She snorts. On her, it’s sort of cute. But also sort of very annoying. “Welcome? What is this, a formal interview?” She moves closer and takes my offered hand though, and along with her drifts some kind of scent on the air—perfume, maybe? It’s light, floral. Like nothing I’ve smelled before, and it fits her so exactly it almost surprises me. That, along with the feel of her soft, smooth palm in my hand, squeezing my fingers like she has any chance of making an impact with those dainty hands against my huge ones, has me jerking back from her quicker than I’d like.
This girl is dangerous.
“Hi, I’m here to apply for the position of person who smashed your car and is being strong-armed into fixing it. Did I get the job?”
I force an easy smile, as easy as I can manage when every ounce of blood in my body is aching to travel directly south to my cock. “Job’s all yours, if you think you can handle it.”
She arches an eyebrow coolly. Fuck, I’d like to see her do that more often. “How hard could it be?” she asks, and thank god she’s so annoying or I’d already be in danger of trying to rip that stupid see-through shirt off her right now.
“Well…” I draw out the word, tilting my head to one side as if pretending to study her. “It took me about five years of apprenticeship before I was trusted to take care of every aspect of work that goes on in this garage, to start with. And about another five years before I started handling the kind of cars like Betty.”
“Sorry, Betty?” Selena’s eyebrows both shoot skyward now, as if they’re trying to join with her pretty blonde row of bangs. “You named your car.”
“Doesn’t she look like a Betty?” I gesture at her, though truth be told, at the moment she doesn’t have quite her same sparkle and personality as usual.
“Like Betty White, or…?” Selena tilts her head, studying the car too. The way she does it, though, makes a strand of hair fall across her cheekbone, and my fingers itch to brush it away.
I fold them into fists in order to resist. “I was thinking Boop, actually, but White works too.”
She grins. “So you watch old movies.”
“What can I say?” I run my hand through my hair, and I’m gratified to notice the way her gaze drops to the line of the plain tank top I’m wearing. Maybe I’m not the only dangerously distracted one here today. “I prefer things with substance. The kind of value that accumulates over time. You can’t fake that kind of style nowadays.”
“So you don’t think anything in modern times has value or substance.” Selena crosses her arms over her chest. Fuck me. The way she does it pushes her breasts up, making it even harder to keep my eyes fixed anywhere but on them.
I stare at Betty and her damaged window determinedly. “I never said that. I’m sure there are some things with substance created nowadays.” I flick my gaze back at her, teasing. “Just, you know, not a lot of them.”
Her face flushes, and her eyes narrow. I really do enjoy pissing her off. Except, doing it now has me thinking how much fun it would be to do that in the bedroom—tease and torment her right up until she’s on the edge of coming, making her so wet she’ll beg me for release.
Shit.
“I’m going to assume you aren’t implying anything about me,” Selena says in her best haughty rich girl voice. Then she tosses her head. I mean, actually tosses it. I thought girls only did that in bad teen movies.
I smirk. “You go right on ahead and do that,” I say, which makes her huff in annoyance. But I’m already moving, across the garage toward Betty, because if I don’t walk away from this girl right now, I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do. Something highly improper, anyway.
To judge by the clack of heels against the cement floor, Selena’s following me. “So, are you going to show me what I need to do, or should I like, pull up some YouTube videos or something.”
I know she’s probably joking, but I actually feel physically nauseous at the thought of somebody ‘looking up some YouTube videos’ and then laying a hand on my baby. “Hell fucking no,” I reply, a little more heated than I meant it to sound. I clear my throat and compose myself as we reach Betty, placing a hand on her roof before I turn to face Selena again. “I’ll be right here to shadow you closely every step of the way,” I say, trying my best to sound stern.
Something I nearly lose control of when she bats her eyelashes. “Well, that’s a relief. I definitely require close supervision.” Her cheeks flush as she says it, which makes me wonder if she actually thought about how that sounded before the words came out of her mouth.
This woman. I arch an eyebrow. “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t want you to risk breaking a fingernail or anything.”
Her face flushes even more. I’ve gotta say, I like it. It makes me want to find out what else would make her blush this hard. Like if I ran my hands over the curve of those sexy-as-fuck hips of hers, all the way down to the backside I can see straining against the seams of her too-tight jeans.
“By the way,” I add, making her turn back toward me, just as she’d been about to peer over at Betty and the damage she did yesterday, “tomorrow, you might want to ditch the skinny-as-fuck jeans. And the heels. It’ll be hard to work in either one.”
She arches one eyebrow, grinning. “We’ll see about that.”
And damn. I am a sucker for a girl who’s willing to step up to a challenge. “All right,” I drawl slowly, tilting my head to one side. Then I slap the car door for emphasis. “So. First thing’s first. What do we need to fix here?”
Selena blinks a few times, rapidly, like she wasn’t expecting a pop quiz so soon into this session. “Um… the paint job?” She side-eyes the huge scratches in it, her mouth forming a worried little moue that only emphasizes how thick her lips are.
Those are the kind of lips that would look incredible wrapped around my—
Nope. Not going there. Not yet, anyway. Not unless she begs me, my animal brain helpfully supplies, and my cock gives a longing throb of agreement, before I suck in a deep breath to steady myself. “Not in the slightest,” I reply, which makes her shoulders slump a little in disappointment. “First thing you want to work on is the most internal damage. Which in this case would be…” I pause, just in case she wants to try another guess. But she seems more hesitant now, her arms folded over her chest, listening to me.
I’m not sure what’s more surprising. The fact that she doesn’t have a cheeky comeback for once, or the fact that she’s actually willing to listen.
I tap the window. “This baby. The tree went through the window, as you may have noticed—”
“Unfortunately, I did,” Selena mumbles.
“So, we need to assess whether there was any damage to the window mechanism itself. Now, in a modern car, this would be a bigger issue, because you’d have the automatic window system to contend with. Those are finnicky as hell and involve about a million parts.” I step around her to open the door.
She moves at the same time I do, and for a split second, my side brushes against hers. Not for long, just enough time for me to get an impression of the way she feels—soft, curvy. Her body supple in every place that mine is hard. Fuck.
Then I’m past her, yanking the door open a little harder than I meant to, which I internally scold myself for, because I didn’t even stop to check if the handle might have been damaged by the impact of the tree before I went and did that. Lucky for me, it doesn’t seem to have been, because the door opens easily. A few pieces of glass I hadn’t managed to catch when I cleaned up last night fall to the ground. Thankfully I drove home late last night, since it brought me no small amount of shame to be driving a car in this kind of shape around town, given my job.
Selena steps back daintily, dodging the pieces of glass, and then she steps up beside me again to study the door with me. But this time, she moves close enough for her arm to press against mine. Her skin feels soft, warm, smooth as silk against my rough forearm. She’s so close I can feel her arm moving as she breathes, slow careful inhales
and exhales that drive me wild at the soft sounds.
“Luckily for you,” I say, trying to regain some modicum of control here, or at the very least, decent behavior, “Rolls from this era had crank windows, which I preferred to keep.”
“Let me guess.” She fires me a snarky little sideways smirk. “Because it’s more substantive?”
“Because I’m a picky asshole,” I reply with a smirk of my own, and that makes her let out another one of those little surprised snorts of laughter. Which in turn makes me want to do that all the time. Make her laugh when she doesn’t expect it, just because it lights up her whole face whenever it happens.
Something tells me she doesn’t laugh like that often.
Though I have no idea why. What sort of problems could the daughter of Mark-fucking-Brown really have? Nothing serious or substantive, that’s for sure.
Still, there’s something melancholy to the tilt of her head as she faces the car once more. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into her every motion.
God, why can’t I get this woman out of my head?
“So, hand crank windows are easier to fix,” she says.
“And also harder to break.” I gesture at the crank. “Go ahead. Give it a turn for yourself, see what the damage is.” She reaches out, but I catch her wrist, stopping her fingers just inches from the handle. Her skin feels soft under mine, and she inhales a quiet breath, like she has to catch it, before she could help herself.
I watch her throat work tightly as she swallows.
“Be careful,” I tell her quietly, and I’m not so sure I’m talking about the car right now. “There could still be broken glass.”
“Right,” she replies. Is it my imagination, or is her voice a little shaky? Still, when I let go of her wrist, she listens to me at least, using the hem of her T-shirt, which she untucks from her jeans in a motion that nearly sends me over the edge, to brush the handle off. Then she grasps it and turns the crank. Once. Twice. A few times.
“Should something be happening?” she asks, biting her lip and tilting her head to look up at me.
The look alone hits me like an electric shock to my dick. I can imagine that look on her face as she kneels at my feet, my pants around my ankles, ready to take my cock between those plump, perfect lips… “Well, you knocked the window out, so no, you can’t see if the glass actually goes up and down when you crank,” I point out.
She grimaces. “Oh. Right.”
“But the handle is turning,” I say, smiling, letting her off the hook. “So you can assume the mechanism itself still functions. That’s good. It means we’ll only need to replace the glass pane when we take off the door’s inner frame.
Her eyes nearly bug out of her head. “We’re taking apart the whole frame?”
I raise an eyebrow at her. “What did you think we were going to do, just leave the window broken?”
“Well, no, but…” Those teeth worry at her lower lip again. Seriously, she has got to stop doing that. “I mean, what if we mess it up? Even worse than it already is,” she’s quick to add.
I shrug. “Then we’ll have to fix it again. Even more than we already do,” I add with a wink.
A funny little frown line appears between her eyebrows as she stares at me. It’s like she’s studying me, but she can’t quite work out what she thinks. What she should believe about the man standing in front of her.
I know the feeling. I’m not quite sure what to think about her either. After all, she did wreck my baby. And then insult me over it. I still can’t get her words out of my head, from last night. 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…
Damn. Am I that fucking easy to read, that even this spoiled rich girl was able to pick me out of a lineup in ten seconds flat? I’d barely said ten words to her and she already had me pinpointed. How the fuck did she do that?
Well, points out a sullen voice in the back of my head, the one that can’t ever quite resist adding its own two cents, You did say more than ten words to her first.
A little ping of regret hits me, because I might have jumped to a few conclusions about Selena based on how we met. Then again, watching her pick up a wrench now and heft it experimentally in her hand, squinting at the head of it like she has absolutely no idea what this mystery item could be, even though it’s one of the most basic tools on the planet… Well, maybe we were both pretty quick to read each other, that’s true.
But then again, maybe neither of us was wrong.
4
Antonio
To my surprise—and to hers too, I’m pretty sure, if I’m reading the raised-eyebrows look on her face right—Selena turns out to be a hard worker. She’s not the quickest study I’ve ever taught, and she has trouble with the finer details, remembering parts and placing them together in the correct order. But she’s more than willing to redo things when I tell her they’re wrong, and to take it slow.
I even catch her whispering to herself when I’m on my way back from a bathroom break, reciting the order in which she’s supposed to place the tools on the cloth we laid out beside the car, within easy reach so we can grab them one by one as we work. I pause, then, to watch her. Just for a second. I can’t resist.
Something about seeing her the way she is right now, kneeling on the dirty, grimy floor of my garage, her formerly pristine white T-shirt covered in smudges of grease and a few flecks of paint from when I was showing her how to match up the body color for later, when we were ready to start repainting the door. She’s still hot as hell, maybe almost more so now, because she doesn’t look too perfect to touch anymore. She’s messy, a few streaks of floor grime on her tight jeans, her hands greasy… like she’s the kind of girl who isn’t afraid to get dirty.
Which in turn leads me to start thinking about all kinds of other things I’d like to see her doing down on her knees like that, and I have to grimace and look up to the ceiling for a second, to get my traitor body under control, and the blood flowing in the correct direction once more—back toward my brain instead of my worse half.
It doesn’t help that in that moment, Selena notices I’m back, and she tosses her hair over one shoulder, peering back over it toward me. “Took your time in there.”
“You about to tell a man how to use the bathroom properly?” I smirk as I drop to my knees beside her. We’re almost finished taking apart the door frame so we can insert the glass itself, which will be a tricky job. We’ll need steady, careful hands for it.
Undistracted hands.
Maybe I should do this part myself.
But then again, I told her she could help me. And I promised her father—one of my best customers, mind you—that I would teach her every step of the process. Make her do the work, since she did the damage. That’s what Mark told me last night, when he took me aside after Selena agreed to the plan, just to apologize personally once more and to insist that I make sure she didn’t get off easy.
Also his words.
But now that I think of them, I realize I wouldn’t mind finding out how easy she is to get off…
God damn it, Antonio. Pull your shit together.
“Just wondering what you found so interesting that you had to stop and stand there staring at me for a few minutes, that’s all.” Selena keeps her tone light and playful. But her eyes flash when they meet mine, challenging.
Oh, I’m up for that challenge, all right. “Just making sure you remembered everything I taught you,” I reply.
“Is that all?” She lifts her chin a little, still smiling.
This woman, I swear to god. But fine, if she wants to toy with me, two can play at this game. “That, and I was reconsidering what I told you about not wearing tight jeans.” As I say it, I kneel beside her, close enough to touch—although I don’t. Not yet. I want her to ask me for it. Beg me for it first.
It takes a second for my words to land. When they do, her face flushe
s again, that delicate red blush I’m coming to really enjoy breaking out across her freckled, normally pale cheeks. “That… I…” She huffs a breath out through her nostrils, and even pissed off as she looks now, or perhaps especially so, she’s sexy as fuck. “So you were staring at my behind.”
“Hard not to, with an ass like that.” I wink, and she goes, if possible, even redder. Who even knew human adults turned this color?
“That’s hardly proper, you know.”
God, I hate when she goes all little rich girl. Or maybe I love it. Or maybe hate and love aren’t too far apart from one another in my brain. Who knows? “I never said I was proper. You want a proper guy, go find some son of one of your daddy’s business partners to fuck.”
Her body goes still then, her chest heaving. But her eyes are glued to mine. Her lips part, just a little. Just enough for me to catch the motion as she darts her tongue across them. Fuck, I wish it were my tongue instead. Tasting her. I’ll bet she tastes every bit as good as she smells, damn it.
“I came here to work, not fuck,” she says, and at least her voice has regained its usual tough steel, even if her body’s still quivering.
I lean a little closer to her, brush my arm up against hers, just so that I can feel the way she’s quivering, strung taut with desire. Want.
I know the feeling. It’s driving me insane to be this close to her, too.
“Sure. Because I wear pants that tight to all my work encounters.” I eye her backside again, pointedly. Because fuck. It really is a nice ass.
Her eyes narrow. “I liked you better when you weren’t objectifying me.”
I grin. “Why, so you could objectify me instead?” To demonstrate, I lift one hand to run it through my hair. Her gaze drops to the hem of my shirt, before she can resist. I knew it would. She’s been doing it all day, every time I move or flex a muscle. Just… staring at me. Like she wants to take a bite.
Again. Same.
“I’m not objectifying you.”
“My bad. I thought that was a fancy word for ogling.”
Work Me Up Page 3