Chapter Fourteen
“Changed man, my ass. He was nothing but trouble when he was a kid, and since when does a leopard change its spots?”
“SONOVABITCH.”
Flynn snatched his hand out of the engine block and shook it as though that would dislodge the sting of grated knuckles. All it did was spray drops of blood over him and the fresh white paint on the side of Mrs. Allen’s Ford Focus.
He swore an unimaginative stream offucksunder his breath and grabbed for the oily cloth to wrap around his hand. Raw knuckles were run-of-the-mill for mechanics, but he’d already stripped the skin off both sets of fingers. His mind wasn’t on the job.
Not because of the dull ache in his thigh, though. Notjustbecause of the dull ache in his thigh. It was just a hobbling reminder that he was too damn old to have this bad a dose of blue balls.
After an early morning start in the garage, Flynn knew he stank of burned oil, sweat, and the eye-watering wintergreen sharpness of liniment. So why couldn’t he get the lingering smell of smoke and sex out of the back of his throat?
It wasn’t like he hadn’t brushed his teeth after he sucked Nate’s cock.
Okay. That didn’t help. Flynn’s tongue curled around the texture-memory of hard flesh and velvet skin, and the taste of salt and copper bloomed in the back of his brain. He screwed his eyes shut for a second and thought about wrenches, brake lines, and the sting of his knuckles. If it worked, he would know he was really getting too old.
Since it didn’t, Flynn reached down and tugged the crotch of his jeans away from his aching balls. His knuckles had stopped bleeding, more or less, so he shoved the bloody cloth back in his pocket and got back to work. He needed to find out what Mr. Allen had “fixed” on his wife’s car before he came to pick it up.
Just when he finally thought he was on the right track, Kenny yelled across the garage, “Hey, Flynn, something’s going on outside.”
Flynn didn’t bother to pull his head out from under the bonnet. “Unless they’re pushing a car, leave it outside.”
He wiped his face on his shoulder and slotted a notched metal ruler into the engine. Yeah. The pulleys weren’t square. The belt didn’t look new, but Mr. Allen and eBay auto parts were old friends. He pulled the ruler out and absently shoved it into his back pocket.
Flynn reached around and scratched the nape of his neck. He twisted his mouth to the side as he considered the engine. The bolts on the tensioner needed to come off so he could realign the pulleys, but it looked like they were badly stripped.
Somewhere on the edge of his attention he could hear the rattle of the door and muffled conversation outside. That meant Kenny hadn’t listened to him, but he mentally cut the kid ten minutes slack. It was what he’d get for a tea or cigarette break. They were about eight minutes in when Kenny yelled again.
“Oy, Flynn. You got Nate Moffat’s number?”
Flynn felt his hackles go up. As much as he groused about the island rumor mill, he didn’t really care about the gossip doing the rounds about him. That was because it was all lies. The thought of them chewing over his actual life made him bristle.
Even if his relationship with Nate wasn’t real and wasn’t his.
“Not sure how that’s your business, Kenny,” he rasped out as he straightened up. The minute he caught sight of Kenny’s face, Flynn realized he’d gotten it wrong. Kenny’s face was screwed up in worry, and he had blood on his hands. The tracks in Flynn’s brain switched from island asshole to rescue. “What happened? You okay?”
“Me?” Kenny glanced down and seemed to catch sight of his bloody fingers for the first time. He scrubbed it off against his overalls. The addition of blood to grease and oil didn’t make much difference to the dense black fabric. “Oh, no. It’s not mine. Ms. Moffatt, she’s had a tumble. I think she’s hurt real bad. There’s blood all over, but she won’t let us call an ambulance or anything.”
“She can’t remember Nate’s number?” Flynn asked as he cut across the garage to grab the first-aid box from the wall.
“She told me not to worry him,” Kenny said. He fidgeted with the ring in his eyebrow. “But I think maybe we should. This last year Ms. Moffatt’s been real poorly.”
That was Islander understatement. Half the church ladies on Ceremony had been planning Allison Moffatt’s funeral the year before, from the music to the flowers. They liked a good funeral, since most of the weddings on the island were held up at the Granshire. But Flynn had heard she’d gotten better—maybe from spite, if she was anything like Nate.
Flynn tossed Kenny the phone with a brisk order to call him and ducked out the door onto the narrow street. His garage squatted at the dead end of the road. The sea wall beside it was an industrial holdover from when Ceremony’s fishing industry supported more than tourism and chip shops. Halfway down the street, a small crowd had formed on the pavement, hunched nervously under the cloud of screeching gulls that filled the air.
“Call your doctor!” Dani Hale, who owned the glossy little boutique tucked into what had been the fishmonger, said. “You could have hurt yourself. I saw you go down. That was a nasty fall.”
“I’m fine!” an irritated voice that Flynn assumed belonged to Nate’s mum said. “I just need a minute, and I’ll be grand.”
“We could call you a taxi, Ms. Moffatt,” the little girl who worked in the chippy said. “Get you home.”
She was a year younger than Kenny and he was going to end up with a bad heart if he kept buying chips so he could talk to her. But they both saidMs. Moffattthe same way. Ms. Moffat had probably been their teacher.
Flynn tapped a man’s shoulder and edged through.
“For goodness sake, Lisa, I’m fine,” Allison snapped. “I’m quite capable. I didn’t lose any gray matter to the cancer.”
