Her expression didn’t look any less anxious, though.
“You don’t have to stay there at the hospital, though,” he assured. “Not if you aren’t ready for that. Nobody’s going to judge you if you aren’t.”
She was chewing her lip. “Truth? I don’t know what I’m ready for. I don’t think I’ll know until I actually get there. But—”
It dawned on him, then. What was at the root of the uncertainty clouding her eyes. “You can stay with me.”
Her lips parted softly.
“Kane and me,” he revised. “We’re renting a bungalow not too far from Provisions.”
“A bungalow.” She’d stopped biting her lip, but had started twirling her fork in her fingers. “Sounds small.”
“Two bedrooms.” He worked his jaw to one side, trying and failing to loosen it up. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
Her lashes lowered.
He felt increasingly cornered. “If you need a place, that is. You might not, once you’ve seen—”
“Linus.”
His pulse pounded in his head for a prolonged moment. “I was thinking of Eric Johnson,” he admitted finally and his words seemed to sit like a ticking bomb in the air between them.
“Here we go.” The server arrived, cheerfully setting two oversize plates in front of them, each loaded with a steaming, golden brown waffle, a mound of fluffy scrambled eggs and several strips of thick, masterfully cooked bacon.
Despite the situation, Adam’s stomach growled.
Laurel heard.
Her expression finally lightened and she smiled slightly as she picked up the small carafe of syrup the server had also brought. “What do you think? Real maple or imitation? Shall we place bets?”
Chapter Thirteen
The syrup was real maple.
And the taste lingered on Laurel’s tongue long after they’d left The Grill—and the small town of Horseback Hollow—in the rearview mirror.
Texas was a big state. She knew it would take hours yet before they reached Houston.
She’d already tried sketching. The decaying remnant of what had once been a barn that they passed. Adam’s hand and the way his wrist hung over the top of the steering wheel as he drove. The three hot-air balloons in Durango. But the motion of the car meant everything showed the slight vibration of the engine and the constant buffeting of the wind blowing across the plains. She finally replaced her pencils in their box and closed the pad.
“Give up?”
“I only have a few pages of paper left. I don’t want to waste them.”
“You can get another sketch pad.”
She lifted her shoulder, a noncommittal “hmm” in her throat. She didn’t know how, when she had no source of income at all. She doubted that the job offer in Vancouver she’d accepted was still waiting after she’d managed to be a no-show thanks to the car accident. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what had occurred during those days between her father calling to tell Laurel about her mother and the car accident. Not only had she forgotten the baby, but she couldn’t even remember her mother’s funeral, and there surely must have been one. But it seemed safe to assume the reason she’d been heading north from Seattle during the storm was to get to Vancouver.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to drive for a while?” They were surrounded by nothing but miles and miles of windblown plains, punctuated occasionally by a windmill or oil pump jack. And the only thing on the car radio again was static.
“You don’t have a driver’s license on you, remember?”
She sighed loudly. “Details.” She lifted her hand, absently pressing against the necklace hidden beneath her shirt. “I wonder how long it will take to get a copy of my birth certificate.”
“Too long, if I had to make a guess.”
He sounded so cross, she shot him another look. “If you won’t let me drive, then pull over for an hour so you can sleep.”
“I’m fine.” He flexed his hand on the steering wheel. “It’s more complicated than you might think, getting a copy of a birth certificate. That’s all.”
She frowned and stared out the window.
“My mom still has copies of all of ours,” he said after a moment and just left it at that. Like a person who drops a stone in a pond to watch the ripples.
“Subtle,” she murmured. “If my mother had kept a copy—” She broke off and it took a long moment before she succeeded in forcing back more tears. “My father’s not likely to know or care where it would be. The cleaning crew would have a better idea than he would.”
“Would it hurt to ask?”
“There’s nothing that simple when it comes to Nelson Hudson.” Her mother had been manipulative and tragic. On the other hand, her father had simply been demanding. Controlling. He’d wanted the perfect family to hold up to his friends.
What he’d gotten was Sylvia and Laurel.
“You lived in Europe. You had a passport.”
“I already thought of that. I would have had it with me if I’d been on my way to Canada. Surely, there is some procedure in place for people to obtain new ID when—”
“—the unthinkable happens,” he said gruffly. She realized the car was slowing. And then he pulled off onto the dirt shoulder and stopped altogether. “Okay. You want to drive. I’ll give you one hour.”
She was too surprised to respond and just stared at him as he put the car in Park and got out, walking around the front of the car to her side.
He opened her door. “Changed your mind?”
She quickly unfastened her safety belt. She slid out of the car and looked up at him. “What do you think?”
“I think I never could make the smart decisions where you’re concerned,” he muttered.
She narrowed her eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He waved his hand at her. “Just go on. Before I change my mind.”
She gave him another look but then crossed around to the driver’s side and got in. She adjusted the seat so she could reach the gas and brake pedals better while he adjusted the passenger seat so he could stretch
