Taking the Heat

“You grew up here, right?” he asked, deciding to drop the subject of her virginity for a while.

“Yes. My dad was an attorney here, then a judge. He’s a federal judge now, but this is his district. So I lived here until I went to college in Cheyenne.”

“Do you ski? Bike?”

She shrugged. “I ski, but it’s not really my thing. I like it once I get up on the hill and it’s so quiet. But you have to get through so many crowds and lines to get up to the quiet part. My first love is hiking. I can be alone. Clear my head. It’s peaceful.”

Gabe felt his heart thump dangerously at her words, but mostly it was the faraway expression on her face. “I know you don’t climb. Are you into camping?”

“Not really. My dad isn’t outdoorsy. I never really had anyone to go with.”

“We could go sometime.”

Her cheeks went immediately pink. Her gaze dipped to her plate. “Maybe.”

“It’s a lot like hiking, except you don’t have to go back to the real world within a couple of hours. And we’ve got so many great secluded sites close by. There’s no reason to go to a campground, unless you like a lot of neighbors with generators and RVs. The key is to ask a ranger on your way into a park. They can point you to great flat sites that are near a creek or have a view.”

“It sounds nice,” she said.

“I’ve got a ton of gear. You want to try it? Separate tents, of course.”

Her pink cheeks went red. She set down her fork. “Gabe, I meant it when I said you were sweet. You are. But you don’t have to feel sorry for me. I have great friends. I’m doing okay. You don’t need to take me in. I’ve just never had a real lover, that’s all.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you! Okay, I felt a little sorry for you today, because I knew you’d be hungover and maybe mortified—”

“Maybe,” she scoffed.

“But...can I be honest?” Her flat mouth told him what she thought of that question. “When I met you, I thought you were someone else. Some high-maintenance city girl who’d sneer at a pair of hiking boots unless they were Burberry.”

“Really?” Her eyebrows rose in pleasant surprise. “I passed as a high-maintenance Manhattan girl?”

“Yes.” He gestured toward her plate. “Until you ordered an enchilada platter bigger than mine.”

She growled, “Shut up. I needed it.”

“I know you did. I’m just saying that you’re nothing like I thought you were. You’re funny and smart and down-to-earth. And I like the way you get shy sometimes.”

“Oh.” She was blushing again.

“And you’re beautiful, of course.”

“You don’t have to say that, Gabe.”

He drew his chin in in shock. “I’m not just saying that.”

“I can pull off cute on a good day. That’s it.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

She nodded, then carefully chewed a bite of enchilada Suiza before setting her fork down again. “I’m not good at graciously accepting compliments. You can add that to your impressions of me.”

“Not like me,” Gabe said. “When you said I was gorgeous, I just accepted that you knew what you were talking about.”

“You’re never going to drop that,” she moaned.

“Never. Will you go out with me?”

She glanced around, her eyes darting from him to the table next to him and then the front door. “Go where?”

“We could go for an evening hike sometime. Or we could go to dinner.” He waited until she met his gaze again. “We could count this.”

She swept another nervous look over the room. “I don’t think we could. I’m wearing flip-flops.”

“I think that still counts. To make it official, we could go do something highbrow afterward. There’s a historical talk at the museum tonight. We might have missed it, though. Still, I bet some of the art galleries are open. We could go nod and murmur at the art.”

She watched him for a long moment, her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed with thought. She cocked her head a little. Gabe tried to look sincere and patient, even though he felt like squirming. “Or we could get ice cream,” she finally said.

Hiking, enchiladas, ice cream. Maybe she was the perfect girl. Maybe he was in big trouble.

CHAPTER SEVEN

VERONICA WONDERED IF she could die from blushing. She hadn’t been lying when she’d called him beautiful. Or gorgeous. Or sweet. Gabe MacKenzie was a fucking dreamboat and she was on a date with him. An embarrassingly honest date.

They strolled down the boardwalk with their ice-cream cones and every time her shoulder brushed his arm, she blushed. It was dark now, at least. And probably too cold for ice cream, but she didn’t think that was why her nipples were hard.

God.

Maybe he’d been joking about the camping, but the idea intrigued her. What would that be like? To go camping with a hot guy? To be totally secluded in the pitch-black night, surrounded by wolves and bears and all sorts of terrifying things? Separate tents or not, surely she’d end up in his sleeping bag. She shivered at the idea of him touching her. She hardly knew him, but she liked the thought. It was strange, this awareness. She couldn’t remember a time she’d felt like this before.

“I’ve been to sleepaway camp,” she blurted out. “I don’t want you to think I don’t have any experience.”

His cone drifted slowly down from his mouth. “I see. At sex?”

“No! What? I meant camping. Experience at camping!”

“Oh. Because sleepaway camp... I thought... I don’t know.” He grimaced and shook his head.

She thought she would blush again. Or die of embarrassment. But instead she laughed. Hard. “Wow. You’re a pervert.”

“I’m not! I was just thinking of...something else. And you were thinking about camping. And I assumed we were on the same topic. That’s all.”

Did he mean he’d been thinking about having sex with her? That was only fair, really. She’d been thinking about sex with him. After last night, it was the standard she’d set. The giant flashing sign she’d put down between them.

“Fine,” she finally said. “Thinking about sex doesn’t make you a pervert, but you also ordered butter-pecan ice cream. Clearly there’s something wrong with you.”

His face relaxed into a relieved smile. “There’s nothing wrong with butter pecan. Even so, that was only the first scoop. The second is chocolate. Surely that redeems me.”

“Maybe.” She finished her ice-cream cone and crossed her arms against the chill.

“So how did you end up back in Jackson?” he asked.

Veronica thought of all the reasons she’d given other people. That New York was too expensive. That she’d been offered a great opportunity as Dear Veronica. That she’d missed her dad. She sneaked a look at Gabe. He was frowning a little, waiting for her answer. He looked...sincere. And he didn’t love the city, either.

The dark gray mass of the truth was pushing at her chest, squeezing the life out of her. It felt as though she were there again, in the city, in her tiny room in her crappy apartment in her intimidating neighborhood.

“I hated New York,” she said, and it felt good to finally say it out loud.

“Oh,” he said, the word a little dark with shock. “Really? Why? Didn’t you say you’d wanted to live there for your whole life?”

“I did, but that was the New York from movies. The New York my mom and I used to talk about visiting. It was Breakfast at Tiffany’s and You’ve Got Mail and later Sex and the City. That’s not a real place.”

“Sure it is,” he said.

“I thought you weren’t a city boy,” she said, suddenly suspicious.

“I’m not!”

“Well, maybe you don’t remember what it’s like to live there. It felt like...a battle.”

He nodded. “I know it can be a rough place.”

“It wasn’t that, exactly. I knew it would be expensive. I knew it could be dangerous. I thought I had it all planned out, though. I found roommates through an ad on Craigslist. Single women like me. I thought... I don’t know. I’d watched too many movies. I thought we’d be friends, and I’d landed this amazing internship at an iconic paper, and everything I was waiting for was right there in front of me—it was all about to happen, and then...”

She felt very alone for a moment, walking down the street with Gabe. She didn’t know how to explain it. It was as if the city had betrayed her. “My roommates weren’t friends. They kept to themselves. And the quirky neighborhood felt like a gauntlet of yelling men and piles of leaking garbage bags, and there were roaches everywhere. And at my amazing job, I was just a cog in the wheel, and even though I did well, nobody cared if I made it or got spit out. The city was nothing but noise and steam and shadow and millions and millions of strangers.”

He nodded. “I get that.”

“Do you?”

He nudged her with his shoulder. “Of course. It’s too much sometimes even for people who love it.”

He made her feel better. Of course New York wasn’t for everyone. She should have known it wouldn’t be right for her. And of course, there’d been things about it that she’d loved, but they’d been hard to think of at night in her lonely bedroom on her noisy street.

Their steps had slowed as they’d talked, but she and Gabe were still heading toward her place. This morning she’d vowed never to see him again, but now they were on some sort of date, and what did that mean? Did he think she’d invite him to her place? Did she want to?

Tension drew her shoulders tight. She didn’t know what to say. She was going to start babbling again. She could feel it. She was going to start talking about virginity and dating and then tell him he didn’t have to pretend to like her.

Maybe she’d start spouting off statistics. She’d looked them up. That was her job. Even if she felt like a freak, she wasn’t alone. About 4 percent of women were still virgins at her age.

Her lips parted. The words pushed at her throat, wanting out. The awkwardness needed to escape.

Veronica snapped her mouth shut and shoved her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. Her fingers closed around her keys just as she and Gabe turned onto the narrow walk that led to her door.

She dropped the keys immediately, then snatched them off the ground before Gabe could reach down to help.

“Sorry,” she muttered, as if she needed to be sorry for dropping her own keys on her own walkway. Sorry, I was just thinking about sex statistics.

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