Allison Leigh - Show Me A Hero

He swore. “Little lady, I’ve got places to be.”

She smiled, though she wanted to grind her teeth. “We all do, sir. Might want to consider preserving your gas a little if you can stand the chill—”

He swore again and rolled up the window, cutting her off. He did not turn off his engine.

She straightened, headed back to her shovel and pulled it from the snow. “Just another night in paradise,” she muttered.

Already two yards farther than he had been, Grant paused. “Say something?”

He’d done such a good job of breaking up the berm that all she had to do was push the tip of the shovel against the road to plow the chunks off into the ditch. “You’re pretty good at this. Had a lot of practice?”

He didn’t answer.

“Naturally,” she said under her breath.

They chipped and plowed for another few minutes when she saw Dave Ruiz signaling with his mag light.

They’d cleared about thirty feet of iced-over berm.

“That’s good enough to start,” she told Grant, and his rhythmic swinging immediately ceased. He hooked the deadly tip of his pickax over his shoulder and headed off.

“Thank you,” she called after him.

He didn’t pause. Didn’t look back. Merely lifted his left hand in acknowledgment.

The less he said about anything, the more curious she got.

The feminine side of her wished she wasn’t so darn predictable. The cop side of her just accepted the fact that she was always curious where all people were concerned. Not just enigmatic, aqua-eyed men.

She propped her shovel against an upturned wheel on the trailer as she walked back around it, stomped her feet hard against the road to make sure she still had some feeling in them and returned to the first car in the lineup. “I’m going to walk ahead of you until you’re past the trailer,” she told the driver. It wouldn’t speed up the process any, but she wasn’t taking any chances on an impatient man going off into the ditch and suing the department as a result.

And one by one, that’s how she slowly cleared enough of the road on her side to allow traffic on Dave’s side a chance of squeaking around the trailer.

Eventually, she was able to get back into her own SUV, crank up the heater and call in the progress as the traffic slowly crawled along the flare-lined path. About two hours after they’d started, three heavy-duty tow trucks arrived and they had to block off the road again from both sides to allow them space to get the semi back up on its wheels.

The only saving grace was that the snow stopped falling halfway through the mammoth task. But when it did, the temperature dropped another ten degrees and the wind—always pronounced, particularly along this highway cut into the hills—picked up.

But finally, the deed was done. The semi was hitched to the back of another tractor and was headed down the road to Braden. The highway returned to its usual quiet midwinter-night state. Dave and Ali congratulated each other on getting the job done without any collisions or injuries, and they all headed home.

When Ali finally made it there, she noticed Greer’s car parked in her half of the detached garage behind the house. In the kitchen, the slow cooker was sitting on the plywood counter. Stone-cold. Full of uncooked ingredients. Ali had forgotten to turn it on when she’d left the house this morning.

She clamped the lid back on top and left it. It wouldn’t be any worse come morning and she could deal with it then.

She dragged herself up the narrow staircase and decided she was too tired to worry about waking up her sister to beg to use her fancy-ass bathroom. Instead, she turned on Maddie’s shower and stripped once the bathroom was full of steam.

Then she finally stepped beneath the blessedly hot spray. She expected her mind to go blank as she stood there, unmoving, her eyes closed while the water rained down on her head. But she was wrong.

She kept thinking about Grant Cooper. Working beside her. Without being asked. Without complaint. Then just walking away.

She shivered, and realized the water was running cold. She shut it off, stepped out and wrapped a towel around her body. Then she wrapped another towel around her head, returned to her own bedroom, climbing in bed just like that, and pulled her quilt up to her ears.

She wasn’t even able to enjoy the grateful thought that she didn’t have to work the next day before she was out cold.

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