Page 54 of Offside Attraction

“Will it?”

Jordan exhaled. “It’s not a problem if the wheels slip. It’s a problem if you can’t recover.” He drove slowly, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. The windshield wipers thumped rhythmically, and the heater blasted warm air into the cab. “You need snow tires.”

Rhonda pursed her lips. “Well aware.”

He glanced over at her, his brow furrowed. “Your tire pressure light was on."

“Yeah. It does that sometimes.”

Jordan blew out a breath, and Rhonda turned in her seat. “Are you judging me right now? You didn’t have to come out here, I?—”

“You were going to get rear-ended and tossed into the ditch. Before or after you froze to death when your gas ran out at three a.m., either or. Take your pick.”

“I wasn’t going to freeze to death,” she muttered.

“Because you’re the expert? It’s supposed to drop to minus thirty tonight. Everyone thinks they’ll be fine until they show up in the ER with black fingers.”

Pressure built in her chest like she was hooked up to an air compressor. “Thanks, Dad,” she snapped, then sucked in a breath.

“Maybe your dad should’ve taught you this shit,” Jordan barked back.

“Oh, trust me, you and my dad would get along just great. Do you think I’m an idiot for not having snow tires? For not having a winter emergency kit in my car? Perfect. If I ever talk to him again, I’ll let him know he has an ally.”

Jordan was silent, his hands tight on the steering wheel. Rhonda’s pulse pounded in her ears. She wanted to keep going, to spew the vitriol churning inside her, but thankfully she had learned some skills over the past seventeen years. Rule number one: don’t keep talking when you’re feeling intensely murdery.

“You don’t talk to your dad?”

Rhonda turned to him in disbelief. “That’s what you got from that?” Jordan nodded once, his eyes trained on the blurring road ahead of them. She stared out the windshield, mesmerized by the swirling snow glaring in the headlights. “No. I haven’t talked to him since I was eighteen.”

“Are your parents still together?”

Rhonda shook her head. “They were until twelve years ago.”

Jordan gave a soft “hmm.” They drove in silence for what felt like an eternity, staring at the monochromatic kaleidoscope of snow. “I wasn’t judging you.” Jordan’s voice split the silence, cracking the chill between them and infusing it with everything soft and warm.

Rhonda shivered. “I deserved it. It was stupid not to check the weather.”

Jordan made a sound in his throat, and when Rhonda turned to look at him, he pulled at the collar of his shirt as if it had shrunk in the dryer. “I was worried.”

Something dropped in Rhonda’s gut, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a bucket. If that stone was also connected to all of her internal organs. She tried to say something, but the words stuck in her throat.

She didn’t want him to be worried. She didn’t want anyone to worry about her. She didn’t want to owe anyone status updates. Jordan already knew far too much about her given that he’d seen her underwear, her medical records, and actual tears in her eyes, and nowhe was worried about her?

Damn it.

"Where do you live?"

He’d asked her that question once, and she hadn’t answered, instead offering to go get her laptop and meet him at his apartment. Now there wasn’t another good option, so she rattled off the address as if she didn’t feel like a hand was around her throat, and he typed it into his phone.

The map said twelve minutes, but at their current pace, it was going to be double that. Rhonda curled into herself, working to stave off the panic attack. She should’ve been fully warmed, but she couldn’t feel her toes. Her legs started to ache like someone was separating her calf muscle fibres with a fork.

This was too much. Even though she was sitting in the cab of a truck, she felt like she’d been shoved into a corner with no path back into the middle of the room and no way to spot the exit.

Rhonda reached out and fumbled with the music knob. His radio was tuned to 98.5, but it was at commercial.

Jordan pulled his phone from his pocket, swiped up, and handed it to her. “It’s connected to Bluetooth.”

She blinked. Staring at his unlocked phone felt almost as intimate as hearing he worried about her. She wanted to throw it back into his lap, but since he’d already seen her wrapped in a picnic blanket for the night, she didn’t want him to think she was fully crazy.

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