“You trust Peck over me?”
“Damn right I do,” he replies.
“So I should just assume I’m not to take any payments or deal with invoices?”
His attempt at biting back his chuckle fails. “No. I can’t afford to get behind anymore.”
If I couldn’t tell he was playing, I would be pissed. But the way his lip curls on the side dissolves it before it gets started.
“My business skills are on fire,” I tell him. “You’re making a mistake, Walker.”
“I’m confident in my decision-making abilities, Slugger.”
“Your loss,” I shrug, heading towards the back cabinet. I lay my purse on a box and close it. When I turn around, he’s still there. “You gonna work today or watch me?”
Shaking his head, he heads towards the door to the garage. “Behave.”
“ARE YA EVEN LISTENING to me?” Peck bumps my shoulder as he walks by. “I get it. She’s hot as hell. But we still have to get shit done.”
“Shut it.”
“Just speaking the truth,” he cracks. “You’ve managed to make it two hours without going back in there. I’m impressed.”
Tossing a wrench into the toolbox with more force than necessary, I glare at my cousin. “This was all your idea.”
“And a damn good one at that.”
I pluck a screwdriver out of the container and head back to the SUV we’ve been messing with all morning. My stomach growls as I remove the screws holding in the faulty part that’s taken two hours to get to. It falls into my hand with a heavy thud.
“Finally,” Peck says, taking it from me. “Now can I go to lunch?”
“Yeah, may as well. When you get back, maybe the new piece will be here.”
“Hell, at this rate, I’m tempted to go to the parts store in Merom and just buy the fucker. We’ve waited all day.”
“And we’ll pay double.”
He grabs his keys and phone from the rack by the door and makes his way out. I watch through the window. He stops and talks to Sienna, telling her something that makes her laugh. I move closer to the glass without thinking, wishing I could hear the sound.
It’s taken everything I have all day not to go back in there. It’s taken more than I knew I had not to look up every three seconds and look for her.
She moves with grace—her chin always lifted, her back always straight. It reminds me of the ballerinas who used to perform with Blaire when she was a little girl. Always poised, always performing. The only difference is, with Sienna, it doesn’t feel like a performance.
That’s the fucking problem right there. That’s the reason I can’t shake this girl from my system despite every attempt at doing just that.
There’s a confidence exuding from her that’s overwhelming. How can someone be that sure of themselves? How can she just blaze into my world, my business, and make decisions like she’ll just fix it if it’s wrong? Who does that?
I laid awake last night with her on my mind. I’ve worked all day today and had a stream of Sienna rolling in the back of my brain the whole morning as I tried to fix this fuel pump. She’s intoxicating, a drug foreign to me that I’ve somehow ingested and can’t purge from my body.
But I need to. Desperately.
“Hey.” Her voice sweeps through the garage, capturing my attention. “There’s a pump of some sort here. Peck said to tell you if it came in.”
“Thanks.”
She waits as I head her direction, holding the door open for me. I want to tell her to stop it, to stop making it so hard to dislike her, but I don’t. Instead, I listen to the door shut behind me and spy the box on the desk.
“What’s this for?” she asks.
“A fuel pump we’ve needed since nine,” I say, leaning against the wall. “We order everything from Standski’s, but their delivery has been shit lately. I don’t want to order from one of the online places, but they’re gonna force me to.”
“You should’ve told me. I could’ve called and spurred them on.”
“You think it would’ve helped?” I scoff.
“I can be really persuasive.”
That, I have little trouble believing. Instead of agreeing with her, I glance around the lobby. “Damn. You’ve done a lot today.”
You can see the cars in the parking lot, the trees lining the other side of the road through the now-clear windows. The floors don’t shine, but they definitely don’t have heaps of dried up mud on them either. And the desk is semi-organized with a handful of stacks of papers in a neat line on top.
“You like it?” She shoots me the brightest smile, one that hits something inside me it shouldn’t. “I didn’t know where to start, so I just started at the messiest place and moved on. I thought I’d take those rags to the cleaners when I leave.”