Boys And Their Toys: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings 1)

Lucas was an exception to that rule, of course, but I got her point.

“I want you to know I appreciate everything you and Dad have done for me,” I told her. “Even if I decide to do things a bit differently. I could never have done anything without you guys.”

I could tell she was touched, because she tried to push me aside with a joke. “That is the literal definition of being a parent, you know, Callie.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Lucas wasn’t so bothered now if I told him I had to work or I didn’t want him around on a particular day. I wasn’t sure if it was the girlfriend angle that had given me a bit more leverage with him, or the sex angle, or if maybe he was actually trying to give me a more reasonable amount of space in our relationship. Just another thing I should have discussed with him and hadn’t.

Anyway, once I let Amanda know I’d be into work up to an hour late that day, it was easy for me to take a sneaky route over to Rob’s car place. And it was amazing how much quicker my new car had him running out to meet me. I might end up being only minutes late to work.

Rob was already looking my car up and down as I stepped out. “That goal to stay away failed already, huh?”

“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with mine this time.” Well, there were some scratches that had turned up mysteriously while I was with my parents overnight, but it was possible the car was so expensive it intimidated most would-be vandals. It was a strange blessing, but I was used to that sort of thing now. “Actually… I was here wondering if you still had copies of the paperwork from when you fixed my, um, boyfriend’s car… Lucas Starling?”

Rob gave me a funny look. “Still the boyfriend, huh.”

“Well, he wasn’t at the time.”

“I didn’t think so,” Rob said.

I would have written it off as just patriarchal nonsense, but I was growing wise to the way people acted when they knew something about Lucas they didn’t want to have to tell me.

What would Rob know? Well… if he’d looked at Lucas’s car and then my car on the same day, it might occur to him that one of them had damage consistent with smashing into the other.

It wasn’t hard to imagine why Lucas might have waited a few weeks to get it fixed, either. He had to assume I would be trying to find the driver who’d hit me, that police might be looking around for any repairers who’d worked on a car that would fit the description I’d provided. And, weak as that description had been, I was fairly confident it would have pinged Lucas when paired with the damage to the car.

So he’d waited. Probably selected a repairer who wouldn’t be likely to blab to his parents—if I was clear on one aspect of their personality, it was that they didn’t appreciate when Lucas did those out-of-control things. They probably would have made him own up if he’d even partially explained his reasons for not getting the car fixed right away. If I’d been a little more experienced with Lucas at the time, I might have known to call bullshit on the idea that his usual repairer wouldn’t bump people out of his schedule to service someone with that much money. It had been a good enough lie at the time, though. He’d just gotten unlucky with picking the same guy I used.

Rob gave me the itemised receipt from Lucas’s visit, which didn’t tell me much. It wasn’t like he’d made notes of needing to remove paint flecks that matched the colour of my old bucket or anything. But Rob clearly had more information to give, if I asked the right questions, and that counted for a lot.

I kept going over and over the implications during lull periods at work. So he’d hid the accident. How had he been able to do that when he was travelling between school and his home every day?

He must have had a friend helping him. Steven—no, Steven, I’d learned from his own self-deprecating ribbing, was not from a wealthy family. Too risky to hide in plain sight on a street.

Ashleigh lived in the same sort of oversized house as Lucas. Her family probably had its own vast garage that could hold the odd unanticipated arrival.

Now I was thinking about it, the whole setup with Lucas had been so strange. It was Ashleigh who’d approached me first, not Lucas. That seemed implausible all by itself. With how suspicious Lucas was of Ashleigh, why would he delegate making contact to her?

He could, of course, have lied about that too. Perhaps they were working together on this, not on opposite sides at all, Ashleigh helping to mess with my head even further by tricking me into thinking she was reaching out to me in kindness. I couldn’t figure out what would be in it for Ashleigh, but it wasn’t as if she cared about me. Maybe for Lucas’s part, it was enough that he had decided he wanted me. It wasn’t hard at all for me to believe he could just spot me one day and decide he was going to have that—it was basically the explanation he’d given me from the start.

All of this was becoming ridiculously excessive for any guy to do to hook up with a girl, but Lucas Starling was not exactly going through the world on a basis of logic, was he?

Amanda clapped a hand on my shoulder once the gate was closed to customers. “Go talk to him before you come back here again. Any more morose and the customers are going to think you’ve found definitive proof there’s a Chinese backdoor in all our stock.”

I blinked at her. “Nice to have someone assume it must be a man problem.”

That was a lot snappier than seemed appropriate for my supervisor, and I was about to apologise, but Amanda actually laughed.

“I know it’s a man problem because I know you well enough to know you don’t have any other problems. You are absolutely solid when it comes to work ethic and conviction. I’ve only ever seen you falter when it comes to Lucas.”

“I hate that you’ve given me an ultimatum,” I admitted.

Amanda was already getting on with the evening cleanup. “Some free advice. You might have heard that ultimatums are a bad idea in relationships… well, for some of us that advice is useless. You need to put your foot down, at least now and then, to see what he does when there’s a clear boundary being presented. Even if you don’t plan on following through with consequences, it’s useful to know where the lines are. For you and for him.”

“Thank you,” I told her. “Do you mind if I take a moment to let him know I’d like to hang out tonight? Just before it gets too late for it to be polite to ask.”

She gave me a look like she understood that for Lucas, time was a barrier that didn’t exist unless he wanted it to exist for me. “Go ahead.”