. And it wasn’t as good as this.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Are you some kind of cook or something?”
I laugh. “I am some kind of cook, yes.”
“At a restaurant?”
I shake my head. “I own my own catering company.”
“Huh.” He starts to wipe tomato sauce from his mouth with the back of his hand, but then gets up to grab a paper towel from the counter. It’s sweet that he’s trying to have manners on my account. “I wouldn’t have thought that.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
He’s looking at me out of his good eye, an unfamiliar expression on his face. If I didn’t know better, I’d have called it respect.
“And how about Abercrombie over there?” Jake jerks his head at Chase, still sound asleep on the sofa. “What does he do? He a cook too?”
“No.” I laugh again. “Chase… um, he sort of works for his father’s company.”
“Sort of?”
I twirl some pasta around my own fork. “He works there, but it’s not clear he actually does anything.”
God, I hope Chase is asleep and not hearing this conversation.
“What company is that?” he asks.
“Hollister and Co.,” I say. “They’re kind of a big deal in Boston.”
“I’ve heard of them.” He leans back in his seat for a moment, his fingers playing with the handle of his fork. “His father owns the company then?”
“That’s right.”
He nods. “And how long have you two been dating?”
I never got around to telling him Chase and I broke up just before he got lost in the snow. For some reason, I decide not to share that information now. “About a year.”
His eye drops to my left hand. “You’re not engaged though?”
“No…”
I don’t know why he’s asking all these questions, especially since he won’t answer a damn thing I ask him about himself. Why does he care how long Chase and I are dating or who Chase’s father is. Unless…
Well, unless he thinks he could get some money off of us. That’s possible. I mean, he rescued me out of a brand new red Porsche. He has to realize we’re both pretty loaded.
When I look around this place, it doesn’t seem like Jake is someone who’s very hung up on money. At all. Then again, I don’t know his personal issues. Maybe he’s in debt. Maybe he owes money to the mob. Who knows?
Jake seems to notice the questions are bothering me, so he quiets down. It’s also a necessity with the way he’s shoveling spaghetti into his mouth. When he finishes everything on his plate, he looks at me expectantly. “There isn’t any more, is there?”
“That’s the highest compliment to the chef.” I get up from my seat to grab what’s left in the frying pan. “Asking for seconds.”
“I just don’t get to eat like this too often.” He lowers his eyes and rubs at the back of his neck, which is oddly endearing. “You’re a really good cook. And I’m… not.”
“Well, I could give you a few pointers before we go.”
“Really?” His face lights up for a moment, then he clears his throat and looks away. “Uh, yeah, that would be good.” He hesitates. “Thanks, Natalie.”
He called me Natalie instead of Princess. I’m embarrassed to admit how happy that makes me.
As I watch him finish the remainder of the pasta, I decide there’s no way he’s trying to extort money from me and Chase. Not a chance. This is a guy who’s happy having nothing. At best, maybe he’s hoping for a reward so he can buy himself a brand new hoe or a few more cans for his pantry.
He runs a hand absently through his newly shorn hair. It looked okay when I first saw it, but now I can tell how bad a hack job it was. Granted, nobody else is going to see him but me, but I still feel like he deserves a better haircut than that. And it’s not like there’s a local Supercuts he can pop over to.
“I have a question for you,” I say. “Don’t be offended.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Okay…”
“Have you ever cut hair before?”
He blinks a few times, then bursts out laughing. He rubs at his scalp. “I butchered it, didn’t I?”
“Well,” I say thoughtfully, “you did a good job with your beard, for the most part. But yes, you butchered the top of your head.”
“I figured being a guy with a bad haircut is better than being a scary forest monster.”
“Only slightly.” I cock my head to the side. “I could fix it for you. If you’d like.”
“Oh yeah? You also got a haircutting business?”
“No. But I’m pretty sure I could do better than that.”
A smile twitches at his lips. “Okay, sure. Why not?”
_____
Ten minutes later, we are in Jake’s cramped excuse for a bathroom. The bathroom is so small that you can stand in the center of the room and be able to touch all four walls. The porcelain of the bowl is cracked, and the bathtub and sink are both badly rusted. The only light in the room comes from a small window next to the sink. He’s sitting on the toilet seat, a towel draped over his shoulders to catch stray hairs. I haven’t admitted to him that I’ve never cut a man’s hair in my life, but I have a feeling even if I told him, he wouldn’t care. He completely trusts me to do this—and it doesn’t hurt that he doesn’t seem concerned about what the outcome might be. I mean, it was his idea to cut it himself with a pair of metal shears.
“You don’t have an electric razor, do you?” I ask thoughtfully.
“No. I also don’t have electricity, remember?”
Oh right. I run my hand over his uneven strands of hair in the back. His hair is thick and dark brown in color, although there are a few strands of gray interspersed. I couldn’t have guessed his age for a million dollars when I first saw him in that blizzard, but now I’d estimate mid-thirties.
My fingers hit the elastic strap from his eyepatch, which cuts a line through his hair. “Can I take the eyepatch off?”
“No,” he says.
“It’s going to make it harder to get it all even…”
“Leave it.”
“Jake…”
He shakes his head, turning to look at me with his good eye. “It’s not… pretty under there. Okay?”
“I don’t mind.”
“Well, maybe I do.”
I look at that thin white scar disappearing under the eyepatch, wondering what horror lies underneath that he feels compelled to spare me from. He thinks he’s going to freak me out, but I doubt it. Eyepatch or not, Jake is… well, he’s sexy. Really sexy. Chase is model handsome, but in all the time we’ve known each other, he’s never made my heart do flip-flops like it’s suddenly doing right now. When he looks at me, I don’t tingle all over my body like Jake is making me do with the gaze of his one good eye.
I hate the idea of being stuck in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or hot water, but suddenly, the idea of being stuck here with Jake doesn’t seem half bad. It sounds… actually, really nice. Really, really nice.
My eyes meet his and my knees turn to Jell-O. Does he know what I’m
thinking? He’s got to know. A guy that sexy has to know he’s sexy. Maybe he’s lived here for several years, but he hasn’t lived here forever. He must have some idea of the impact he has on women.
Chase and I are broken up. Nobody would fault me a little rebound fun… would they?
No, what am I saying? That would be a terrible idea.
“So can you fix it?” Jake asks me. “Or am I going to be ugly for life?”
I manage a smile. “I’ll do my best. No promises.”
Oh, Lord.
I don’t fix it entirely, but I definitely even it out considerably. He doesn’t look like he came out of Rolando’s, but at least he doesn’t look like he got a haircut when the power went out at the barber shop anymore. I brush the hairs off his neck and step back, appraising my work.
Jake shifts on the toilet seat. “Well?”
“Much better.”
“Thank God. I got a hot date coming in tonight by bobsled.”
I snort. “Do you want me to fix your beard too?”
He rubs his hand over it. “You said I did okay with that.”
I squint at his face. “It’s got a couple of uneven areas. It wouldn’t hurt to have a touch up.”
He shrugs. “Sure, go for it.”
I realize the second we’ve agreed to do this that it’s a mistake. I get down on my knees to get the right angle, and I’m all up in Jake’s face. I am, like, way too close to him. He smells like pine needles and fresh air and that stubble on his face I’m supposed to be trimming is just so freaking sexy. I can’t be this close to him.
“Everything okay down there?” he asks me.
“Don’t move,” I croak.
“Oh, sorry.”
Except I’m the one whose hands are shaking. It’s really hard to be this close to a guy who’s this hot and at the same time focus on making tiny little clips to his beard hairs. I’m probably going to cut off a chunk of skin if I do this. His skin or mine. But I’m not sure what to tell him…
“Natalie? You okay?”
“Uh huh,” I manage.
He lowers his good eye to look at my face. And now, for the first time, he gets it. He inhales a sharp breath and leans toward me, almost imperceptibly. Six more inches and he’ll be kissing me. That’s all it would take. And this is a guy who hasn’t been with a woman in God knows how long. It’s hard to believe he’ll pass this up, especially when it’s got to be obvious to him I want this too.
But then he pulls away.
“I think my beard is probably fine,” he says. “Good enough, anyway. It’s not like I’m posing for the cover of any magazines.”
“Right.” I scramble back to my feet. I don’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. “It’s fine.”
He smiles crookedly. “Thanks for your help.”
“Anytime,” I say.
Chapter 9
I nearly let Jake kiss me.
And the only thing that stopped it from happening was he apparently didn’t want to.
Yes, Chase and I ended our relationship right before he left the car. But it still doesn’t feel right to be with another guy only a day later, while he’s seriously ill in the next room. Chase wasn’t a terrible boyfriend. I owe him better than that.
I need to steer clear of Jake. He’s hot, but he’s not that hot. I’m perfectly capable of resisting him.
In order to make it up to Chase, even though he has no clue what I almost did, I heat up some more soup for him. Half of the soup from this morning is still sitting in the fridge, so I put it on the stove, regretting that Jake doesn’t have a microwave. Drew teases me that I’m the only culinary-school-trained professional who uses the microwave daily, but what can I say—I love my microwave. It heats things so quickly! If it were a choice between my pressure cooker and my microwave, I might pick the microwave.
I bring the soup over to the sofa, where Chase is still dozing. He might be recovering from hypothermia, but he looks almost like his usual self again—absolutely gorgeous. Handcredible. He blows air softly from his lips with each breath, his long eyelashes fluttering. Yes, Chase has longer eyelashes than I do.
I don’t understand why I wasn’t more infatuated with him. It would have made my life so much easier. But I wasn’t. I was never in love with him. If not for my family, I would have ended it with him months ago. And now that it’s over, all I feel is relief to be free of him. Even when our relationship was at its peak, I never felt as helplessly drawn to him as I do to…
Well, I’m not going to think about that right now. It’s pointless and frustrating.
“Hey.” I nudge Chase’s shoulder. “Wake up.”
His eyelashes flutter. “Nat?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
He struggles into a sitting position. He’s still very out of it. He rubs his eyes, then looks around the cabin. “Is this… where are we?”
“We’re just staying here a couple of days,” I tell him. “Until the storm blows over.”
“Oh…”
He doesn’t ask any other questions, which means he really must still be pretty sick, because the usual Chase would have about a million questions about where we are and how we got here and where’s room service. I’m relieved he doesn’t seem to be his usual self, because I just can’t deal with a barrage of questions right now.
I wonder if he remembers me breaking up with him. God, I hope I don’t have to do it a second time.
“Have some soup,” I tell him. “You’ve hardly eaten anything today.”
“I feel nauseated,” he says. But he takes the spoon from me and scoops some of the broth into his mouth. He makes a face. “Where did this soup come from?”
It’s Campbell’s chicken noodle soup from a can. But he won’t like that. So instead, I say, “It’s from Tavern.”
Tavern is one of Chase’s favorite restaurants in his neighborhood. I’m counting on the fact that he has no clue what’s going on.
“Oh,” he mumbles. “I guess… I don’t know. It’s fine, I suppose.” He groans and clutches his temples. “My head hurts.”
I wonder if Jake has any Tylenol in the house. “Do you want to take something for it?”
“Maybe.” He rubs his eyes again. “I’m so tired. Why am I so tired?”
“You almost froze to death.” I wince at the truth in those words. If Jake had come along an hour later, it might have been too late. “That was only last night.”
“Yeah…” He lies down again, pulls a blanket around his body, and shuts his eyes. “I’m going to go to sleep again. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I lace my fingers into his, which are now very warm compared with last night. I hold his hand until his breathing evens out. He’s asleep.
Jake comes out into the living room. I’ve noticed he’s always wearing his boots in here and that he limps slightly when he walks. When we were outside, I thought he was just struggling to walk in the snow, but now it’s obvious he has the same problem on even ground.
“He won’t stop sleeping,” I tell Jake.
He shrugs. “What do you expect? He almost died last night. Give him a day to recover.”
Jake’s right, of course. But I’m still worried.
He sees the look on my face and his shoulders sag. “Okay, look, if he’s still so out of it by tomorrow, I’ll check the roads. Maybe we can make it to the hospital.”
“Thank you,” I say, although when I looked outside, there was so much snow, it seems impossible we could go anywhere. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of here. We’ll almost certainly have to wait until Monday, when people realize we’re not back when we’re supposed to be. Fortunately, Drew knows where we were going, so at the very least, he’ll make sure someone is out there looking in the right place.
_____
Snow never looks like this in Boston.
In the city, snow falls on the ground, then immediately either gets scooped away or turns brown. I’m reading Drew’s serial killer thriller, b
ut it isn’t holding my attention. My eyes keep getting drawn to the window, at all that fresh white powder. Finally, I put down my book completely.
I pace the room for a couple of minutes, finally ending up at the closed door to Jake’s bedroom. After a hesitation, I knock.
“Come in!” he calls out.
This is the first time I’ve been inside his bedroom since we arrived. It’s very small—even smaller than the living room, which is tiny. His bed is simply a mattress on the floor, and I can see the lumps in it from the doorway. Other than the mattress, he’s got a dresser constructed from unfinished dark brown wood that looks like he might have built it himself, and there’s also a rusty file cabinet pushed into the corner.
I notice that on top of the file cabinet, he’s got a pair of binoculars.
Interesting.
Jake himself is lying on his mattress, still wearing his boots—I’ve never seen him without those boots. He’s reading a book, but I can’t make out the title. He shoves it to the side of the mattress when I come in and sits up straighter. “What’s up?”
“I was wondering,” I say. “Could I borrow a pair of gloves?”
He eyes my hands. “I think mine will be big on you.”
“I’ll make do.”
He raises his eyebrows. “What do you want them for?”
“Well…” I wring my hands together. This is so embarrassing—I don’t know what I was thinking. “Never mind.”
Jake struggles to his feet from his mattress on the floor. “What is it? Tell me.”
I’m not sure why I should tell him something embarrassing when he won’t tell me a damn thing about himself. “Nothing. Forget it.”
He arches an eyebrow. “What’s wrong? You need them to protect your nails, Princess?”
“No.” I glare at him. “I… I was just thinking I might go out in the snow and… and build a snowman.”
He stares at me for a moment, his mouth hanging open. After a few seconds, he bursts out laughing.
My face burns. “I’m glad you think that’s funny.”
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