Page 6 of Make Me Love You

In the next heartbeat she remembered why they weren’t. She sat up, pushing away from him, and wiped the rain from her arms as best she could. It didn’t make her feel any less damp. She shivered.

He turned on the heat, but only cold air came out the vents. “It probably won’t heat up until I drop you off. You want a blanket? There’s one behind your seat.”

No, she didn’t want to wrap herself in something that smelled like him. She shook her head.

“Suit yourself.” He glanced at her and then quickly looked away again. He gripped the steering wheel so tight his knuckles turned white.

“I thought you would have your patrol car,” she said. She was glad he didn’t.

“I’m off duty.” He gestured to his jeans, his eyes never leaving the road. No uniform.

“You don’t work Mondays?” she asked, surprised, and then bit her lip, wishing she could take the question back. She didn’t want to have a conversation with him.

“No. I requested weekends, and since no one else wanted to be on call for Hart’s Ridge, I usually get the shift.”

What would make a person give up weekends to work? Emma loved weekends, or the idea of them, anyhow. Everyone having the same two days off as everyone else, so there was nothing better to do than have long, lazy meals capped with an overindulgence of fruity alcoholic beverages? It sounded blissful. Trouble was, she couldn’t afford weekends—and neither could most of Hart’s Ridge, for that matter. She kept her food truck open seven days a week, six to three, which meant that she started cooking at five a.m. But if she had a choice, she would spend Saturday and Sunday doing absolutely nothing but sleeping in and reading in her hammock.

But here was Eli willing giving it all up. For what? Mondays off? No one liked Mondays. If it were anyone else, her curiosity would have gotten the best of her, and she would have demanded an explanation. But it wasn’t anyone else. Eli could work weekends until he died—alone and miserable, because no one went on Monday night dates—for all she cared.

She didn’t care.

Still, she was curious. She glanced sideways at him. Once she would have claimed that no one knew him better than she did. Now she didn’t know him at all. He was a mystery.

He didn’t even look the same, not really. A man could change a lot between twenty-two and twenty-eight. Eli certainly had. Back then he’d still had a baby face with a dimple in each cheek. Now he had facial hair, something more than stubble but less than a full blown beard. She couldn’t tell if the dimples were still there underneath. Maybe, maybe not. He’d leaned out and put on muscle over the past eight years, judging from his forearm and the way his gray T-shirt looked on him.

She hated herself for noticing.

It was a short drive. He pulled into her long driveway and slowed to a stop. He still didn’t look at her.

“Where do you want me to leave you?” he asked. “By the Airstream, or your house?”

Hers was a fairly large property. The Airstream was parked next to the road, but the house was set a quarter mile farther down the maple-lined drive. It was a big, turreted house left over from the Gilded Age, when it had been a fancy summer home for the Rockefellers. Emma’s parents had bought it for nearly nothing when she was still a baby. The thing had been in shambles, but the bones were good. They had joked about it being their retirement plan. Someday they would turn it into a bed and breakfast. But someday never came, and now Emma lived there with five extra bedrooms to dust and vacuum.

“Here is fine,” she said. “It’s not three yet. We’re still open, even if we don’t get any customers.”

He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the steering wheel, and peered through the windshield at her Airstream, saying nothing. She followed his gaze, noting the hand-painted wooden sign that simply read Emma’s, the small gravel parking lot she’d made that replaced a chunk of her lawn, and the picnic table.

“It runs,” she said defensively. “I know there are different laws for food trucks than if it were a brick-and-mortar restaurant. It can’t be a food truck if it’s not mobile. So, it runs.”

His lips quirked. “Okay.”

“There’s no law that says it can’t be parked in one place for most of its business hours. There’s no law that says I can’t own the property it’s parked on. It just has to be mobile. And it is. I even haul it to the church on Sundays so people can get coffee and lunch after service.”

“I know. I saw you there, once or twice.”

“Then why are you eyeballing it like it’s a health code violation?” she demanded.

“I’m eyeballing it like I never thought I’d see the day where you hung daisy-printed curtains on your Airstream, but here we are.”

“Oh.” She was taken aback. “Suzie made them.”

“Suzie Barnett? How is she doing?”

The wistfulness in his voice caught her by surprise. They had all been friends, once, but Suzie had stopped talking to Eli the moment Emma had. Suzie was now pregnant with her third baby, but Emma wasn’t feeling particularly generous with that information right now.

“She’s fine,” she said, not giving him anything more.

“That’s good.”