Work Me Up

She’s already reaching for the little clutch purse on her arm before I stop her with a brush of my hand. “No, nothing like that. I’m fine, Mom.” The worry lines around her eyes relax, but only a little bit.

“Well, then—”

“It’s about, er, well. I had a little accident with Mrs. Samson’s car.”

My mother’s cheeks flush, her breath catching and her eyes going wide. “Are you—”

“Just in the driveway,” I hurry to add. “I bumped one of your Meyers, really messed up someone’s car out there, it’s all a bit of a mess. I thought Dad might be able to smooth it over.”

It takes my mother a second to recover. I’m not the only one with scars. But when she does, her lips tighten in disapproval. “Hmm. Well. You can try to find your father, but I haven’t seen him in an hour, not since one of the partners asked him to come and see some newfangled golf device out front on the lawn.”

“It’s called a club, Mom. Honestly.” I roll my eyes and flash her a grin, before I turn to go. But when I peel away and back toward the front lawn, there’s still no sign of my father. At least not anywhere I can see. There’s a cluster of men near the fence smoking cigars, but Dad doesn’t smoke, so I doubt he’s among the crowd.

I glance over my shoulder again, nervous, and my stomach plummets. Shit. There’s a man standing next to the car I wrecked, running a hand through his hair. Praying it’s not the owner, and having a strong feeling it probably is, I smooth my dress down as best I can and make my way back across the driveway. Guess I’ll have to try to handle this without Dad’s help.

2

Selena

“Hey, sorry about this,” I call as I near the scene of the crime.

A man tenses and turns toward me, and for the first time, I get a good look at his face in the lights strung up all across our bright lawn. He’s taller than me by far, lean yet muscular, with a full head of dark, messy hair, along with sharp, angular features and, as my grandmother would say, “the kind of jawline that could cut glass—or hearts.”

I swallow thickly, as his dark eyes fixate on me. “Did you do this?” he asks, his tone carefully neutral. Like he’s trying to repress some kind of emotion.

I pray it’s amusement. Or maybe mere annoyance. Please don’t be some important customer of my father’s. Please don’t be integral to this damn merger my parents have been planning for eons.

“Sorry,” I say again, smartly. Then I clear my throat, trying to make my brain work through the fog he seems to induce just by staring at me with that unreadable expression. “Um, I sort of… tripped. Out of my friend’s car. I can pay for the damages of course—or, well, my father can, are you acquainted with him? I was trying to find him to help sort this out but—”

“Your father,” the man interrupts, his eyes narrowing. He glances at the broken car window, his scraped paint job, and then back over at me. “You’re Mark Brown’s daughter?”

My smile stretches wider, so wide it feels positively painful on my face. “One and the same. So, like I said, we’ll cover damages.” I expected that line to at least assuage some of the frown lines on the man’s face. I can’t help thinking how much more handsome he’d be if he’d just smile at me right now instead of scowling.

But instead, the lines only deepen. “How often have you used that line on people?” he asks.

I blink, thrown by the shift of topic. “What do you mean?”

But the man just crosses his arms, warming to the topic. “You always just offer to throw money at people in order to make up for your mistakes?”

I stiffen, frowning. “What am I supposed to do, tell you that I’ll fix your car myself?” I snap.

He snorts. “I’d like to see you try, Princess.”

“I’m hardly a Princess,” I reply haughtily, sticking my nose in the air. That, at least, finally makes him crack a smile, even though it makes me blush when I realize why he’s suddenly laughing.

“Sure. Very convincing act.”

“It’s not an act. Maybe I could fix your car, you don’t know I couldn’t. You don’t know anything about me, besides who my father is—”

“Which tells me more than enough about what I need to know.” The man leans against his car door and folds his arms over his chest, eyes wandering up and down my body, then narrowing as he scrutinizes me. “Let’s see… trust fund kid, obviously. Your parents probably pulled strings to get you into a top liberal arts college, where you majored in something ridiculous like English Lit or Gender Studies—”