“I brought sodas in the cooler.” Irwin nudged it with his foot. He’d brought it in from his car an hour earlier.
“Also not healthy,” Joe muttered.
The clock on the wall ticked off a minute.
Sam wasn’t the only one counting down the hours to the end of the school day. That clock couldn’t move fast enough for Joe.
“Are you sure about this place?” Rex gestured with a big hand toward Joe. “He’s about as exciting as paint drying.”
The two old dudes chuckled.
Something moved by the bridge. He spotted Brittany’s pickup slowing and stopping. She got out of the truck, pulled black coveralls over her leggings, rolled up the sleeves and then took a rake from the back of the truck.
She was going to look for that Volkswagen Rose had spoken of. The one Joe had forgotten about.
She had little chance of finding it. The blackberry bushes had taken over the bank on his side of the river. Fifteen feet wide and nearly one hundred feet in length. The thorns alone were a deterrent to uncovering what was underneath. She was wasting her time.
Joe took a bite of sandwich. The clock ticked off another minute.
On his side of the service counter, his new cell phone began playing “Jailhouse Rock.”
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Irwin asked.
“No.” He’d decided he wasn’t ready to talk to Turo, to hear the disappointment in his voice when he yelled at Joe for selling him out. He’d decided not to ask where he’d hidden the stolen vehicles. Was it too much to hope that Agent Haas would get lucky and find them on his own?
Luck hadn’t been with Joe lately.
Joe stared at his white-bread sandwich. He stared at the men scarfing down nachos. His phone beeped to indicate he had a voicemail. “Gentlemen, can you watch the shop while I take care of something outside?”
“Now we’re talking.” Irwin rubbed his hands. “We’ve got your back, dude.”
* * *
MOST DAYS, WHEN Brit was poking around in the weeds for discarded junk and heard footsteps behind her, she got up quickly and put on her friendliest smile.
But this wasn’t most days and she knew whose booted steps were nearby.
“This isn’t your property, Heroic Joe.”
He stopped walking.
Maybe she should have been at the house clearing out the garage. But Phil had been napping and a treasure hunt was more appealing than tackling her grandfather’s stuff and setting up an art studio.
Brit was on her hands and knees, crawling along the edge of the blackberry patch. Judging by the inch-long thorns, the bushes were very old. Every few feet she carefully lifted the vines, letting them poke her skin through her coverall sleeves while she peered into the gloom. When she saw something—she’d only seen something inorganic once so far—she stuck the handle of the rake through the shrub to see if she could hit metal.
So, yeah, she was on her knees, crawling along like a hound dog trying to find a scent. And there was an attractive, heroic guy standing behind her. If her father were alive, he’d want to kick the snot out of Joe for standing there, presumably watching her, certainly not offering to help. Her mother, who’d remarried and was living comfortably in Southern California, would encourage Brit to stand up and smile as if Joe was the most attractive man on earth. But Brit had an agenda and too many obstacles in her path. She couldn’t afford a fight or a smile.
“Save your knees. There’s no car under there.” The tone of voice Joe used was different today. Not the volume of anger. Not the bite of annoyance. Not the rumble of frustration. Would his eyes be more sky blue than arctic?
She didn’t dare look. “Not your knees, Heroic Joe. Or your expedition.”
“I suppose.” He had a nice voice when he wasn’t yelling at her.
“Which means you can leave.” Watching her crawl around couldn’t be that interesting. And having an audience made her self-conscious about her love of carbs.
“I’ll give it a few more minutes. In case you get lucky.”
Brit inched forward, trying not to think about Stoic Joe teasing her, because that just seemed impossible. Something caught the light when she moved the branches in the next section. She edged closer, thorns pricking her side. And then she stuck her rake in between the vines, deeper and deeper until she held it by the tines.
Thunk.
A thorn bit into the back of her hand making her drop the rake. She lifted the vines with more care so she could probe once more.
Thunk. Thunk.
Definitely solid. Glory hallelujah! “Did you hear that?”
“Nope.”
She got to her feet, removed a pair of clippers from her pocket and began snipping the vines a few painful feet at a time.
“Is this a public service? Hedge trimming?”
Brit spared him a quick glance to see if he was smiling. He wasn’t. How like him to deadpan a tease. “There’s a car in there.” She cut a vine, held it with two fingers to avoid being skewered by two-inch-long thorns and tossed it behind her. “I’m not going to drown. You don’t need to watch over me.” But didn’t it feel nice that he was? Brit glanced over her shoulder again. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. You saved my life. You rescued the bike from the river. But this is going to take a long time and you have a business to run.”
Translation: please go.
Left unsaid: you make me nervous.
He glanced back at the garage.
“Ouch.” A thorn penetrated the skin on her arm. She turned back to her task at hand. “At this rate, it’ll take me all afternoon to see what’s under there.”
Perhaps realizing she wasn’t putting on much of a show, Joe left.
The task should have been better alone.
It wasn’t.
It was a painstaking process without the distraction of Joe. Emphasis on pain. Her hands and arms were getting a free acupuncture treatment. She now knew what it felt like to be a voodoo doll.
A strong hand landed on her shoulder. She yelped and skittered free before she realized it was Joe.
“This might speed up the process.” Without apology, Joe eased her away from the vines. He was holding a chain saw and wearing goggles. “Your problem is, you’re approaching this the old-school way.” He started up the chain saw.
Brit stumbled back as bits of vine flew about. Joe was no stranger to the chain saw or using it against thick ropey vines. Brit gave him space, breathing in the fresh smell of green vines and exposed earth.
In no time, Joe had cleared a wide path into the brambles. He shut off the chain saw. “I wouldn’t have bet money on it, but you’re right.” He stepped to one side so she could see.
A bubble hood and cracked headlights peered at her from beneath a thin layer of vines.
“It’s roached,” Joe said. “Rusted clear through.”
The vegetation and weather had worked the body into rusted metal lace. It was beautiful.
Brit grinned with unabashed relief. “I guess you won’t be fighting me for this one.”
“I don’t know.” He knelt for a better look. “If the chassis and floorboards are intact, it’s still worth something.”
She gave a faux gasp. “You’d part it out?”
His mouth worked as if struggling to hold back a smile. Instead, he shook the black hair from his laughing eyes. “Sure. If it wasn’t salvageable. Why not part it out?”
“Ha!” She couldn’t resist teasing him. “You’ll be making money off the parts in your field in no time, just like me.”
The ice returned to his gaze.
A beige sedan drove over the bridge. Brit waved. The driver, an elderly woman, raised her hand as if to return the greeting, saw Joe and sped up.
“Why does everyone
give you a wide berth?” Brit asked. “From what my grandfather has said, which is very little, you were a wild teenager, but this...” She gestured toward the fast-retreating car. “I’ve seen you at night. You don’t have fangs.” And he’d rescued her. She couldn’t discount that.
“Not everyone avoids me.” Joe’s attention drifted from the repair shop to her. The ice in his eyes had melted to a minor frost. “You certainly don’t.”
“You can’t call this avoiding. You keep showing up to save me.”
“Maybe you should stop taking risks.” His voice was getting louder.
She’d struck a nerve somehow, but Brit wouldn’t back off the teasing. She wanted to reclaim that moment from last night—a connection made through glass. Although she would kind of miss his stormy bluster.
“And then you give me those bossy, territorial glares,” Brit continued as if he hadn’t said a word, because they’d fallen silent and it was her turn to speak. “Like this.” She lowered her brows and tried to show him her best glower. “Maybe that’s why people avoid you.”
“My glares are overrated.” The frost had thawed. A rare blue sky had appeared. The man had the most expressive eyes. Who needed smiles with eyes like that? “They don’t work on you.”
Oh, they worked. Just not how he might like. “What did you do? Besides joyriding? You can tell me.”
Something rustled in the vines, but other than that they were alone. She wasn’t going to let this opportunity to know something else about him—something as intimate as the story of how he’d lost his wife—get away.
His voice started low. “My brothers and I were the wild ones in town.”
“Big deal. It’s a small town. Wild could have meant staying out late with the mayor’s daughter.” That had been her first impression of him. Wild with women. Now that she knew him better—ha! Just a smidge—she knew he’d have no patience for most women. And most women would have no patience for his brooding nature.
“My older brother was the ladies’ man.” Joe’s mouth quirked to one side, but almost immediately fell. “We were just like any other boys in town. That is, until my mom left us. Not that we fell apart or anything.”
The way he said the last part—all monotone—she recognized it as a lie, the same as any lie she’d been told from people who didn’t understand her junk creations were art. And so she kept up the teasing. “Careful, you might become a cliché. Bad boy raised by a single dad.”
He studied her the way a scientist does a new species. “It’s not that simple. We weren’t bad when Mom was around. More like a handful. My father was...” There was nothing on Joe’s face even resembling a smile. Nothing in his eyes either. This was serious stuff. “My dad struggled with mental health issues. Schizophrenia. We were teenagers. We didn’t understand. So we avoided him after Mom left because it was... He was...” A deep crease formed between his bladed brows and he turned away.
She hadn’t imagined him being abused or abandoned as a child. He presented himself as invincible. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He gestured with his hand, but his fingers were fisted as if clenched around memories he couldn’t let go of. “It wasn’t all bad. Uncle Turo came to live above the garage. He got Dad on some good meds.” He picked up the chain saw, looked at it, set it down again. “Dad had force-fed us the basics of mechanics—how to change oil, how to clean a carburetor, which electrical wires not to cross.” He knelt in front of the Volkswagen and pushed on the rusted metal bumper. “It was my uncle who gave us motorcycles and made fixing things fun.”
There was a trick to interacting with Joe, she realized. When he blustered, you had to weather the storm and blow back. When he shared something personal, you had to do much the same, but with no visible sympathy, no pity. She’d given him exactly that kind of look in Phil’s driveway when the woman ran away from him and he’d blasted her with a frozen glare.
This time, even though her heart was breaking for him, she put on her poker face and sent some breezy humor his way. “Tsk-tsk. Again, you turned into a cliché. Black leather jacket and a Harley. I bet you had a lady-killer glint in your eye and enjoyed every minute of it.”
He pivoted so he could look at her. She could swear he almost smiled. She could swear her heart nearly skipped a beat.
For the first time, she realized this connection they were building was dangerous. Not physically dangerous. It was her heart that was at risk of injury.
“I could’ve convinced you to take a ride on my Harley.”
If her heart had been skipping before, his words had it sprinting. She needed to remember who she was. The ugly duckling. The wallflower. She needed to backpedal. “You wouldn’t have offered me a ride. You would’ve asked Reggie.”
He frowned. “Reggie wouldn’t want her hairdo ruined by the wind.”
Yep.
The frown softened. “You would’ve laughed when I went fast.”
Brit smiled. She didn’t mean to. But she suspected he was right.
And then a miracle of sorts happened. He smiled back. Not a big smile. Certainly not a flirtatious smile. It was the smile of a boy inviting a girl to take a secret, forbidden ride on the back of a Harley.
Be still my heart.
It was beating so hard her ears were ringing.
Joe stopped smiling and checked his cell phone, silencing a beeping alarm. “I can cut you some space around this junker and then I’ve got to pick up Sam from school.”
Without waiting for her to answer, he restarted the chain saw and went to work as if he hadn’t just made an ugly duckling’s day.
CHAPTER TEN
SAM RACED TO the truck almost the instant after the bell rang, flipping up her hood as she ran.
“How was your day?” Joe asked when she’d slammed the door.
“I didn’t die.”
“Sam,” Joe said wearily.
“Can we just not talk about school?” She gave him the once-over. “You smell like you’ve been to a gym and mowed the lawn.”
Eau de Women Repellant. It hadn’t worked on Brittany. If anything, it’d jimmied the locks he had on his past. “I trimmed the blackberry bushes by the road.”
“Why?”
Here was a conversation he wanted to avoid. Any time he told his daughter he was helping a woman, she got ideas. He put the truck in gear and headed home. “Do you have homework?”
“Math. Vocabulary. Reading in my science book.” Sam slumped in her seat. “I can’t wait to be done with school.”
“You’ve got about ten to twelve years left.”
“How do you figure? I’ve got seven years to graduation.” Leave it to Sam to have counted out her time as if it was a jail sentence.
“College. You’re going to college.”
“You didn’t go to college. Mom didn’t go to college. And Uncle Turo—”
“Should have gone to college. We all should have gone.” Maybe then Uncle Turo would have learned his letters—the letters of the law.
A few minutes later, Joe turned onto their street.
“Is that Brit’s truck?”
“Yes.” Gray body filler had been used to smooth damage to the fender, but had been left unpainted. It was the gray color of Brittany’s skin when he’d fished her out of the water. Since then he’d been doing all the wrong things—giving her a glimpse into his past, letting himself smile.
And where had that gotten him? Nowhere. There were still no customers at the garage. Irwin’s small white sedan and Rex’s golf cart were exactly where they’d left them in the parking lot. He hadn’t gotten Agent Haas the answers he was looking for. And the cars in the field were still a potential, if questionable, source of income waiting to be dealt with.
Sam was still fixated on Brittany. “Is that a car in the bushes?”
“So...those are the bushes you trimmed?” A smile split her cheeks. “I want to say hello.”
More likely, she wanted to arrange a date. “Go sit behind the desk and do your homework. If you have any questions, you can ask Irwin or Rex.”
“Dad, you left Irwin in charge of the garage?” Her smile vanished. “I don’t think he’s qualified to handle clients.”
“Luckily, he’s been the only client all day.”
“Oh.” He could see her realizing she wasn’t going to get new clothes. She tugged her hood forward.
“Run along and get your homework done. Take my things so I won’t lose them in the bushes.” He handed her his wallet, keys and phone. He waited for her to go inside and then sat in the truck, watching Brittany, delaying the inevitable.
She was clipping a path through the brush behind the car. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail. The lock he’d had to cut to release Brit from the bike spoke swung free every time she bent to chop a low vine, as did a matching lock on the other side of her face. Had she found something else buried beneath the brambles? Or was she just prospecting?
Curiosity won over common sense. He got out and crossed the field to join her. “You should be doing someone’s hair. Time is money.”
“It’s Monday. Shop’s closed.” Brittany wiped her forehead. She’d rolled up her sleeves. The marks on her arms looked like she’d been in a cat fight. “You should be fixing someone’s car. Time is money.”
They stared at each other for a moment and an understanding passed between them. Life was hard. Money was tight. But cars...cars and engines made a tough life interesting.
She and her curves and her sparkly clothing were hidden beneath plain black coveralls. It didn’t matter. She still sparkled with energy. “I found something else.”
“And you waited this long to tell me?”
Her dark brown eyes were hidden beneath her long lashes. “I didn’t think you’d want to know.”
He’d counseled himself against it, too. “Should I get my chain saw?”
“Could you?” She smiled sheepishly, not telling him what she’d found. On purpose, he’d bet. “I’ll reimburse you for gas.”
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