An Accidental Gentleman (4 page)

He killed the engine. Three full days he’d wrestled the urge to track her down. Staying away, starving the thoughts of her, would’ve been the smartest play. Shake off her fierce grip on him, the one drawing him to see her and pushing him back to cautious recon. Saturday softball had nailed the lid on his coffin. Not the rug rats running wild, but the partnerships. Most of the guys had a wife or girlfriend who watched their backs. An elite squad of two assigned to each other’s support and defense.

He hadn’t believed, not really. For years he’d preferred one-nighters and sweet freedom from drama while Rob had dated one special lady for months on end and showed up with a case of beer when the relationship inevitably went south. One woman with a blown tire, and he stood on the verge of the same painful leap. Turning bachelorhood into breakups and loneliness. The fuck had gone haywire in his head?

Heavy as a thunderclap, his car door slamming cut through the traffic noise. He stood outside, unsure when he’d opted for a closer look or why his feet dragged him over the curb and the brick pavers to the storefront. Sun-bleached stencils promised warranty repairs, in-home service for large items, and a three-day turnaround time for appliances with parts in stock. His would-be partner spent her days behind the green door with its white lettering.

“Partner. Christ.” They hadn’t fucked. They hadn’t so much as kissed. His brain answered the age-old question of how long it took to go ’round the bend: thirty minutes of conversation with a woman. But grease stains and road grime had painted the target, and whatever demanding fucker had taken charge of calling the shots for him refused to lock on anywhere else.

Hands cupped across his forehead, he peered through the window. Electrics and motors. Household appliances, radios, and hobby toys lined shelves back to a wide counter. Crock-Pots and big kitchen mixers flanked the typewriter in the window.

Not a damn thing he owned. He’d made his whole life disposable. Well, if he had nothing busted to bring her, he’d have to borrow an appropriate whosie-whatsit. Scanning the list, he unsnapped his phone and placed a call.

Rob picked up on the second ring. “You miss me in the twenty minutes since you left work?”

“My heart’s pining for you something awful.” He dropped his ass on the passenger window frame and bent back over the top of the car. Clear blue sky absorbed his sigh. “Can I borrow your mower? Or your vacuum?”

“You don’t have a lawn.” Dead silence transformed to suspicion just so. “And the last time you cleaned your carpet, the rivers ran red with blood and the sun went out.”

“I know.” The building’s maintenance guy managed the lawn, and his maid service dropped by once a month to keep a lid on his mess. Valid objections, but neither helped his case. “It’s for a friend.”

“I know all your friends.” Rob tried to cover, but fuck if he wasn’t laughing.

“Dammit, man. Can I borrow one or not?”

“Easy, airman. First time I’ve heard of impressing a woman with a lawn mower.”

“He’s doing what?” Nora chimed in from the background.

A spreadsheeted breakdown and overhaul loomed for his whole dating strategy. “Oh, for the love of—”

“Yeah, yeah. C’mon over, man. Bring a six-pack.” Muffled chatter alternated high and low, Rob’s phone likely smothered against his shirt. “And fishsticks.” The garbled speech continued. “With brown sugar barbecue sauce.”

“I see who’s queen of your castle.”

“You want our mower? Beer. Fish. Barbecue sauce.”

Call ended, Brian hustled around to the driver’s side. The Vanderhoffs lived clear across town and beyond, a good fifteen or twenty minutes. He swung by the grocery store for the essentials.

* * * *

The customer bell over the front door tinkled a warning an hour before closing Tuesday evening. Pickup, more than likely. The extra hour gave office jobbers unable to fix a loose screw with two hands and a flathead time to drop their problems in Kit’s lap and take pieces good as new home for dinner.

From her workbench in the back, she hollered a greeting. “Be right with you.”

The stand mixer cracked open on the operating table would have to wait for its fresh worm gear. As she walked to the front, she wiped food-grade machine grease from her fingers. “Can I”—holy fuck, Prince Charming had tracked her down—“help you?”

His dress shirt sported navy pinstripes today. No grease stains, but she could change that.

He rubbed the back of his neck, driving his short hair up, and flashed her a toothy grin. “I was going to bring you a lawn mower.”

Snail-slow, she tilted from the waist and scanned the shop floor behind him. She loved a good laugh, but fucking with Brian delivered a charge her body hadn’t learned to measure. “You showed up empty-handed.”

“Yeah.” He kept his distance, ten feet back from the counter, between the refurbished kitchen appliances and the working antique radios. “It wasn’t mine. Or broken.” Two steps forward, he dropped his hand and lifted his head. In his unblinking stare, his eyes glowed green as a solid grounded connection. “I wanted an excuse to see you.”

The corner of the intake ledger hung off her side of the counter. She aligned the edges. The leather cover had collected stray scuffs in the sixty-five years since Grandpa Jake had opened the shop. The softness stretched over the unyielding boards beneath, protecting the pages between. “What’s your replacement excuse?”

“No excuse.” One shoe rapping in place on the vinyl, he created sharp tick-tock beats over the air conditioner’s low hum. “Games are for boys.”

“And you’re not a boy.” Sometime between Thursday and Tuesday, he’d gained confidence. All kidding aside, he’d be a hot fuck if he didn’t insist on the dating part. Her skin prickled with the charge of an approaching storm.

“I acted like one for a long time.” Shrugging, he gained another stride. Two feet back from the counter, he spread his hands, palms up. “I’m tired of that life. Something’s changed for me.”

Her heart demanded more amperage to keep up the pace. “What changed?”

“You.” He dropped the word like a stone in an old well, all else quiet as they waited for the splash.

“You don’t even know my name.” Her own fault.

“You want me to?”

No. Maybe.

The no-strings fuck she’d turned down Saturday at the track despite being revved and ready to race she blamed on Brian. His damn soft-looking hands and the challenge in his tone, and the way in her fantasies he hadn’t been afraid to use her real name—

“Katherine.” Sonova-fucking-bitch. “Kit. Everyone calls me Kit.”

The wattage on his smile for sure blew out a fuse box somewhere. He closed the gap to the counter. “So which is it for me?”

“Kit. It’s Kit.” Much safer. He owed her two orgasms—the one interrupted in the shower and the one she’d given up Saturday. Wouldn’t telling him shock his good-guy sensibilities.

“Okay. Kit. For now.” He unsnapped a smartphone from his geeky-as-hell belt holster and held it up. “But I’m putting ‘Katherine’ in my phone.”

“Did you just take my picture?” Jesus, fucking him would be dangerous if he meant to make more out of it, but the danger added to the attraction. The thrill of being a bad girl.

That’s all this was, no different from taking a walk with the traveling grease monkeys and gearhead farm boys at the dirt track. Not about Brian at all, no sirree. Completely about coaxing him to be a bad boy, to open up his collared shirt and give in. Once she had him, he’d be out of her system.

Thumb-punching into his phone, he leaned away from the counter. His damn grin didn’t shrink a bit. “Are you going to come after me if I say yes?”

Shooting him her come-hither stare, she tossed his words back at him. “You want me to?”

* * * *

Holy fuck, those eyes. Bright as a beach bonfire, she stiffened him to attention, ready and able to serve.

“If you come after me, I’m doing something wrong.” Heart whomping, he went for deadpan delivery. She’d said Thursday not to hold back on the filthy thoughts, but—

As her chin dropped, she laughed and smacked the counter. “Fair enough. Wasn’t sure you had it in you to let some bad boy out to play, Brian. But maybe you do.”

Foot in the door. Yes. Now if he kept that fucker wedged open long enough to win a date, he’d be getting somewhere. “You let bad boys take you out?”

“No.” She twisted her lips sideways, plump and teasing. “But I let them fuck me sometimes.”

Christ, she refused to budge. “And that satisfies you?”

“Depends on the bad boy.” Her crossed arms pushed her breasts up and out in challenge. She raised an eyebrow. “How bad are you, Brian?”

With a deep breath, he dove in like greeting 55-degree waves on Lake Michigan in October, the cold shocking on exposed skin. “So bad I’m good. Can you handle that?”

“I’ll give you persistent, that’s for sure.” Anchoring her hip on the counter, she sighed. Standoffish and unimpressed as Mom’s favorite cat. “Okay, let’s pretend you’re a bad boy. Prove it to me. Tattoos? Piercings? Love for illegal street racing?”

“No to one, two, and three.” More from lack of money and parlors willing to risk tatting a minor when he’d been sixteen than by choice. “But my father called me ‘rotten punk kid’ so many times it might’ve been my legal name from fourteen to eighteen.”

Stories not worth telling, after he’d graduated from stupid stunts like sledding off the roof to swiping his older brother’s motorbike and getting wasted with the rest of the burnouts in the boarded-up former grocer’s instead of going to class.

“And then?”

“I joined the Air Force and straightened up my act.” The sense Dad hadn’t knocked into him with shouts and grounding and the occasional swat, he’d learned with Rob as his study buddy. Who the fuck knew he’d had an aptitude for computer science before Rob prodded his ass to tech school? Not him. He’d been too busy making his buddies laugh to worry about homework.

“You’ve been straight-arrow since then, I bet.” She gave him the once-over.

No question what she saw—a quiet computer geek who never stepped out of line in his office-dressy leather oxfords and his I-sit-at-a-desk collared shirt. Dress pants today, too, since he’d had a teleconference presentation for the new clients in Phoenix. Not a match for her bright blue-and-gray ringer shirt, the hem flirting with the top of her jeans and the sleeves circling above those damn sexy bicep curves. Motorcycle leathers, now, those might’ve gotten her attention.

“So what’s the stupidest thing you ever did as a punk-ass kid?”

“Surfing the lake without a wetsuit.” Hands down, no fooling, the dumbest fucking dare he’d taken. Lungs had seized up on him in the first minute, and he’d been too bullheaded to cop to weakness in front of the guys. He’d paddled out and ridden the seven-foot swell all the way in, his feet not feeling the board and his chest aching so bad he’d wanted to die. He’d hardly tasted the congratulatory beer—illegally obtained—his brother Matt had slapped in his hand after.

Head tipped back, she squinted with sweetly confused intensity. Two freckles, ripe for kissing, rested at the base of her throat. “The lake?”

“Lake Michigan. Halloween weekend. The water’s so cold you need a full-body suit—unless you’re a dumb as fuck sixteen-year-old pissed about your folks giving a big fat ‘no’ to trick-or-treating and you go out blowing off steam with your brothers and friends. You can’t puss out on a dare from your big brother. But you can come damn close to killing yourself when you stop shivering and your fingers go numb and your lips turn blue.”

Also how you get the nickname Surfer Boy from your squad mates a couple years later, but he’d save that tale for when he had a few beers in him. Kit—
Katherine
, a whisper dancing between his brain and his balls echoed—didn’t need to hear all his stories today. A handful would catch her interest, list him under “attractive potential date” in her data sets instead of stuffing him headfirst into file thirteen.

Her playful smile suggested he’d given her some secret knowledge instead of a matter-of-fact accounting of his dumbassery.

“So you’re a man who can’t resist a dare.” Stroking a leather-bound book on the counter, she clicked her tongue. “Good to know.”

Tiny nicks and burns marked her, the map of pale lines and dots a badge of honor. Skills learned and work completed. She grabbed life by the horns, his Katherine.

She tapped her fingers. “Lawn mower, you said, right?”

Freckles and scars together would take more than a full night to kiss. Wouldn’t want to miss one. “Yeah, mower, but I—”

“I’m out of intake forms up front.” With her burning stare, she set him ablaze. “Why don’t you c’mon back with me and we’ll get you squared away.” She sauntered through the open doorway behind the counter.

No need for paperwork when the mower wasn’t broken and he hadn’t brought it anyhow. He’d been clear about his motives right up front. Hers—well, he’d have to follow to find out, wouldn’t he? Her invitation, handled right, might lead him closer to winning his frustrating temptress. At least he’d glimpse how she spent her days when she wasn’t ordering him around by the side of the road. “Yes, ma’am.”

* * * *

Hot damn, Prince Charming owned a bad-boy streak. Curiosity, at least. Either way, he trotted at her heels into the back. Not the nice-guy decline she’d half-expected. Well hell, if he wanted to play, no point in bluffing when her throbbing clit demanded she up the stakes. A nudge, that’s all he needed.

He stopped in the thin rectangle illuminated by the light spilling from the shop floor. “Holy shit, it’s hoarder heaven in here.”

With the overhead lights off, most of the stockroom plunged into comforting darkness. The maze of shelves stuffed with parts donors—toasters, typewriters, remote-control and battery-powered toys of all types—could’ve extended into infinity.

“You’re racking up points with that attitude, buster.” The electric graveyard stopped at three rows deep, but he wouldn’t know. He hadn’t grown up among the shelves, fetching pieces to bring new life to needy patients. Dr. Frankenstein without the lightning. They made their own.

“I mean I like it.” He gravitated toward her workbench, breaking the circle cast by her swing-arm lamp over the latest patient. “Kind of like a server room, humming with energy, packed to the rafters. Just yours is—”