Page 83 of All I Want For Christmas

“You're staying over at that cabin and you didn't bring any food?”

“Yeah. I'm not from here. I wasn't prepared when I packed.”

He snorted. He couldn’t help it. “Ellie's gumbo’s in the fridge. What the hell do you need eggs for?”

He could hear her suck in a breath of air from the few feet that separated them. She probably got some bugs in that lungful too.

“Oh my God!Theo?”

“Well, who the hell did you think it was?”

“I don't know! I didn’t knowanyoneelse would be out here! Why would I think it wasyou? You’re the one who was all excited to strand me out here!”

He let his feet drop to the porch floor with athunk, then leaned forward. “Strand you out here? That wasn’t part of the plan.”

“Well…” She hesitated.

Yeah, because he never said anything about stranding her out here.

He leaned his elbows on his thighs. “What are you doing out here? Really?”

She pulled a quick breath. “Why didn’t you tell me you were staying in the cabin right next to mine?”

He thought about that. He supposed he hadn't mentioned that because it would've set her up for potentially saying something like,should we have dinner together?Want to come over for a beer? How about I come over to your place for a beer?And all of those were bad ideas. Having Savannah at his house, alone, deep down in the bayou where no one would find them,alone, was a very bad idea.

Kind of like they were right now.

“Didn’t think it mattered. You’re supposed to be over there.” He pointed at her cabin. “Alone.” He got to his feet. “What are you really doing over here?”

“I was just going on a walk. Then I realized there was a cabin here, with atruck.”

“The truck you were trying to get into.”

She moved closer, shaking her head back and forth quickly. “I just wanted to make sure it had keys in it.”

“So you could take it.”

She stared at him from the bottom of the steps. “Take it? Where would I take it?”

“That’s a good question. If you stole my truck, where would you go?”

“I wasn’t going tostealit. I just wanted to make sure it actually ran.”

“If you didn't want to steal it. Why do you care that it runs?”

“Because that means if Ineededit, I would know that it was here. All I want is to know it’s here and in working order.”

He shook his head and lifted a hand to scrub the back of his neck. “I don't understand.”

She dropped her hands on her hips. “I have no idea where I am. If I did steal it, where would I go with it?”

“Toward town, I suppose.”

She glanced behind her in the general direction of Autre. “Yeah. Probably. I guess.”

There was something weird about her demeanor. She wasn’t being sassy. He wasn’t sure he’d ever spoken to her when she wasn’t sassing him somehow.

“What is going on?” He descended the steps. “Are you all right?”

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