Work Me Up

by Wylder, Penny

  “Mom.” I hug her back, and she squeezes me a little too tightly, leaning in to hiss in my ear.

  “We’ll talk about your tardiness later.”

  “I’m sorry,” I manage, before she’s already drawing back and spinning me forcibly toward a stranger in a suit, practically glaring at me until I offer my hand to shake.

  “Mr. Gordon, may I present our daughter, Selena?”

  “It’s a pleasure,” Mr. Gordon says, squeezing my hand just a little too hard.

  I smile at him through my teeth. “So good to meet you. Thank you so much for coming tonight, it means the world to us.” Mom has me trained well. She and Dad used to throw these sorts of company events all the time when I was younger. Before everything in our personal lives went to shit. It’s probably why she’s so nervous about tonight’s party. This is the first soirée in a while, and one to celebrate a huge merger.

  But I can’t get distracted by her, not just yet. “Mom, is Dad here?” I ask her softly, turning my head before Mr. Gordon can respond to me. “I need to speak with him privately.”

  The lines around Mom’s eyes tighten almost imperceptibly with worry. She glances at Mr. Gordon, smiles huge and fake for him, then gracefully spins me away, calling over her shoulder to him that she’ll be back in a jiffy. We’ve barely taken a step away from him before she leans in to whisper to me once more. “Is everything all right? Have you been taking your medications? Do we need to call Dr. Rosen? I have him on speed dial.”

  She’s already reaching for the little clutch purse on her arm before I stop her with a brush of my hand. “No, nothing like that. I’m fine, Mom.” The worry lines around her eyes relax, but only a little bit.

  “Well, then—”

  “It’s about, er, well. I had a little accident with Mrs. Samson’s car.”

  My mother’s cheeks flush, her breath catching and her eyes going wide. “Are you—”

  “Just in the driveway,” I hurry to add. “I bumped one of your Meyers, really messed up someone’s car out there, it’s all a bit of a mess. I thought Dad might be able to smooth it over.”

  It takes my mother a second to recover. I’m not the only one with scars. But when she does, her lips tighten in disapproval. “Hmm. Well. You can try to find your father, but I haven’t seen him in an hour, not since one of the partners asked him to come and see some newfangled golf device out front on the lawn.”

  “It’s called a club, Mom. Honestly.” I roll my eyes and flash her a grin, before I turn to go. But when I peel away and back toward the front lawn, there’s still no sign of my father. At least not anywhere I can see. There’s a cluster of men near the fence smoking cigars, but Dad doesn’t smoke, so I doubt he’s among the crowd.

  I glance over my shoulder again, nervous, and my stomach plummets. Shit. There’s a man standing next to the car I wrecked, running a hand through his hair. Praying it’s not the owner, and having a strong feeling it probably is, I smooth my dress down as best I can and make my way back across the driveway. Guess I’ll have to try to handle this without Dad’s help.

  2

  Selena

  “Hey, sorry about this,” I call as I near the scene of the crime.

  A man tenses and turns toward me, and for the first time, I get a good look at his face in the lights strung up all across our bright lawn. He’s taller than me by far, lean yet muscular, with a full head of dark, messy hair, along with sharp, angular features and, as my grandmother would say, “the kind of jawline that could cut glass—or hearts.”

  I swallow thickly, as his dark eyes fixate on me. “Did you do this?” he asks, his tone carefully neutral. Like he’s trying to repress some kind of emotion.

  I pray it’s amusement. Or maybe mere annoyance. Please don’t be some important customer of my father’s. Please don’t be integral to this damn merger my parents have been planning for eons.

  “Sorry,” I say again, smartly. Then I clear my throat, trying to make my brain work through the fog he seems to induce just by staring at me with that unreadable expression. “Um, I sort of… tripped. Out of my friend’s car. I can pay for the damages of course—or, well, my father can, are you acquainted with him? I was trying to find him to help sort this out but—”

  “Your father,” the man interrupts, his eyes narrowing. He glances at the broken car window, his scraped paint job, and then back over at me. “You’re Mark Brown’s daughter?”

  My smile stretches wider, so wide it feels positively painful on my face. “One and the same. So, like I said, we’ll cover damages.” I expected that line to at least assuage some of the frown lines on the man’s face. I can’t help thinking how much more handsome he’d be if he’d just smile at me right now instead of scowling.

  But instead, the lines only deepen. “How often have you used that line on people?” he asks.

  I blink, thrown by the shift of topic. “What do you mean?”

  But the man just crosses his arms, warming to the topic. “You always just offer to throw money at people in order to make up for your mistakes?”

  I stiffen, frowning. “What am I supposed to do, tell you that I’ll fix your car myself?” I snap.

  He snorts. “I’d like to see you try, Princess.”

  “I’m hardly a Princess,” I reply haughtily, sticking my nose in the air. That, at least, finally makes him crack a smile, even though it makes me blush when I realize why he’s suddenly laughing.

  “Sure. Very convincing act.”

  “It’s not an act. Maybe I could fix your car, you don’t know I couldn’t. You don’t know anything about me, besides who my father is—”

  “Which tells me more than enough about what I need to know.” The man leans against his car door and folds his arms over his chest, eyes wandering up and down my body, then narrowing as he scrutinizes me. “Let’s see… trust fund kid, obviously. Your parents probably pulled strings to get you into a top liberal arts college, where you majored in something ridiculous like English Lit or Gender Studies—”

  “Hey, Gender Studies is important. So are all the humanities, in fact, and studies show that defunding those programs leads to undereducated populations who vote against their own interests and regress socially and societally.”

  “Thanks for proving my point.” He winks.

  I groan and cross my arms. Something about this man frustrates me to no end. So I raise my chin and blurt the first retort that comes to mind. “Well, I can certainly guess a few things about you, too.”

  His eyebrows arch, his smile turning playful. “Oh really. Do tell.”

  I tilt my head and pretend to scrutinize him. Then I actually scrutinize him, because damn, he’s only wearing a simple white collar shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, but in this light I can tell he’s ripped. And the sleeves are rolled up past his forearms, which bristle with lean muscles, the veins standing out around hands that look scraped raw on the backside. Something inside me tightens at the sight of those hands, with his big, strong fingers.

  The things this man could do to me… The thought rises, unbidden, and I choke it down with effort, trying to keep myself focused on the task at hand.

  “You work with your hands,” I say. “Probably went to a trade school, which before you think I’m insulting you, I think is a smart and important move, because we need trade workers in this country more than ever, and there’s nothing wrong with hard work for honest pay.” His eyebrows rise, and he blinks as though taken aback. But I ignore him, because I’m on a roll now. “But you probably have a chip on your shoulder and act like a jerk to anyone who did go to college because of that,” I add. My gaze drifts past him to the car behind him. “This car is your baby—you take care of it, treat it well, because you probably don’t have anyone else at home to dote on, no girlfriend or wife or anything.”

  He snorts. “Presumptuous of you.”

  “Tell me I’m wrong, then.” I smirk.

  He shakes his head, just a little. But he’s grinning, too. At lea
st it’s better than his scowl. And, fuck, I was right—the man is positively devastating when he smiles.

  I’m about to offer a hand and introduce myself, when footsteps crunch on the driveway behind me.

  “Your mother said you were looking for me?” my father calls from just a few paces away. My heart does a funny little flip, as I realize that I’d been hoping Dad wouldn’t find me after all. At least not until I finished flirting with this guy.

  But now I remember where we are, why we started talking, and I wince. “Um, yeah, sorry, Dad, there’s been a bit of a—”

  “Your daughter wrecked my car,” the man interrupts me, with a gesture toward his vehicle.

  My father lets out a groan, glancing from me to the damage and back. “Selena, is this true?”

  “It was an accident,” I protest.

  “And have you offered to make amends for it?” Dad asks, crossing his arms over his chest, in a posture that I’ve long since come to recognize as his “time to teach my daughter a lesson” face.

  “I tried to—”

  “Actually, she was just insulting me.” The man’s grin widens.

  Now it’s my turn to glare at him. The nerve. “He started it,” I mutter, and the second I do, I realize it was the exact wrong thing to say.

  “Selena Brown.” My father draws himself up to his full height, stern and glowering. “Surely your mother and I raised you with more manners than this.”

  “It isn’t like it sounds,” I protest. “We were joking, I thought. I tried to offer to pay for the damages—”

  “Oh, and with whose money?” My father’s eyebrow arches wryly over the line of his spectacles.

  I grimace. “Look, Dad, you know I can only barely afford rent.” Grading papers for TAs and professors at my alma matter doesn’t exactly pay many of my bills. But I’m trying to get a freelance editing career off the ground, to take more jobs wherever I can find them.

  “So you offered mine, is that it?”

  I chew on the inside of my cheek. “Well… what else could I do?” I finally reply.

  “You did tell me you thought you could probably fix the damage yourself,” the man butts in, at the least opportune moment possible. I’m starting to notice he has a knack for doing that.

  I fire a glare his direction, hoping at the very least it will shut him up. But instead, it only seems to encourage him. He actually has the nerve to wink at me.

  “In fact, I think that might be the best option. After all, if you’d have to borrow money to cover the damage, I wouldn’t want to impose on Mr. Brown…”

  My face flushes. “But… I…”

  My father, much to my chagrin, starts nodding. “You know what, Antonio, I actually think that’s a great idea.”

  Antonio. I glare at my nemesis, glad to finally have a name to put to the schemer. He would be an Antonio. What with those dark eyes and the sharp cheekbones and the kind of jawline that photographers would die for in a model. I’ll bet he works part-time doing shirtless modeling for Car Obsessed Men weekly or something.

  Antonio grins at me, completely shameless. “Great. I can put her to work tomorrow. That is, if you’ll be available by then?” He tilts his head, finally addressing me directly.

  “Look here, Antonio—” I start, but Dad cuts across me quickly.

  “It’s high time you learned what real work feels like, Selena,” my father says. “I know you’ve been through a lot.” At that, I notice a flicker of interest dart across Antonio’s face, before he hides it again behind that damn smirk of his. “But it’s no excuse to stall your entire life from now on. You need something to get you off the couch, out from behind the pages of those romance novels you’re always reading and into the real world.”

  My cheeks burn white hot. “They’re not romance, Dad, they’re fantasy books with romantic elements. It’s totally different.”

  “Does the guy get the girl at the end?” Antonio asks, a single eyebrow raised, as if to emphasize his point.

  I purse my lips. “Maybe.”

  His grin widens. “Sounds like a romance to me.”

  “Yeah, well,” I raise my chin, “nothing wrong with reading romances, even if they were them, which they are not.” I’m getting scrambled now. Why is it that this man has the ability to make me feel so damn flustered? I can’t remember the last time I felt this way around anyone. Normally I’m a confident, take no bullshit person.

  Then again, normal is something I haven’t been in a long, long while. That unpleasant thought settles in my stomach, sours the mood. I shouldn’t agree to this. I can’t. But Dad’s still talking, glancing back and forth between Antonio and me with his arms folded.

  “Getting your hands dirty will be good for you, Selena. It will remind you that there’s a whole world right here in front of you. You don’t have to hide away from it chasing fantasy ones. Okay?” He reaches over to pat my shoulder, and all at once, he doesn’t look stern or scolding anymore. He looks… worried. About me.

  The churn in my gut kicks a little harder and faster. So I nod, before I can think better of it. Because the last thing I want to do is add to my parents’ already prodigious burden. I want to make my father proud of me. I want to look into his face and not see constant worry and disappointment reflected there. “All right, all right,” I say, my voice coming out gruffer than I intended, mostly to hide the emotion in it. “I’ll fix the damn car.”

  “Good.” Dad smiles one more time. “Glad that’s settled. Now, if you’ll excuse us, Selena… Antonio, I was just speaking to Paul Myers about you.”

  Before he turns to follow my father, Antonio flashes me one last grin over his shoulder, his dark hair falling across his eyes in a way that would make my heart skip, if it wasn’t already beating faster out of sheer annoyance.

  Yeah. That’s it. Annoyance.

  “See you tomorrow, Selena,” Antonio calls. And I can’t help but wondering why it sounds so good, to hear my name from his lips.

  3

  Antonio

  This was a bad idea. I should never have agreed to this. I pace back and forth across the garage floor, my eyes never straying far from my Rolls. My Rolls Dawn Drophead, my baby. The prize possession in my fleet, the one I only ever whip out for big, expensive parties where I need to impress a lot of people.

  Like last night, when I went to the Browns’ big fancy merger party, in the hopes that I might be able to drum up some business. Mark Brown has been using me to fix up his Jaguar for a few years now, and we’ve become good friends. He told me a lot of his friends—many of whom were at the party last night—would be in the market for luxury car tune-ups, from the kind of mechanic who had extensive experience working on their specific models. All of which I have. All of which I’d planned to showcase by walking a few of them past my baby throughout the course of the evening, so we could talk specs—how long I’d had her, how I got her back into solid working condition from the shape I bought her in.

  All of those carefully wrought plans, however, came crashing down the moment Mark’s daughter dropped an entire damn tree through my baby’s window.

  I groan again just thinking about it now. It’s painful enough to look at her, all lonely and isolated in the corner of the garage, her beautiful, authentic vintage paint job scarred to hell.

  I still managed to talk up a few clients, I think. But I didn’t have any luxury car on hand to show them aside from Mark’s own Jag, which, no offense meant to the Browns, isn’t exactly unique in terms of luxury standards. I mean, it’s a great car, don’t get me wrong. But a lot of people have them. Big-shots like the ones at that party weren’t interested in cars that a lot of other people had.

  They want the unique ones. The rare black leopard of the car families—the kind of car that, if it were a big game animal, you’d need to go on a seriously illegal nighttime raid to hunt it down, because it’d be on the endangered species list and you’d be arrested for even talking about going after it.

  Not that
I condone big game hunting, of course. Just, hunting down the kind of unique, rare, expensive as hell cars that I do is about as close as I’ll ever come to that experience.

  And now, to top it all off, I’ve agreed to let the woman who trashed any hope I had of securing some really important customers last night, be the one to fix up my baby.

  It’s not too late to change your mind, I remind myself. One more glance toward the Rolls has me wondering whether I ought to do just that. Call up Mark and tell him that on second thought, I’d rather just take an insurance check, please. I’m sure he’s got insurance that would cover an accident like this. No need to get his daughter involved.

  His frustrating, oblivious, self-involved, incredibly fucking hot daughter.

  No. Not hot. I’m just confusing anger with passion. Two different kinds of heat, Antonio, I remind myself.

  Besides, Selena Brown is the last person I can afford to be attracted to. She’s everything I don’t want in a girl. High-maintenance, stuck-up, full of herself…

  I’m still listing traits when someone knocks at the door to the garage. I turn around, and fuck. All those adjectives drop away, and there’s only one pounding through my head all over again.

  Hot. Hot, hot, hot.

  She wears a tight white T-shirt, stretched thin enough I catch a glimpse of the pink bra underneath. And she paired it with what look like very tight jeans. At least, they hug every inch of her curves. And oh, she’s got plenty of those. A waist I could probably fit both hands around easy, but then hips to spare, and a chest that I have to forcibly drag my gaze away from, because I can already feel a dangerous tightening in my own jeans, and the last thing I can afford right now is to have Mark Brown’s daughter catch me ogling her tits.

  But fuck, I bet she has fantastic tits. The stretch in her shirt is enough to attest to that.

  I swallow thickly and clear my throat, before I stick out a hand. “Welcome.”