Total pages in book: 196
Estimated words: 186555 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 933(@200wpm)___ 746(@250wpm)___ 622(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186555 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 933(@200wpm)___ 746(@250wpm)___ 622(@300wpm)
“I’m good!” I yelled back. “Are you?”
“Scarred for life watching you grab Dad’s butt like that, but I’ll get over it. Thanks for wondering!” he hollered sarcastically before shaking his head and closing the door.
Rhodes and I both froze. Our eyes met, and we both started cracking up.
Yeah, I was right where I wanted to be. Where I was happy. Thank you, Mom.
Chapter 27
The next couple of weeks went by in an absolute blur. Mostly because we were so busy at the shop. Summer had been hectic, fall had been slow until hunting season had started, but everything had gotten kicked into high gear once the snow came and schools started closing down for holiday break.
We were slammed with rentals and sales, and Clara had given me a crash course in helping customers select skis and snowboards the day I’d gotten my own rental. Everything else I needed to know—questions that customers could or would ask—I made a list of and asked some of the locals I’d gotten to know since working at the shop. Amos, surprisingly, answered a lot of them on the nights we had dinner together. Fortunately, there was only one resort close by, so there weren’t too many things people could ask, except where they could take the tubes they rented for sledding.
With work being so busy, I was grateful that I’d bought all my Christmas presents in advance on my lunch breaks, shipping most of them straight to my aunt and uncle’s, and having a few sent to my PO box in town. If it hadn’t been for those presents I had sent to my box, I might have totally forgotten about the plane ticket I’d booked back in October to go to Florida for Christmas.
Even back then, I hadn’t wanted to leave Clara alone for too long, so I’d reserved my ticket to leave early in the morning on Christmas Eve and come back the 26th.
When everyone started talking about a big storm that was supposed to roll in the day before Christmas, I didn’t think much of it. We had been getting steady snowfall every few days for a while. I’d gotten more confident driving in it, even though any time he could, Rhodes came to the shop and followed me back home.
Just thinking about Rhodes made the funniest feeling fill up my chest.
I wasn’t sure if it was because I had been raised by people who believed in me too much or just weren’t the helicopter-parenting type, but his overprotectiveness just did something to me. Big-time. I swear it lit me up from the inside out like one of those Lite-Brites I used to have when I’d been a kid.
We hadn’t gotten to spend any time together by ourselves again, and there hadn’t been any more real kisses since the day I’d basically thrown myself at him after Mrs. Jones’s visit, but that was mostly because of how often he’d been working late. There were all kinds of issues he had to deal with that I had no idea were even a thing. From problems with snowmobilers, to ice-fishing issues, and illegal hunting. He’d explained to me one night when he’d gotten home early enough and brought pizza with him, that after summer, winter was the busiest season he had.
To be fair, any time he got home early enough—with the exception of a night he’d gone over to Johnny’s to play poker—Rhodes invited me over.
And of course I went.
Sitting as close to him as possible on the two nights we’d watched a movie with Amos sprawled in a recliner. We’d smiled at each other from across the table on another day when, after dinner, we’d played an old version of Scrabble that no one knew where it had come from. But the most special part was how he walked me back to the garage apartment every night we spent time together and he gave me a long, lingering hug afterward. Once and only once, he kissed me on the forehead in a way that made my knees tingle.
I didn’t think I was imagining the sexual tension every time my breasts got pressed against his chest.
So all in all, I was happier than I’d been in forever, in so many different ways. The hope that I’d gotten so many glimpses of over the last few months had grown bigger and bigger in my heart with every passing day. A sense of family, of rightness, wrapped around just about every part of me.
But on the 23rd of December, when Clara and I were closing up the shop, she turned to me, seriously, and said, “I don’t think you’re getting out of here tomorrow.”
Covered in a down jacket I’d had forever that didn’t have enough filling for the temperatures we were having, I shivered and raised my eyebrows at her. “You don’t think so?”