Heart Thaw

HEART THAW

by

Liz Reinhardt

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Published by LIZ REINHARDT

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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2014 Liz Reinhardt

All rights reserved.

To BDizzle

Sister-in-laws don’t come cooler than you, kid. You don’t know how much I appreciate the fact that you’re always rooting for me. I may be able to tuck you in my pocket, but you have the biggest heart. I’m honored to call you family. Love you much.

Chapter One

“I can’t make it home for Christmas,” I announce.

My heart feels like someone tossed a handful of shiny sharp nails into it. I wait for my mother to reply. Even the sadness of her voice would be better than her brewing silence.

“Mom?” I whisper, phone gripped tight, eyes screwed shut.

“Can’t I call AAA? Can’t they come out there and pick you up?”

Her voice peaks high and crumbles just short of hysterical on the last words. I lean my head on the freezing, grimy roof of my traitorous car and bite back a sigh.

“Where will they tow me? The whole town is deserted for winter break. I don’t have the money for any repairs anyway. It’s fine, Mom. If Ella can get a few days off—”

“They just laid off Lloyd and Monty.”

I hear the whir of an electric mixer and can smell the phantom sweetness of cinnamon I know she’s dumping into the spritz cookie dough. She always uses so much you can taste cinnamon when you sneeze for weeks after Christmas is over.

“Lloyd and Monty?” The names stick to my tongue with the shock of this new information. “I can’t even picture Jerry’s without the two of them there.”

“Jerry’s wife just lost her job. They can collect unemployment until they age into retirement. But it’s been hard. Your sister is picking up all the slack.”

When the mixer’s frantic whip slows, I hear the low, slow tones of Elvis Presley singing about how blue Christmas is.

The king is playing my song.

“I’ll make a few calls.” My cell chirps, letting me know the power is about to fade out. “Mom, I gotta go plug this—”

The phone dies.

The car’s dead.

The lamplights barely cough up a dull yellow glow, the snow spits and sputters like jagged bits of confetti on the slicing wind, and I have the cold comfort of my igloo of a room to look forward to this holiday season.

Ho ho ho.

I crunch across the gravel drive and slide the brass key into the lock of my tiny studio apartment. There’s a strand of white Christmas lights on some real pine branches I hung over the window for a festive flourish, and it gives a false feeling of warmth to the Arctic air inside. My landlord ‘pays for’ the heat—which means I’ll slowly freeze into a human popsicle during the long weeks when no one else is around to complain about the thermostat being set at sixty-four degrees.

It takes the combined complaints of every single apartment dweller in our unit to force him to move it up by tiny increments. Since everyone else cleared out early for the holidays, I’m doomed to hypothermia.

I plug my phone in with stiff fingers and wrap my blanket tight around my shivering body. I don’t even take my boots off because I can’t feel my toes, and I’m literally scared of frostbite.

I hold my eyes closed, my lashes at a quick flutter, and talk myself out of bawling. I’m twenty-one years old, a mature, reasonable college student. I can manage
one
Christmas without my family. It’s just a single day. A day stolen from the Pagans by a church hell-bent on conversion, nothing magical.
Logic, logic, logic
. I fall back on facts for comfort.

I fill my lungs with deep breaths and release them slowly, lying on my bed so I can calm down and sleep through all this misery. Only when I’m five or six breaths away from sleep, do I relax enough to ignore the few tears that trace hot lines down my face and make my pillow damp.

When I wake up, there’s a cold, clammy sweat all over my skin under my clothes. My nose, the tips of my ears, and my fingers are icy, and I feel like there’s a mallet bashing me over the head.

Or else someone is knocking.

Oh, shit! Someone
is
knocking. Who the hell would be knocking right now?

Fear paralyzes my legs and makes my teeth grit into each other with a sharp, hard crush.

The campus is deserted. There may not be another person in any apartment on my entire street. Would a murderer knock? I don’t want to die alone in this frozen room.

The red numbers on my alarm clock scream 2:07 AM.

I reach for my wrought-iron lamp, tug the cord out of the wall and, holding it like a bat, tiptoe around piles of books and the legs of too many pieces of odd furniture in too small a space. I peek out the window and every muscle in my body instantly relaxes. The door shakes with more knocks, and I swing it open.

The fear’s completely gone, but the feeling that replaces my terror is a twisting, wary thing.

“Trent? What the hell are you doing here? Come in.”

I pull him inside by the front of his coat, still surprised that he’s a head taller than I am and that his shoulders are so wide it seems like he has to turn sideways to fit through the doorframe. I yank the door closed quickly so no more cold air gets in this already freezing dump and lean back against it.

I stare at my unexpected guest with my heart a half-frozen lump of meat in my chest.

Trent Toriello is in my living room/dining room/kitchen, his ears and nose pink from the cold, his overlong hair shiny and pushed back, helmet under his arm, hazel eyes more brown than green.

Sometimes they’re more green than brown.

Like when he’s turned on.

Holy freaking hell, that thought makes a log-filled fireplace’s worth of heat blaze up in me. Because I shouldn’t know what my best friend’s little brother looks like when he’s turned on.

But I do.

Dear God, I wish I could forget I do.

And I wish I could never forget.

It’s complicated.

“Your mom called Georgia in a panic.” He pops a hip on the counter that runs, inexplicably, under my living room window. He hovers his fingers over the curled leaves of the potted ferns I’ve been trying not to kill for the last few months, his words slow and accusatory. “Why didn’t you call her?”

“Georgia?”

I’m embarrassed to admit it hadn’t even occurred to me.

The last time we talked, she told me her life felt like it was being ripped into shreds. That she didn’t know what to do. That she couldn’t get out of bed most days. She broke my heart and made me feel more helpless than I’d ever felt in my life.

Because what was I supposed to tell her? That finals were really hard? That my landlord would probably jack the rent again, and I’d have to find a third job? That my car was belching clouds of fumey smoke? That I was overwhelmed and unsure how to chart my future and so damn homesick for a home I wasn’t all that sure even existed anymore?

All of these would have been completely acceptable topics for the two of us to gripe over, except for one tiny fact; Georgia’s problems buried mine in a rocky landslide.

Georgia’s gorgeous, hilarious, amazing mom had died, and, honestly, none of us knew what to do in the aftermath. My best friend lost her mother, a woman I loved like my own mom, and I had no clue how to begin to help her get over it.

How do you
ever
get over losing your mom? Is it even possible?

“Yeah, Georgia.” Trent’s voice is testy, and I don’t exactly appreciate his tone. “Your best friend since you two were in diapers. She’s been screwed up, Sadie. She needs you around.”

He nudges the blue and green pots that hold my ferns into a neat line, leaving dusty, muddy rings as a map of their formerly haphazard placement, focusing on them instead of looking at me.

I feel my throat tighten dangerously. Does Trent think I just don’t give a shit? I hate to admit how much that possibility hurts.

“My car’s dead, Trent. I know Georgia’s not in the position to drive all the way out here and back. I didn’t really see the point in calling her and dumping my problems in her lap right now.”

I finger-brush my hair back and snap it into a tiny, messy bun with the hair band that hangs loose around my wrist. Playing with my hair is an old nervous habit I haven’t fallen back on in a long time. Having him here, so close, in my space, is making me nervous.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?”

Trent’s plucking dead leaves off my wilting plants with fingers that seem way too big and rough for such a delicate job, still not looking directly at me.

“No.”

The word tries to tack itself up on the ferocity of my tone, but I have a feeling neither one of us is convinced. I know I’m not.

“Okay.” He raises one black eyebrow and dumps the palm-full of dry leaves into the garbage can by my fridge. “Well, you need a ride, and here I am. I know it’s late, but we better get a move-on if you’re going to be conscious for Christmas Eve.”

Home for Christmas!

My heart pirouettes in my chest. So Trent and I are a little rocky right now, so he accused me of blowing off his sister. The bottom line is, he’s here for me now, and I’m on my way home. I need to be there so badly, it’s an ache.

Then the reality of Trent’s vehicle situation jumps out at me.

“Did you bring the bike?” But his pink ears and nose already answered that question. “Are you sure it’s safe for both of us to ride?”

“I’m always careful. And I’ll be especially careful if you’re on it.”

He says it like I insulted him by implying otherwise, and his protectiveness rushes over me in a hot wave.

I watched him play Matchbox cars and Nintendo. He was always running wild with a gang of friends, up to no-good, covered in dirt, raising hell, and making a mess of Georgia’s attempts at a neat life. The words coming out of his mouth have no business making my gut clench and my face get hot, but they do.

Oh hell, they do, and I’m not sure I have it in me to fight off the way they make me feel right now.

“How long did it take you to get here?”

Directions, mileage, speed…I focus on the facts and logic to keep a handle on the emotions running like the slow, hot swipe of a tongue from the base of my spine and up the back of my neck.

“Four hours.” The shock that pops my eyeballs out of their sockets makes a smile curl over his lips, and that smile makes me feel unglued. “I’ll slow down when you’re on.”

“It’s freezing.” That is a massive understatement. If we were polar bears, this would still be achingly chilly weather. “We’ll get hypothermia. And frostbite.”

“I’ll keep you warm.”

His voice is melted chocolate to the strawberry of my desire.

And I’ll starve before I take a bite of that forbidden fruit. I’ve been down that road, and it’s trouble. Period.

“Stop it,” I hiss as I grab the shiny edge of my dining room table and dig my fingernails into the seventeen layers of varnish I painted on myself.

“Stop what?” He takes a few steps closer, until only the diameter of the tiny table stands between his body and mine. “You’re wound so tight, Sadie. You didn’t used to be like this.”

I get hot, bothered. Being around him makes me lose my hold on logic and good sense. He makes me feel like someone I don’t even know. And like someone I wish I was.

It’s scary as hell, and I have to fight to push it away because losing my way isn’t even an option.

“You never knew me. You were a kid, and so was I. And I grew up, but you’re still a kid. That’s all there is to it.”

I force those words out, but Trent Toriello doesn’t feel like a kid right now, his head a few inches from the ceiling of my apartment, his hands wide and strong, flattened on the table. His eyes are lightening to a bright, clear green, and I’m a second away from leaning over and grabbing his bottom lip between my teeth, nipping it the way I know he likes.

But he stands up before I can make any idiotic moves.

“Well, this
kid
is your only option if you don’t want to break your mom’s heart this Christmas. So are you up for it?” He flicks a stack of bills into a fan on the tabletop with one long finger. A finger that’s made my entire body ache with a single light touch. “You’re going to freeze in this meatlocker anyway. Did you forget get pay the heat?”

“Landlord provides it.”

Just then a shiver coils up my spine and knocks my teeth together. Trent points to my bedroom.

“Make sure you dress in layers.”

I’m exhausted, confused, agitated—but I
really, really
want to get home for Christmas. So I scuttle to my room and dig out a silk cami, my thermals, the thin, tight-knit wool sweater I love, my least frayed jeans, wool socks, leather gloves, a hat, a winding scarf, and my bulky coat.

Even though I wish it didn’t matter, I hate that I’m going to look like a snowman. I waddle out and catch him as he heads back in with a helmet and a leather jacket under his arm.

He tosses me the jacket. “Put it on under your winter coat.”

“It’ll be too tight,” I gripe.

“We’re going to be out in the wind for a long time. Better to be over-dressed than under.” He ducks his head and smiles so wide it moves his ears.

“What’s so funny?”

I cram my arms into the leather jacket and pull my winter coat on top, feeling like a stuffed sausage.