lasted all of about thirty seconds.
Way to go, Hadley. Do you really hate him enough to want to see him puke his guts up in the rental?
Because she was still pissed enough that she was doing what her mom called her “huffy breathing,” she had to stop to consider it as they barreled down the highway. After all, he was the reason for one of the more humiliating experiences of her life, and now she knew he thought she was friends with Web only for his money. Still, her mom had raised her better than to leave a person—even a total asshole—to suffer, so she started scanning the road up ahead for signs advertising a decent place to stop. Well, that and the fact that she didn’t feel like driving for three more hours in a car that smelled like upchuck.
“Sorry,” she said, not even close to meaning it. “I had no idea you got car sick.”
He closed his eyes tight. “Web did.”
“Oh!” She gasped. “He set you up.”
Her lips twitched, and she bit the inside of her cheek. She wouldn’t giggle. She wouldn’t chuckle or guffaw or snicker. She’d been raised better than to laugh at people who were obviously in misery. Clamping her jaw shut tight, she kept her eyes on the road and told herself to stuff a sock in it.
“Go ahead and laugh,” Will said. “I won’t hold it against you. Your perfect family probably never pulls this crap on one another.”
She snorted and took the next exit, heading straight toward the last big gas station before the miles grew longer between towns and then the towns totally disappeared. “One time my brother Knox replaced my shampoo with Nair, not realizing that it was impossible to miss the very distinctive scent of the hair remover.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
The tension in the car lessened at his question, eased by the common ground of sibling pranks, and the tightness in her shoulders gave a bit. “Whatever makes you think I’d take my revenge?”
That got a chuckle out of him, if a weak one. “I’ve met you.”
“I Saran Wrapped the opening of his bedroom door and then woke him up in the middle of the night screaming there was a fire. He ran smack into it, and I got the entire thing on my phone.”
“Nice one,” he said.
She pulled into a parking spot next to the convenience store / gas station / restaurant / trucker shower stop hybrid. “Hold on. I’ll be right back. Don’t puke in the rental—that smell will only make the motion sickness worse.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Thank you very much for that mental image.”
“Sorry,” she said as she lowered the windows before getting out of the SUV and hurrying inside.
It took only a few minutes to buy a couple of cans of ginger ale and a snack-size box of saltines as well as some over-the-counter Dramamine, but by the time she got back out, Will was standing outside the car, leaning against it with his boot heel on the tire and the brim of his black cowboy hat dipped low. Replace the highway in the background with grassland and it would look like the start of a cheesy cowboy movie. All he needed was the single strand of straw hanging from the corner of his mouth.
It wasn’t fair that he could still manage to look so hot even while looking like a basic-cable-cowboy rip-off. That he did and she still noticed just revved her up in the way being around him always did.
It made no sense.
He looked exactly like her best friend—duh, they were twins—but she had never been tempted to kiss Web. Just the thought of it made her make the “ew” face.
But with Will? It was always half hate and half lust swirling inside her at even the mention of his name, which pissed her off to no end. Why didn’t being around Web make her body react like that? It would make her life so much easier. The whole situation just drove her up a wall.
“I got you this.” She shoved one of the cans of ginger ale and the box of crackers into his hands, covering up her inconvenient attraction with a surly attitude, per usual. She opened the box of Dramamine and threw a pill at him. “Take this, too. This is pretty much the end of the line for places like this. We’ll hit a couple of small gas