Page 10

Eden

W e get back into the car, and I install myself for the long haul.

First, I tuck a fleece blanket around myself.

“I poached it from my in-laws,” I say.

He whistles. “You’re turning out to be quite the lawbreaker.”

“I think Paul and his family owe me at least this much. Especially given that he’s still not responding to my texts.”

“For sure,” he agrees. “You probably should have taken the silver.”

“I thought about it.”

It turns out that it’s challenging to keep hating Rhys. So far today he has rescued me from humiliation, driven me to the beach, cooked me dinner, called my ex a giant douchebag, and revealed that he has a sense of humor. It’s a lot.

I open the center console, a fancy leather two-door thing. I set a bag of Sour Patch Kids, a bag of peanut butter M I snort at personality potato . “ I’m the one who has the stress. I’m the one who got jilted. And if I’d known I was going to have to share my precious Cool Ranch, I would have gotten a bigger bag.”

I sneak a peek at him. He’s definitely trying not to laugh. And unfortunately, it looks good on him. I let him have the Doritos.

“God, these are disgustingly tasty,” he says.

“Right?”

We’re both quiet for a moment, worshipping at the altar of fake food.

He quietly licks Cool Ranch flavor off his fingers, and I absolutely, one hundred percent, do not wonder how his tongue feels licking up the inside of his finger and across the tip of his thumb.

How it would feel rasping over my own fingertips, drawn into the heat of his mouth.

Oh, hell.

I’ve tumbled into a sexual fantasy about a man who disassembled me like a kid’s discarded playset.

We make our way through Maroon 5’s “Memories” (“Memories of how I cribbed this entire song from Pachelbel’s Canon,” Rhys says grumpily), past Lake Street Dive’s “Hypotheticals” (“Now this is actually a great song; you’re one for, what, a hundred?”) to “Try Everything.”

“That’s shitty advice,” he says. “‘Try everything.’ I mean, no . There are a lot of things that are straight-up bad ideas. Bull-riding. Free solo climbing. Base jumping. Heli-skiing. Recreational fentanyl.”

“She doesn’t mean literally everything ,” I say.

“See?” he says. “And there we have it. Two people, same song, totally different interpretations.”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t see how that’s somehow a refutation of marriage. You’re so?—”

“Pessimistic? Cynical? Misanthropic?”

“All of the above. You ready to tell me what childhood wound made you this way?” I ask, half-teasing…half…not.

He shrugs.

“Yes, Eden,” I say, pitching my voice low to roughly imitate his. “Since we have another five and a half uninterrupted hours of being stuck in this car together with absolutely nothing else to do, I would love to tell you all about my childhood.”

Rhys is quiet for a moment. Then with a sigh, he says, “What do you want to know?”

“You have, like, five siblings, right?”

“I have, in fact, exactly five siblings. Hanna and four brothers.”

“You’re all sort of Rush Creek famous at this point. I can’t remember all the stories, but there’s a chemist, right?”

“Quinn.”

“And a movie actor—Shane. His name I know. Everyone knows his name. And his?—”

“Don’t say it!”

“— backside ,” I conclude. “We should just acknowledge, since we are in this car together for five and a half more hours, that I have, in fact, watched your brother doing the d?—”

“And then there’s my brother Preston,” Rhys interrupts decisively. “Preston used to be in finance, and now he’s finding himself in Rush Creek. God only knows what he’ll end up doing. Maybe bull-riding.”

“You changed the subject.”

“You noticed. And then there’s Tucker. He’s our big mystery. Broody and mostly absent, and if anyone tries to get him to talk about what’s going on with him, he closes up like a Venus flytrap devouring its prey.”

“So you all grew up together in Rush Creek.”

He gets quiet. It’s not only that he stops talking. He gets quiet all over, his big, leanly muscled body statue-still. “Yeah,” he says.

I decide I’m going to wait him out. I sit in silence, too, staring straight ahead as he merges onto I-5 north, not sure if he’ll say anything else but not willing to give up on the possibility yet.

Even though I don’t know why I want to know. I don’t know why, suddenly, after hating him, I want a glimpse of the man, not the lawyer.

We go three exits before he says, “We thought we were gonna run the ranch together when we grew up. We actually swore a blood oath.” He laughs, but it’s not a real laugh. It’s bleak and humorless, and it hurts my chest. “Kids, right? They have no idea.”

“Do you ever wish you did? Run the ranch?”

“Hell no,” he says. “That’s not me. I never loved that work. I just—” He bites down on whatever he’d been about to say.

I take a stab. “Love your siblings?”

He slides me a surprised glance. “Yeah.”

“Do you ever think about practicing in Rush Creek or somewhere on the West Coast? Instead of New York?”

Rhys shakes his head. “No. New York is where I belong. It suits my cold, sharky soul.”

I file this away. It’s exactly the way I would have described him when we were adversaries—if I’d admitted that he had a soul at all.

And yet now that he’s cooked dinner for me and insisted on driving the next leg of this impulsive trip, I’m pretty sure he does have a soul.

Which calls into question both “cold” and “sharky.”

“What made you want to become a divorce attorney?”

“It’s lucrative. And combative.”

That’s definitely the shark answer. I wait.

He gives a half shrug, shifting his hands uneasily on the wheel. “And I wanted to keep more women from getting screwed.”

My eyebrows practically hit Earth’s orbit. “Yet you represent assholes like Teller Austin and steal money and dogs from women who didn’t do anything to deserve it?”

Okay, it’s all true , but as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. Not because they’re not accurate, but because I know they’ll shut down this conversation, and I don’t want that. “Uh,” I say. “That was…harsh. Can we strike that from the record?”

Rhys makes an amused sound. “Sure, I guess. I mean, I deserved it. But yeah.”