I finally tried calling a tow company. No such luck. There were no Ubers running at this time of night, either. #smalltownprobs
A set of headlights came around the corner and I hurriedly jumped in my car and locked the door. No way was I getting murdered tonight. I had a hair appointment in the morning, and I wouldn’t miss it.
I unlocked my phone, ready to call 9-1-1.
The car slowed to a stop next to mine. The passenger window rolled down, revealing a man in a dress shirt and loosened tie. I lowered my window a couple inches.
“Are you all right?” He smiled warmly at me. He was somewhere in his thirties and looked like I imagined a CEO of a big company would look. A large watch on his wrist. A dark suit—although the jacket hung over the seat behind him.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn’t about to be murdered. CEOs weren’t murderers, right?
“No, actually, I can’t seem to get my car started.” I frowned.
The man nodded and started to pull forward. So much for my knight in shining armor. Apparently, he knew as much about cars as I did if he was leaving me here. To my surprise, he pulled his SUV over in front of my car, then climbed out.
He was not a desk jockey. Or if he was, he used one of those walking desks because he was a fit guy.
“You know, I’m not sure I’ll be any help,” he admitted as he rolled up his sleeves. “I’m not much of a mechanic.”
I unlocked my door and climbed out. “That makes two of us.”
“Is there anyone you could call?”
I shook my head. “No one is answering.”
He nodded and grinned. “Not exactly an all-night town, is it?”
I laughed. His humor putting me at ease. “You’ve got that right,” I agreed as I glanced at the city lights just half a mile from us. And by city lights it was only the gas stations and the grocery stores that were still open.
The man lifted the hood and leaned his arms on the frame. His well-muscled forearms even stood out in the moonlight.
Fletcher had been the first one to challenge my stereotype of a person’s career, specifically that of what an IT guy looked like. Honestly, I still wasn’t even sure what an IT person did. When he tried to explain it to me, it made me think he was a jack of all trades.
And if this man was a plain old businessman, he did not look like what I had pictured.
He chuckled and said, “You know. I don’t actually know what I’m looking at.”
I stepped next to him and looked at the engine. “Well, at least nothing’s on fire…that has to mean something good, right?”
He quirked his lips to the side and sniffed the air. “Not even a hint of smoke.”
I sighed. “Do you know how refreshing it is to be around someone who can admit he doesn’t know everything?”
“Just so long as you keep my secret. I’m part of a car club in the summer and don’t want my membership revoked.” He winked and I couldn’t help but feel the pull toward him. His charisma was palpable. Older than me by almost ten years, but he wasn’t afraid to flirt—politely. I liked that in a man.
If I were honest with myself, having the attention felt nice at the moment. When you couldn’t hold your own boyfriend’s attention, you began to wonder if something was wrong with you.
I turned my attention back to the car. “Honestly, I’m not sure what I can do until the morning.”
He rubbed one hand against his chin. “You know, I know a guy who owns a tow truck.”
“Oh, I already called the tow company. They’re not open until the morning.” I shook my head and closed the hood of my car. “I’ll try and call someone to pick me up.”
“How about I call that friend of mine? It’s a side hobby he has. He’s not with the tow company here in town. He would do it as a favor to me.”
“But why would you do that for me?”
He ducked his head before slowly lifting his gaze to meet my eyes. “It’s not every day I can help a beautiful lady stranded on the side of the road.”
I felt myself blushing, even though I recognized his humility as false. Funny how when someone flatters you, you’ll let them get away with anything.
“Well, okay, sure. That would be great.”
He nodded and pulled out his phone. “I’ll be just a minute.”
He walked back toward his car as he spoke on the phone. I unlocked my own phone and tried Fletcher one more time. No one answered. Where the hell was he?
The man walked back. “He’ll be here in an hour.”
“Thank you so much. I don’t know how I can repay you.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged abashedly. “At the risk of sounding crazy, I’d love to ask you out.”
I tugged absentmindedly on the hem of my jacket. “Well, the truth is, I have a boyfriend.”
“You do?”
“Hey, no need to sound so surprised.” I laughed, embarrassed by my outburst.
He smiled and raised his eyebrows. “It’s not serious, is it? I don’t see him rushing to your rescue or anything.”
I felt a strange urge to defend Fletcher, even though this was a complete stranger who had an incredibly valid point. “He works a lot.”
“What’s he do?”
“He owns an IT company. He’s dealing with a lot of clients and their IT emergencies and such.”
“He must talk about his clients a lot then.” He pressed, seeming oddly curious about my boyfriend’s work.
The mental alarms were buzzing in my head. That strange feeling I got in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t explain. It was my very own sixth sense that warned me when something wasn’t right with someone. I groaned inwardly. I’d been enjoying the man’s casual flirting, and now my crazy-weird, inexplicable gut feeling was telling me something wasn’t right.
I slipped my hand into my pocket with my phone. Prepared to hit the emergency SOS at a moment’s notice. His questions now had more to do with Fletcher than any interest in me.
“It seems strange that a man could choose a computer over you.” He smiled again, causing me to relax, but not completely ignore the warning bell in my head.
“Well, I’ll admit, sometimes it’s frustrating to compete with nameless people who pay your salary versus your girlfriend who doesn’t.”
He pulled a business card from his pocket and handed it to me before extending his hand to shake mine. “Sullivan Keene. I’m a broker here in town. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself earlier. I don’t want to get lost with those nameless people.” He winked and I released my jacket to shake his hand.
“Saidy Perez. And thank you again for helping me.”
“Do you want me to give you a ride home, so you don’t have to sit here alone? I can text my friend that the keys are in the car and the address to where you want the car towed so you don’t have to wait for him.”
I bit my lip, glanced at my car, the deserted road, and then the nice man who was helping me. If he was going to kill me, he probably would have done it already. Everything I’ve ever been taught about safety as a woman went flying out the window. “You know, that sounds really great.”
And now I hoped Fletcher or Dad never found out about the night a perfect stranger gave me a ride home in the dark. They’d never let me hear the end of it.
I just hoped I lived long enough to make it home tonight.
Chapter Three
Fletcher
Four months earlier
“Get back here!”
The piercing scream floated through the open window of my service van. I slammed on the brakes and glanced around the old neighborhood I was driving through.
My Exploratory Solutions tech van didn’t seem out of place in a neighborhood, so I wasn’t sure what the person could be yelling at me for.
Maybe they’d had an emergency issue with their security system and needed some tech support. It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to hire my phony company.
I was on my way to report
to my boss—my real boss, the chief of police—and tell him everything I’d discovered while I worked undercover.
My tech company was my cover story for a man we’d been investigating for trading black market goods. I’d gone into this job with high hopes that it would be a short undercover job. I was hoping to make detective after this. But this wasn’t a quick hack. I couldn’t slam my way through this job. There were too many intricacies, too many people involved and too little trust.
The man we were investigating, Sullivan Keene, had an extensive criminal ring that sold stolen goods as well as dabbling in some money laundering.
While their operation was no secret, no one had had any luck turning up hard evidence. Which was why they sent me undercover as a security tech.
So far I’d learned nothing. I’d been “hired” a week ago by our suspect and hadn’t learned anything valuable in that time. The guy was good at covering his tracks—even within his own operation.
I started to accelerate again. The older neighborhood had quaint houses with large yards and usually lots of kids and pets running around. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of the two of those had gotten away and the mother was chasing after it.
I took a right onto a side street.
“Don’t you drive away from me!” The voice yelled again.
I stopped the van and glanced in the rearview mirror. In my left mirror I could see a woman running down the sidewalk.
In a bathrobe.
Holding a mug.
I glanced at the clock. It was ten o’clock in the morning—that seemed a little late for robe wearing. But then again, I was in suburbia. Maybe robes were a requirement to be a mom in the suburbs.
I needed to go check in with my boss, but I couldn’t possibly ignore the fact that this woman seemed to be in distress. It was probably a domestic dispute, but I didn’t want to risk it being something more serious. Like a kidnapping or a missing child.
I flipped a U-turn and sped across the street, back toward the woman.
I pulled over behind her and jumped out of the van. She was barefoot and running down the sidewalk still, her robe flapping behind her.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” I called after her. She didn’t seem to hear me as she turned down a gravel alleyway—a common thing in older neighborhoods like this.
My shoes crunched on the rocks as I caught up to her.
She was muttering under her breath as she ran. I sprinted alongside her, cringing when I saw her bare feet pounding into the gravel.
She never slowed—just kept holding that mug like a relay racer.
“There he is,” her whispered words were still loud enough for me to hear as she stopped abruptly and turned to face me. “Hold this.”
She thrust the open-top cup—of what appeared to be coffee—into my hands. The liquid splashed over the side and onto my pale blue shirt. I don’t know how she’d managed to keep anything in the mug after the sprinting she’d done, only to have it splash out as she passed it off to me.
She leapt forward onto the sidewalk at the end of the street.
I glanced up in time to see her throw herself out into the street in front of a mail van.
“No!” I yelled, as the van slammed on its brakes. The postal driver looked terrified.
I would have been shaken up a little too if someone had leapt in front of my moving car. Unfortunately, we’d seen things like that all too often on the force.
The woman slapped a hand on the front of the van. “You’re going to give me my package, Bill. The notification said you delivered it, but we both know you didn’t.”
He nodded rapidly, put the van in park, and spun around to pull out a package from the back.
He passed a large box out the window into her waiting hands.
“Don’t try to hoard my packages again. Do your job and get out of the van next time.” She glared at him. “This is getting ridiculous.”
She hugged the box to her chest and continued to glare at him as she stepped onto the sidewalk. She stared at the van as the mailman pulled slowly down the street—almost as though he were afraid she might run after him at a moment’s notice.
I cleared my throat. She spun around. “Oh, thank you so much! I forgot you were here!”
She shifted the box to one arm and reached to retrieve the coffee cup.
Taking it from my hands, she leaned back, trying to shake her long, dark hair from her face.
It was the first clear look I’d had.
This was not a run-down suburbia mom. This woman was beautiful. Possibly slightly unhinged, if I were being honest. She wore shorts and a tank top beneath her now-open robe. And she was young, maybe a year or two younger than me. Somewhere in her mid-to-late-twenties. Her hair was in direct contrast against her fluffy, cream-colored robe.
She smiled and I completely forgot about the ‘possibly unhinged’ part. “I’m so sorry you had to see that. My mailman refuses to get out of his van and deliver my mail, so if I want my packages, I have to chase him down.”
Her big, hazel eyes sparkled as she nodded, like it was the most natural thing to sprint down an alleyway after a delinquent, and obviously lazy, mailman.
Her face dipped down to my shirt, and she gasped. “Oh no! Did I do that?”
I glanced down at the big coffee stain on the front. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal.” I shrugged.
“No! This is all my fault. I was so focused on getting that package, I spilled coffee all over a stranger. Come on, let me take care of that for you.” She gestured for me to follow her back the way that she came.
In my line of work, ‘let me take care of that for you’ had all types of double meaning. It usually involved a form of bribery. But since I wasn’t in uniform, and she seemed to think I was an innocent bystander, I was curious what her manner of ‘care’ was. Curious enough that I put one foot in front of the other, this time at a more casual pace.
“How is this not killing your feet?” I asked as she tiptoed across the gravel.
She laughed, “Oh, I’m feeling it this time. When I was running earlier, I was more focused on the package.”
What I wanted to do was offer to carry her across the gravel. That would only make this situation even more strange than it already was. I also didn’t want to scare her or risk her turning me down for a date when I asked. Because I would be asking. It wasn’t every day you met a woman capable of sprinting on gravel barefoot without spilling a drop of coffee—at least until she slammed it into your chest. “What’s in a package that you would run barefoot on gravel for and almost get yourself killed stepping in front of a moving vehicle? Nothing could be that important.”
We stepped out of the alleyway and she hugged the box tighter to her chest. “Shhh! Don’t let it hear you say that! This is a limited edition.”
I followed her to where my van was parked. “Limited edition what?”
She glanced over her shoulder as though there were thieves lurking everywhere, waiting to snatch her limited edition. She leaned closer and said quietly, “It’s a limited-edition wallpaper sampler.”
I blinked. Wallpaper. Sampler. Then, I laughed. And laughed. Until my eyes watered.
She stood there and grinned at me, not offended in the least.
“I thought someone had stolen your child. And there you are running after something as mundane as wallpaper.”
“Sampler,” she corrected. “And, well, I don’t have kids, so it’d be hard to steal them.”
I swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand, trying to compose myself. It’d been a good while since I’d had a reason to laugh that hard. It felt good. The last time was when a friend had asked me out on a date, just to prove that she had some semblance of a dating life. Trailer park life usually lent itself to some humor, though. “I hope that wallpaper lives up to its expectations.”
She laughed with me this time. “I know it sounds crazy, but I needed it before tomorrow.”
I chewed on the ins
ide of my cheek, trying to stop the laughter that was working its way out. “You’re right. I mean, those walls aren’t going to paper themselves.”
“Stop making me laugh!” She gasped. “I know I look insane! But this really is my life.”
“How so?”
“I’m an interior designer, and I’m meeting with a client tomorrow.”
“Ah, okay, well, if it makes you feel better, that makes you seem slightly less crazy.” I grinned at her.
She smiled back, and we stood there like two fools grinning away at each other. I didn’t want to go. But there was no reason for me to be standing there any longer, especially since she wasn’t actually in danger—now that the wallpaper sampler was safe, and the coffee was back in her hand.
I shrugged a shoulder toward my Exploratory Solutions tech van. “I guess I’d better get back to work, or I’ll be late for my appointment.”
“You stopped just to help me?” she asked in awe. “That’s so sweet. And then I went and spilled coffee all over you. Oh, wait, don’t leave yet!” She hurried up the sidewalk to the house I was parked in front of.
I watched as she juggled her coffee cup around so that she could open the door.
She disappeared inside, only to return a moment later without the coffee cup and package. She must have had enough time to secure the sampler in her laser-protected vault.
“Here!” She stopped in front of me and opened a pack of wipes. “They’re stain-removing wipes,” she explained as she began to wipe away at the coffee stain on my shirt. I stared in awe at her hands as she made quick work of the stain. Her nails were painted a pale green that reminded me of mint ice cream.
“Again, I’m so incredibly sorry for spilling this all over you.” She kept talking as she pulled out another wipe, trying to salvage my shirt, her hands brushing against my skin as she lifted the hem of my shirt to scrub at a particularly tough spot.
“Uh-huh.” Words weren’t working right now. My brain wasn’t working either. Do you know what happens to your mind when a beautiful woman puts her hands on you? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Your brain simply turns to mush.
World's Worst Boyfriend: A Romantic Comedy Adventure (Fake It Book 3) Page 3
