by Stacy Gail
Besides, she knew the conversation Katherine wanted to have with her verbatim. Had Coe coughed up any proof linking him to the creation of the valve? Was there anyone else who knew Coe had invented it? How many more days did they have to wait, and why did Dad leave her in this interminable limbo of uncertainty? Why was Katherine condemned to endure this wretched life of misery? Didn’t anyone understand the outcome could put a financial pinch on her million-dollar wedding?
Miranda would have played the world’s smallest violin, but she had to keep both hands on the wheel. Safety first.
Her sister’s harping did have one beneficial side effect. Until Katherine had mentioned other people knowing about Coe’s invention, Miranda hadn’t considered there might be others who could possibly know about it, aside from Lucy. The man Coe had worked for at the garage had long ago sold the business to Coe and had since passed away, and she couldn’t remember the name of Bitterthorn High’s shop class teacher Coe had often mentioned as his mentor. She’d gone into town in the hope of finding old Bitterthorn High yearbooks at the library, only to find the town’s small library was no more. She’d then gone to the school itself, but again came up empty.
The only person who might know the name of that old teacher was Coe himself, and voluntarily talking to him was like voluntarily deciding to play Russian roulette.
In the grand scheme of things, his apology didn’t change things. Of course it had been great to hear; for days whenever she thought about it, she felt like she was walking six inches off the ground. But their history couldn’t be wiped clean with it, no matter how sincere she believed Coe to be. Her father’s actions had kicked off a chain of events that had gouged a permanent scar in her. She now knew Coe had never seen any real value in her, just as he looked at her and saw nothing more than the daughter of the man who stole the only thing of value he’d ever had. There was no force in the world strong enough to erase that kind of damage.
Though, if he’d loved her...
Ruthlessly she jerked her head to the side in a physical attempt to avoid the thought. Love could heal just about anything, true. But Coe had never loved her. That was the bottom line.
The coffeehouse she’d adopted was on the north end of town and off the main drag—as out of the way as one could get in a small town like Bitterthorn. Both Pauline’s Praline Sweet Shoppe and Mabel’s Diner were closer, since Garden Court was located on the south side of town, but she wasn’t about to darken those doors anytime soon. Mabel’s was within sight of Coe’s garage, and Coe’s BFF, Lucy, worked at Pauline’s. If she had to drive an extra mile or two to get some decent coffee and free Wi-Fi, it was worth not having to deal with anything Coe-related.
An ominous clank jerked Miranda upright in her seat, her heart rocketing into her throat. The hopeful thought of having hit an unseen rock in the weak light of sunset died as smoke billowed out from under the hood and her dashboard lit up like Chevy Chase’s house at Christmas. Icy alarm sprinted through her as she hauled the car over to the shoulder of the road and hastily turned off the engine, only to discover she shouldn’t have bothered—it had already stalled out.
“Crap.” Rattled, and hating how her hands shook with it, she dutifully hit the emergency lights and took a few seconds to figure out how to pop the hood. She wasn’t sure why she did as, minutes later, she stared at the mechanical mystery that was her car’s engine. She had no clue what it was supposed to look like when it was in fine working order, so what the hell should she look for now that it broke? Coe had said something about a fan belt—
Determinedly she slammed the door on that thought before anything more could escape. Huh-uh. No Coe. She would drag her car to San Antonio twenty-eight miles away rather than go to Coe with this. And who knows? Maybe she could even fix it herself. She wasn’t a spoiled little princess anymore, for God’s sake. She knew how to take care of herself. Maybe if she pulled on this little loop thing...
“Hey, there. Need some help?”
Miranda jumped and locked onto the owner of the female voice coming from the other side of the road, a thin rod she’d determined was a dipstick mucking up her hands. It took a moment to place the kindly, round face in the open car window, and when she did her automatic defenses slammed up to seal her in tight.
Pauline Padgett, Lucy’s employer and good friend. She could only imagine what the woman thought of her.
“Thank you, but I’m fine. I’m just...” She gestured uselessly with the dipstick. “Figuring things out. Everything’s fine, though. Terrific, even.” Okay, maybe that was a bit much.
Pauline’s raised brow seemed to be in agreement. “Have you called for a tow yet?”
A tow. Good grief, how much would a tow into San Antonio be? She tried not to shudder at the thought. “My phone is...in my car.” Which gave no answer at all. Maybe Pauline wouldn’t notice.
The woman’s eyes narrowed, as keen as a cat’s. Crappity crap. She’d noticed.
“While you’re figuring things out, dear, do me a favor and sit tight. Don’t go wandering off with someone you don’t know just because they look like they might want to help you. We might be a small town, but that doesn’t mean we’re safer here than anywhere else.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Miranda deflated with a sigh of relief as Pauline drove on toward the heart of town. That could have been worse, she thought as she turned back to the car that still emitted a thin thread of smoke here and there. Now all she had to do was figure out where she’d pulled the dipstick from, get on the business of lining up a garage that wasn’t Coe’s, and find a tow truck that would take her there.
Ten minutes later she was staring in open horror at her phone, now smudged with the oil she’d tried to wipe from her fingers with some shriveled-up wet wipes excavated from the depths of the glove compartment. Why would anyone pay that kind of money just to have a car towed a measly twenty-eight miles? It was like every tow service in the vicinity thought the distance between Bitterthorn and San Antonio was akin to the distance between earth and the moon. Surely NASA paid just as much for the first Apollo mission.
Another vehicle rumbled up behind her, its lights cutting through the falling twilight. Startled, she glanced in the rearview mirror, only to mutter a heartfelt curse. Damn that busybody Pauline Padgett. Apparently she couldn’t leave well enough alone.
She just had to go running to Coe to rat her out.
Chapter Eight
The slamming of her car door sounded loud in Miranda’s ears. She leaned against it with her hands behind her back and aimed for a casual, she-meant-to-be-there attitude. “Hi. Fancy meeting you here.” Damn you, Pauline. Damn you, damn you, damn you...
“Hi yourself.” Coe kept his car lights on as he emerged from it, clicking on a heavy-duty flashlight while heading right on past her toward the open hood of her vehicle. “If I say something that sounds like ‘I told you so about the fan belt,’ are you going to be a pain in the ass about it?”
Miranda stifled the urge to stick her tongue out at him as he bent over the engine. “Considering the spot I’m in...no.”
“I told you so about the fan belt.”
She let that simmer for a few seconds. “Lord, do I want to be a pain in the ass about that.”
His low chuckle drifted to her as he tinkered around a bit. “Why is the dipstick out?”
“I pulled it out to see what it was, then as it got darker I couldn’t find where it needed to go back.” Her sigh was short and she rubbed at her brow in frustration. “Go ahead. Feel free to tell me what a useless princess I am.”
“If I didn’t know my way around an engine, I’d be hard-pressed to find where anything went in the dark.” He stuck his head out from under the hood to tangle her gaze with his for a long, charged moment. “Princess.”
Her heart bumped hard enough to be felt. Anger. Had to be. “You have no idea how
much I want to slam the hood on you right now, do you?”
“Probably not.” But he seemed to find it prudent to straighten up and lower the car’s hood himself, snapping the flashlight off as he went. “Aside from a happily relocated dipstick and a thrashed fan belt, I can’t tell what else is wrong with it until I get it back to the garage. With luck, it won’t be too bad.”
Luck, Miranda knew, usually sucked like a vacuum if it was relied upon to be good. “Actually, while I’d like to thank you for your kindness in coming out here to check on things, I haven’t yet decided where I’m going to tow my—”
“Stop.” To her surprise, he tossed the flashlight through her partially open driver’s side window. The move baffled her until he locked his now-empty hands on the car’s roof on either side of her—not touching her in any way, but rather just...looming. It was an aggressive position that should have made her feel threatened, and being backed into such a tight corner should have kicked off a fight-or-flight response. Instead her senses stumbled over the scent of the soap he used at the garage to wash the oil off his hands, and the warmer, deeper scent that was all man and all Coe. The rest of the world faded away as the unimportant thing it was, until his dark eyes smoldering in his stubble-shadowed face were all she could see.
She took in a careful breath. She’d rather die than let him hear it tremble. “Stop what?”
“You know what.” A gust of cold November wind whistled past. He moved, and it seemed for one crazy moment that he was trying to protect her from it. “I thought you said you’d accepted my apology.”
“I did.” She was barely aware of speaking as she measured the distance between the wall of his chest and hers. She wondered in a frazzled sort of way if he felt the wildfire heat ballooning in that small space, or if it was just her overactive imagination. “I do.”
“Then what’s the problem with me fixing your car?”
“There’s no problem.”
“You sure about that?”
He seemed closer. Why did he seem closer? “Mmm-hmm.”
“Then you’ll have it towed to my garage. Since there’s no problem.”
“Ah.” Slam. The trap she’d stepped into like a dimwit snapped closed around her. Desperately she prodded her mind in the hope of getting it to clock back into the conversation. “I just think distance is a good idea. For us, I mean.”
“Distance.” His elbows had bent a fraction. Just enough to bring his face close enough for her to suffer the completely unhinged desire to close her teeth over the silver barbell in his brow so she could toy with it with her tongue. “Yeah, distance would probably be a good idea. We don’t want to hit the replay button on us. Do we?”
“God, no.” Just the thought made her shiver. Never again would she get so lost in another person that she was left crippled when he pulled the rug out from under her. “We were kids, we were idiots and we failed spectacularly. There’s no need to revisit that salted earth.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Good.” The bend in his arms deepened. It was like he was engaged in the world’s slowest standing push-up. “The only thing I need from you now is the proof that will return everything to you that should have been yours seven years ago. And the only thing you need from me is...”
“What, Miranda?” Coe’s breath whispered over her lips like the stroke of a feather. “What is it you think I need from you?”
“Nothing.” And that was the bottom line she couldn’t allow herself to forget. “Nothing at all. Except my absence.”
His nose brushed the tip of hers. “It’d be a nightmare if I needed anything else from you.”
“For you and me both.”
“Do you always have to have the last word?”
“Always.”
He took her answer into his mouth as it locked onto hers. With the last of her will she stifled a moan of longing while sweetly sensual sensation hammered her. A voice that was probably her common sense clamored for her to stop the madness and push him into the next county. She knew—God, how she knew—that anything this mind-blowing from Coe couldn’t be good for her. She shouldn’t enjoy how the pressure of his lips was both familiar yet different enough to be a free-falling thrill ride. Nor should she delight in how his chest pressed against hers so that she could feel the wild thrum of his heart, in perfect sync with hers. And she sure as hell shouldn’t love the feel of his hands abandoning their hold on her car to plow into her hair, angling her head in such a way that held her to the locked-on heat of his kiss. No matter what, she wouldn’t allow herself to forget that this was his version of her kiss under the bleachers—a punishment designed to blow her peace of mind to smithereens.
Too bad reminding herself of that didn’t stop it from happening.
He whispered her name into her mouth, so that she felt it more than heard it. Shock resonated through her at the rough yearning that pulsed through it before her breath hitched at the bold stroke of his tongue. Desperately she gripped her hands behind her back to keep from reaching for him. But oh, she wanted to. The stillness of her arms bordered on agony, her muscles cramping against the restraints her mind had clamped down on them. Stupid body didn’t understand that she couldn’t reach for something that was both addictive and bad for her in equal parts. Coe was her drug of choice, God knew. But she wouldn’t willingly get hooked again. No matter how perfectly his mouth made love to hers.
Oh, help.
The hot fusion of his lips melding to hers seemed so complete it was almost impossible to imagine they could ever again be separated. She was sure that was why a chilling shock of loss punched through her system when he at last raised his head to stare down at her upturned face. And in that moment, with her lips throbbing and his taste crowding out everything else in her universe, the mindless part of her ached to wallow in his gaze as it roamed over her as if desperate for the sight of her.
The sound of her sister’s ringtone suddenly sliced through the silence. Reality slammed in, hard enough to destroy the sensual haze shrouding her brain. With a shake of her head to dispel the madness, Miranda stepped to the side and away from the soul-melting temptation that was Coe.
“‘Everybody Hurts’?” In a blink, Coe’s expression cleared to become nothing more than vaguely curious, glancing into her car while Miranda gained some more distance. “Is that someone’s ringtone?”
“My sister’s.” Amazing, how she sounded almost normal and not completely shattered. “No one knows the depth of her misery, you see.”
“Ah. You gonna answer?”
“No.” It would just be the same song and dance.
He listened to the mournful dirge a moment longer. “I can only imagine the ringtone you have for me.”
“I don’t have one for you.” Mainly because she didn’t have his number in her phone’s memory. “Katherine’s convinced she’s going to be plunged into a life of Dickensian poverty when you attain ownership of the patent. What will she do when she has to cut down on her housekeeping staff?”
“I see the ins and outs of how to clean a toilet looming on her horizon.”
“If I can do it, she can. I worked on the janitorial staff at my university all throughout undergrad, and it didn’t kill me. And speaking of that patent, I’ve had an idea.” She kept her tone light and hoped he didn’t notice how breathless she still sounded. Maybe if she pretended that kiss wasn’t anything to get excited about, he’d assume she wasn’t affected by it. And maybe she could trick her staggered brain into thinking that as well. “Didn’t you once do a lot of your old fabricating when you were working for Lefty at the garage?”
He nodded absently, his eyes on her mouth. “Lefty was pretty cool with me doing whatever I wanted when we had downtime.”
“Would he have kept anything you created?”
He lifted a shoulder, then glanced into
her car again when the ringtone stopped. “I tossed a lot of his stuff when I bought the garage from him.”
Her heart sank. “You didn’t keep anything? Not even anything that had to do with you?”
“I don’t think so. I do have some boxes of his cluttering up a cabinet in the office from about that time period. It wouldn’t hurt to go through them, I suppose.”
“I thought of something else as well,” she added, undaunted by his skeptical tone. “I remember you used to talk about your old shop teacher, and how he encouraged you to create whatever came to mind. Would he know anything about your valve gizmo?”
“I doubt it.” He paused when the sound of a wailing baby emanated from the car. “What the hell...”
“Katherine’s text chime.” With an irritated sigh, Miranda reached in through the open window and scowled at the screen, before moving her thumbs over the screen. Not now, Katherine. Working on leads to track down patent evidence. “Ha. That should shut her up for a bit.” She showed him the screen with a bright smile. “Now. About your shop teacher?”
He searched her expression as if looking for something specific, before he shook his head. “I thought up the valve while in high school, true. But it wasn’t really a reality until after I graduated. I don’t see how Mr. Osweiler would have anything like that.”
“What was his first name?”
“Stuart, I think. Or Herbert.” Then he grinned, a dazzling work of masculine art that, for once, was free of sharp edges designed to cut her to pieces. “What are you going to do, hunt the guy down and interrogate him?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” The wailing baby sounded again, and she made a sound of frustration. “I’m going to tell her I’m off to hunt down your Mr. Osweiler, then hold a séance for Lefty’s ghost. Do you have anything you’d like to pass on to her?”
“Sure. Tell her to get a job.”
She snorted and typed, then turned off the volume so they could have some peace. “I don’t suppose you’re still in touch with Mr. Osweiler?”
