When It's Right (3 page)

There was a sad chuckle to her voice. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d tell you.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes as Nate watched the miles disappear beneath them. Beside him, Cassie stretched and shifted.

When she spoke again, her voice was markedly lighter, but the cheer sounded forced, projecting through the heaviness still lingering around them. “Well, I’m awake now. How do you want me to entertain you?”

She was trying. Nate would try, too. “I don’t know. You’re the English major. Tell me a story?”

He could feel her glare even as he kept his gaze trained on the road.

“Ha-ha. Unless you want a dramatic retelling of the
Canterbury Tales
…”

“Ugh. No, anything but that.” He thought about it. Thought about how to make the cheer less forced, how to make things easy between them again. How to get his best friend back. “Tell me a story about you. Something I don’t know.”

She hesitated. “There’s nothing about me you don’t know.”

“That’s not true.” It wasn’t. Friends grew together, intertwining and intersecting even as they lived their separate lives. There was always something new to learn. “Hell, until last month, I didn’t know you were allergic to raspberries, remember?”

“Don’t remind me.”

He winced on her behalf. It had taken days for the rash on her chest to go down.

And he didn’t need to be thinking about her chest.

“Come on,” he urged, refocusing. “There’s got to be something.”

She drew her knees up to wrap her arms around them, resting her heels on the seat and staring out the window, her quiet more thoughtful now than awkward. He knew her well enough to give her time.

“How about…” She trailed off before starting again, taking a deep breath and then letting it go. “How about this? When I first met you, I thought… I used to think you were hot. Really, really hot.”

Nate’s breath caught, and his quiet, “Oh?” sounded choked, even to him.

“Yeah. I even…you probably could have called it a crush.”

Jesus Christ. Their whole friendship twisted and changed before his eyes. “You never said anything.”

She laughed low in her throat. “Can you blame me? With all those girls throwing themselves at you…”

She was right. She usually was. Part of what had drawn him to her off the bat was that she hadn’t flirted, hadn’t flattered him or tried to get him to go home with her. Instead, she’d just
talked
to him. Gotten to know him, and he had gotten to know her, free from the pressures of attraction.

Not that he hadn’t felt it for her, too. In his own way.

“I always thought you were cute,” he admitted.

“Cute?” She said it like it was an insult.

“Hot, but in a different way.”

“If that’s your way of saying I have ‘a great personality’…”

“But you do!” He stopped himself. Made himself take a deep breath and
think
. “I mean, I know that’s a code word for ugly, but it’s not. You’re attractive
because
you don’t try. Because you’re just yourself, and it makes you hotter.” The words were falling out of him entirely too quickly, truths he rarely even spoke to himself meeting the air. “You’re smart and fun and nice. And yeah, you’re gorgeous, but that’s not the point. You act like just one of the guys, but you’re not. You’re
you
.”

He didn’t know how else to say it. And now that he was letting himself think like that, he couldn’t turn it off.

The waters surrounding him were utterly uncharted. But then again, they always had been with Cassie. Before her, when someone had caught his eye, if he’d been available, he’d jumped into bed and then into a relationship. He’d never been just friends with a woman before, and he’d definitely never let friendship evolve into something more.

God, what would that be like? To touch Cassie like that, to
hold
her like that.

Unbidden, flashes of what she might look like under her clothes danced across his eyes. Taut breasts and naked thighs, athletic muscles and a toned stomach and ass. Below him and spread for him and her mouth around him…

“Nate? Earth to Nate?”

He blinked hard. Chanced a look at her. But what he saw couldn’t wipe away the images still streaming through his mind. It was all he could do to stop himself from reaching out and touching her. What would her skin feel like beneath his palms?

She broke his reverie by grinning at him. “You still in there?”

He was. He was there, and he was hard, and it was her.
Cassie.

“Yeah,” he croaked. His head was spinning. “Did you say something?”

She looked at him like he was mental. He probably was.

“I said it’s your turn.”

“For what?”

“I told you something you didn’t know about me. Now you tell me something. And you better make it good.”

His mind felt like it was running off in a hundred directions at once. Tell her something? Like what?

He couldn’t think straight—couldn’t stop thinking about what she had told him. Unwilling to let her change the subject, he shook his head. “Hold on. I’m not done with your little confession yet.”

He could practically feel the heat of her blush.

“What about it?”

There was one little detail he couldn’t let go of. “You
used
to think I was hot? As in you don’t anymore?”

She swatted at his arm. “Egomaniac.”

Grabbing her hand, he held onto it for just a second longer than he should have. Her skin wasn’t as soft as he had thought it would be. It was softer.

He let go, feeling as if he’d been burned. “I’m serious, Cass. How long did this…” he had to take a deep breath before he could say it, “…this ‘crush’ last?”

She squirmed. “A while.”

“A while?”

That white-hot something in his chest. Was it hope? Did he
want
things to change?

“Yeah,” she conceded. “But thank goodness that’s behind us now.”

The feeling of expansion and heat inside his ribs collapsed. “Oh?”

Her words were shaky. Like she was swallowing something down, too. “Yeah. I mean, how awkward would that have been?”

He couldn’t answer. Because right now, he didn’t think it would be awkward.

He didn’t think it would be awkward at all.

Chapter Four

She’d told him. She couldn’t believe she’d just up and…
told
him. Her resolutions must be short-circuiting her brain. After all those years of keeping her feelings under wraps, the words had come tumbling out of her. And in its own strange way, it had felt good to speak the truth. Well, except for the part about how her attraction to him was all in the past. That was just wishful thinking.

She’d imagined how that kind of confession would taste so many times before, but the one thing she’d never expected had been his reaction. He hadn’t laughed it off the way she’d always figured he would. Instead he’d seemed…floored. She didn’t know what to make of that. There probably wasn’t anything
to
make of that.

Cassie turned her gaze toward the window and hugged her knees a little closer to her chest before letting them go. Nothing had really changed after all. Around them, the road kept rolling away, the earth kept turning. The bank of clouds that had swallowed the sun grew darker, and the first spittle of rain hit the windshield.

Well, that was an ominous sign. But rain was good. It watered the earth and it would water her. From it, maybe—just maybe—new things could grow.

Strengthened by that image, she smiled and lifted her chin. Looked over at Nate with eyes and heart both as clear as she could make them and whispered her mantra in her mind.
You are over him. You are
over
him.

“So?” she said.

He blinked rapidly. “So what?”

“Soooo. No more stalling. It’s your turn.”

With one hand, he turned on the windshield wipers, while with the other he tapped out a staccato rhythm on the steering wheel. Unfortunately, she didn’t have nearly as much patience left for him as he had shown for her.

“Well?” she prompted.

“I’m thinking.”

“Think faster. I gave you a big one.” Had she ever. “You’ve got to have something.”

There was another long pause. Just when she was about to goad him again, he finally shifted, sitting up straighter. When he spoke, his voice was quieter than it had been. It was the kind of voice he usually reserved for when he was a little drunk—or a little too truthful.

“I never loved Giselle.”

Cassie wanted to laugh. “You goof. This is supposed to be something I didn’t know.”

He shot her a glance and gaped. “I’ve never told you that before.”

He hadn’t. That much was true. “No. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t know it.” In the following moments of quiet between them, she thought it over. “You act differently when you love something. Like when you’re on a really great case or when you’re getting back from one of those runs where you almost kill yourself. You get this look on your face. I never saw you like that with Giselle.”

And wasn’t that just part of what broke her heart every time she’d seen the two of them together? Not only had he chosen another woman. He'd chosen one who brought out
nothing
in him. Not even the faintest hint of a spark.

His response wasn’t anything Cassie could have anticipated, the tone of it softer and more raw. “So what does that say about me?”

She scoffed. “I think it says a lot more about her.”
And how you feel about me.

If he was willing to accept so little from someone else, he must feel absolutely nothing at all for her.

Shaking his head, he sighed. “I know what loving a woman is supposed to feel like. You’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to. But it’s never been like that. Hell, Cass. I was thinking about asking her to move in with me because she was good enough. Doesn’t that mean there’s something
wrong
with me?”

“No…”

“I’ve never felt that way about anyone. I was ready to settle down with her and I didn’t even—I didn’t even
like
her as much as I like—” He stopped abruptly, darting his gaze to hers and away as he swallowed.

Her hands tensed and her breath caught. She gave him time to keep going, but he didn’t. Just tightened his fists around the wheel and trained his eyes forward.

He hadn’t been about to say anything about her. He hadn’t. She needed to accept that. And she needed to help him.

Everything inside her softened. God, was she really doing this?

You’re over him,
the voice inside her mind reminded her.

Her throat felt dry as she said, “You were the one who said you were in a rut. That you needed to make a change this year. I know I give you a lot of shit about the women you date, but seriously. It’s one vapid socialite with a great rack after another. Maybe it’s time to try something new.”

She didn’t mean her. She’d given up on that three days after he’d broken up with Giselle and still hadn’t looked at her.

“Maybe you’re right.”

All she could do was hope he found what he was looking for.

It would have been the most perfect symbolism if, just at that moment, a ray of sunlight had burst through the clouds. But reality had a different kind of symbolism in mind entirely. Cassie looked up to see the clouds had turned a menacing black. She ducked her head to gaze higher.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “The sky—”

She couldn’t even finish her sentence before her words were swallowed by the deluge, a sudden pummeling of rain on the windshield, barreling down like thunder on the roof of the car.

“Holy shit.”

The road was a wash of water, the five feet in front of them a haze of gray, the landscape all but washing away. The wipers blazed, flying as fast as they could go.

“Slow down,” Cassie urged. The tires on this fucking car…

“I—”

And then they were in motion, a swerve and then another. Steering into it and out, and Cassie screamed.

Spinning, and Nate’s voice in her ears, deeper than the rain and higher than the shriek of tires and wind. Cuss words and a glimpse of his arms flexing hard as he jerked wildly at the wheel.

Spinning and spinning, green and gray and asphalt. The tug of the seatbelt on her chest, her ribs, and then her arms flailing out, connecting with plastic and the seat. She cried his name.

And even through the sickening lurch, through the whip and swirl and the feeling of weightlessness and bracing, there was a moment. A crystalline moment.

If she had to die, she was glad it was here. With him.

There was nothing she could do, and deep inside her, something gave up and gave in.

And then everything was still.

“Cassie. Cass!”

Her head was still whirling, but her eyes were wide open, staring through cracked glass at bare trees and dead, still-clinging leaves.

She was breathing. Just to prove it, she sucked in another lungful and let it out. It didn’t hurt. She wiggled fingers and toes, pushed her foot into the floor.