But he might be the key to her reclaiming some of her creativity. And she was going to run with that.

Except thinking like that forced her to think back, and the whole time she headed down the stairs, she was thinking about him. And about how tonight paralleled another moment he’d come to her rescue.

Before

She felt like a coward leaving the motel as early as she did, a coward for avoiding Flint. But he’d been about to kiss her. Or he’d at least been considering kissing her.

And she’d...she’d panicked. Because she wanted to kiss him. She wanted to kiss him so much it consumed her every waking moment. She couldn’t do that. Because...

He’s not just a cowboy, though. He’s Flint.

He’s your friend.

Yes. He had become her friend over these last few days. It seemed improbable and strange. But she liked him. He was the highlight of every day. She...

She was headed down the highway when her truck started to overheat. Persistently.

“Shit,” she shouted. She hit the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. “Shit.”

Smoke started to pour out the top of the engine and she pulled to the side of the road.

She sat there. And she looked at her phone. No service. No damn service. What the hell was she supposed to do? It was Arizona, and it was hot.

She squinted and looked up ahead. There was a call box, blessed be. She got out of the truck, panic making her move quickly. It was hot, and she had Cinderella in the trailer, and she needed to get gone.

She was halfway between her truck and the call box when she heard the sound of another engine. She stopped and looked behind her. It was a sleek, shiny Chevy pickup, and it pulled sharply off the road behind her.

She ran back toward her truck, ran back... And realized exactly who it was.

“Flint,” she said, not knowing if she sounded scared or relieved... Relieved. Overly relieved.

“What happened?”

“I overheated. It’s this...this shitty truck. I need a new truck. It’s fine.”

“Well, if you win...”

“Do not offer to buy me a truck, Flint Carson,” she said.

She stuck her finger out toward him, and he grabbed it, and shook it, the contact of his skin against hers making her tremble. She pulled it away, and took a step back.

“Okay, I won’t offer,” he said.

“Flint...”

“I have an idea. I’ll unhitch your trailer, we’ll get it hooked up to my truck, and we’ll call someone and have them get yours. Then we’ll get on the road together so you and your steed aren’t sitting here in the heat. How does that sound?”

There was no way to argue with this. She’d tried to avoid him, she’d broken down. He was the one who’d found her.

Maybe it was fate.

“Thank you.”

About half an hour later, they were driving down the highway in Flint’s truck, with his superior air-conditioning keeping them both cool.

“Lucky I happened down the road when I did.”

She could argue. She could say that it wasn’t lucky, because there was a call box, and while it would’ve been a whole thing, she could’ve handled getting out of there herself. But this was better. And not just because she had been rescued sooner. Because she was with him.

“Yeah. I was lucky. Look, I... I’m sorry.” She wanted to fix what happened last night. The way that she had freaked out and overreacted.

“You don’t need to apologize to me for anything.”

“I was weird about last night. And I was avoiding you. It’s why I tried to leave really early today. But apparently we both had the same idea. And thank God,” she said.

“It was my mistake. You made yourself clear. I was trying to give myself a loophole. You know, a kiss isn’t a one-night stand.”

“Now that’s a song title,” she said.

“It would be a good one.”

There was nothing but the sound of the tires on the road. “You really just wanted to kiss me?”

“Right in that moment, yeah. Now, what I would’ve wanted thirty seconds after that...”

She leaned across the cabin and pushed his shoulder. He was solid and warm, and she could smell soap and his skin, and she regretted all that a little bit.

The touching. It was dangerous.

Why?

She shoved that to the side. She shoved that ridiculous question right to the side, because she knew that it was dangerous. She wanted to be friends with him. He had helped her; their friendship was valuable to her. She enjoyed talking to him, and he had given her the cactus, which now—against her will—seemed to function as a good-luck token.

He had rescued her from the side of the road.

It didn’t have to be dangerous, this thing. It didn’t have to be wrong or bad. It could be good. But she had to be... It had to be not kissing. It had to be friendship.

“I really like you,” she said. And she felt so stupid with those words coming out of her mouth. He was a man. A man who had one-night stands. A man who probably didn’t have silly girls saying that they liked him.

And when she had said it, she hadn’t meant to be confessing that she liked him. It had started out as a speech about how he was a really good friend. But the truth was...she liked him. In all the middle school glory that it implied.

It was just that she wanted to be his friend more.

“You’re the only real friend that I’ve made on the circuit,” she said. “You’re the only friend I’ve had in a long time.”

“Same,” he said, his voice sounding rough.

“It just matters a lot to me. This.”