Antonio. I glare at my nemesis, glad to finally have a name to put to the schemer. He would be an Antonio. What with those dark eyes and the sharp cheekbones and the kind of jawline that photographers would die for in a model. I’ll bet he works part-time doing shirtless modeling for Car Obsessed Men weekly or something.
Antonio grins at me, completely shameless. “Great. I can put her to work tomorrow. That is, if you’ll be available by then?” He tilts his head, finally addressing me directly.
“Look here, Antonio—” I start, but Dad cuts across me quickly.
“It’s high time you learned what real work feels like, Selena,” my father says. “I know you’ve been through a lot.” At that, I notice a flicker of interest dart across Antonio’s face, before he hides it again behind that damn smirk of his. “But it’s no excuse to stall your entire life from now on. You need something to get you off the couch, out from behind the pages of those romance novels you’re always reading and into the real world.”
My cheeks burn white hot. “They’re not romance, Dad, they’re fantasy books with romantic elements. It’s totally different.”
“Does the guy get the girl at the end?” Antonio asks, a single eyebrow raised, as if to emphasize his point.
I purse my lips. “Maybe.”
His grin widens. “Sounds like a romance to me.”
“Yeah, well,” I raise my chin, “nothing wrong with reading romances, even if they were them, which they are not.” I’m getting scrambled now. Why is it that this man has the ability to make me feel so damn flustered? I can’t remember the last time I felt this way around anyone. Normally I’m a confident, take no bullshit person.
Then again, normal is something I haven’t been in a long, long while. That unpleasant thought settles in my stomach, sours the mood. I shouldn’t agree to this. I can’t. But Dad’s still talking, glancing back and forth between Antonio and me with his arms folded.
“Getting your hands dirty will be good for you, Selena. It will remind you that there’s a whole world right here in front of you. You don’t have to hide away from it chasing fantasy ones. Okay?” He reaches over to pat my shoulder, and all at once, he doesn’t look stern or scolding anymore. He looks… worried. About me.
The churn in my gut kicks a little harder and faster. So I nod, before I can think better of it. Because the last thing I want to do is add to my parents’ already prodigious burden. I want to make my father proud of me. I want to look into his face and not see constant worry and disappointment reflected there. “All right, all right,” I say, my voice coming out gruffer than I intended, mostly to hide the emotion in it. “I’ll fix the damn car.”
“Good.” Dad smiles one more time. “Glad that’s settled. Now, if you’ll excuse us, Selena… Antonio, I was just speaking to Paul Myers about you.”
Before he turns to follow my father, Antonio flashes me one last grin over his shoulder, his dark hair falling across his eyes in a way that would make my heart skip, if it wasn’t already beating faster out of sheer annoyance.
Yeah. That’s it. Annoyance.
“See you tomorrow, Selena,” Antonio calls. And I can’t help but wondering why it sounds so good, to hear my name from his lips.
3
Antonio
This was a bad idea. I should never have agreed to this. I pace back and forth across the garage floor, my eyes never straying far from my Rolls. My Rolls Dawn Drophead, my baby. The prize possession in my fleet, the one I only ever whip out for big, expensive parties where I need to impress a lot of people.
Like last night, when I went to the Browns’ big fancy merger party, in the hopes that I might be able to drum up some business. Mark Brown has been using me to fix up his Jaguar for a few years now, and we’ve become good friends. He told me a lot of his friends—many of whom were at the party last night—would be in the market for luxury car tune-ups, from the kind of mechanic who had extensive experience working on their specific models. All of which I have. All of which I’d planned to showcase by walking a few of them past my baby throughout the course of the evening, so we could talk specs—how long I’d had her, how I got her back into solid working condition from the shape I bought her in.
All of those carefully wrought plans, however, came crashing down the moment Mark’s daughter dropped an entire damn tree through my baby’s window.
I groan again just thinking about it now. It’s painful enough to look at her, all lonely and isolated in the corner of the garage, her beautiful, authentic vintage paint job scarred to hell.