Page 12 of Wes and Addie Had Their Chance

I suppose it’s fair to say I very much wanted to avoid you.”

They stared at each other in silence, a smile planted firmly on his lips. (And Wes could only hope against hope that the smile

didn’t resemble that of a B-movie monster learning to feel.)

“So what happened here?” she finally asked, stepping forward to survey the side-by-side for damage. “You’re not hurt, are

you?”

He shook his head. “No. I mean, my pride’s bruised...”

“And that’s as it should be.” She stepped back toward the truck to secure the chains and called over her shoulder, “You do

know that these things are specifically designed to handle these exact conditions, right? It’s kind of like sinking a raft

when all it’s doing is floating across a swimming pool.”

Growing up, Wes had always been the most athletic of them. Adelaide Springs didn’t have enough students for school teams,

so you had to travel an hour or two or join church leagues if you wanted to compete in team sports. As fun as it was to lob

softballs at senior citizens with all the high-speed velocity of that feather that floats around Forrest Gump, he’d realized

at a pretty young age that team sports weren’t where he was going to burn off all his excess energy. Instead, he’d turned

to tennis and skiing and snowboarding and whatever else made his pulse race.

Of course it helped that all of those solo things could be done in tandem with his friends.

With Addie. She certainly hadn’t been as daring as he had, so she’d passed on accompanying him down the scarier ski courses.

Brynn had been his fellow adrenaline junkie, and it wasn’t at all unusual for them to fearlessly race each other down a black-diamond slope only to find Addie, Laila, and Cole at the bottom enjoying hot chocolate, having already had enough excitement on the bunny slopes for the day.

It had been a long time since he’d been allowed to ski down any real slopes, but he really believed that if he was given the opportunity, it would come right back to him.

Considering he’d felt exactly the same way about driving a UTV on Banyon in the thick of winter, he might hold off on booking

his ticket for Aspen.

“I just overcorrected. It was stupid. Something ran out in front of me, and I was coming up on the curve...” Wes looked

ahead to the thousand-foot drop-off he had been approaching when he panicked. “I didn’t realize how sensitive the steering

is on this thing, I guess.”

She shrugged and made her way back to him. “Don’t beat yourself up too much. It happens. That’s why no one really travels

on Banyon this time of year. You can’t see much, and the road never sees sunlight. I think the elk have begun taking it for

granted that they have the road to themselves.”

He circled his arms around himself as a whip of wind attacked them off the mountainside. “I wish it had been an elk. At least

an elk is a respectable adversary.”

“Deer?”

Wes shook his head. “Rabbit.”

“Well, then, that is embarrassing.” Addie knelt down and made one last adjustment to the chain. “So are you going to get out of there, or do you

want me to flip it with you still in it?”

Oh. Yeah. How idiotic he must have looked, still standing there in the capsized side-by-side, his body peeking out from the

chest up, just watching her work. “I’m so sorry.” He pushed up and climbed out on top of it, then jumped into the snow. “How

can I help?”

“You can help me flip it over. And while we’re doing that, you can tell me what in the world you’re doing out here. Where did you even get this thing?”

Wes followed her lead and crouched on the side popping out of the ditch, and they got it mostly upright pretty easily. A little

too easily, truth be told. So easily he was afraid she was thinking what he was thinking: he could have done it himself.

“I borrowed it from—”

“This is Jo’s,” Addie said at the same time.

“Yeah.”

She looked the UTV up and down and then looked Wes up and down. “Did you steal it?”

“What? No! Of course not. I borrowed it.” Addie crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow, so he clarified, “With her permission.

I didn’t steal it. Good grief, Addie.”

Her second brow joined the first in what he interpreted as a transition from mistrust to surprise, and Wes realized in the

second before Addie spoke that he had accidentally thrown Jo under the bus. Or at least he’d begun to. Maybe he could still

save her.

“You’ve seen Jo?”

He nodded. “I have. I mean, at the inn, of course. And she—”

“Did she tear you to shreds? I bet she tore you to shreds.”

He didn’t expect sympathy, of course, and he definitely wanted to avoid putting Jo in the hot seat for being in contact with

him and inviting him to town—even if the last time he’d seen her before going to bed she was still insisting she had done

no such thing—but he could have done without the smile that was overtaking Addie’s face at the thought of him being torn to

shreds.

“No, she didn’t ‘tear me to shreds.’ Why would she?

” Well, if that wasn’t just the stupidest thing he possibly could have said.

“I mean, not that she doesn’t have any reason to.

Not that you don’t have any reason to, for that matter.

Because you do. Have reason to. To, um. .. tear me to shreds or whatever. To

be mad at me, I mean.”

“You’re saying this to me as if I’m not aware that any anger I might feel toward you is justified? Thanks for that.” She rolled her eyes. “Give me your gloves.”

Wes looked behind him—why, he wasn’t quite sure—and then back at her. “What?”

“Come on.” She put her right hand in front of her, palm up. “Give me your gloves. I forgot mine.”

Okay, that moment wasn’t quite as embarrassing as pretty much every other moment he’d experienced with her in the last twelve hours or so, but he didn’t

exactly feel good about himself as he surveyed his own situation (Saint Laurent wool coat buttoned up to his chin, cashmere

Burberry scarf circled around his neck, hands covered in wool-lined leather gloves, still basically just standing there watching

her work) and compared it to hers (no scarf, no hat, no sunglasses, no gloves, her hands flexing continually to keep blood

circulating).

“Of course.” He snapped out of his less than chivalrous inactivity and pulled off his gloves. “Here.” He took a step toward

her and held them open, one after the other, for her to slip her hands into. “Sorry.”

“Thank you.”

She pumped her hands into balls a few more times inside the gloves before leaning over to verify the connection of the chain

to the now-upright side-by-side. It was then, when she pulled the palm of the right glove away from the metal chain and it

created that lovely sound that usually accompanied shoes being lifted from a poorly mopped bathroom floor, that she looked

up at him again.

“Why are your gloves sticky?”

Wes stuffed his bare hands into the pockets of his coat and bobbed up and down. “Hot chocolate. It spilled when—”

“When the bunny rabbit jumped out and scared you?”

It was funny: as he looked at her, the years simultaneously piled up on top of one another and disintegrated before his very eyes.

He’d never seen this woman, as she currently existed, in his life, but he absolutely would have known her anywhere.

Her body had changed, her face had changed, her voice had changed, but that look?

The one she was giving him right now—one of impatience and frustration and lack of amusement (which had always brought him great amusement)? That was his Addie.

“It really is good to see you, Addie Atwater.”

“It’s Elwyn now, actually. And if you don’t mind, I would really appreciate help understanding why Jo not only didn’t rip

you to shreds for showing back up here but was also happy to let you take her side-by-side out for a joyride.”

Her pupils dilated, and her arms crossed, and her brow furrowed, and he could hear her insisting he shouldn’t settle for staying

in Adelaide Springs and taking a job in maintenance with the city. He could see her insisting they didn’t need money to be

happy. He could almost smell the pumpkin pie she’d been baking for Thanksgiving when he told her she shouldn’t throw away

scholarship offers just to be with him.

Regardless of her last name, an annoyed Addie was apparently the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Wes shrugged. “We talked last night when I got checked into the inn—”

“Had a good little chat, did ya?”

“Yes, actually. And this morning I asked her if I could borrow the UTV in exchange for shoveling the sidewalks and plowing

the driveway.”

Addie’s shoulders dropped down from her ears. “Oh.”

He didn’t have to ask her to translate the “Oh.” They were no longer dealing with Jo just being kind to Wes—Wes, whom, he

was pretty sure, no one else in Adelaide Springs would see as deserving of kindness. He’d leave Jo to sort that out with her

neighbors in her own time. Right now, it seemed that Addie was satisfied there had at least been a very Jo-like requirement

of manual labor behind her offering of kindness to the pariah.

“And as for why I borrowed it—”

“That’s enough talking. It isn’t worth the frostbite.”

Another gust of wind assaulted them, and she pulled her hands up in front of her face and huffed on them, attempting to warm them up through the gloves.

Disgust registered in her expression as her hands stuck together (again, just enough to evoke that unpleasant bathroom floor imagery), and Wes laughed at her as a little stickiness (which was, admittedly, building upon itself as wind and dirt and moisture compounded into hot chocolate–based goo) completely undid the competent woman who had just been maneuvering chains and hitches and truck beds like a boss.

“Get these things off me!” she shrieked as a small twig got stuck on the fingers of one glove and then the other.

“Hold up.” He leapt over a mound of snow and reached her just as she growled at the gloves, now in one chaotic clump on her

hands, causing her fingers to splay like the talons of an old, disfigured witch in a Disney cartoon.

“Hot chocolate,” she muttered under her breath.

He pulled her clustered fingers closer to his chest, and her grumbling stopped. Everything stopped. Her grumbling, her twitching,

maybe her breathing...

His breathing, come to that.

Wes freed one gloved finger at a time and transitioned his involuntary holding of breath into a conscious decision so as not

to accidentally startle her into refusing his assistance. She kept staring down at her hands between them, her brow furrowed,

even as he hovered over the knuckles of her left hand and thought about when he’d slipped a white-gold band (with the tiniest

diamond that he’d known wasn’t good enough for her) onto her finger and promised her he was hers for life. His need for oxygen

began warring with his desire to dwell in the memory as long she would let him, but he steeled himself and pulled her hands

apart.

Neither of them could help but react to the hideous glurp that resulted. Wes exhaled his held breath as laughter while Addie closed her eyes and shook her head.

“Why couldn’t you drink coffee like an adult?”

He shrugged.

“Get them off of me,” she instructed, spreading out her hands toward him, and he obliged, pulling on the gloves from the tips of her fingers.

He stuffed the gloves in his pockets and stood there, unable to pull his eyes away from her, especially as the corner of her mouth twitched again and her lips curled up. Just slightly.

“Stop smiling,” she told him, “or I’ll unhitch this thing and leave you to dig yourself out with your bare hands.”

She began walking back to the cab of the truck without unhitching a thing—though he most certainly had not fulfilled his half

of the bargain.