Regan smiled into her mug. “Eat your eggs, Sienna.”
I did, because the eggs were excellent and because food gave me something to do with my hands besides reach for my keys or throw something at Mason’s head.
Outside, the desert kept brightening through the kitchen windows. Gold spread across the scrub and low rocks, softening the hard edges of the morning. My truck sat under the mesquite like a corpse awaiting official identification. Bandit had been relocated to the mudroom in his crate, where he was making intermittent threats against the household. Every few minutes, someone paused and listened to him scream, then kept eating like this was normal breakfast music.
Maybe for them, it was.
I looked around the kitchen at the women moving easily around one another, at Mason by the counter, at the coffee in my hand and gauze on my wrist, and felt that dangerous little warmth from last night try to creep back in.
Belonging was a trap if you mistook temporary kindness for a place to stay.
I knew that.
Still, when Regan nudged the plate closer and Mason looked at my truck through the window like he had already accepted the problem as his, I didn’t get up.
Not yet.
CHAPTER 6
MASON
We gother truck into the shade by nine, which was generous considering the thing deserved a shallow grave and a prayer.
The Airbnb had a detached carport off the side, more decorative than useful, built with smooth wooden beams and a clay-tile roof that looked like it belonged in a resort brochure. Still, it cut the sun enough to keep the engine from cooking while I worked. The desert was already heating up, the kind of dry heat that didn’t sweat on you at first. It just waited. Got under your clothes. Pulled water out of your skin by inches.
Sienna stood beside the truck with a mug of coffee in one hand and suspicion in every line of her body.
She had changed into jeans and a thin white T-shirt that had probably been harmless when she put it on. Then she’d helped me push her truck out of the open yard and under the carport, because of course she had. Didn’t matter that I told her to steer and let me do the rest. She’d planted both hands against the driver’s side pillar and shoved like the truck had personally insulted women in STEM.
Now her shirt stuck to her chest from the effort, clinging in places I had no business noticing before breakfast had even settled. The cotton was damp between her breasts, molded to thecurve of her ribs, and when she lifted her coffee, the fabric pulled tight across her nipples.
I looked at the engine.
Hard.
Metal was safer.
Metal didn’t smirk when it caught you looking.
“You always glare at machinery like it owes you money?” she asked.
I grabbed the hood prop and locked it in place. “This one does.”
“She has a name.”
“Of course she does.”
Sienna came closer, boots crunching over the packed dirt. “Her name is Dolores.”
I stopped moving and looked at her over the engine. “You named your dying truck Dolores?”
“She’s resilient, underappreciated, and occasionally dramatic.”
“She’s overheating, leaking coolant, and knocking like there’s a tiny man with a hammer trapped inside the block.”
“Dolores contains multitudes.”
I should’ve hated that.
