“I’m not scared.”
“You literally just hid from her using loud music.”
Fair point.
She heads toward the office, then pauses. “For what it’s worth? I think she likes you too. Nobody gets that annoyed with someone they don’t care about.”
“She was annoyed because I wouldn’t answer her question.”
“She was annoyed because you matter enough to annoy her.” Bea grins. “Think about it.”
She disappears into the office, leaving me alone with Mrs. Henderson’s Buick and entirely too many thoughts about Tessa Lang.
The thing is, Bea’s not wrong. I am gone for her. Have been since the first time she steamrolled in here demanding I fix something “immediately” because she had a meeting in twenty minutes. She’d been wearing a blazer with a coffee stain on the sleeve, her hair falling out of its bun, and she’d looked at me like I was personally responsible for every mechanical failure in the universe.
I’d fixed whatever it was—brake lights, maybe—and she’d barely thanked me before rushing out. But her scent had lingered in the shop for hours, and I’d spent way too long thinking about that coffee stain and the way she’d tapped her pen against her clipboard while I worked.
The problem is that Tessa doesn’t do casual. She doesn’t do halfway. If I pursue this—if I admit that her intensity doesn’t scare me, it turns me on—then I’m all in. No backing out. No pretending it’s just attraction.
And that terrifies me.
Because the last time I went all in on someone, she looked at our life here and decided it wasn’t enough. That I wasn’t enough. And I’ve spent three years building walls to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
But Tessa...
Tessa makes me want to tear down every single wall and see what happens.
I turn back to Mrs. Henderson’s Buick, but my mind’s already calculating how long it’ll take to source that radiator hose. Whether I can get it here by Wednesday instead of Thursday. Whether showing up a day early with her fixed car counts as pursuing her or just being a good mechanic.
I pull out my phone and text my parts supplier. If I order the radiator hose now with rush delivery, I can have her car ready by Wednesday morning instead of Thursday. She doesn’t need to know that. I’ll just text her Wednesday night that it’s done early.
Not pursuing her. Just good customer service.
Who am I kidding?
Through the garage window, I can see my truck pulling out of the lot, Tessa behind the wheel. Even from here she looks stressed. Determined. Beautiful in that frazzled, too-much-caffeine way of hers.
And now she’s got my truck. My truck that smells like me, that she’s going to be driving around for days.
That wasn’t part of the plan. There wasn’t a plan. I just saw her standing there in the cold, needing something, and I handed over my keys without thinking.
Probably.
Maybe.
Shit.
Chapter 3
Tessa
Ben Wilson’s truck is a disaster.
I’ve been driving for exactly four minutes, and I’ve already counted three empty coffee cups, a stack of receipts shoved into the cup holder, what appears to be an entire toolbox worth of loose wrenches rolling around the back seat, and a flannel shirt balled up on the passenger side like it personally offended him.
The man runs a business. How does he function like this?
I white-knuckle the steering wheel—which pulls left, because of course it does—and try to focus on the road instead of the chaos surrounding me. His scent is everywhere. Leather and musk, soaked into the seats, the headrest, the fabric of that crumpled flannel. It wraps around me every time I breathe, which is unfortunately something I have to keep doing if I want to stay alive.
