“So she’s there,” he went on, working to keep the bitter edge out of his voice. “It’s one of those fall days when it’s in the seventies one moment and then high fifties the next. I offered her my coat.”
Hadley let loose with a loud bark of laughter. “You told me everyone knew to dress in layers that time of year, and then you shoved your coat at me before you even knew my name.”
Okay, he might have said something along those lines—he’d probably said something along those lines—but it didn’t change the fact that he was right and though he’d had a perfectly good coat, she’d looked at him like he was holding a tennis ball that had been thoroughly dog slobbered all over.
He kept going without addressing her comment. “She tells me she doesn’t want my jacket even though she has her arms wrapped around herself and her teeth are chattering despite all the coffee she was drinking from this leaky thermos that dribbled every time she took a sip.”
“I wasn’t that cold and my teeth weren’t chattering. I’ve used a blow dryer to open a car door that was frozen shut before; I know what cold is,” she said with a soft chuckle. “Anyway, I was wearing an old long-sleeve T-shirt, so it didn’t matter if I dripped on it.”
“Then my brother comes by and gives her his ancient hoodie covered in stains and she puts it right on.”
Really, their grandmother’s Pomeranian would have turned up its spoiled nose at the grimy sweatshirt, but not Hadley. She’d smiled up at Web and put it on with a thank-you. That’s when Will had realized something had to be up.
“I used his sweatshirt because if I spilled on that, it wouldn’t matter, unlike your coat that probably cost as much as my rent,” Hadley said.
It would have been better for Will if she hadn’t been right about the cost of his coat. He hadn’t thought about it that way before. If he had, he probably would have given her the benefit of the doubt instead of that moment being the trigger for his suspicions. Web had always been adamant that they were just friends, but things changed, and Will had come across his distrust of people’s motives honestly.
“And you started dating after that?” PawPaw asked.
It took all Will had not to scoff out loud. More like at that point, they started facing off against each other every time they met. He couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t set her off and she couldn’t seem to do anything that didn’t seem suspicious, from suddenly starting to show up at what had been brothers-only brunch to offering unsolicited advice about how the Holt Foundation should be operating, she seemed to have her nose in everything—just like Mia had.
Hadley cleared her throat. “Around th
en.”
PawPaw looked at them skeptically. “Well, since Hadley’s never brought a man around before, I guess it must be serious. Maybe you’re even getting ready to announce you’re getting married.”
Hadley gasped, and the car swerved over the yellow line before she righted it. “Us? Married?”
“What?” PawPaw shrugged. “It’s a logical assumption. I mean, the only other one is that the whole thing is a giant head fake and you two aren’t dating at all.”
Will froze, that oh-shit buzzing sensation of a negotiation about to go pear-shaped making his ears vibrate. He glanced over at Hadley. Her face was perfectly neutral as she drove eighty, going past the cornfields on either side of the highway, but she was white-knuckling the steering wheel.
“Why don’t you think we’re dating?” Will asked.
“Because I wasn’t born yesterday.” PawPaw snorted and rolled his eyes. “Are you telling me the others all think that you two are actually dating?”
Testing the water of were-they-really-in-trouble-or-was-the-old-man-fishing, Will turned on his you-can-trust-me grin. “What makes you think we aren’t?”’
“Are you telling me that the instincts and experience my eight decades on God’s green earth are wrong?” PawPaw asked. “Or the fact that you two can barely look at each other unless the other one is looking somewhere else isn’t a dead giveaway? There are sparks as big as those wind turbines Gabe allowed to go up on the western edge of the ranch, I’ll give you that, but you two are too naive to notice them, I’d guess.”
Hadley’s shoulders slumped as she let out a long sigh. “You can’t tell anyone else.”
PawPaw let out a triumphant holler. “I knew it. I’ll keep my trap shut, but on one condition,” PawPaw said. “You’re both on my team for game night.”
What the— “Game night?” Will asked.
“It’s a family tradition, a sort of a game Ironman. Rummy. Monopoly. Scrabble,” Hadley said, sounding every bit as if someone had run over her three-legged swift fox.
Okay, he was obviously missing something. “What’s so bad about being on PawPaw’s team?”
“Who said there was?” the older man asked with an indignant huff, but he didn’t make eye contact.
Yep, something was definitely going on here.
“PawPaw,” Hadley said in that über-patient tone people used with toddlers who refused to grasp the realities of logic. “I love you, but you know no one wants to be on your team. You take it all a little too seriously.”
“What is the point of playing a game if you’re not doing what it takes to win?” PawPaw asked.