happy with Kerri, but that happy? No. And ever since she’d left, it was like he’d been walking around on automatic pilot.
Until today. Until that exact moment when Ellie looked back and smiled at him.
Ellie smiled at him.
An odd sensation started in his gut, a little like a tingle, and wound its way up and around every part of him until it tugged at the corners of his mouth, first one side, then the other.
Suddenly Nick’s hand was in front of his face, waving back and forth, bringing Brett’s gaze back from the empty bleachers where a few minutes ago he’d watched from the corner of his eye as Ellie climbed on her bike and rode off in the rain.
“Wow.” Nick looked down at Jayne before both of them turned their grins to Brett. “Was that a…no. Really?”
“What?” Licking his parched lips, Brett frowned from Nick to Jayne.
“Well, call me crazy,” Nick chuckled. “For a second there, it almost looked like you were actually going to smile. It’s just been so long since I’ve seen you do it, though, I wasn’t sure if it was a smile or if you just had a little gas.”
“Very funny,” Brett grunted. “I smile.”
The other two laughed as though he’d made some kind of joke. He smiled sometimes; maybe not as often as they did, but he didn’t think anyone smiled as often as they did. Okay, maybe Carter and Regan.
“Sure you do.” With a friendly slap on Brett’s shoulder, Nick opened his truck door and waited until Jayne was settled before he climbed in behind the wheel and called back to Brett. “Next time it happens, maybe let your face know so the rest of us can see it, too. Just sayin’.”
Brett was smiling right now—or was he? Well, he sure as shit wasn’t frowning, so that counted as a smile in his book.
He got into his truck and followed them out of the parking lot, then waved as they turned north and he headed south, down the back road toward home. A couple hundred meters on, someone was hunched over on the shoulder of the road in the rain.
Was it…Yup, it was.
If the situation had been reversed, Brett couldn’t honestly say for sure if she would’ve stopped for him, but his foot was already on the brake. Flicking on his hazards, he pulled up, stopping his truck so it was half on the shoulder, half on the road, acting as a buffer between her and what little bits of traffic used this route. Before he got within two feet of her, Ellie held up her hand to stop him.
“It’s just the chain; I got it.”
Thick rivulets of rain slipped down her helmet, dangling in heavy drops from the front peak. Both of her hands were covered in grease and a dirty mud line of wheel spatter ran up her butt and the back of her soaked T-shirt. If any of these things bothered her, she didn’t let on; she just kept working.
“Want me to give it a try?” he asked, squatting down on the other side of the bike.
“I got it.” Still crouched on the balls of her feet, she wrapped her left fist around the free loop of the chain and wedged the greasy fingers of her right between the gears to try to wiggle the chain free. A second later she stopped, both hands frozen in place, and pressed her face against her forearm.
“You okay?”
“Ya…I…I…” She scrubbed her nose against her arm, and when she finally looked up again, her face was scrunched tight while she wiggled her nose back and forth. “I have to…Achoo!”
The force of her sneeze—which startled even Brett—rocked her off-balance, sending her sprawling backward into a shallow puddle, the end of the now-broken chain still firmly clutched in her fist.
“Damn it!”
He started to reach a hand out to help her up, but she waved him off. Still squatting, Brett let his gaze linger on her for a second before pointing down at the length of chain still jammed in the gears.
“Safe to assume that wasn’t the result you were looking for?”
There was about half a second when he wished he’d kept his mouth shut; then she made a low, mocking sound deep in her throat as she pushed to her feet.
“Jeez, two funnies in one night,” she muttered, swiping her forearms awkwardly across her butt. “Careful or you might pull something.”
There it was again: that weird sensation in his gut, only this time it was more