I fold my arms tight over my chest. “I thought we were going to have a counseling session.”

“We are. I just think we should have it off property.”

“Neutral territory?”

He shakes his head. “Just someplace I thought you might like to see. Maybe even a bit of excitement.”

I nod. “A change of scenery could be nice.”

I have to bite my tongue to keep from arguing the point that Lost Haven has very quickly become one of the most exciting places I’ve ever been. Bonfires, stick shifts, and surprise CBD tea? It’s a lot more excitement than I’ve experienced in a long time. Tack on the steamy forbidden make-out session we had last night, and I can confidently say that this tiny little mountain town easily beats out Boston in terms of excitement.

But I don’t say any of that. Instead, I shrug and say, “I’m down for whatever.”

“Cool.” A sly grin tugs at his full mouth. “Follow me. You’re driving.”

Well. That’s the worst news I’ve heard all day.

Reluctantly, I follow him out to the driveway, eyeing public enemy number one—that manual rust bucket of a truck.

“Can’t you drive?” I plead, but Logan shakes his head.

“You can do this, I promise. I’m going to teach you.”

When I slide into the driver’s seat, baffled as ever by the numbers on the stick shift, my shotgun passenger wastes no time launching into his lesson.

“First, you’ve got to ground the clutch,” he says, as if that should mean something to me.

When I stare at him with wide, clueless eyes, he laughs and rephrases his instructions.

“Use your left foot to press all the way down on that pedal, and put the gear shift in neutral.”

For as hotheaded as he is on the ice, Logan is a surprisingly patient teacher. I follow each and every one of his steps to a tee, stalling only a handful of times, and barely resist the urge to bang my head against the steering wheel until the car horn sounds.

Here I am, supposedly the calm, cool, and collected counselor, and Logan is the one guiding me along the learning curve.

It’s hardly what I was expecting out of today, but by the time we hit the highway, I’m a few steps short of a master of the manual transmission. All it took was some encouraging words and a few gentle squeezes of my thigh from the handsomest driving teacher this side of the Rocky Mountains.

With all my intense focus on being in the right gear at the right time, I’ve hardly paid attention to where Logan’s directions are actually taking us. When he has me pull over on the side of a wooded back road, I’m sure we must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

“Where are we?”