Page 19 of Sharp Lies

It was being called back to Oakville because my mom had been in an accident. It was not knowing how that accident had happened but suspecting that it was more complicated than what I’d been told. It was the fear that the McCarthy men had been behind it and the bigger fear that they were going to come after me for coming back to town when they’d paid me to stay away.

It was my mom being in a rehab center rather than at home.

It was living in a house again after such a long period of freedom.

It was this town where I didn’t feel at home anymore and all the people I didn’t know. The freaking hot but cranky neighbor who glowered at me every time I was outside.

I felt like I’d been handed a whole wall to paint and only given half as much paint as I needed. I was running out of resources and feeling like everything was crumbling around me. And that was such a stupid thing to think, and so selfish, that the fact I was feeling this way was also annoying me.

I wanted to start throwing things and screaming. And that didn’t seem at all helpful.

I jumped when I felt something shoved right into my stomach and looked down, surprised.

A hand was holding a wrench right in front of me.

Confused, I looked at the arm attached to the hand, and then the body attached to the arm, and found that it belonged to Warren, of all people.

“Did you come over to shout at me for making too much noise or something?” I asked, too frustrated to mind my manners.

To my extreme surprise, I saw his mouth quirk with what could have been the start of a smile.

“Came to offer you my wrench, actually,” he said, his voice low and gravelly and entirely too sexy for someone who had just yesterday been telling me to get my dog off his lawn.

What in the hell...

I reached down and took it from him. “Thank you. I was just...” I gestured vaguely to the van and all the pieces I’d taken out of the engine already, and then to the broken wrench on the ground.

He turned and looked at the van, then the pieces on the ground. And the broken wrench. “Alternator belt?” he asked.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

Another of those smirks. “I’ve replaced a few of those myself. Want a hand?”

I almost sagged in relief, not only at the thought of help, but also at the friendly tone of his voice. “Yeah,” I breathed. “That would be great.”

And without another word, he went to work. And damn the man, he made it look easy. He started working without even having to look at any article online, unscrewing here and pulling there, handing me things as he took them out and then leaving me to keep track of them. And before long, we’d fallen into a rhythm, him working and me putting a finger where he pointed or holding the things he needed me to hold. We didn’t talk. We didn’t even look at each other. But it felt...

It felt like we’d been doing this for years. Like we’d learned how to work together at some point and had done a million and one projects together. Pretty soon, our shoulders were rubbing against each other as we bent over the engine and I was holding my hair back to keep it out of the way while I watched what he was doing.

Pretty soon our hands were brushing against each other when we both reached for the same thing.

And my stomach was jumping every time it happened. I felt like I was full of butterflies and laughing gas, a giggle caught in my throat. I didn’t miss the way he paused for a split second whenever we touched, and I didn’t think I was imagining the way his breath caught in his throat.

But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t turn to me and look longingly into my eyes, his older, wiser gaze telling me everything he wouldn’t say.

Though I wanted him to. I wanted him to turn to me and smile and make a joke. Flirt with me a little. Let his gaze linger on my lips.

I didn’t know where it had come from or how it had happened, but I was way, way too aware of how hot his body was next to mine and how much taller he was than me. He was way too old for me and probably much too experienced to ever want someone as young as me.

But the thought of what he might know how to do had my blood running hotter than the sun could account for.

Once he’d replaced the belt and we’d put everything back together, I was sure he’d say something about what a good job we’d done or how impressed he was that I knew how to work on an engine. He didn’t. Instead, he turned to me and gave me a single nod, then took his wrench and walked back to his house.

Like we hadn’t just spent an entire afternoon leaning up against each other and covered in grease, bonding over the engine of an old VW bus.

Like I hadn’t just discovered that there was a whole lot more to him than just the cranky next-door neighbor with the amazing body and the eyes that said he’d seen far, far too much for one man to handle.

CHAPTER 10