Honey gathered her bag but paused before opening the door. “Thank you for the ride. And the hospitality.”
“You’re welcome,” Ethan said, barely louder than the hum of the engine. “Don’t forget to try the cookies.”
She closed the door gently behind her and walked up the path to the inn.
He sat for a second longer, hand still on the wheel. When he glanced in the rearview mirror, he caught sight of himself.
He was smiling.
And that, more than anything else, scared the hell out of him.
Chapter 10
Ethan
Cold reality sank back in as he pulled up to Lucky’s Auto Shop. The scent of hot metal and motor oil drifted in through the open window.
Jonah “Lucky” Bell was in the open bay of his shop, hunched under a lifted hood with one boot braced on the bumper. The radio perched on a nearby workbench, playing something smooth and jazzy just like it had been doing for the last twenty years.
Folks started calling him Lucky back in high school, after he crawled out of a wreck that should’ve sent him straight to the pearly gates. He rolled up to the ER with his leg held together with nothing but duct tape and his car dragging half its bumper, grinning like he’d just won prom king. Then, on his thirtieth birthday, he won the state lottery with more zeroes than witches in Brim’s Hollow.
After that, the name stuck for good.
Lucky never let the money go to his head or change who he was. His ball cap was fraying at the brim. Grease stained his coveralls, and fingerprints from half the town's engines smudged them. There was always a thermos of lukewarmcoffee somewhere nearby and a box fan blowing dust in from the open bay doors.
Ethan turned off the engine and sat out front for a long moment.
Lucky had a heart as big as his tool chest. He was the kind of man who’d give you his spare tire, his shop rag, and half his sandwich without asking why you needed any of it.
Which is why Ethan was going to lie to him.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Lucky said, when Ethan finally made his way out of the car and into the shop. “Didn’t think you’d ever take me up on my offer to help you get her fixed up.”
Ethan offered a tight smile. “Not today, man. I need an appraisal.”
“You’re selling?”
“Yeah,” Ethan said, trying hard to sound casual. “A friend of a friend out of town wants to buy, and I just want to make sure I give a fair price.”
There was a beat of silence as the jazz crackled softly in the background.
“Hell,” Lucky said, quieter now. “Never imagined you’d get rid of this old beauty.”
“Me neither.”
Ethan glanced over his shoulder at the car. The cherry-red paint had faded to something closer to rose, but she still turned heads. Growing up visiting his grandma’s, he dreamed about the day he’d own it.
“She’s never really been a family car,” he said finally.
“I don’t know about all that. Marg and Lois managed fine.”
Ethan huffed a breath, lips twitching at the corners. As a teenager, Grandma Marg loaned it to him to impress a girl. He drove fifteen miles an hour under the speedlimit the whole time, scared to death of scratching the paint. She’d kissed him anyway, and he’d married her not long after.
But the numbers weren’t lying, and collections didn’t care about sentiment.
“If you need the money, you know I’d help you out,” Lucky said.
Ethan’s jaw tightened. “That’s not what this is.”
