So much for her being the nice one.
“Haven’t you done enough for all of us?” she demanded. “The answer’s yes, by the way. So do not use us as an excuse to stay. Your mom wouldn’t want that, and Jacob, well he’d just beat the shit out of you for even thinking it.”
Hud nodded and whipped out his phone. He hit Bailey’s number.
He went straight to voice mail. “Bailey,” he said. “Call me.” He paused. “I’m coming to you, okay? So call me. Please.”
Bailey drove away from Cedar Ridge, the storm on her tail the entire way. Halfway, she thought she would have to stop and wait the weather out, but luck was on her side, leaving her just ahead of the road closures. It took her a nerve-wrecking four hours to get home though, and by the time she pulled up to her apartment complex, she was a shaky mess. She looked at her phone, which beeped a voice mail from Hud.
She’s not a keeper to me.
The words were still reverberating inside her head. When she’d first processed them, her heart had leapt into her throat, and there hadn’t been enough air for her to breathe ever since.
When she heard Hud’s voice saying, “Call me,” she sucked in a breath. Nope, she couldn’t do it. So she deleted the rest of the message without listening to it. She got that he was probably worried about her. But she didn’t want his worry.
She wanted what she couldn’t have. His love. She sent him a brief text that said: I got home safe. And then she turned off her phone.
On top of her nursing job, her mother was the building super and had the first apartment. Bailey let herself in and found her mom in the kitchen pulling frozen cookie dough out of the freezer. She took one look at her daughter and turned on the oven. “We’re going to need the cookies cooked, not just raw dough,” she guessed.
Bailey nodded wordlessly.
Her mother’s welcoming smile faded. “Oh, baby. He hurt you. Dammit, I knew this would happen.”
“No.” Bailey shook her head. “I hurt myself.”
Her mother turned to the phone on the wall. “I’m going to call Aaron.”
“No! I don’t need Aaron.”
“What do you need?”
“Cookies.” She gulped some air. “And you.”
And then she burst into tears.
The snowstorm that blew in was indeed massive, closing most of the highways and causing havoc from one end of Colorado to the other.
Thirty-six hours went by and for each of those hours Hud grew more impossible to live with, or so each of his family members told him.
“You want to change your tone, or I’ll shove it down your throat,” Gray suggested mildly when Hud told him where to shove it after Gray had dumped a bunch of paperwork on his desk.
“You kiss your mama with that mouth?” Aidan asked when Hud had to pull one of their snowcats out of a ditch, which took all night.
“Just because I’m a chick doesn’t mean I can’t kick your ass,” Kenna said when he snarled at her for drinking the last soda in his place. “And I could totally do it too,” she told him, “since you’re still pouting over letting the love of your life get away—which, by the way, is your own damn fault, so you might want to stop taking your dumbass moves out on the people who actually still like you.”
That night Hud stood in his kitchen staring out at the storm that wouldn’t end. Every year for as long as he could remember, a storm like this had been a dream come true. It meant feet of fresh powder that, at first light, he and his brothers could plow through, racing each other through the trees, hip deep in snow the consistency of sifted flour.
In more recent years it also meant good business. People flocked to Cedar Ridge from far and wide for snow like that, snow that only came along like this once or twice a season.
But right now he’d give anything for it to be summer.
“Want to talk?” Gray asked, coming into the room.
“Hell no.” Hud let out a breath. “I waited too long to tell her how I felt. You warned me and I still waited too long.”
Gray waited until he turned to look at him. “It’s never too late.”
Hud hoped like hell that was true.
The next day finally dawned clear and bright, and Hud did something he’d never done before. He took himself off the schedule on a workday.
“Thank God,” Penny said fervently, and took the dry-erase pen from him and marked him off for the rest of the week. “Don’t take this personally, but no one wants to see you back here until you’ve handled your shit and have the girl.”
Hud followed the GPS to Bailey’s Denver address and found himself in a neighborhood that had seen better days. Snow covered the yards in huge berms, but he’d bet even in spring there wasn’t much landscaping going on. There were few cars in the building’s lot, which suggested this was a hard-working area and everyone was on the job.
When he parked and walked the not-quite-shoveled path, a woman stuck her head out the first apartment, which had MANAGER printed on the door.
“Can I help y—” She broke off at the sight of him and narrowed her eyes. “You.”