Set the Night on Fire

by Laura Trentham

  Dear Lord, that had sounded very naughty even to her own ears. She stopped breathing and popped her eyes open. For a split second, what looked suspiciously like amusement flickered in his hazel eyes and quivered the corners of his mouth. She blinked, and it was gone. He let go of her and stepped away.

  “Your skirt is ruined too, I’m sorry to say.”

  She twisted to see. The back of her skirt looked like an inkblot test. She wondered what word would come to mind if she turned and presented her backside to Mack.

  “Next time, I’ll know what not to wear.” She bypassed a leather chair and perched on the edge of a cheap vinyl one.

  Mack cleared his throat and tossed the dirty wipe into the trash with a jerk. “Why did you come in the first place?”

  She shifted on the seat and straightened, kicking her chin up a notch. “I own a quarter stake in the garage.”

  “Yeah. About that. I want to buy you out.” Mack half-sat on the desk doing his hungry, looming hawk-in-search-of-a-mouse imitation once more.

  “You can’t afford to buy me out.”

  “Why do you assume that?”

  “Because Ford wouldn’t have offered his stake to me if you’d been able to afford it. And I expect to make a profit on my investments.”

  He let out a slow breath through his nose as if his control was slipping. “What happened with Ford is more complicated than money. But things between us don’t have to be. Name your price.”

  But their situation was more complicated than money. Mack just didn’t know it yet. “I don’t want to sell.”

  “Why do you want a stake in a two-bit mechanic shop in the middle of Podunk, Louisiana?” He gestured to the shop floor then slammed his palm against his desk.

  Was he really resentful he’d been stuck with overseeing the family business? Ford certainly had been. She rose and looked out into the shop. His twin younger brothers, Jackson and Wyatt, stood in front of the open hood of the Datsun chatting, their heads close, their bond undeniable, even at a distance.

  The shop was tidy, the floors as clean as they could be, considering the work. The equipment was top of the line and looked well maintained. No. His anger didn’t mask resentment, but something else. Pride. And she was stomping all over it.

  The garage and his brothers were the most important things to him, and he was worried she might try to destroy it.

  “My goal is to help, not hurt you.” Employing an old pageant trick, she spun around on her toes.

  “How the—” He caught the curse in his hand. “You’re not a mechanic, Ms. Boudreaux.”

  “Call me Ella.” At his stony stare, she shrugged and continued. “You don’t need another mechanic. You have plenty of mechanics. What you need is someone to market you.”

  “And you know enough about cars to do that?” His skepticism hit her like a kid pulling her pigtails behind the monkey bars. Annoying.

  She shouldn’t rise to the bait. Unfortunately, her mouth was less mature than her mind, and she reeled off facts her brother had recited with pride.

  “That Datsun 240Z you were under? It’s a seventy-three with a two-point-four-liter straight-six and side-draft carburetors. It can hit sixty in eight-point-two seconds with a hundred fifty-one horsepower. Top speed is a hundred twenty-five miles per hour. Not that anyone should be driving that fast on parish roads.”

  He looked … stunned. She confined herself to a small self-satisfied smile. She had a feeling nothing much surprised Mack Abbott, or if it did, he made sure the world didn’t realize it.

  “How did you … How do you know all that?”

  “That’s not important. What is important is that I can help you.”

  “We don’t need help.” He shook his head and re-chinked the breaks in his wall of grump.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, we don’t.” The playground-level annoyance continued with his childish denials.

  “Whatever.” She rolled her eyes, probably not helping to defuse the situation.

  “Name your price.”

  “That’s not how this is going to work, Mack.”

  “I say how things are run and done in this garage. Not you, Ms. Boudreaux.”

  “I have a quarter stake and an equal voice.”

  “Except, we handle things democratically around here and my brothers will have my back. Every. Single. Time.”

  Dangit. He had her there. Pushing against Mack was like trying to move a mountain. She glanced at the twins. If she couldn’t move Mack, then she’d have to go around him. She wanted to stalk out and slam the door, but forced herself to mosey as if she wasn’t bothered at all by the situation or the man. He followed her to the door. She stopped with one foot out and one in. The breeze caught her hair, and she tossed her head to get it out of her eyes.

  “You might vote me down, but at least give me a chance to be heard.”

  “Name your price,” he repeated in a growly, grizzly voice that was meant to grind down her dissension.

  Where she found the gumption she didn’t know, but she gave his cheek two pats and said, “You can’t afford me, tough guy.”

  Chapter Two

  Mack’s cheek burned as Ella Boudreaux walked away with a sexy twitch to her grease-covered ass. He let his gaze travel down her legs and back up again. Holy hell. He’d never met a woman who exuded her kind of raw sexuality and confidence.

  Was that what money could buy? Mack shook his head to reorder his jumbled brain. It wasn’t often he suffered from a crisis of confidence, but Ella had sucked his out like a leech. He no longer felt grounded, but flailing on the edge of a precipice.

  The truth was she was right. He couldn’t afford her. He couldn’t even afford what she’d paid Ford for the twenty-five percent stake in the garage. Not yet anyway. The upgrades to the equipment had eaten away at their capital. It had been a good investment and would pay off, just not fast enough to avoid the oncoming collision with Ella Boudreaux.

  “What’d she say?” Wyatt’s voice startled Mack into the doorjamb.

  He had managed to come up on Mack unawares. No surprise, considering his thoughts were centered on the woman who was heading toward a tiny convertible. Its soft-top was closed in deference to the cool spring day, but he could imagine her dark, silky hair whipping through the air like an old-school movie star driving with the top down. He caught a peek of her leg as she climbed in, her skirt sliding up a few more inches.

  Those legs.

  The sight of her sprawled on the shop floor with her long white legs against the dirty gray floor had done something strange to his innards. He couldn’t describe the feeling because he didn’t understand it. All he knew was that for the sake of his sanity, he needed her gone for good.

  “She’s not looking to sell,” Mack muttered.

  “I didn’t think we had the money to buy her out anyway.”

  “We don’t. But we will. Unfortunately, it seems like she’s not willing to be a silent partner after all.”

  “Are you worried she’s going to try to change things?”

  Change. He was forever worried about change.

  Ella backed her car up and gave them a wave through her open window. “I’ll see you boys soon!”

  She hit the parish road fast and fishtailed on the gravel, correcting the skid and handling the nimble convertible like a pro. Mack stood staring at the curve where she disappeared from sight.

  “She says she wants to help market the shop,” he said darkly.

  “Sounds like a good thing.” Wyatt nudged Mack with his shoulder.

  “I don’t trust her. She has an ulterior motive. Why would she want to go out and hustle for the shop? Who are we to her?”

  Wyatt let out a gusty sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe it will all become clear if we give it some time.”

  Time. How much did they have? Not enough of it in the day to get all his work done, that was a certainty. Since Ford had abandoned them and with Wyatt and Jackson spending more time with Sutton and Wi
lla, Mack felt like Atlas trying to hold up the world by himself.

  Something else bothered him. The way she’d reeled off the facts about the Datsun. Finding out which cars were being restored wouldn’t be difficult, as they kept a Facebook page updated with their progress, but the Datsun had just come in, and he hadn’t had a chance to post the before pictures. How had she known to memorize the details? Or was she more familiar with classic cars than he’d given her credit for? If so, a new deep worrying wrinkle complicated the issue.

  “Where did you leave things?” Wyatt asked.

  An unsettled feeling was in the air like a storm gathering far on the horizon. “She’ll be back, but I have no clue what’s next.”

  It cost him to admit his uncertainty.

  “Might as well get back to work for now. We can have a happy hour in the back of the barn and discuss tonight,” Wyatt said.

  “You and Sutton don’t have big plans?”

  Wyatt and Sutton had gotten engaged over Christmas, and he had moved in with her. Without fail as the hands of the clock approached five every evening, he was itching like he’d been infested with fire ants to get over the river to her.

  “She and her mother are talking wedding stuff. This would be a great excuse to escape. I swear if her parents wouldn’t disown us both, I’d haul her to the courthouse and get it done in five minutes like Jackson and Willa.”

  Jackson and Willa had gotten married without fanfare and fuss the week before. Instead of heading out for a traditional honeymoon, they had been back at work the next day. Mack had pressed them to take some time off together, but Willa had smiled, shaken her head, and shared a glance with Jackson that had made Mack’s chest ache.

  Mack retreated to his office and stared at the numbers on his computer screen until they blurred. You can’t afford me, tough guy.

  She was a hundred percent right on that one. Her casual sophistication made him feel like Bigfoot crawling straight out of the swamps.

  The rest of the day passed with him in a state of distraction. He ripped the leg of his jeans on a jagged bumper lying on the floor and dropped an air wrench on his foot. With a curse, he tossed his tools into the box with less care than usual and headed to the back of the barn thirty minutes early.

  He grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator they kept for such occasions, cracked one of the wide barn doors open, and propped his shoulder against it. The sun fell toward the trees, casting deep purples and oranges over green spring growth.

  How long had it been since he’d walked through the dense forest that backed up to the garage? Too long. Since before their father had died of a sudden heart attack on the shop floor a year and a half earlier. Once the forest had been his refuge. Now, he felt lost and adrift and disconnected from his past and the reasons he spent every waking and sleeping hour focused on the garage.

  Failure would mean he’d failed his father, his family, himself. The last year and a half had been the hardest of his life. The ache for his father, the infighting with his older brother, Ford, for leadership of the garage, and the fear he wasn’t up to the task.

  Jackson and Willa made their way into the barn side by side. It’s the way they’d always worked but now lived too. River trotted up and bumped Mack’s hand. He gave her a rub and got a lick in return.

  “I’m going to shower.” Willa bussed Jackson’s cheek. He caught her wrist and tugged her close enough for a kiss on the mouth.

  Mack turned away to stare at the trees that stretched to the far distance and rubbed a hand over his chest. Willa sped up the stairs with River on her heels.

  Jackson grabbed a beer, uncapped it, and joined him at the door. “Might frost tonight.”

  Mack hummed and took a swig.

  “We’re making spaghetti if you want to come up for dinner.”

  Mack took another swig but didn’t answer. It used to be that Jackson and Wyatt would wander over to their old childhood home where Mack lived for dinner more often than not. He missed those evenings filled with car talk and comfortable silences that only knowing someone bone-deep could imbue.

  Mack couldn’t shake the feeling of being an interloper the couple of times he’d joined Willa and Jackson in the loft. Even though Willa had worked at Jackson’s elbow for two years, their marriage was like a fledging bird with all the nerves and excitement of its first flight. They needed time together to find their wings.

  Jackson picked at a piece of splintering wood at the door. Their gazes met in an identical side-eye. “I take it things didn’t go smoothly with Ms. Boudreaux.”

  “Seems like she wants to actually, I don’t know, do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “She mentioned marketing the shop.”

  “Well, hell, she can’t do a worse job than Ford did and Lord knows, while Wyatt has the skills, he doesn’t have the time. Why not give her a shot?”

  Mack huffed and shifted to face Jackson, who did the same on the opposite side of the door. “Because this is Abbott Brothers Garage and Restoration and she’s not an Abbott.”

  “Dude. We all wish Ford had offered us a chance to buy him out. But he didn’t.”

  “I can take out a second mortgage on the house or the shop and—”

  “No. Only as a last resort.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “Wait her out. She’ll get bored and move on to the next thing. Probably sell her stake for cheap.”

  It was a logical course of action. Any investment manager would have pegged the garage a poor return on investment. They’d never make millions. Yet something beyond a simple return on investment had driven her to buy Ford’s stake. Jackson hadn’t seen the light and energy brewing in her eyes and the knowledge she’d spouted like it had resided in her head for years.

  Ella Boudreaux was a force of nature, and he wasn’t confident they could batten down the windows and survive her.

  Wyatt came through the back and provided a much-needed lightness and humor. He grabbed a beer too and the three of them took up their customary spots from oldest to youngest on the couch. Although, Wyatt was technically only a few minutes younger than Jackson.

  They talked football and baseball and NASCAR, and the normalcy spackled a veneer over the unsettled feeling Ella Boudreaux had left behind. Still, Mack’s worries surfaced as he lay in bed and chased sleep.

  * * *

  “She’s back,” Wyatt said on his way by the office door in a voice worthy of a horror movie trailer. He was gone before Mack could reply. The ball of anxiety in his chest tripled in size. He’d been anticipating her return, but not this soon. She hadn’t even given him a day, and the beers he and his brothers had shared the night before had left a dull throb of a headache at the base of his skull.

  How did he play this? If he acted like a total asshole, would that drive her away? Maybe, but that sort of behavior might also bring down the wrath of the aunts if they caught wind. Safer if he ignored her altogether and left her to flounder on the edge of things until she gave up and left. If everyone was busy and working, what could she do except sit in his office and twiddle her thumbs?

  He glanced out the bay door window. She slid out of her tiny car. His black truck could roll over it like a speed bump. She was in jeans and a blue-and-pink striped button-down. More practical than the skirt and sweater of the day before, but hardly anything she’d want to get down and dirty in.

  He bypassed the Datsun and headed for the welder in the far corner. He stopped Jackson as he was pulling on the welder’s mask. “I’ll finish up the hood. Go pull the engine on the Datsun. It’s going to need an overhaul.”

  “You sure?” Jackson’s eyes narrowed.

  Mack had planned to handle most of the work on the Datsun because it was one of his favorite cars. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  Jackson’s gaze moved over Mack’s shoulder, his mouth flipping from a frown to a smirk. He pushed the mask into Mack’s hands “You’re a coward, big bro.”

  Mack preferred c
alling it “strategic.” The sooner she accepted he didn’t need her, the better. Welding took up all his concentration, leaving no room for his worries. It was therapeutic and bordered on meditative for him.

  Thirty minutes of work knitted old metal to new. He flipped his mask up and ran a glove-covered finger over the bead weld. When they got through grinding it, no one would be able to tell the difference. It would be like the two pieces of metal had always been joined.

  Was she still here? He snuck a glance. She sat at his desk in front of his computer. Wyatt had propped himself in the door like he often did when chatting with Mack. Something he said made her laugh. Echoes of the throaty sound slivered through the noise to his corner.

  What the hell? Mack ripped the mask off, turned off the welding equipment, and stalked toward his office.

  Jackson dropped an arm in front of him like a crossing guard, forcing a stop. “You done with the weld?”

  “Yeah, it’s ready for grinding.” Mack stared at Ella as if his gaze could punch through concrete.

  Jackson patted his shoulder. “I think she genuinely wants to help.”

  Mack transferred his violent gaze from the office to his brother. Jackson only blinked and raised his brows.

  “So we just sign over the garage to her? Is that what you want?” Mack threw a hand up.

  “It’s not what I want, but she owns a part and there’s nothing to be done about it right now. Wyatt and I think it’s best to see how things play out.”

  “You do, do you?”

  “You would too if you weren’t being so emotional about the whole thing.”

  “Emotional? Of course, I’m fucking emotional. Our pop built this garage up from nothing and passed it to us to nurture and grow. Ella Boudreaux is a threat.”

  “She’ll be more of a threat if she feels backed into a corner. Wait her out, then buy her out.”

  Jackson’s advice was sound and nothing Mack hadn’t told himself. Problem was the woman unbalanced him, and he sensed an approaching disaster.

  “I’ll try to be charming and welcoming,” Mack said through clenched teeth.

  A laugh burst out of Jackson. “Don’t shoot for the impossible. Aim lower. Not rude would be a good start.”