Page 20 of Boston
Cora looked out her side window, warring with herself now. “A boss?”
He scoffed. “No, I’d never take my boss to a family event, even if it is only my cousins.”
She watched the faint reflection of herself smile. “So a friend.”
“I guess,” he said, and oh, he sounded so grumpy about it.
A smile stretched through her soul, and Cora couldn’t stop herself from looking at him. She hadn’t imagined the crackling, chemical tension between them. “If I’m not a friend, then what am I?”
He looked at her too, and one thing Cora really loved about Wyoming was the wide open spaces and the lower population, because right now, it meant Boston didn’t have to worry about traffic on this road.
It would be great if he could say something, though.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
In all honesty, Boston wanted to slam on the brakes and pull the truck to the side of the road. Maybe then he could demand that Cora tell him what she really thought. That felt like an Uncle Luke thing to do, and an image of him and Sterling flashed through his mind.
He knew their love story, and it had taken Sterling showing up and bawling Luke out before they’d gotten on the same page. Maybe he just needed to open his mouth and say something.
He thought of a scripture he’d read that morning, and he wanted to be more faithful and less fearful. So he swallowed and focused on the highway in front of him. “I think we could be friends, sure,” he said. “I don’t know you that well, but I think—I mean, I’d like to.”
He nodded, wishing saying the right thing came more naturally to him. “Yeah, I’d like to get to know you better.”
She didn’t respond, and Boston let a few seconds go by before he looked over to her. She studied her hands, and she seemed as unsure as he felt. “I think we should just be honest,” she said.
Wasn’t that what he’d just done? “Okay,” he said, not sure what else she needed him to say. She looked at him, and Boston realized she definitely needed something more.
His mind blitzed and seemed to fracture.Dear God, he thought.I’m going to open my mouth, and I’ve heard You’ll fill it with the right words.
He took a breath.
Please don’t let me crash and burn.
“If I’d met you somewhere else and I didn’t know you were my boss, I’d ask you to dinner,” he said. “There, yep. That’s it. I think you’re beautiful, and I’d ask you out, so I could see if this weird, twisting, fizzing in my gut is just me coming down with something, or if there’s something between us that could become?—”
He cut off when she started to laugh.
Pure humiliation cut through him, and Boston now wanted to slam on the brakes and turn the truck around.
“Sorry,” she said, immediately sobering. “Really, I’m sorry.”
“Why are you laughing?” He refused to look at her and instead poured all of his focus into gripping the steering wheel as tightly as possible.
“I’ve never heard someone say that their attraction to another person is ‘weird’ or ‘twisted’ or could just be them getting sick. I don’t know, it sounded funny.”
Boston pressed his teeth together, his jaw already aching. He’d barely been able to eat breakfast that morning, and he’d waited for Cora past noon. His stomach buzzed with angry hunger, and he told himself to stay silent.
He’d already said way too much anyway.
“I’d go out with you,” Cora said next, and that caused Boston to jerk his attention to her. She grinned at him, the gesture only enhancing her beauty. “I mean, I couldn’t even wait an hour to ask you for your number, so yeah. I’d like to get to know you better too.”
Boston relaxed again, the tension in his legs and back finally letting the seat hold him upright. “So let me ask you this.”
“Oh, brother,” she said. “This isn’t going to be a meeting filled with questions, is it?”
Meeting.
