TWICE SHY (A SECOND CHANCE ROMANCE)

by Ivy Spears

  “Of course I didn’t trip!” I pulled my hands away. “Besides, I’m the nurse here, remember?” I inched around him and pulled the side door closed. “Let me worry about my hands.”

  He took my hand in his and brought it to his lips, sticking it in his mouth slowly and kissing it. “I can worry about any part of you that I want.” He took his other hand and pushed it between my legs. “Especially this part.” He gripped the center of me tightly.

  I closed my eyes and turned to mush and wetness.

  But Asher released me quickly and turned away, heading toward the back of the garage. “If there’s a car here that they’re trying to hide it’s probably going to be toward the back and covered up. It’s only been a few days so I doubt they would have made much progress.” He started lifting tarps up quickly and surveying the vehicles underneath. “A few more days though and we might be having a different conversation.”

  I glanced under the tarp closest to me and pushed it back down when I saw a white jeep with a taillight out. “What do you mean a different conversation?” I moved closer to him, looking at another car only to find no luck, just like the one before.

  “Well, if the car was already fixed up we would have no way of knowing how much damage it actually started with, you know what I mean?” He moved down to the second row of raised cars.

  “Right,” I told him. “So we’re here just in time.”

  “Something like that.” He flashed me a smile and pulled back a dark black sheet, revealing an old red Ford with a dented in front end. The passenger side door was completely torn off, sitting in the back of the truck bed.

  Asher let out a low whistle. “Looks like we have a winner.”

  It took me a second to realize what he was talking about because I was so caught up in his smile. It was the first time I’d seen it since I got back. Sure, he’d smiled before but it was more of a sexy brooding look or a grown up sure of himself one. It was only in that moment that I saw the same goofy go lucky toothy grin he used to get what we were kids. And it was gone just as quick as it had come.

  I snapped out of it and jolted over to him, surveying the outside of the truck. It definitely looked like it could have crashed into my dad and sent him flying into the dashboard.

  I ran my fingers back and forth over the dented hood and took in the chipped green paint that was stuck to the outside. “Green paint,” I said slowly. “The same color of my dad’s truck.”

  Asher ran his hand up and down my shoulder slowly.

  Seeing the car right in front of me that could have been responsible for what happened to my dad made me emotional and light headed. I could barely contain the emotion from my voice as I turned back to him. “Do you recognize it?”

  Asher shook his head and reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out his cell phone. “Nope, but I will soon enough.” He leaned down and snapped a bunch of photos of the car, sure to get the license plate included in a few of them.

  “What are you going to do with them?” I asked, looking back at the specs of paint again. My dad must have been so scared, seeing the hood of that huge truck coming flying at him before his vision faded off into the darkness. I felt tears spring up in the back of my throat but I pushed them down. “Will you send them to me?”

  Asher turned me away from the car and shook his head. “Listen to me, I’m going to find out who the driver of this truck is, okay? And then me and you are going to make them pay for what happened.”

  I blew out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in and then nodded into his chest. I just hoped that he was right, that somehow this car would lead us back to the driver and it would be enough for an open and shut case because the truth was I wasn’t sure Asher really got how far I was willing to go to get justice.

  But he was about to find out.

  And so was the rest of the world.

  ***

  One day of work and the barn already looked a million times better. I had been at the hospital all day yesterday and then been too busy playing detective to come out and check on their progress much the day before. But looking at it now, I hadn’t had to worry; Asher’s men clearly knew what they were doing.

  The inside of the barn was completely clear, even though I had told them I would take care of the clean up myself. Boards and old wood had been taken down and had started to be replaced with fresh pieces, old pieces of cages had been taken out and new ones leaned against the back wall.

  The amount of work they had done must have taken them far into the night and they were already here this morning, working away bright and early. When I woke up and looked outside they were just there, almost like they had never left.

  I’d showered, made a huge pot of coffee and a fresh thing of cinnamon rolls and brought them out to them. It was the least I could do considering all they were doing for me. I suspected Asher had something to do with how fast and hard they were working.

  “You guys must have literally never left to get all this done in a 24 hour time period.” I took a cup of my coffee and looked around the barn for about the tenth time since I walked in a few minutes earlier.

  It was already starting to look beautiful again.

  I pulled my sweater tighter around my body and watched the sun peak up over the horizon in the distance through the large back window, the way I used to when I was a kid. If I closed my eyes I could almost feel the same calmness I used to get when my dad and I would come out here on early weekend mornings.

  Ralph glanced at the group of five other guys standing around a few feet away from us, talking and laughing while they drank their coffee and chowed down on the food I had run out to them.

  “It didn’t take us that long,” he lied.

  I looked at him skeptically. “Come on, Ralph, I may have been gone for a long time but I’m not stupid. I really appreciate you guys putting in all the extra hours.”

  He shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

  “It is, though.”

  “Well,” he said, looking back at his crew. “It’s an important job and we don’t get too many of those anymore.” He took a huge sip of the hot liquid in his hand, draining the rest of the cup dry.

  “Well, if it counts for anything… my dad is going to lose his mind when he sees it.” I moved the toe of my boot back and forth in the dirt, kicking at the small pieces of rock scraps around me. “Oh, who am I kidding? I’m going to lose my mind when I get to show it to him.”

  Ralph laughed. “Yeah, I mean no. I mean… of course, it’s important to you and your dad but that’s not what I meant.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “It’s really important to Asher, too, you know?”

  “Oh.” I looked at him, surprised. “How can you tell?”

  He didn’t say anything, looking down at his empty coffee cup.

  “Did he say something to you?”

  “Na,” he shook his head. “I just know him, that’s all.”

  I opened my mouth to press him further, curiosity taking over but the front door of the barn swung open and the subject of our desire himself came strolling through. He was clothed in a pair of dark tan pants, black boots, and a long-sleeved gray shirt. Why did he always look like his work clothes cost more than I made in a month?

  And why did his arms look so good in that shirt?

  I clapped my legs together; paranoid that somehow someone would be able to tell just the sight of Asher made my flower weak. The nasty things we did last night came rushing back as soon as he met my eyes and I forced myself to look away.

  Asher glanced at his guys. “Are you force feeding my men sugary treats?” He raised his eyebrows at me in question and then winked. “Without offering me any?”

  “Maybe they’ll share?” I suggested.

  “I’ll share with you, boss, but you have to take it out of my mouth.” One of his crew called out, puckering his lips up and starting to make kissing noises, sending the rest of the guys around him into a bunch of hysterics.

  �
��Alright, alright.” Asher nodded. “Let’s get back to work, hey? I’m not paying you to stand around and stuff your faces while you stare at a pretty lady.”

  The guys tossed their paper cups into the trash on the side wall and went back to their various posts, starting to pick up trash or tools to get back to what they were doing before I came out.

  Asher looked around the farm with his arms crossed over his chest. “It’s coming along nice, Ralph. How are we on our schedule for the end of day?” His cell phone went off and he hit the silence button without bothering to look at the screen.

  Ralph picked up a clipboard and started fumbling with a bunch of papers. “Right on schedule, sir, might even finish in time to get home for dinner.”

  “Doubt it,” Asher said, grabbing the papers and starting to look down at them while he compared the notes to the work that had started to get done. “Looks good,” he said after a few minutes. “And you have someone set to get the new shipment of wood coming in this afternoon?”

  “Sure am, boss, all set, boss.”

  “Good.” Asher turned to me for the first time. “Good morning, Ms. Reynolds, you look exhausted. Late night last night?” He said it with a completely straight face, no trace of deeper meaning in his tone. To everyone else around he was just a contractor on a job making polite conversation with the woman who had hired him.

  “I’m pretty well rested, actually.” I shook my head, trying not to laugh. “Nothing memorable or exciting happened to me at all last night.” I bit down on my lip as he studied me.

  In my mind was a flash of us throwing rocks through windows and breaking into garages. Followed by another flash of me sucking his cock while he shoved his fingers inside of my pussy forcefully a few minutes later.

  Good thing people couldn’t read minds.

  Ralph looked up from his hammer. “Are you okay?”

  Clearly, I wasn’t as smooth as Asher.

  “She’s fine,” Asher smirked and then put his hand on my shoulder, guiding me toward the door. “Come with me for a second, Ms. Reynolds, I want to show you something out front you might be interested in.”

  He didn’t have to push very hard since I would follow Asher anywhere.

  As soon as the door slammed closed behind us Asher took me by the waist and shoved me into the outside of the barn, slamming my back up against the hard wood and overwhelming his mouth on top of mine as he pulled my hair into the palms of his hands.

  I clung to his neck, not wanting him to break our embrace but eventually he did, leaving me all short of breath and turned on even in the coldness of the outside air.

  He took one of his hands and pushed my sweater open at the sides and then slipped his fingers inside of my t-shirt and up to my bra, finding my hard nipples through the laciness and starting to rub back and forth over one and then the other. “Nothing exciting happened last night, huh?”

  I moaned as he rubbed back and forth over my sensitive nipples and bit down on my lip hard so I wouldn’t get too loud where someone would hear. “Okay… so maybe I wasn’t completely honest.”

  Asher laughed and pulled his hands out from under my shirt. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.” He took my sweater and zipped it all the way up to the top. “Pretty sure my guys were looking at your chest more than their work.” He ran his hand over my chin. “Also pretty sure it belongs to me.”

  I grinned. “Is that so?”

  He looked down at me seriously. “Definitely.”

  “Well then…” I took his hand and placed it back inside my sweater. “Where are you going?” I massaged his hands into my breasts, moving them back and forth aggressively.

  He smirked and pulled back, kissing me on the cheek. “As tempting as that is…” He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me after his body toward the driveway. “We have work to do.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Twenty minutes later Asher pulled off down a dirt road across town and started to bump and grind over all the potholes that lined the ground. The truck we were in today was a deep red and even nicer than the one from last night, which I hadn’t known was possible.

  “Who’s truck is this?” I asked for the millionth time since I got in.

  “Why do you ask so many questions?” He glanced at me.

  I shrugged. “I don’t like secrets.”

  He laughed loudly. “A nice truck is hardly a secret.”

  “Then why can’t you explain where it came from?”

  “I can, I’m just choosing not to,” he explained.

  “Ah,” I said. “Kind of like a secret.”

  “There’s no winning with you, Bella Reynolds, is there?” He took his hand and let it rest on the inside of my thigh, a simple gesture he was apparently unaware would have an effect on my body.

  I linked my fingers over him, hoping my hot spot would get the message that this wasn’t the time for it to get all worked up because it wasn’t going to get any relief.

  What had happened to me back at the barn had been bad enough. Asher couldn’t get my body all worked up like that and then just walk away and leave me hanging.

  Only he had.

  “Nope,” I answered. “So, are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

  “Are you ever going to stop asking questions?”

  “Are you ever going to stop answering questions with questions?”

  “Well played.” He hit his blinker and turned into the driveway of a large white house. “I didn’t say anything before because I didn’t want to get you all worked up but at the same time, I knew it was important for you to be a part of this… the guy I put a call into last night came back with a name on the plate he ran for me.”

  I gulped. “And this is the house?”

  Asher shifted the car into park and turned in the seat, stretching his hand over the back of the seat. “This is the address that came back to the guy that the truck was registered under, yes.”

  “Okay, so what… what are we doing here, Asher?” I looked up at the house. It looked so normal, so big and country. It was hard to believe there was a criminal somewhere inside. “We need to go to the cops.”

  “We will,” he reassured me. “I just… I just thought we should check it out before we go and ruin someone’s life, you know? What if my guy was wrong on his information? You know how this town is… they play judge and jury even when the facts aren’t there.”

  I knew he was right. If this town heard about the sheriff being on this property they would just assume he had caught whoever hit my dad and everyone would be talking about it. Even if no charges came from it, they would just assume he or she had found a way to get away with it. Then the town would cause so much gossip that the accused wouldn’t even feel comfortable walking out of their house.

  “You’re right.” I chanced a look at him. “Who is it?”

  Asher sighed and inched the truck closer toward the driveway. “Paul Ryan.” He pushed down on the breaks a good distance away from the door and put the truck in park, cutting off the engine.

  “Paul Ryan?” There must have been some kind of mistake. I knew the Ryan’s well. They had a bunch of kids who were always running around crazy with little supervision. Some had gotten in trouble for petty crimes before but nothing like this, nothing anywhere near this level.

  Last I knew they were living on an old abundant farm on the other side of the lake that ran through our town. “The Ryan’s don’t even live here!” I told Asher before he had time to react to my previous question.

  “They do now,” Asher told me, looking at the house with a sick look on his face. “Your friend Josh Parker bought the land from the bank their farm was on when Paul lost his job and couldn’t afford the payments anymore. He kicked them out, plans on knocking it down and paving it over for some apartment buildings.”

  “What?” I was stunned. “He can’t do that!”

  “When you have money you can do anything,” Asher assured me. “Anyway, Paul and his family had to relocate and downgr
ade majorly, hence why they ended up here.”

  A throw-up feeling came over my body and I sighed. I wanted to catch who did this to my father more than anything else in the world but something about all of this didn’t feel right. The Ryan’s were the town joke, sure, but this didn’t seem like them.

  “I know,” Asher said; the way he always did. “Doesn’t feel right.”

  “I guess we’ll see.” I started to open my door.

  Asher shook his head, holding his hand up to stop me and pulled me back in the car. “No, let me go ahead first and check it out. Paul and I go way back anyway, I did some work for him not too long ago.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Nothing is going to happen, Asher.”

  “Then you won't mind staying back a second,” he pointed out.

  As much as I wanted to get in there and start breaking down doors, finding out what the hell had happened that night, I had to admit the fact that Asher wanted to protect me was cute. “Go ahead.”

  He patted my thigh gently and then jumped out of the car and headed toward the front door. He turned around and glanced at me before he moved up the steps and looked through the window next to the entrance.

  And, suddenly, everything just felt wrong.

  The entire thing just felt off, like something was about to go wrong at any moment and if I wasn’t careful I was going to end up at the center of the whole thing. My heart was beating so fast in my chest that I felt like it might explode.

  People had gone through them enough at my work for me to know that I was having a panic attack. The pressure of everything that was happening with my dad was coming to a head and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be anywhere near the man that was responsible for it.

  I tried to put my training to good use and closed my eyes tight, breathing in and out slowly, waiting for the rapid and heavy emotions that I was feeling to pass. I had to remind myself over and over again that it was just a temporary feeling; that this wouldn’t last forever.

  I dug my hands into the leather of Asher’s seats, gripping onto them so tight my knuckles started to turn white. It felt like I was moving high above the ground. Like if I didn’t hold on for dear life then I would float away and end up exploding into zillions of specs never to be heard from again.