You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(69)
In a flash of insight, Marc saw Babe when she was young, when her face was smoother, her stomach not so generous, and her eyes less wary. He also saw that her remembered youth was both the reason she wasn’t trying to talk Selina out of going and the reason she worried about Selina.
“I have no interest in forcing her into anything, if that’s what you’re implying. As for the rest . . .” His voice trailed off because he had no idea how to finish that sentence with anything remotely truthful. If they did more than talk and share the car, he couldn’t promise not to hurt Selina any more than she could promise not to hurt him.
“Well, at least you’re smart enough to know your limitations. I’ll give you that.”
“Thanks.”
A couple of years ago, when he was younger and his ego hadn’t been battered about by years of near failure designing his app, he would have been insulted by Babe’s comment. But he was neither so young nor so stupid. Instead, he saw Babe’s protectiveness as confirmation that he’d made the right choice asking Selina to come with him. Babe seemed like the type of person who didn’t give her love easily but who loved hard when she did. If Selina had earned that love, then Marc was going to be lucky to have her with him.
“I’ll have Selina text you my phone number and any other contact information for me that you’d like. If having my parents’ phone numbers will make you feel better, I’ll give those to you, too.”
“Ha! It would serve you right if I called them and told them what you were doing with a young woman you picked up in a diner.” Her face softened, as though Marc had made the first steps to earning her trust. “I want them. I won’t call them right away, but don’t you doubt that I will if I feel I need to.”
He chuckled, nodding his agreement. Babe wasn’t making an idle threat. “Then I’ll include my grandmother’s number, too. She always gives the sternest lectures.”
Babe smiled at him for the first time since he and Selina had walked into her living room and told her their plans. She patted him on the arm. “Show her a good time. She needs it,” she said, then walked off before he could say good-bye.
As Marc watched her leave, he could feel Selina’s gaze through the window behind him. Babe’s front door shut, and it was time to go. He walked around the front of the car, opened his door, and climbed in.
“Babe read you the riot act?” Selina asked.
“Yeah,” he said, turning the key in the starter. As he shifted into reverse and backed out of Babe’s driveway, he was suddenly conscious of Selina’s beauty and Babe’s certainty that more than driving would be happening on this trip. The possibility was as attractive as the woman sitting next to him, except it also seemed like a terrible idea.
The tires crunched over gravel, ice, and snow as Marc navigated his way to the main road, the sounds filling all the spaces in the Land Rover. He didn’t know what to say, and apparently, nor did Selina. Neither of them reached for the radio to drown out the silence, either.
Marc turned onto the highway leading south, their previously easy comradery left behind in Babe’s driveway.
Chapter Five
Selina woke to the car slowing down. She stretched her arms above her head, then looked around, expecting to see a gas station, or motel, or something other than snow and the side of the road as the SUV came to a stop.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Honestly? I don’t know.” Marc shook his head, a slow, deliberate motion that worried Selina more than the blinding white their headlights lit up in front of them.
He cocked his head toward her, his brows raised and worry making the wrinkles of his expression especially shadowed in the dark of the car. “You wouldn’t happen to be able to look around and tell, would you?”
She peered past the heavy falling snow into the blackness beyond. Mountains had to be within spitting distance of the road, but she couldn’t see them for all the snow in the night. She couldn’t see anything more than a couple of feet from the car, even out the windshield where the headlights should have helped.
She turned to him and cringed. “Idaho?”
“Yeah,” he said with a wry chuckle. “I hope so. The road has been so hard to follow for the past hour that I’m not even sure about that.”
As she looked back outside, cold started to seep into her bones. Marc hadn’t turned the car off yet, so it wasn’t the actual cold from the outside. It was fear. “Are we going to keep going?”
Did I misjudge you?
She couldn’t ask him that, though. And she didn’t feel that this was the moment when he’d change from the nice, funny, flirtatious guy in the diner to a scary man who would kill her and leave her body in the wilderness.
But that didn’t mean she didn’t think it. There had been enough news stories about missing young women that she knew it was possible, that her gut feelings could have failed her. And Gary was a perfect example of how men could be rotten in many different ways.
He shook his head. “I’m not comfortable driving with this little visibility. If you think you can do it, I’ll give you the keys. I don’t want to spend the night in the car, and I especially don’t want to have to dig us out in the morning.”
His words reassured her fears. It wasn’t even so much what he said but how he said it, calm and even, as though he didn’t have any reason not to trust her with his life. Because that’s what he was doing when offering to let her drive. He was trusting her with his life as much as she had trusted him with hers when she’d agreed to accompany him on this journey.