I feel dizzy. I’m going to throw up. “What’s going on, Will? I thought you were gone. I thought you’d left town this morning, never to be seen again—and now, here you are…driving a truck as if my world hasn’t been crumbling this entire day.” My voice is climbing the rungs of a ladder into a land of the hysterics.
He briefly looks at me and then back at the road. “Your world was crumbling?”
“Well…” I raise and lower my shoulders. “Sort of. Internally. Yeah.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have admitted that. Maybe I’m showing my cards too soon. But I don’t even know what game we’re playing because I thought he was gone about five minutes ago. And now he’s mansplaying in his Bronco and having the audacity to look casual.
He shakes his head. “Why did you think I’d left town? Or that I’d ever leave without saying goodbye to you, for that matter?”
I laugh a stunted laugh. “Um, let’s see. Maybe because you weren’t there when I woke up this morning, and then you never texted or called or left a note, and then Mabel said you checked out of your room this morning too. What else am I supposed to think?”
Again he glances at me with furrowed brows. “But I did text you…this morning. I told you I wouldn’t be able to make it to the wedding, but I’d see you tonight.”
My mouth falls open. “No. You didn’t.”
“I did.” He fishes his phone from his pocket and tosses it in my lap. “Look.”
I tap the screen on his phone, pausing briefly to marvel at his new wallpaper photo: me standing in the flower shop the night we kissed for the first time. My heart shakes, and so do my hands as I slide open his phone and look at our text thread. Sure enough, there’s a message he sent me saying those exact words. But above them is a little red exclamation mark.
“It never went through.”
“What?” He cuts his eyes to his phone screen and back to the road, grimacing. “Damn service. I’m sorry, Annie.” And then like I’m outside of myself, I watch his hand—my favorite hand in the world, reach over and lie across my thigh. “I would never ever leave without telling you. Never.”
A heavy knot in my chest uncoils. I begin to breathe normally. “Good.”
He smiles over at me. “Good. Now…can I finish my kidnapping, please?”
My dizziness spills into my stomach and turns into butterflies. Something is happening right now. My thoughts run to play catch-up now that all sense of dread is sliding away. Will kidnapped me for fun. He bought a truck. He hasn’t left town. His hand is on my thigh.
I try but fail to smother a grin as I raise the blindfold back up over my eyes.
A few short minutes later, Will is putting the truck in park and cutting the engine. “I’ll come around and get you,” he says before getting out of the truck.
During his short walk around the cab, I try to imagine what in the world all of this could be about—but I can’t come up with anything. Or maybe I’m just too scared to dare to. Either way, when Will opens my truck door and slides my hips to the edge of the seat, my thoughts are lost as he leans in and lightly kisses my mouth. “Come with me?”
I nod. “Anywhere.”
There’s a heavy silence, and in it, I lift my hand to feel his smiling mouth against my fingertips. And then he hoists me over his shoulder, again quoting impossibly cheesy lines I recognize from a few of my favorite pirate romances. All ones in which a heroine gets kidnapped by a rogue pirate. I can’t help but smile thinking of how much Brandon would scoff at this. How much my sisters would make fun of me. But Will doesn’t just support my love of historical fiction—he reenacts them.
I hear his footsteps thud against wood and then a door opening and closing again. The faintest amount of warm light floods through the fabric of my blindfold. Will slides me off his shoulder to the ground and holds my waist when I sway slightly from all the blood rushing from my head. He turns me toward him and then I feel his fingers tenderly brush against my face as he lowers the blindfold.
Again, I blink the world into focus. My breath catches.
We’re in a mostly empty house—except for all the things Will has clearly added. Warm twinkle lights all around the room. Candles lit inside the empty fireplace. And the most wonderful part—all different kinds of flowers strewn across the floor. A carpet of petals. A cloud of foliage. And surrounding it all, a cushy-looking pallet in the middle of the room.