Good Lord, am I gonna need Your strength.
Chapter 2
At six o’clock on Saturday morning, a rumble outside the Chelsea Scott Paper headquarters announced the arrival of the massive truck and its handsome and helpful driver.
“Do I have everything?” Chelsea’s question was mostly to herself.
“Yes,” her intern Miranda with the twenty-year-old perfect skin answered anyway. “We triple-checked.” She took another sip of her throwaway coffee cup before returning to shipment labeling.
How she could look so perky at this hour was beguiling, especially when the team had spent weeks of long hours designing their premium display space for the convention’s main exhibit hall. After many lingering dates with her toolbox and a little help from YouTube, Chelsea had modified the exhibit walls and shelving for easy assembly and built a center island that would double as storage. Then she’d photographed everything for memory’s sake, deconstructed and packed it all in huge wooden crates, along with the inventory that was coming and the supplies her team had packed for anything and everything that could go wrong.
Chelsea filled her lungs and rotated her shoulders as she blew it out, taking in a long drink of their communal workspace, where they all brought their computers despite having their own offices. It could have been any other day with Missy typing intently and Miranda and the other intern, Hope, assembling online order shipments.
Thank you, Jesus. Each of her on-site employees had come in to see her off and make sure she was ready before they met up with her in Chicago for the convention opening. She could never thank Him enough.
Two taps sounded on the swinging glass door to the warehouse. Now, it was Chelsea’s turn to come through by nailing this meeting and giving them a better life—and better job security, for that matter.
Nick’s tall shadow filled most of the doorway in the early morning light.
“Come in,” Chelsea called to him.
He backed into the glass door, swung a dolly around to face them, and then pushed it through the entryway, flashing her an easy grin. “Morning.” Broad chest and shoulders filled out a hunter green T-shirt that made his blue eyes almost translucent. His strong trunk, tucked into khaki utility pants and gray work boots, conveyed many years of hard work and heavy lifting.
Her team all stopped what they were doing, eyes fixed on him—even Missy’s. Hope’s pen clattered to the floor. My, how their tune had changed from the healthy interrogation they’d given her to ensure Nick wasn’t a serial killer who would leave her on the side of the highway in a million pieces.
“Morning.” Chelsea hadn’t elaborated on how close she and Nick had once been, but with Missy’s help, she’d convinced them that, this time, bringing in a very handsome Mulligan wouldn’t cost them thousands of dollars when he didn’t deliver on his syrupy promises.
“What all is going?” Fortunately, Nick ignored their ogling, his gaze sliding up the massive mountain of crates and boxes in the middle of the workroom and back down.
“This is it.”
Nick nodded and, after surveying the pile from all angles, started wedging the dolly under one of the largest crates.
Chelsea bent toward a stack of small boxes, and Nick’s muscled hand on her arm pricked her like a live wire.
“No, you don’t.”
She flexed fingers that itched to rub the heat of his touch from her arm. “And you’re sure they’ll be restrained properly?”
“I’ll take care of everything.” He held up a Boy Scout salute. “Promise.”
“Okay.” Chelsea turned around and found her team in one of their customary daily huddles. She nudged her way in between Missy and Miranda.
“Good. You’re just in time,” Hope said. “I was just about to pray for us.”
Chelsea could hardly hear her intern’s prayer over the sound of Nick packing, the pulse that was ratcheting her ears, and her own silent—frantic—cries: Please, dear Lord. Please, dear Lord. Please, dear Lord.
“And please help Chelsea control herself in the presence of pure hotness.”
“Hope!” Chelsea whirled around, but Nick was nowhere to be found.
Hope batted long lashes. “Any final instructions, boss lady?”
“Um…” Chelsea ran a hand through her hair as if that could magically conjure everything she needed to remember. “Missy, will you keep me updated if you hear from Ronnie Goss? Miranda and Hope, go ahead and send out the member monthlies now with a note about the slow shipment from our sticker vendor, but keep it neutral. Don’t make it seem like anyone’s fault.” Must breathe.
“We won’t miss a thing,” Miranda said. “But make sure you have fun, too, okay?”
Chelsea nodded, tearing her eyes from the suggestion rich in her intern’s raised eyebrow. The convention would be a totally different level of hustle—no time to think about that. Which was why she’d booked Nick a plane ticket with credit card points if he wanted to return to Oklahoma during the convention and come back when it was over. Best to avoid the temptation to let her imagination wander if she could help it.
“Are you ready?” Nick stood before her, in 3D, sharper and handsomer than anything her imagination was capable of.
“Yes.” She bounced between the balls of her feet as she ran through her mental checklist a final time. “Oh—I need to get my suitcase from my car.”
“I brought it in for you.” Hope peeked her head from behind her double monitor.
Nick cocked his head toward the door. “It’s already loaded.”
“I guess that’s everything, then.” The mental tallying stopped.
Missy hugged her so tightly that her shoulder popped. “We’ll see you in Chicago!”
Peace poured over Chelsea as her team dispersed to their workstations.
“After you.” Nick held the glass door open.
She thanked him, starting down the steps. And then her momentum lunged backward until strong hands circled around her waist. She covered one with her own, heart galloping, and they stayed like that for a lingering moment before he let go.
“And again, thanks. I was, you know, going for the matching set.” She stuck out her bandaged leg and unhooked the strap of her bag from the place it had snagged on the porch railing.
The moment the doors closed, a vacuum seal sucked the easy air from the cab. It was much nicer than the truck they were originally going to go with, updated with GPS and pine air freshener, where the other truck was less maintained and smelled like it’d been sprayed with eau de day-old onion burger.
Chelsea’s stomach churned. At the end of that road was the convention, after all of their hard work. Important meetings that would decide the future of her business. Yet for some reason, all she could think about was the human sitting beside her—a human who, by all counts, seemed just as full of thought as she was.
“So, how’s working in the office?” Chelsea winced at the uncertainty in her own voice.
“It’s good.”
Silence.
“I still get to drive a little bit,” he finally added. “It’s, um, a really good balance.”
That’s all he was going to give her? “What made you decide to change?”
“It was my dad.” Nick’s phone buzzed in the console, but he ignored it. “Once I finally got my degree, he thought I was ready.”
“I see.”
Another notification sounded from his phone. “Guess I forgot to turn that off. I’ll text her back later.”
Her? Huh. Was Nick seeing someone? Of course he was probably seeing someone. He was handsome and hard working and not Chelsea’s for the giving or the taking.
Another looooong stretch of silence fell over the truck, and Chelsea sweated as if she’d eaten a bag of spicy cheese curls. In all of her preparation, she hadn’t given much thought to how things would be with Nick, much less anticipated this new space between them.
“What about you?”
Chelsea’s heart seized. “What?”
“Brand
on said you’re keynoting this convention. That’s pretty awesome.”
“Oh.” Totally not what she thought he was talking about. “Thanks.”
This small talk wasn’t working. She could handle awkward—after thirty years of being Chelsea Scott, oh, could she handle awkward. But Nick had always held the things she couldn’t tell anyone else, so little things seemed out of place on him.
Chelsea leaned against the window and closed her eyes for who knows how long. Then she gave up on trying to sleep altogether. It was pointless. Plus, what if she snored?
“Same side?”
Her breath caught as she felt his knuckles nudge hers. It was like she was ten years old again, the first time Nick said those words after they’d argued. She sat straighter in her seat and tapped her fist against his. “Same side.”
And he’d made sure they were okay with the same words ever since, sometimes the only words they needed.
Some of the unease evaporated from her middle. This was still Nick—he was still the same, good-natured guy underneath all the layers the years had added between them. Despite the fact that he’d told her the three most vulnerable words in the English language, and she had run.
Now, if only they could go back to a time when the biggest thing they had to worry about was whose turn it was to bat first.
Nick didn’t often make a decision in six seconds, but when he did, it was important, and he made sure his passenger and cargo were safe.
“What are you doing?” Chelsea asked, her mocha eyes round as she, no doubt, tried to calculate why he was exiting the highway.
“You’ll see.” He steered onto the small town’s main street and pulled up to a truck stop restaurant framed by a dusty parking lot. Good. It was still there.
Nick led Chelsea to a booth and then wandered to the front counter to order. It was still early for lunch, but she’d be game for this. No amount of time could have changed that about her.
Chelsea was checking something on her phone when Nick reached the table with their goods. “These were necessary for today.” She jumped at the sound of his voice. But beams of light could have radiated from the smile that then split her face as she spotted the sugar cones in his hands, piled high with swirls and swirls of vanilla and chocolate ice cream. Maybe the most ridiculously stacked cones in the history of the world, but that’s how they liked them. “It was getting stuffy in that truck.”
He slid into the booth across from her, and time might as well have slipped back to the summer of 2000. Nick and Chelsea would run into a little mom-and-pop grocery store in Greencliff that had a self-serve ice cream machine, throwing their quarters on the counter, their bodies sticky with sweat and red dirt.
Suddenly they weren’t grown adults in a truck stop on their way to a convention but preteens sitting on an old, abandoned dock with their toes dangling in the lake, eating in silence as the sun dipped behind the hills. With the occasional nudge of shoulders to let each other know they were full and happy to be with each other.
“You were right.” Chelsea crunched her cone before a drip of cold cream could hit the table. “These were necessary.”
“I think about you every time I see one of these machines.” Nick glanced at his cone, and when he looked up, Chelsea’s cheeks were almost the same red as the laminate on the table. “But it doesn’t feel right getting them without you.”
“Same. Though my ice cream fix is milkshakes disguised as coffee these days. The girls say I shouldn’t drink so many, but they’re just so stinking good.”
“You never did care what the other girls said, did you?”
Chelsea gave a little laugh. “Well, there was middle school.”
Nick winced. It was a pretty much universal fact that middle school could be brutal, no matter who you were.
“And suddenly there were these new, invisible dividing lines and my first hint that it wasn’t okay to like baseball more than boy bands.” Chelsea chuckled. “The girls in my class made their opinions about my ball caps known, and the boys would snatch them off my head—the same boys I was whipping on the field days before that first day of school magically transformed them.”
“Ah.” Nick crumpled his napkin. “They were probably just noticing you were a girl for the first time and didn’t know what else to do about it.”
“You wouldn’t have done that. You were always more mature than the other guys.”
He paused, halfway unfolded from his chair. “Oh, I definitely noticed you were a girl.” He grabbed their pile of napkins and walked toward the trashcan, flicking Chelsea’s braid over her shoulder as he passed her.
The shadow of a grin still lingered on her face when she joined him at the door. “Thanks for the ice cream.”
“You’re welcome.” He unlocked the truck. “Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get you to Chicago.”
Chelsea launched into a landscape and license plate treasure hunt of sorts the minute they were back on the highway, so they picked out letters, weaved in between catching up on where they’d left off and stopping for lunch at the cafe Missy had listed on their itinerary.
“How old is Liz now?”
“Just got her driver’s license—there’s an X.” He reached past Chelsea to point out her window. “On that sign.”
She whistled. “Wow. Sixteen.” Unimpressed he’d finally spotted the elusive X, but he could understand why the fascination with his niece.
“Can you believe it?”
Chelsea had walked him through the hard, volatile years between his parents and sister after their messy, sudden divorce. His sister’s teen pregnancy had essentially saved her life.
He glanced at Chelsea, fiddling with her sleeves next to him. If it weren’t for her, Nick very well could have let that same anger overcome him.
Maybe it was the leftover sugar high from the ice cream, but as they filled each other in, Nick couldn’t ever remember feeling more peace in this truck. Chelsea told him about her attempts to reconnect with her father, who’d skipped town when she was four after her mother’s career took off—and her realization that some things were better left alone. They talked about everything from their drastically different experiences with stepsiblings to lighter things like bad prom dates and state championship baseball runs.
“So, what about you, Nick?” Chelsea sucked down the last of the Dr. Pepper refill she’d been sipping since lunch. “You work in the office and sometimes drive trucks for your father now. You live in Oklahoma City. What else?”
He shrugged. “I’m boring.” His phone buzzed in his pocket, and Chelsea took a deep, shaky breath.
“Any special ladies in your life?”
“Not unless my dog counts.” He passed a minivan that was going fifty. “You?”
“Just a committed relationship with my laptop and planner.”
Knots of tension untangled in his chest. “Fair enough.” Was he actually…relieved by her answer?
His phone sounded again. One quick burst for an incoming message.
“Did you say you minored in journalism?” Chelsea’s voice softened. “What’s the story with that?”
Another buzz. Then three more.
Fantastic. The rest of the world was finding out news he’d learned the night before. That was something he could tell her. “I’ll tell you more in a minute, but first I need you to read what’s on my phone for me.”
“Are you sure?”
He pushed against the floorboard to give his work pants more slack and reached for his phone. “Positive. There’s nothing on it that you can’t know about.”
She took the phone with hesitation, the softest skin he’d ever touched brushing against his fingers, and leaned back into her seat. “Orlando Weston arrested—oh my goodness! Wasn’t he NEOSU’s top wide receiver this year?”
“Yep. It was his second DUI, and I’m sure you know coach has no tolerance for that kind of stuff.”
Her phone pinged in her lap. “And that would be ESPN finally re
leasing the story. This is why I get my news from the message boards. Have you ever read this guy who—” She whipped toward him. “Hold on. You already knew about it?”
Wait for it.
“But this…” She swiped the screen.
Chelsea was even smarter than he thought.
“You’re GoBroncs314?”
“One and the same.”
She dug her fingertips into his arm. “Are you being serious right now? I have alerts set for your blog—wait, have we argued on the message boards before? Did you know it was me?” She shook her head. “That doesn’t matter. Am I going to have to change my name and dye my hair and live on the run in a Winnebago now that I know?”
Laughter exploded out of him. “No, you can know. You have the clearance for it.”
“But you have three hundred bazillion followers on Twitter. I’ve been reading your blog since I was in high school!”
“That’s crazy.” Though he should have known. “Do you want to be him for a while?”
“Do I?” Chelsea’s tone took on a musical lilt. “Of course.”
Nick dictated replies to her for the next few minutes and told her how to turn off the notifications. If he only had a few hours with Chelsea between here and there, all other noise could wait. Her own phone had lit up several times, but she hadn’t checked it since lunch. Maybe the feeling was mutual.
Plus, during the course of their easy conversation, she’d somehow drifted closer to him, their shoulders touching over the console—and he didn’t hate it.
“Ha!” Chelsea yawned as she handed him back his phone. “I told my roommate GoBroncs314 wasn’t our econ professor.”
“Just me.” He nudged her with his elbow. “Hey, why don’t you get some sleep? You have a really busy few days ahead of you.”
She stifled another yawn that seemed to come on at the mere suggestion. “A nap would be good. Just a little one.”
“If your team calls, they can take it up with me.”
Chelsea nodded noncommittally, her drooping eyes were already focused on the prize. She produced a gray sweater from her bag and draped it over herself, shoving her arms in the sleeves, and burrowing into the seat. Nick turned on a soft acoustic playlist, and after a few minutes, her breathing slowed, a curtain of shiny, strawberry blond hair pooling in the curve between her jaw and neck.
Love at First Laugh: Eight Romantic Novellas Filled with Love, Laughter, and Happily Ever After Page 60
