“And let me…” He turned the wrench once, twice, and three times. Then, when the engine matched all of the pictures he’d read about in his books, he stood up to his full height to share a triumphantyawpwith her. “There.” But when he did, he only saw the black marks on the flowing white shirt she’d donned for the day. “Oh, Christ.”
“What?”
“Your clothes. They’re all ruined.”
When had they gotten so close? Their lips only a breath apart? When had he gotten so lost in her eyes he couldn’t offer to help her out of those dirty, dirty things and into something clean? Her breasts pressed against his chest, beckoning him closer with her every breath. He wanted that closeness, wanted to scoop her into his arms and see just how dirty they could get. Her lips turned up in a small, reassuring smile, and he found he couldn’t stop staring at them, wanting to know how they tasted.
“That’s all right. They’re just clothes.”
…
Please kiss me. I feel like I’m suffocating and the only thing that will make me breathe again is your lips against mine.But Sam’s prayer went unanswered when the shrill ring of Daniel’s cell phone cut through the air. Their tense moment passed, leaving him with an apologetic wince.
“I’m sorry. One second.” The air thus ruined, he fished into the back pocket of his half-worn coveralls—the ones that featured in many of her dirtier dreams about him—and answered. “Angie? What’s wrong?”
From there, Sam only caught snippets of the conversation, both from Daniel’s end of the line and from Angie’s. Daniel’s sentences kept getting cut off by what sounded like loud blubbering, leaving the entire conversation mostly unintelligible until he glanced up at her and muttered into the receiver, “Look. I’m at work. Can I call you back? Yeah… Okay. Bye.”
Jaw set determinedly, Daniel tossed the phone into a pile of car-buffing rags nearby and returned to his work on the old-school engine in silence. Bothersome silence.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, hovering over his shoulder, worried at the cold lines of his forehead.
“I’ve told her a million times she can’t call me while I’m here.” He chuckled, though the laugh didn’t meet his eyes. “This isn’t like working at Crowdwell’s. I have real bosses when I come to Ashbrooke.”
Surely, he hadn’t meant the sentence as a punch to the gut, but that was how it landed—straight between the halves of her rib cage and twice as strong as any physical assault. Everything between them was false, but the selfish parts of her still wanted him to like her. She bristled at the implication in his words.
“You’re worried I’ll snitch.”
“What? No—”
“What did she say?”
A heavy sigh. “Her trumpet has been missing for a few weeks. She’d been going to the police every day to check in, but no one’s doing anything to help her. Today, they called to tell her the case was closed.”
The worry in his eyes was real and gripping. Dropping her textbook in favor of a black sweater that would cover her grease-stained shirt, Sam bolted for the staircase out of the garage and only stopped when his strong voice called after her. “Where are you going?”
“Out. Do you want to come with me?”
“I’m working.”
Confusion replaced worry as he watched her slip into her sweater.
“You work with our cars, right?” She shrugged and tossed him the keys from her pocket. “Drive me there and that’s a full afternoon.”
“Okay, but where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
After all, she was sacrificing everything to be the daughter of a duke. What was the point of that if she didn’t use it every once in a while? And more than that…she liked Daniel and she liked Angie. If she was going to break his heart, Sam wanted to put as much good into his world as she possibly could.
The police station was everything she expected a British police station to be. Cold, efficient, full of tea, and all too willing to bow to the whims of an MP’s daughter. Within ten minutes of being inside of the building, she’d been awarded an audience with the head of the region, offered no less than three servings of Earl Grey, and given a comfortable rolling chair that previously belonged to one of the detectives. Not to mention that Daniel, even in his grease-stained coveralls, had been mistaken for her bodyguard.
“Now, Miss Dubarry,” the chief superintendent, a tall, spindly man with what looked like a poorly corrected broken nose dotting the center of his otherwise stately face, said, settling into the chair across the desk from her. “What can I do for you today?”
Being Lady Mary Crawley or any of the other British aristocracy she’d wanted to be hadn’t worked on Daniel. But she got the sense it would work on this man. Hugging her sweater tighter around her chest to cover the grease-stains she’d gotten helping Daniel with that car engine, she sat up straighter than she’d ever imagined possible and somehow managed to stare down at the man who stood an entire foot taller than her.
“What can you do for me?” she asked, adopting the brittle tone her father did when he’d been placed at a less-than-respectable table at a restaurant. “I think the better question is whathaven’tyou been doing?”
“Pardon?”
