Southern Bombshell (North Carolina Highlands 5)

Dropping my phone into a cup holder, I adjust my grip on the wheel. Shift into second, then run my sweaty palm over my jeans. Shift into third. Put my sunglasses back on. Run my hand through my hair to get it out of my face. The breeze blows it back into my face, and I tug at it again, wishing it were still long enough to tie back the way I did when Milly and I would take our weekend drives to nowhere and everywhere.

I want to look at Milly.

I don’t.

I want to be polite.

I don’t want to cross any more lines. I just had my arm splayed across her tits, for crying out loud.

Asking about her personal life is definitely crossing a line. But I’m fed up with this bullshit small talk. And yeah, the tension between us is killing me. If I don’t talk, awareness of her fills me from head to toe, and I literally can’t stay still. I sit here and I sweat and I fidget, despite the delicious breeze blowing through the windows. That’s why I had to keep my hands shoved in the back of my pants outside Malaprop’s. She was distraught, alone, and I wanted so badly to comfort her, to reach for her, but I couldn’t.

The impulse to apologize to her, to explain everything, presses against the back of my throat like a fist.

I can’t take another hour of this. The fidgeting. The not knowing. It always fucks me in the end, but I care, and it physically hurts to think I might have something to do with the way she’s feeling.

“Wanna talk about what happened this morning?” I ask carefully, glancing at her. “Why you were crying on the side of the road?”

Milly gently tugs at Lucy’s ears. She doesn’t look at me. “My car got towed. That’ll ruin anyone’s Saturday.”

“Fair point.” My body burns, but I resist the urge to rip off my shirt. “Tell me to fuck off, and I’ll fuck right off because this is none of my business. But I don’t think that’s why you were crying. Well, not the whole reason, anyway.”

Milly takes a second to digest this. My heart pops around my chest as I wait for her answer. Part of me hopes she’ll ignore my question and change the subject. Talk about floral arrangements or seating charts or some shit.

Another part yearns for her to tell me what’s really going on. Seems like no one talks to me anymore—really talks to me, tells me the truth—except for Silas, and he’s more of a pain in the ass than anything because he tells me truths I don’t want to hear.

Milly’s truths? Those I always craved.

“You were right.” With a sigh, she lets her head fall back on the seat, but she still doesn’t look at me. “Considering I’m your wedding planner, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this. I don’t want you to feel guilty or anything. Working with you and Reese has been a pleasure.”

“But?”

She sighs again. “But I have a lot on my plate right now. Nate, my head is spinning. I don’t want to complain because, again, y’all are wonderful, and it’s all good stuff I’m worried about. I’m lucky. I know that. But I’m also so overwhelmed I can hardly breathe. I feel suffocated, you know?”

My heart thumps. Why does my name sound so different when she says it? And why does the fact that she feels safe enough to confide in me make me feel all warm and fucking fuzzy inside?

I do not do warm and fuzzy.

“I do know what it feels like—being underwater that way.”

“It’s like I want life to just let me be. I just want a goddamn minute to catch my breath and sit and—I don’t know, do nothing. Smell the roses or whatever they tell you to do. Why else do we work so hard? But I think . . . I think that maybe I work so much and so hard that when I do have five seconds to myself, I don’t know what to do with them. So I just work some more, because otherwise, I worry I’ll get crushed by everything I have to do. Like if I don’t keep up with it all the time, I’ll fall behind and never get caught up. But the harder I work, the unhappier I feel. The less creative I am. Ideas, they used to come to me like this.” She snaps her fingers, making Lucy jump. “But now the things I create don’t come together how they used to.”

I know Milly won’t appreciate a dumbass platitude, so I don’t give her one. Instead, I turn onto Highway 146, and I think while the autumn air cools my skin.

I think about the way I make whiskey. In my master distiller training, I figured out early on how important it was to refill my creative well. Sounds hokey, but every time I skipped the recharge button and opted to work instead, whatever I made was trash.