by K. A. Tucker
I certainly wouldn’t call myself pretty now.
Maybe that’s why, when there’s a knock at my door followed by the squeak of a hinge, I instinctively duck my head. For all the weeks and all the nurses who have strolled in and out of here, I’ve never felt the instinctive need to conceal my face. But now that I know what I look like, I’m suddenly desperate to hide.
“Jesse, you can’t be in here!” Dr. Alwood hisses.
“I need to head back to the city, Mom.” A masculine voice—deep like the sheriff’s, only smoother—answers.
Despite my distress, I find myself hazarding a glance, curious what the offspring of Dr. Alwood and Sheriff Welles might look like. I find a young guy standing in the doorway, his face a stony mask.
His intense gaze riveted to me. A wave of familiarity washes over me as I take in the eyes he shares with his father—set with striking eyebrows and so dark they could be mistaken for black. He holds my gaze steady, even takes a step closer. He’s curious, I’m sure. He’s probably never seen a face this bashed up before.
A police officer pokes his head into the room. “He told me it was okay.”
“Of course he did,” Dr. Alwood mutters, shooting her son a dirty look before standing.
The officer seizes Jesse’s bicep and gives it a tug.
With a scowl, Jesse jerks his arm free. “Get your fucking hands off me, Crane!” He obviously has no qualms about swearing at a police officer. I assume it’s because he’s the town sheriff’s son and can get away with it.
Dr. Alwood intervenes. “It’s okay, Officer Crane. We don’t need a scene in here.” She turns her attention to me. “This is my son, Jesse. He drove me in to work today. Car troubles. I’m sorry for his rudeness.” I feel her weighty gaze on me as I can’t help but steal another glance, quickly evaluating him from head to toe—his short ash-brown hair, his strong jaw, the way his blue-and-black checkered shirt hangs nicely off his body.
Yes, the good doctor and the sheriff certainly created a handsome child.
I duck my head again, knowing that my battered face can’t possibly earn the same appraisal from his end.
“I’ll leave this here for you, okay?” Dr. Alwood sets the mirror down on the nightstand. With a slow smile, she adds, “Don’t worry. It will all work out.”
Hiding my right side, I watch Dr. Alwood stroll toward the door. “Come on, Jesse. It’s time for you to go.” She loops her arm around his waist. He’s still staring at me as she tugs him out.
Back to their lives.
And I am left completely alone, waiting to remember mine.
SEVEN
Jesse
then
“Not bad, kid.” Miller hovers over the open hood of Rust’s ’78 red Corvette, the low rumble of its engine filling the six-bay auto shop. “Get working on the Enclave.” And then the burly man ambles toward his office, a greasy rag hanging from the back pocket of his ratty jeans.
I shoot a glare Boone’s way. Is that all I get?
Boone shrugs and smiles lazily. “What do you expect?”
I’ve got the boss’s car purring in under an hour, when it wouldn’t give more than a hack and a cough before stalling for everyone else. I know that our shop manager can be a dick, but this is fucking ridiculous.
“A bended-knee proposal, that’s what,” I mutter as I kill the engine and slide out of the driver’s seat, wiping my hands on a cloth. For all the good that’ll do. My fingernails have been stained black with motor oil since I was fourteen.
Boone wanders over to slap the frame of the car, as if he’s the one who fixed this beast. Given it’s his uncle’s, he’ll probably be driving it anyway. “You want a bended-knee proposal, come out to The Cellar with me tonight and maybe you’ll get one from Viktor.”
“No thanks,” I mutter, heading over to the Enclave, already up on the hoist. “I’m done with that place. If this Viktor guy wants to make a deal, he can come talk to me here.”
“Nurse Boone, will you please hand me that torque wrench?” Tabbs hollers from beneath the hoisted Cadillac.
Snickers fill the shop as Boone drags his boots along the concrete floor to meet the mechanic. He slaps the tool into his greasy hand none too gently.
“Hey! Didn’t they teach you how to pass tools gently in nursing school?”
Zeke, a heavyset black mechanic with a Louisiana accent, explodes with a roar of laughter.
“Just keep it up . . .” Boone pops a dirty middle finger in the air and marches over to join me under the Enclave. “I’m fucking sick of this.”
“What’s your problem? You had those brake jobs and that timing belt.” I guess his complaints to Rust at The Cellar reached Miller, because he’s been giving him some work.
“Yeah, but these guys are never going to stop busting my balls. Not until I’m running this place and I fire their asses.”
“Just smile and ignore them until then.”
“Easy for you to say.” He wanders over to a table covered with tools and begins wiping them down. Miller may look like a bum off the street, but he’s meticulous about how he keeps this place. I don’t know if that’s his rule or Rust’s, but every tool is cleaned and put in its rightful spot each night or there’s hell to pay. Unfortunately for Boone, that job normally lands in his lap.
I’ve managed to make a good impression on the other mechanics. I got a lot of smirks when I strolled in here the first day. And then I overhauled a Volkswagen W8 engine in record time and they all shut up pretty quick. Some of them have even asked for my advice when it comes to an engine problem. I’ve been here for only six months.
“You’re the one who wanted me here so bad.” I wait for him to glance back so he can see the wide grin on my face. I know Boone’s not jealous of me. Well, maybe a little. But he hasn’t been a dick to me about it.
“So . . . The Cellar tonight?”
I shake my head. Any place that requires I borrow clothes from Boone isn’t my style. Plus, I can live without another vodka-induced hangover, especially when I have to be inhaling fumes here at eight a.m. sharp tomorrow. Miller docks pay by the hour for latecomers.
“You sure, man? Priscilla’s friend, the redhead at the bar, was asking about you.”
“Sure she was.” Boone can be relentless. And a liar. “For what, exactly?” It’s fair to assume that she’s exactly like Priscilla. I picture a girl like Priscilla waking up on the double mattress lying on my bedroom floor—no frame—and I burst out laughing.
Turning back to work on the wheel alignment, I listen to the guys chirp harmlessly back and forth. I like them. They’re all a little rough around the edges, but they know cars. Just like me.
I’m finished with the Enclave about half an hour later and lowering the hoist when a loud grumble approaches outside. We had the bay doors open all summer, but now, with the cool fall temperatures, Miller makes us keep them closed.
Tabbs peers through one of the windows and drawls, “She’s baaaack. Wonder what the missus did this time.”
Any half-wit would know it’s coming from a wrecked muffler.
I glance out the small panel window but can’t make much out besides drizzle from this distance and angle. A whistle sails through the garage as Tabbs punches the button on the wall, and a door begins its noisy ascent along its tracks.
My attention immediately zeros in on the rare silver BMW Z8 parked just outside. There’s little doubt that it’s the same car. But can it possibly be . . . ? A woman steps out of the driver’s seat and pops a zebra-striped umbrella open.
No way. It’s the gold-digger from The Cellar. The one with the peanut butter–colored hair.
Her hair isn’t peanut butter–colored anymore, though. It’s back to the platinum blond that my headlights caught that night in passing. In black dress pants and a fitted leather jacket, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she still screams money, only now there’s something less trashy about her, something decidedly more sophisticated.
Maybe it
’s because she’s not attached to her middle-aged Russian sugar daddy.
Her husband. The car thief.
Who she technically cheated on, with me.
Holy shit.
“I hope that chubby’s for the car, because nothing good can come of it otherwise,” Tabbs warns in a low voice as he passes by me and steps out into the rain to meet her, his polite mechanic mask firmly affixed. When the doors are closed and we’re working, there’s nothing polite about Tabbs. He’s five-foot-four, balding, and tests new combinations of every cuss word I’ve ever heard, plus some new ones.
“Sounds like you have a problem there, little lady.”
Boone guffaws and I know exactly why. The top of Tabbs’s head comes up to her chin.
Her eyes don’t veer from Tabbs as she sighs. I hear the slight shake in it. “I must have hit something on my way home from class. Viktor said to bring it right over and someone would take a look at it.”
I do a cursory glance at the six bays—all being used. There’s a line of cars waiting to get in, too. I don’t see how this is going to happen.
“Zeke! Clear Bay Two for me, will ya!”
I guess our boss’s business partner has a lot of pull around here.
“Thank you.” At least she remembered her manners.
“Of course. It’s no problem, Mrs. Petrova.”
She glances at her watch. “Will this take long?”
“Depends on what’s wrong. Hopefully you just lost a clamp. If we need a replacement part, that’ll take time.” Tabbs gestures with one greasy hand toward the waiting room. “Come . . . Have a cup of coffee. It’s on me.”
I roll my eyes at Tabbs’s cheesy line. The customer lounge has one of those coffeemakers that does everything but sing and dance. There are over thirty types of coffee to choose from, including the organic stuff that most people in Portland would be happy pumping into their veins intravenously, and it’s all free.
A faint smile curls the girl’s lips. Her heels click along the pavement as she rounds the car, using her free hand to open the passenger-side door and pull out a messenger bag. She struggles to sling it over her shoulder, the corner of what looks like a textbook popping out.
Though I should turn my focus back to the car, I can’t pry my eyes from the zebra umbrella as it passes each bay door, heading toward the customer entrance to the lounge.
It isn’t until someone bumps into the back of my knee, buckling my legs, that I snap out of it. “I thought you weren’t into her breed,” Boone says.
“I’m not. It’s just . . .” She disappears from sight. Is that really her? It’s got to be her, but how are my mystery woman and Viktor’s trophy wife one and the same? “Shut up and open the bay. I’ve gotta test this.”
Shaking his head, he reaches up to slap the button on the wall.
“Gotta admit, it’s impressive,” Boone says to the group standing under the car, staring up at the gaping crack in the muffler.
Tabbs doesn’t look impressed. “Was the broad off-roading through the ass-splittin’ mountains? How in the hell did she manage this?”
“It’s a low car. She probably punched a speed bump,” I offer as I pass by, the Enclave’s keys swinging around my index finger. Miller likes us to report in as soon as the work is done.
“Well, we need a new part and we won’t get it in today. She may as well go home. Hey, kid!” Tabbs hollers, and I know he’s talking to me. “Let her know, seeing as you’re going that way?”
I was hoping he’d ask.
“And watch your manners.”
I shoot him a glare on my way to the sink to scrub the dirt and oil off my hands. The lounge is the only truly clean room in the entire shop and everyone, including Miller, gets pissy if there’s so much as a fingerprint left on any of its white surfaces.
I push through the service doors and into the brightly lit hall as a ball of nerves hits me. Which girl am I going to get when I walk in there? The stony gold-digger from The Cellar or the sweet kissing bandit from the side of the road? She may not even recognize me from the club. In my mechanic’s coveralls, I sure don’t look like I did that night.
Rounding the corner to enter the spacious lounge, fully equipped with leather chairs, a flat-screen television, and inspirational pictures of mountains, I see her sitting in a chair with her jacket and heels off and her bare feet pulled under her ass. She’s twirling the end of her ponytail in her fingers, her long, blood-red nails such a contrast against her pale hair.
She’s relaxed and casual, her attention focused on a textbook.
“You’re muffler’s mangled.” I didn’t inherit my mom’s bedside manner, like my sister, Amber, did. I figure this is as good an opener as any.
She must have been deeply engrossed in her studies because she jumps at my voice. The textbook slips off her lap and lands on the ground. I feel her staring at me as I stroll over and pick it up, silently praising myself for spending extra time on washing my hands. The last thing I want to do is be the dirty mechanic who left grease marks on all her stuff.
When I lift my gaze again, I sense recognition in her eyes. But does she really recognize me? I match her stony expression with one of my own. Two can play at this game. “Anatomy and Physiology?” I read out loud, handing the textbook back. “My favorite.”
Finally, a small smile touches her lips. “Maybe you can tutor me.” So she has a sense of humor. That or she’s propositioning me.
Remembering Tabbs’s warning and who her husband is, I clarify, “I know engines, not science.”
“Mechanics is a science to some degree,” she counters, setting the textbook down on her lap, closed. “You have to fix cars made by all those manufacturers, all designed differently. Not everyone can do that.”
I know that she’s paying me a compliment, but I don’t take compliments well. So, I do what I always do. I play it off. “Are you saying Boone is smart, then? Because there’s a garage full of guys out there who may argue with you on that one.”
She grins at that. A real, dimple-cheeked grin that makes her eyes sparkle as she watches me. And then a long, lingering silence hangs between us.
I clear my throat. “What are you going to school for?”
“Nursing. It’s my first year.”
“Huh. Really?” When her perfect, thin eyebrows shoot up, I explain, “My sister’s a nurse, so . . . small world.” Amber works long hours with sick and hurt people, some of whom can be real assholes, from the stories I’ve heard. Honestly, you couldn’t pay me to handle the kinds of bodily fluids she’s had to deal with. You have to be a special type of person to want to do it. A giving, kind person.
I’ve never been accused of being giving or kind. Except by the woman on the side of the road.
And this woman in front of me now? I can’t picture her rolling up her fancy sleeves to help with an enema.
“Is she here in Portland?” she asks, those pretty eyes watching me.
“Nah. Bend.”
She nods once and then begins biting the side of her mouth, her gaze drifting over my coveralls.
“That’s a really nice car out there,” I say.
“It’s too flashy.” The diamonds on her wedding band glitter in protest as she smooths her hand over her hair. “Viktor bought it for me as a wedding gift.” I don’t feel the love when she says his name.
Veering over to the coffee machine, I offer, “Want one?” I know I need one. Plus it gives me an excuse to stay a little longer.
“I’m fine, thanks.” She watches me quietly as I make mine. “I remember you.”
“Yeah?” I stifle my smile as I suck back Colombia’s finest. Do you, really? Because I remember her. I remember the way she smells, the way her lips taste, the way her mouth moved against mine. The way that single kiss held my thoughts long after my head hit my pillow that night. I assume that’s what thirteen-year-old girls act like after their first kiss.
This woman made me act like a thirteen-year-old girl.
> “Yes. You’re Jesse, right? We met last week.”
I pause. I never gave her my name at The Cellar. Which means she made an effort to know my name.
I stall as I decide on my answer. Hell, yeah, I remember you sounds a little too forward. You’re the one married to that asshole who slapped you across the face would probably be considered offensive. True, but offensive. I settle on, “I think the word ‘met’ is a stretch, but, yeah, I was there. I don’t remember us meeting, officially.”
“Luke talks about you a lot,” she says, adding, “and I remember your face. I mean . . . your eyes. They’re very dark and intense.” Her cheeks flush red, wrecking her whole calm and sophisticated persona. In a good way.
“Boone talks a lot, period.” I choose not to address the comment about my eyes. I’ve heard it before; I know they’re dark, even darker than my father’s. I’ve had girls tell me that it makes them nervous when I look at them. I kind of get it. There was a time when I was afraid of my dad, for no other reason than what it felt like to have his dark eyes settled on me.
She nods, smiling. It’s getting harder for me to look away from her. I should be walking out of here and moving on to Miller’s office before he finds me. My feet seem to have planted themselves, though.
“You’ve only come once,” she says.
So you were keeping track of that, too. I shrug. “Not really my thing.”
Her gaze slides over my navy mechanic’s coveralls, heating my blood a few degrees. “No. Not really mine, either.”
I’m hit with a mental image of the sparkly dress, the killer heels, the slathered makeup. “Sure looks like your thing.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” That smile, that glow, flickers and fades with my words, until it vanishes. She glances at the clock on the wall as she swallows. “Are you guys able to fix my car?”
I wish I had a time machine to go back ten seconds. I don’t want to lose that smile. “We need to order a part. You can either leave your car here or bring it back when we call. Depending on how far away you live, the cops may ticket you for driving with a faulty muffler.” I know my dad would. He can be an ass like that. I also know that the rich area she turned off the highway to that night is twenty-five miles from here. “Or I could give you a ride home.” Did I just say that out loud? Miller will have a fit. Fuck it. I don’t care. She needs a ride home and I want to know 100 percent if she’s the girl who kissed me. The one who wants a new life and—this is just a wild guess—to leave her husband. “My car’s not as nice as yours, though,” I warn. Understatement of the century. That ’05 Toyota Corolla has been through hell and back with me. It’s clean, but it’s definitely past its prime.