One of his so-called friends. His sister Dana, who had never truly forgiven him for catching her entire Senior Prom date on audiotape.
God, now his delusional thoughts were sliding into paranoia. Exasperated, his voice came out strangled. “Ms. Hanson, what the hell is wrong with you? I tell you to go home and you stay. What is it—are you afraid of the dark?”
She stilled. Her eyelashes lifted to reveal those blue-as-some-exotic-flower eyes.
Josh’s gut twisted. Don’t, he thought, suddenly as desperate not to know any more about her as he’d been desperate to know more about her earlier. Don’t say it.
But then she did. “Yes.”
* * *
Lori knew Josh wasn’t happy as he held open Anderson Inc.’s front door for her. “You should have said something,” he grumbled, following her into the darkness.
She pretended the heat on her cheeks was from the cold night air, not her embarrassment. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m in a new place…it’s unfamiliar—”
“Don’t apologize,” he said shortly. “I should have thought of it myself.”
It wasn’t his fault. “It’s me. The dark parking lot…”
“I’m going to get one of the men to install a light out there tomorrow,” he said.
Halting on the brick walkway, she turned to him. “Oh, no—”
“Lori.” In the darkness, his body was a massive shadow, but his voice was gentle. “It’s done. But to ease your mind even more, remember this isn’t the big city. You’re in Whitehorn now.”
“Yes.” Looking up, she took a deep breath of the clean, icy air. Whitehorn, Montana. “The stars seem so clear, so close here,” she said. “It’s as if someone polished the sky.”
“Someone did,” he answered lightly. “We like things to look their best when Southern girls arrive.”
She laughed. “Well, I’m impressed. I didn’t expect it to be quite so beautiful.” With a hand, she gestured toward the building they’d exited. “I didn’t expect a construction company office to look like an old schoolhouse either.”
Josh started toward the parking lot again. “It is an old schoolhouse. Miss Lilah Anderson’s schoolhouse, as a matter of fact. Dad and I rescued it a few years ago.”
“Lilah Anderson? A relation?”
“Yep. An aunt. I forget how many greats,” Josh answered. “My sister Dana knows, though, she’s the genealogist in the family.”
“Your roots go deep in Whitehorn, then.” Lori had roots here too, roots that she wanted to reconnect to. Roots that she hoped would help her build a new life. “It must be nice.”
“Are you rootless, Lori?”
She figured he was thinking of her resumé and the many jobs she’d had and cities she’d lived in over the past years. But she didn’t want to go into that. “I don’t have a big family like you do,” she said instead. “My mother died when I was twenty-three, after a long illness. We were…alone in the world.”
And how alone she’d felt during her mother’s illness. So alone that she’d made a mistake she’d been paying for every day since.
They reached her car. Though Lori had her keys in her hand, Josh leaned against the driver’s-side door, blocking her way. Goodness. His shoulders had to be twice the size of the average man’s.
“You make me realize I shouldn’t take so much for granted,” he said. “My family’s always been there for me. And the business was always there for me, too.”
Lori dipped her hands in the pocket of her coat. “So you always wanted the business? You always wanted to build things?” She could see him, she thought, a tall gangly kid following his father around with a hammer and a hundred questions.
His grin sliced whitely through the darkness. “I wanted to be a cowboy until I was nine years old and I fell off my friend’s horse and onto my keister. Then good ol’ Smokey stomped all over my hand. Couldn’t sit down or make a fist for a week.”
“Poor baby.” Lori shook her head, amused by the picture he painted. “Though you’re ruining Montana’s image for me. I thought all western men were horsemen.”
“Yeah,” he said dryly. “Just like we all smoke Marlboros and drag our Christmas trees behind sleighs through snowy fields.”
“Wearing ten-gallon hats,” she added.
“And sheepskin jackets.”
She couldn’t help but smile. “You don’t have a sheepskin jacket? I think I’m going to cry.”
“I’ll get one tomorrow,” he said promptly. “Just so you won’t.”
The teasing note in his voice made her nervous again. “Well…” she started.
“Well?”
“I guess it’s time for me to take myself and my fractured preconceptions home.” She drew her hand and her car keys from her pocket.
He moved away from the door so she could unlock it. “It’s not that I don’t like horses, Lori. Just that I like them best when they’re standing and I’m standing too.”
When she opened the door, the car’s overhead light pooled on Josh’s heavy construction boots but didn’t come close to illuminating his face, somewhere above her. “You seem to have bad luck with things falling on you,” she said, daring to tease a little about their meeting in the gym.
“I wouldn’t say it’s bad luck at all.”
With just those words, her pulse quickened again. She looked up at him, then swallowed, because he was so big and because there was that current running between them, that hot, tingly current she’d worked so hard to ignore all day. She had no business feeling this. For Josh, or for any man. It was too easy for her to become dependent on one. The wrong one.
“Josh.” She meant to say the word as a warning, but instead it came out uncertain.
“Lori.” He took a step closer, and she automatically shrank against the car. He froze. He muttered to himself. He turned away from her. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
But before she had the door shut, he turned back. “Lori.”
“Yes?”
His face was still in shadow, but it didn’t take night vision for her to know he was battling himself. “Are you…is there…” He broke off, muttering again.
“What do you want, Josh?”
His voice was rueful. “For the moment, the answer to a question.”
“Yes?”
He
