Beside me, Cole stirred. His face was in the shadows because the road was twisting through a deep green forest. “We’ll have more rooms soon. We’re expanding.”
There’d been no mention of that on the inn’s website. Or at least I hadn’t spotted it. Truth be told, their website looked like something from fifteen years ago and was hard to navigate.
“How many guests are staying there this week?” I hoped there wouldn’t be a nice, innocent family there who might get caught in the crossfire.
“Just two,” Brady said. “You and Penny. We closed up shop for the week.”
“And Gideon. He’ll be in and out,” Cole added.
Crap.
“Ah, Mr. Massage Mate 3000.” I didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm from my voice. “Does he live there, too?” A lot of the videos he’d made had been set at the inn.
“He’s got his own place.” Brady didn’t elaborate further.
That was just great. As much as I wanted to smack Brady and Cole for putting me in this position, Gideon was the one I blamed the most. He was the asshole who’d made me feel so damn amazing, only to yank the rug out from underneath me. Plus, he’d been so damn smug.
In vain, I pressed my legs together and tried to make myself as small as possible, so I didn’t have to touch either of them. It was strange, because on the train, I’d been shoulder to shoulder with another passenger, but here in the truck, it felt different. Maybe because my seatmate on the train had been an elderly woman, and these were two virile men.
“I need more space.”
Brady chose to ignore my meaning. “You’ll have it at the inn. It’s in the middle of forty acres of woods.”
“I mean now. You guys are squishing me.”
For some reason, I was hyperaware of every time my arms brushed against theirs. Or my thighs against their hard legs. It made me think about how long it had been since I’d been purposefully touched, not just involuntarily pressed up against someone like this.
“If you don’t want to be in a position like this again, there’s a simple solution,” Cole said, his eyes on the road. “Don’t go attacking strangers online.”
I jerked away from him and managed to pull my knees up to my chest, my feet resting on the edge of the seat. Hugging my knees to my chest, I bit back a retort.
As far as I was concerned, what they’d done to me was far worse than what I’d done to them. It was the internet. People got snarky. If they didn’t realize that, they were in the wrong business.
And I was damn sure that they’d realize it by the end of the week.
8
LILA
“Now that you’ve seen the town of Donovan’s Mill, are you ready to see Donovan’s Inn?” Brady said, as Cole made a right turn onto a narrow road with no street sign.
“There was a town?” I said, resisting the urge to rub my stiff muscles. “I must’ve blinked and missed it.”
“Funny,” Cole said. Unlike me, he had room for his feet. Then again, that was probably a good thing since he was driving. Though I was in no hurry for my week’s stay in the sticks, I sure as hell wouldn’t mind getting out of this car.
“You just insulted us and 1,682 other people,” Brady informed me.
“Really? The population’s under two thousand?” Though Donovan’s Mill mostly seemed to only consist of a town square, a courthouse, two streets of shops and a few assorted churches and schools, that still seemed like an incredibly small number of people.
“In the town itself. But there are farms all around us just outside the town lines.”
That would probably add another twenty or so people to the population. A thought occurred to me. “If the town is Donovan’s Mill, why isn’t the inn Donovan’s Mill Inn?”
“Because the inn doesn’t belong to the town. It belongs to the Donovan family.” The pride in Cole’s voice made him sound warmer.
“Ah. So you two are like founding fathers?”
“Our great-great-grandparents were,” Brady said. It was hard to believe that they both had the surname Donovan. Where were the grandkids of women who’d gotten married and taken on their husbands’ names?