Page 26 of Steinbeck
She caught it.Stared at him.“You did hear me, right?I don’t do...partners.Look at what happened in Cuba—already you’re regretting our...whatever that was.”
“Teamwork.”He crunched a chip.“And that’s not what I regret.”He had such piercing eyes, she had to look away.
“This is going to end badly,” she said softly, almost to herself.
“As long as I don’t get blown up, we’ll be fine.”
She looked at him and must have worn horror on her face, because he grinned.
Oh, for the—“Stein.Don’t kid yourself.Sure, we have...moments.”
He raised one sexy eyebrow.
“But this”—she gestured between them—“you, me.We can’t work.We’re like?—”
“Fireworks.”He put a chip in his mouth.
“I was going to say a cluster bomb.With lots of shrapnel and internal injuries.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“How about this?”She leaned forward and enunciated each word.“It.Can’t.Work.Steinbeck.”
He stopped, a chip halfway to his mouth.“Don’t make that bet quite yet,Emberly.” Then he winked.
She leaned back and looked out the window.Hated the way his wink stirred up all the wrong feelings.
Very wrong, inconvenient feelings.
He grinned at her, still crunching.
Oh,this was going to be a long, very long, trip.
* * *
“There’s no need for a blindfold.”
Harper stood in the opening of the oversized garage in the town of Duck Lake, the early September night warm on her skin, stars winking overhead.
“I don’t want you to peek.”Jack stood behind her, his soft voice close to her ear, casting over her, raising just the right amount of tingles.
Tonight was the night, she knew it in her soul, and when Jack had shown up on her doorstep, showered, shaved, smelling like a man with a plan, yeah, this wasit.
He was going to propose.Finally and hallelujah.
Although she might have picked a picnic by the lake or on the dock of his family’s lakeside inn.Maybe in town, a fancy dinner at the Paddle House.
Or they could have flown down to his place in Melbourne Beach, and he could have bent the knee in the sand, the ocean as witness.
She’d even have been thrilled if he’d simply popped the question on the patio of her mother’s home, where she was staying.With Phillipa gone on a cruise, it was the perfect setting for such a moment.
But okay, the garage where they’d spent the better part of almost nine months would be Just.Fine.
Maybe it was symbolic.The start of their life together on the steps of Flo, their—no, Jack’s—1970s-era mint-green city bus, restored to be a home on wheels.But she’d expended enough sanding, painting, and general sweat equity in the monster to call it hers too.
Besides, when Jack had first shown it to her, he’d said...well, he’d said magic words to her.“Someday, Harper Malone, I’m hoping you’ll be my wife.”
Not a proposal, of course.Because that would come with a real question, but...
