I raise an eyebrow at her. “What did you think we were going to do, just leave the window broken?”
“Well, no, but…” Those teeth worry at her lower lip again. Seriously, she has got to stop doing that. “I mean, what if we mess it up? Even worse than it already is,” she’s quick to add.
I shrug. “Then we’ll have to fix it again. Even more than we already do,” I add with a wink.
A funny little frown line appears between her eyebrows as she stares at me. It’s like she’s studying me, but she can’t quite work out what she thinks. What she should believe about the man standing in front of her.
I know the feeling. I’m not quite sure what to think about her either. After all, she did wreck my baby. And then insult me over it. I still can’t get her words out of my head, from last night. This car is your baby—you take care of it, treat it well, because you probably don’t have anyone else at home to dote on, no girlfriend or wife or anything…
Damn. Am I that fucking easy to read, that even this spoiled rich girl was able to pick me out of a lineup in ten seconds flat? I’d barely said ten words to her and she already had me pinpointed. How the fuck did she do that?
Well, points out a sullen voice in the back of my head, the one that can’t ever quite resist adding its own two cents, You did say more than ten words to her first.
A little ping of regret hits me, because I might have jumped to a few conclusions about Selena based on how we met. Then again, watching her pick up a wrench now and heft it experimentally in her hand, squinting at the head of it like she has absolutely no idea what this mystery item could be, even though it’s one of the most basic tools on the planet… Well, maybe we were both pretty quick to read each other, that’s true.
But then again, maybe neither of us was wrong.
4
Antonio
To my surprise—and to hers too, I’m pretty sure, if I’m reading the raised-eyebrows look on her face right—Selena turns out to be a hard worker. She’s not the quickest study I’ve ever taught, and she has trouble with the finer details, remembering parts and placing them together in the correct order. But she’s more than willing to redo things when I tell her they’re wrong, and to take it slow.
I even catch her whispering to herself when I’m on my way back from a bathroom break, reciting the order in which she’s supposed to place the tools on the cloth we laid out beside the car, within easy reach so we can grab them one by one as we work. I pause, then, to watch her. Just for a second. I can’t resist.
Something about seeing her the way she is right now, kneeling on the dirty, grimy floor of my garage, her formerly pristine white T-shirt covered in smudges of grease and a few flecks of paint from when I was showing her how to match up the body color for later, when we were ready to start repainting the door. She’s still hot as hell, maybe almost more so now, because she doesn’t look too perfect to touch anymore. She’s messy, a few streaks of floor grime on her tight jeans, her hands greasy… like she’s the kind of girl who isn’t afraid to get dirty.
Which in turn leads me to start thinking about all kinds of other things I’d like to see her doing down on her knees like that, and I have to grimace and look up to the ceiling for a second, to get my traitor body under control, and the blood flowing in the correct direction once more—back toward my brain instead of my worse half.
It doesn’t help that in that moment, Selena notices I’m back, and she tosses her hair over one shoulder, peering back over it toward me. “Took your time in there.”
“You about to tell a man how to use the bathroom properly?” I smirk as I drop to my knees beside her. We’re almost finished taking apart the door frame so we can insert the glass itself, which will be a tricky job. We’ll need steady, careful hands for it.
Undistracted hands.
Maybe I should do this part myself.
But then again, I told her she could help me. And I promised her father—one of my best customers, mind you—that I would teach her every step of the process. Make her do the work, since she did the damage. That’s what Mark told me last night, when he took me aside after Selena agreed to the plan, just to apologize personally once more and to insist that I make sure she didn’t get off easy.