Breaking Even (Sterling Shore 5)

My face floods red, but I do my best to hold my composure. “Probably,” I murmur, casually unraveling myself from him as I stand up. Crap.

“I need to get home. I have some invoices to log before I crash. Long day for me tomorrow,” he says while standing.

Then he slaps my ass and shocks the hell out of me. “I’ll see you tomorrow. The war will resume.”

“War on. But next time only get cheesecake,” I joke, knowing there won’t be a next time most likely.

“Next time I’m bringing two slices of pizza and that’s it.” He slides his shoes back on, and rubs his sexy set of abs that are hiding beneath the thin black shirt, but it’s hard to look away from the hard ridge behind his zipper. “I won’t be able to walk tomorrow, thanks to you.”

Maggie chokes on something when she overhears the tail-end of that conversation on her way to grab her laptop.

Ah, hell. That’s going to take some explaining.

Rye just laughs and leaves the full explanation on my very tired shoulders. I have to be at work at five, he’s just now leaving, and Maggie is about to interrogate the hell out of me.

As soon as the door is shut for a full five seconds, Maggie drops to a chair and stares expectantly. “Details. All of them. Don’t leave anything out.”

Chapter 6

RYE

“I want to pay you back,” Brin argues, following me around my office as Wrench works on her car. I refuse to let her go down to the work area, even though she’s begged. Numerous times.

“I’ve already said no. I told you I had the parts on hand. It’s not like very many of my customers have vehicles to match those parts. They’ll just be wasted.”

It’s a complete and total lie. The car would have been fixed by now if I had already had the parts on hand. I’m still waiting on two parts to come in, because I just ordered them yesterday. Wrench keeps finding more shit wrong every time he digs a little deeper. But she can’t know that.

“I’m paying. Now let me go see it,” she demands.

“Not happening.”

“Why?” She acts as though I haven’t already gone over this ten times with her.

I walk over to her, lean down so that I’m in her face, and meet her mean little scowl that I happen to find pretty damn cute.

“Because I’m not letting you anywhere near power tools. Insurance thing.”

She crosses her arms as I lean back up, and she tries harder to intimidate me with her glower. Not effective.

“Well, I need my briefcase out of the back. It has a file that I need to get back tomorrow.”

She’s relentless. But I’m not caving. She’d end up killing someone on accident if she got down there. Or she’d hurt herself, and I’d end up spending the rest of the day in the hospital waiting room.

“Fine. I’ll go get your briefcase. You stay put. If you try to come down there, I swear I’ll haul your ass out of here over my shoulder.”

She glares at me but finally looks away, silently admitting her defeat. I walk out and head down the steel staircase to the lower level where we keep the cars. It’s an open warehouse space, and the cars are driven in from the lower deck. There’s a higher elevation parking deck where the workers park and come in through the office area—my space.

“You coming to inspect my work again?” Wrench asks, an amused eyebrow cocked as I open the backdoor to her car.

Where’s the briefcase?

“Nah, I’m looking for a briefcase. Have you seen one?”

He wipes his hands on a towel while shaking his head. “The only thing I’ve seen are a couple of receipts. I didn’t read them, but I put them in the glove compartment so that we didn’t knock them out by mistake.”

“We?” I ask, my eyes narrowing. “Who else has worked on this car besides you?”

He laughs while leaning back under the hood.