Hitched by Ruthie Knox Read Free Book Online Page B

ruining my life, and I hate you.”
    “Is it broken? Let me see.”
    His hand wrapped around her calf, and she pulled her leg away and somehow kicked him in the face.
    He covered his nose with his hand.
    “Sorry! I didn’t mean to do that. Are you okay?”
    Roman didn’t say anything. He just sat there, breathing. She looked for blood dripping out beneath his hand, but there wasn’t any.
    “You must be okay, because you’re not bleeding, and the only other possibility is that I drove your nose bone up into your brain and killed you instantly. In which case you’d be a lotmore limp.”
    “Noses don’t have bones.”
    “Huh. Then how do people get killed that way? You know, in movies, where the guy shoves his palm into the other guy’s nose and pushes it—”
    “Jesus, do you ever give it a rest?”
    Ashley lapsed into silence.
    The good thing about absorbing one blow after another was that each subsequent one stung a little less.
    Her ankle had settled into a dull sort of throb that she could already tell was going to fade, so she sat all the way up and placed it gently on the floor.
    “Well, on the plus side, we’re both going to live.” She surveyed the trailer. There were eleven cardboard boxes on the floor but no sign of the old Trusty Toolkit she and her grandmother had kept on board to use for emergency repairs. “In the minus column, I have no idea where to find a screwdriver.”
    Roman stood. “I’m going to rip the cord off those blinds and tie the door shut with it.”
    “No, you’re not. No ripping of things off my Airstream. Rip whatever you want off the Caddy.”
    She took his proffered hand, and he hauled her to her feet. When she put weight on her ankle, it yelped. She hissed in a breath through her nose.
    “You okay?”
    “I’ll live. But for the record, I hate you.”
    “Understood.”
    She stared up at him, and he cupped the back of her head in his hand, his fingers stroking her hair. The tenderness of the gesture was so sudden, she had no defense against it. She just felt it right through her—in her heart and lungs, in between her legs.
    She inhaled and froze. In that long pause between breaths, she memorized the shape of his mouth, measured the breadth of his cheekbones and the hard angle of his jaw with her gaze. She admired his wide nose and the black slashes of his eyebrows, the punctuation of his face.
    “What are you doing?” she asked in a whisper, because she was afraid he was going to kiss her.
    She was afraid she might actually want him to.
    “Checking your head.”
    “For what? Nits?”
    “You hit it, didn’t you?”
    She had, in fact. And then he’d touched her, and she’d forgotten.
    Because he was so gorgeous.
    And she was a moron.
    She stepped backward, crushing a box. “It’s fine. I’ll just …”
     … crawl in a hole and die.
    Helplessly discombobulated, Ashley cast around for something to look at and saw only the cartons her grandmother had asked a stranger to pack for her—this legacy Ashley hadn’t even been able to bring herself to open yet. She glanced around the trailer. The deeply, terribly familiar location of so many of her happiest memories with Grandma.
    She tried to find something to look at that didn’t hurt, but there was nothing, so she looked at Roman. A sound came out of her throat that she couldn’t accept and didn’t even want to admit she’d heard.
    Like her heart, punctured by an awl, leaking out all the hope.
    Roman touched her elbow.
    It was a different sort of touch for him, and so awkward. He put one fingertip on her body with such reluctance—as though he had to, but he didn’t want to own what might happen afterward.
    “You know,” he said quietly, “you’ll find something else. You’re the kind of person who always finds something else.”
    She wished, then, that she weren’t.
    Everyone always said, You’re just like Susan. You’re so like your grandmother. They’d toured the country in the Airstream