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“Thought you’d jump at the opportunity to make yourself useful and get out of this room for a while. That prospect should have been enough of a deal sweetener.”
Ugh… he was right about the latter. Why was she risking the possibility of him changing his mind?
Nonetheless, she had some leverage and she needed to use it. “I’d help for the Wi-Fi password.”
He crossed his beefy arms over his massive chest and his unkempt beard twitched as his top lip curled.
“Sure.”
His easy acquiescence threw her, and she blinked up at him, her mouth slightly agape.
“What?”
“I said ‘sure’,” he repeated.
Iris’s stomach sank and she gave him a dejected frown.
“You were going to give it to me anyway, weren’t you?”
The wicked gleam in his eyes told her she was right, but he didn’t admit as much out loud. Damn it, she should have asked for something else, like visitation rights with Luna… or leaving the door unlocked.
What a letdown. She’d been so certain she had the upper hand, but no, he held all the cards. She was so damned frantic to get out of this room that even if he’d refused to give her the password, she would still have conceded. And he knew it.
“Put on some shoes,” he said, after a glance down at her socks.
He made no acknowledgment of, or apology for, the fact that he’d been about to drag her out into the wet and cold without shoes.
Iris grumbled under her breath as she went to the closet to drag out her hiking boots, which she’d nearly not brought because of how heavy they are. But she’d had some romantic notion of joining Trystan Abbott on long hikes, while they amicably chatted about his life, loves, and losses.
Such foolish, optimistic whimsy.
He eyed her boots when she rejoined him at the front door.
“Those are surprisingly practical,” he acknowledged, almost begrudgingly, and Iris did her best to disguise her rolling eyes from him.
Unsuccessfully.
“What’s with that expression?” he demanded to know, and she huffed an impatient sigh.
“I’m not sure why you’re surprised by my choice of practical shoes when you know nothing about me.” She used air quotes around the word practical just because she figured it would annoy him. Sure enough, his eyes flashed at the gesture.
“You don’t strike me as a very practical person. You trekked across unknown terrain, in the dark and the rain, armed with nothing but a phone flashlight… thinking that your intrusion would be welcomed by someone who’d clearly sought the most isolated place he could find in order to avoid human contact. Not very practical or—y’know—clever.”
“My decision to trek here through the dark, and wind—it only started raining after you tossed me out into the storm—was validated if what you said about the car being crushed is true.”
He didn’t respond, merely leveled a malevolent look at her before turning abruptly. “Do you have anything waterproof? A rain slicker? Jacket?”
Her lips thinned and her silence spoke for her. Same as his insufferable, smug, know-it-all snort spoke for him.
“Now, packing some kind of waterproof gear when traveling to an area infamous for its winter storms would definitely have been considered a practical, clever move.”
Arrogant prick.
“I don’t have anything that’ll fit you,” he said, running an assessing glance over her frame.
“I’ll be fine. I can bear a little rain.” Only it wasn’t a little rain. There was a seriously scary amount of water falling from the sky right now.
“If you say so,” he said with a disinterested shrug. “Follow me.”
