Audrey turned her phone around and showed Josh a picture of water rushing over the bridge.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Audrey turned her phone around and started typing.
If the bridge was washed out and the owner couldn’t make it up here…that meant they couldn’t make it back to the main road. Which meant they would be stuck here. In this cabin. Overnight.
Audrey was still typing when her phone rang and she answered it. “Hello.”
“Yes, I got the photo.”
Thor hopped up on the oversized couch, making himself at home. He circled three times and then plopped down.
“Okay.” Audrey nodded. “Okay.”
“Are you sure that…” She was silent again. “Oh, okay.”
When she hung up the phone, he noticed that her chest was rising and falling in shallow breaths.
“What did he say?”
“He said that all the heavy rains we’ve been having overloaded the dam up the road and it broke causing the river to overflow. Road crews won’t be able to get out until tomorrow morning. He apologized profusely but said that the fridge and bar are both stocked, and we should be fine until then, but we’re basically stranded here overnight.” Audrey stared at him for a minute and then looked down at her phone. “I need to text Viv to stop by and feed Frank and Lucy. And make sure that Frank’s blanket is fluffed.”
Josh was torn between being thrilled and terrified at that news. So many emotions were rushing through him that he felt his anxiety begin to build. They were stuck here. Together. All night.
His chest constricted at the thought of what the ramifications would be if anything happened tonight. For so long he’d been adamant that nothing could happen between them and one of the main reasons was because he couldn’t have kids. Now that he knew that she didn’t want kids, it changed things.
Just like finding out she was a virgin and her asking him to be her first had changed things.
But for some reason, he was still scared. Mainly because he didn’t want to do something that couldn’t be undone. Once you cross that line of intimacy with someone there is no going back, and also because he wasn’t even sure he could do it if he wanted to.
So where did that leave them?
He didn’t have any of those answers, but one thing he did know was that neither of them had had dinner. He might not have control of anything else tonight, but he could make sure they ate.
When Audrey finished texting her sister, she looked up at him and he noticed she was biting her lower lip. She only ever did that when she was nervous.
There was an electricity in the room that hadn’t been there when they’d been expecting Jeremy Mills to walk through the door any second. Now that they knew it would be just the two of them until morning, the air was crackling with expectation.
Hoping to relieve some of the tension he clapped his hands together. “Okay, well there’s really only one thing to do.”
“What?” she breathed out.
“Eat.”
A wide smile spread across her face.
He walked over to the kitchen area and saw that Mills hadn’t been lying. There was enough food here to feed a family of four for a week. After a brief inspection he turned to Audrey and asked, “Do you feel like chicken or spaghetti?”
Her eyes twinkled with delight. “Spaghetti.”
“Italian it is.” Nonna would be furious at him for cooking Ragu, but desperate times.
“What can I do to help?” Audrey asked.
They worked together and prepared the food. He noticed that while they did she slipped out of her shoes and put her hair up in a bun. Audrey always loved to be comfy when she was at home. Not that she was home, but this was home for the night. He also realized that she was in her work jeans and T-shirt and they hadn’t brought a change of clothes because this wasn’t supposed to be a sleep over.
“Can you watch the sauce? I need to run out to the truck to grab something.”
“Sure.” She moved in front of him and took the spoon out of his hand. When she did her ass brushed across the front of his pants and he got hard. Not rock hard, but hard enough to make his jeans uncomfortable.
Even though it probably shouldn’t, he had a little pep in his step as he went out to the truck. That was the first time in two years that he’d had any movement down below when he was with a female. He grabbed the Hope Falls Effect sweats that he’d washed and had planned on returning to Viv from behind his seat and brought them into the cabin.
“You can change into these if you want.”
“Sweats?!” Audrey’s face lit up adorably.
The girl loved to be comfortable.
Josh nodded and handed them to her then took the spoon from her hand. “I got this. You can go change.”
He moved the sauce off the hot burner and was draining the noodles in the sink when Audrey returned. The pot almost slipped out of his hand when he saw that she wasn’t wearing any pants. She was holding the sweats and they were folded up. His eyes were drawn to her bare legs which were peeking out beneath the oversized shirt that hit her mid-thigh.
“The sweats don’t fit me, so I figured you could wear them.”
He forced his eyes back up to hers and he nodded, not trusting himself to speak. They were stuck in a cabin together. Overnight. And she wasn’t wearing any pants. He’d either died and gone to heaven or this was his personal hell.
18
Audrey sat on the couch, fire raging beside them, her legs curled beneath her, sipping on a glass of wine. Josh was on the far side of the large sectional couch and Thor was sleeping in between them.
After dinner she’d cleaned up while Josh went and showered since he’d been working in the garage all day. When he came out of the bathroom, he was wearing the sweats, but he’d put back on his T-shirt, which she was very disappointed about.
They’d played a couple games of cards and now they were watching This is 40.
She knew that time was slipping away from her, and she was never going to get another opportunity like this. She needed to seize the day. Or the night, in this case.
She shifted her position so she was facing Josh, took a deep breath, and summoned all of the boldness that she knew had to be somewhere in her DNA since Viv was her sister. “Are we going to talk about the kiss? Or what I told you after the motorcycle ride?”
Josh’s face was still staring straight ahead at the large flat screen television, but even from his profile she could see his expression tense. He blinked and then turned the television off and readjusted his position so he was looking at her. “Yeah. We should.”
The tone in his voice caused her stomach to drop like it did when Viv made her eat at a restaurant that was one-thousand feet above street level and had a glass bottom floor. It was not a happy tone. It was a let’s-get-this-over-with tone.
He lifted his hands and ran them through his hair. Strike two on how well this talk was going to go. If he was running his hands through his hair that meant he was stressed or frustrated, neither of which were good signs.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this…I was just trying to figure things out in my own head first. I just don’t think…I don’t see how we could…”