Sold As Is

by Holley Trent

  He pressed a mostly completed form and a couple of supporting documents onto the counter and handed her a pen. “Sign right there.” He turned his attention to the clerk. “Magistrate on the way?”

  “Yep. She was trying to find her stamp.”

  “Aaron, how’d you get a copy of my birth certificate?”

  He chuckled. “Mike got it for me. Remind me to thank your mother for storing yours with his.”

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah, I’m here!” Mike hobbled in through the door leaning heavily on his cane, Eleanor in his wake.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You needed one more witness.” He winked then collapsed onto a hard orange plastic chair.

  Mandy put her hands on her hips again. “Aaron?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “You have something you want to tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “We’re getting married.”

  She shook her head. “No. We’re not.”

  He was nonplussed. “I know I didn’t read you wrong, Miranda. You’re not a big wedding kind of girl. You’re the secret elopement type. I figured I’d do you a solid and just skip the asking step.”

  “Oh, you figured, huh?”

  Mom stepped in between them, still dabbing her eyes. “Don’t you love him?”

  Mandy looked from Mom to Aaron. He tried to wipe the smirk off his face and failed. Who was he kidding?

  “Do ya, sweetheart?”

  “Yes,” she answered, voice so small as to be almost inaudible.

  He pulled the pen closer to the edge. “Sign it. This is me taking a stand, sweetheart. No one but me is going to decide what makes me happy, and you’re it.”

  She picked up the pen, tentatively. “But … married? What about — ”

  He gave her a squeeze. “Honeymoon in Spain, perhaps?”

  The tightness in her jaw softened, but she still wasn’t signing. “What about your dad’s campaign? And CTW’s funding?”

  “Oh, screw the campaign. I’m sick of hiding my light under a bushel. And I’ll fund CTW myself if I have to,” Mom said. She started digging around in her giant purse.

  “Sweetheart, don’t worry about that. I’ve got a bunch of pokers in the fire. The organization isn’t going bust anytime soon. Even if it means we have to sell chilidogs to raise funds.” He made a blech face.

  Mandy laughed. “Well, then, if you put it like that! Where do I sign?”

  CHAPTER 19

  “Are you sure you really want to do this? I mean, this way?”

  Mandy twirled her rings around her finger and chewed the inside of her mouth. Aaron appeared to be cool as a cucumber, which somehow made her even more apprehensive.

  “Oh yeah.” He slung an arm around her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. “Kill all the speculation at once then head out for Madrid with the press approximately 65 percent less interested in my love life.”

  “Your father is going to kill you.”

  “Not until after the election.” He gave her a little pat on the rear and nudged her toward the entrance into the packed meeting room. Flashes lit the room as photographers caught their arrival.

  Mandy slipped in behind the long white-cloth-covered table and sat to the immediate left of her stepbrother. She made an appreciative grunt at the title printed on the placard in front of him.

  “Congratulations, I guess. Development director? Fancy!”

  Mike wriggled his brows. “Thanks, I’m feeling pretty fancy.”

  “What’s Archie think?”

  “Ooh! Let me answer!” Tina, at Mike’s right, tapped the tabletop in front of him for attention. “I heard the entire exchange through the phone speaker. Archie’s loud, huh?”

  Mandy cringed. “Understatement.”

  “I believe, and correct me if I misheard, Michael, his instruction was for Mike to blow it out his ass. Apparently he thinks Mike is bad for business.”

  Mandy nodded, considering. “Yep. That sounds like Archie.”

  Jasmine scampered up, panting, right at the one-minute-before-showtime mark and placed paper name tents in front of Aaron and Mandy respectively. “Sorry about that! I truncated the letters in Mandy’s name. That would have looked bad, people thinking I can’t spell.” She darted away. Mandy turned the placard around.

  “Hey! I have a new title, too.”

  Aaron sat back and crossed his arms over his chest, smirking. “Two new titles. I think the unwritten one is more important, though.”

  “Yeah, you would.”

  The reporters on the front row went quiet, studying the signs. Hands started going up.

  Aaron ignored them and got down to business. “I thank everyone for their continued interest in Cars to Work and the growth our organization is currently experiencing. Today I’m going to speak briefly about some of our recent corporate partnerships and what our expansion plans are. First I’d like to introduce some of my key staff members. At the end is Tina Hoye, who’s been with me since the start of CTW. She is our training director and will be overseeing the competency of all the staff we’re hiring. Beside her is Michael Leonard, our development director. He’s come on board to help us plan our future programs. You can ask him any questions you’d like about how we go about procuring and distributing cars. You all know Miranda. She’s our COO. Just call her ‘chief.’ She likes that.”

  Laughter filled the room.

  “Now, I’d hate to rush this thing but I’ve got nonrefundable plane tickets for tonight and I haven’t packed my suitcase yet.”

  The reporters in the room waited patiently while Aaron ran down his talking points for about fifteen minutes. When he was done, he took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. “Any questions?”

  Every person in the room put up a hand.

  “Well, let’s just start first row and go left to right.” He pointed to the woman closest to the door. “Yep?”

  “I’m sorry, just for the sake of accuracy, your COO’s surname — ”

  “Is correct.” He pointed to the next person. “Yeah?”

  “Uh, and by correct you mean correct as printed on the name card?”

  “Yes. Miranda Owen.” He pointed to the next person.

  “Um … ” The man looked down at his notebook and seemed to have forgotten whatever it was he was going to ask.

  “Next?”

  “Yes, I’m from the Indy.”

  “Oh, boy,” Tina mumbled.

  “First of all, congratulations?”

  “Thank you,” Aaron and Mandy said in unison.

  The woman made a note. “Second, as you’re married to your COO, how are you going to handle oversight issues?”

  “The same way I handled them when I was CEO, COO, CFO, phone grunt, mechanic, coffee guy, and delivery boy all in one. And while we’re on the subject of transparency, I’d like to make it obvious that Mr. Leonard is my brother-in-law.”

  Hands went down. More popped up.

  Aaron pointed to the next person. “Yes?”

  The man cleared his throat. “Mr. Owen, how much involvement does the governor have with your organization? Is he on the board, or — ”

  “None.”

  The reporter blinked. “Uh, sorry, if I may follow up on that question, are you saying CTW has no ties to the governor at all?”

  “That’s correct. We’re a non-governmental organization in the purest sense. As of next year, we’re receiving no funding from the state at all. Politics don’t come into play here, folks. We’re just trying to help folks in rural communities get to work. I think that’s something both sides of the party line can get behind.”

  Mandy marveled at his absolute cool. He hadn’t even
pulled that pen out of his pocket, and she wondered what had happened to it, anyway. She, on the other hand, was shaking like a leaf and was glad no one had directed a question specifically to her. Or so she thought.

  When she felt a hand on her left thigh, squeezing, she looked up to find Aaron giving her an encouraging smile.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “You can answer.”

  “What was the question?”

  “Mr. McNamara, can you repeat the question for my wife, please?”

  She looked out into the room and found a man in rough-dried clothes with messy hair standing and squinting down at a pad. “Ms. Mc … uh, Mrs. Owen, I understand you developed a traffic system to coordinate the CTW staff coordinates. Is this a system that can be adapted to other businesses and organizations?”

  “Possibly. Really, it started as a series of spreadsheets and my stepbrother Donald adapted it into a simple program. Each team member inputs data from their own computers and it gets compiled on our server. I make assignments based on that information.”

  “I’d like to learn more about it, if possible. I write for a technology magazine based out of RTP. I think a lot of small companies with remote staff would be interested in how it works.”

  “Of course. I can put you in touch with Donald. He loves talking geek. See me after the press conference? I’ll get you his card.”

  Another squeeze of the thigh. This time, a good girl squeeze.

  The questions continued for another half hour. There were a few questions about Aaron and Mandy’s relationship they carefully diverted and one about Aaron’s politics which he responded to with, “Politics get in the way of getting real work done, as evidenced by the last legislative session, so what exactly are you asking me?”

  The reporter didn’t follow up.

  After that, once the crowd had seemingly determined the panel was not, in fact, a circus sideshow, the questions became more specific to the mission of Cars to Work — why they were there in the first place.

  At the end, Aaron pulled Mandy behind the curtain the secretary had put to hide the sound equipment and gave her lips a crushing kiss.

  “What was that for?” she panted once she’d caught her breath.

  He pushed her bangs back from her eyes and kissed her again. “For being a perfect human being.”

  “Wow, you said it even with me wearing clothes.”

  He smiled that thousand-watt smile. “It’s true. Think about it. I went out looking for someone to organize my staff, and ended up with a woman to run my life. It’s like a buy-one, get-one special.”

  She laughed and gave him a swat. “I don’t want to run your life, Aaron.”

  “Really? ’Cause from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re stuck with me. Remember that whole ‘better or for worse’ bit? No warranties. Sold as is, sweetheart, and you’ve already driven me off the lot.”

  About the Author

  Holley Trent grew up in rural eastern North Carolina. She now lives in the not-so-wild West on the Colorado Front Range, but still sounds like a Southerner.

  When she’s not writing or reading romance novels, she’s chasing kids, yelling at incontinent cats, or trying to match mated pairs of her husband’s multitude of gray socks. Like Mandy, she knows diddly-squat about cars.

  Holley’s an active member of RWA’s Colorado Romance Writers and the CIM special interest chapter.

  Find her online at www.holleytrent.com/blog.

  More From This Author

  (From My Nora)

  “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  The small woman with skin the color of light burnt sugar didn’t hear Matt Vogel calling into the barn for her attention. She was too busy cutting a rug to the tune of music Matt couldn’t hear with her eyes closed. Well, he’d tried, so he ogled the lithe stranger’s undulating form, assessing her swells and curves through her fitted work clothes without guilt. From his vantage point, the woman was doing a pretty good job of partnering with that old rusty hoe she was holding, although he couldn’t tell whether she or the garden tool was the one leading. Matt leaned against the barn’s doorframe and crossed his arms over his broad chest. God, he’d never seen a woman like her before, and he was absolutely smitten at first sight.

  She was agile as a cat burglar, lean with a narrow waist but bearing shapely hips that supported a firm round bottom that he watched with special interest. Matt thought he’d done pretty good in the past. He’d dated some of the most attractive women in Chowan County, but compared to his new neighbor’s remarkable beauty, they were downright plain.

  Suddenly, she turned and shouted “Lipschitz!” and dropped into a deep lunge, her pose supported only by that lucky hoe. She said “Ow!” when her hip flexor gave a loud pop and opened her brown eyes to finally take note of the stranger in her outbuilding. She startled at the sight of Matt. He couldn’t blame her. There he was, this big, lumbering white guy trespassing on a rural property where a single woman lived all alone. Her hands slipped down the hoe’s handle, causing it to drop sideways on the floor. With that, she lost her balance and fell backward to the dirt floor on her bottom. The caramel skin between her high cheekbones and the v-neck of her tee shirt flushed to an unhealthy burgundy tone.

  Matt walked over with one of his hands extended to help her up. “Sorry. I tried knocking at the house but … ” She held up her index finger to hush him, yanked the small headphones out of her ears by their cord, and shoved them down the collar of her shirt.

  “I’m sorry, what?” she asked in a smooth, husky voice.

  Matt opened his mouth to speak, but found himself gaping. He’d for some reason expected her to sound high-pitched and raspy judging by the way she shrieked “Lipschitz!” Instead, she sounded like the personification of sex and well-aged whiskey. He must have been staring, because she stood without the aid of his rough hand and waited in front of him with her hands on her hips and one elegant eyebrow raised. When he wasn’t forthcoming with words, or anything else for that matter, she said “Yoo hoo, ” and snapped her fingers in front of his face.

  “Sorry, ma’am.” Matt dropped his hand back to his side and then quickly jammed both into the pockets of his faded blue jeans. “I knocked at the house and when no one answered, I walked back here since the door was open.”

  She dusted her hands off on her yoga pants and straightened her colorful kerchief to tuck some hair escaping from the temples back up into the fabric. “Okay. You’ve found me. What can I do for you?”

  Matt opened his mouth to explain, but she held up her index finger once again and said “Wait, let me guess.”

  She paced around the broken tractor parts and empty steel oil drums, wringing her hands behind her back. “Well, you’re not dressed well enough to be a Jehovah’s Witness, and besides, they normally do their proselytizing in pairs.”

  Matt looked down at his typical autumn Saturday attire of a long-sleeved ringer tee, jeans, and much-abused brown harness boots. It wasn’t fancy, but it was typical Matt.

  She continued, “You’re obviously not the mailman.” She poked her head outside the barn door just to verify her hunch. “Unless you can strap bags of mail and parcels onto that motorcycle. I’m expecting a package, by the way.”

  He shook his head “No.”

  “Okay.” She resumed her pacing. “You’re obviously not the guy I’ve been waiting on for two weeks to install my satellite dish so I can have Internet, huh?”

  Matt shook his head once more, his hair settling into his eyes in the process. He flicked it away with annoyance. At the moment, the ends reached mid-neck. He knew his grandmother would have a fit if she ever saw it. He never had enough motivation for a haircut.

  “You don’t look like you need directions.”

  “Nope.”

  “Ah. Well, then you must be here to
ask if you can hunt on my land.” She gave him what was obviously a disingenuous, practiced smile and propped her hoe against a rack containing various garden tools that were well past their prime.

  Now it was Matt’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Well, yeah.”

  She sighed. “Well, you’re not the first.” She picked up a black yard waste bag and started tossing rusted bits of scrap metal and old yellowed newspapers into it. When it was half full of detritus she added, “And so you won’t be first I tell ‘no.’”

  “No?” Matt asked with disbelief, taking a few automatic steps in her direction. “Why not? I’ve been hunting in those woods since I was old enough to hold a rifle.”

  She put her hands on her hips and scowled at him. If she was trying to look ugly, she was failing miserably in Matt’s opinion. “Mr. — ”

  “Vogel. Matt Vogel.”

  “Mr. Vogel. I put that sign up at the road not because I’m being picky about who hunts here or because I want to keep all those goddamned deer for myself.” Matt cringed.

  “I live in that house up there.” She pointed to the very obvious two-story farmhouse in the near distance for emphasis. “I moved here from a really shitty neighborhood in Baltimore where I had my front windows shot out not once, but twice. I wasn’t even who they were aiming at.” She stopped pointing and got up so close to Matt that their toes were nearly touching through their shoes. Matt sucked in some air. She smelled like hard work and something fruitier he couldn’t identify. She had a scent he wanted to roll around in. “I don’t want anyone on my property with a gun.”

  Matt looked down into her piercing gaze and ground his teeth to fight off the smirk that was his longtime nervous tic. It wouldn’t do for her to think he was off his rocker during their first encounter. He didn’t even know her name and she’d lived on that property for several weeks.

  “Mr. Vogel, did you hear anything I just said?”

  Matt nodded slowly. “Yep. I heard you. No guns.”

  “Good. I’m glad we understand each other.”