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She almost wished she’d hit her head in the fall. At least it might explain this insanity.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Thanks, Mark,” Cody said into the phone.
“No prob, buddy. It’ll be good to see you. So who is this reckless woman? Someone special?”
Cody wasn’t sure he had an answer to that anymore. “A neighbor,” he said, figuring that was safe enough, given the woman in question was in the seat behind him. But even as he said it, he was aware his reflexive answer would have been: “Just a neighbor.” And a week ago, it probably would have been: “The pain-in-the-ass girl next door.”
And he didn’t know how to deal with the change. Didn’t even know how to categorize it. Was it a change in her? In him? A change in his perception of her? Or a change in their relation—
He broke off his own thought, veering away from even using the word relationship in conjunction with Britt Roth. This was just…forced closeness, that was all. And all it was going to take to end it was telling her the truth. Once she knew this was his fault, he knew exactly what she’d do. There would be no holding back, as he suspected there had frequently been on her side just as there had been on his this last week.
“I’ll be there in time for lunch. I’ll even spring for someplace nice,” he said to Mark, knowing that unless there had been a huge change since their college days, Mark Pruitt was still a notorious cheapskate. But Cody was more than willing to buy an expensive lunch after he offered to put in a weekend at work.
“I’ll hold you to that,” Mark answered with a laugh. “See you Monday.”
When he’d hung up, he glanced at Mr. Roth, behind the wheel of the SUV. “Mark will head in in the morning and start on it. I’ll pick it up Monday afternoon, and bring it back to the doctor’s office. That’ll cut a couple of days off the process.”
“Your friend’s going to work on this on the weekend?” Britt’s mother asked from her seat behind her husband, beside her daughter.
“Yeah. He’s a good guy.”
Britt said nothing. Cody didn’t look at her, since she was sitting directly behind him and it would have been blatantly obvious.
“That is so incredibly sweet of you, Cody!” Mrs. Roth exclaimed. He shrugged. “Now, don’t deny it, you’ve been wonderful.”
“It’s what he does, Mom,” Britt said quietly. “He does something…wonderful and then shrugs it off as if it were nothing.”
Cody went still. He stared unseeingly at the dash of the car, feeling not for the first time as if he’d slipped into some parallel universe where he and the woman behind him hadn’t grown up hating each other. Where they hadn’t constantly played tricks on each other as kids. Where they now didn’t snipe at each other constantly. Where they maybe even liked each other.
Where maybe it was more than like.
“How very Rafferty of him,” Mrs. Roth said.
“That Maggie’s a hell of a woman,” Mr. Roth said approvingly. “Raising you four boys to turn out like y’all did.”
“She is that,” Cody said, his voice sounding a little tight because his throat was constricted.
When they got back to the Roth place, her mother promptly excused herself to go fix lunch for them all and instructed her husband to come gather up Britt’s things that had migrated to the main house. “Since you agree she should go back to her place,” she said with a sniff as she strode off.
Cody looked at Britt in time to see her eye roll. And he couldn’t help grinning at her and saying, as he had before, “Moms.”
And again she grinned back and repeated, “They do have their ways.”
Which lightened the mood a bit, a good thing since they’d left Cody to unload the wheelchair and get Britt into it. She wanted to do it herself, but the doctor’s caution about doing as little as possible while only the temporaries were in place had clearly registered, and she let him pretty much lift her out of the car and into the chair. And he made himself focus on doing it as gently as possible, trying not to add to the storehouse of memories he seemed to be building, of how it felt to touch her, hold her.
“Thank you for calling your friend,” she said once she was settled and they were headed toward her place. It wasn’t the smoothest of rides, over the hundred yards or so of open ground between the main house and her smaller place. He heard a smothered grunt of pain as they started out, but she didn’t complain.
“He’s a good guy,” he said again, “and the company won’t mind. I helped them with the computer program, back when they were getting started.”
“So you’re calling in a marker, for me?”
He shrugged. Realized she couldn’t see him. Remembered what she’d said in the car. But before he could think of anything to say she spoke, sounding amused. “You just shrugged, didn’t you?”
He saw no point in denying it. “Yep.”
She laughed. But it faded, and she said with a sigh, “It’s going to be a long weekend, if I can’t move.”
