Well, if Trey liked his women prissy, he’d chosen the right girl. Sadie’s half sister, Celeste, was a daddy’s girl—Celeste’s daddy, anyway. Wendell DeWalt was Sadie’s stepfather. Celeste and Sadie may have shared a mother, but they were as different as diamonds and cubic zirconium. And Celeste knew her jewels.
Trey’s infatuation with her higher-class, polite sister may have been why Sadie sharpened her edge to a razor-thin point in the first place. Becoming more like her sister would only prove Trey right, that Sadie needed some softening.
After he left her, she started serial dating—er, serial first dating, anyway. Each and every first date proved the man sitting across from her as flawed as Trey, and likely to let her down as hard. Until Aiden. He’d changed everything. At first, she thought for the better.
Boy was she wrong.
She marked another few pieces of inventory for clearance and put them back on the shelf. In search of more bargain-basement products, she headed for the warehouse, stopping short when she spotted Aiden. And a woman.
Sadie froze, her eyes skating down the other woman’s thin but muscular frame, and back up to the short dark hair barely brushing the tattoo on the back of her neck. She was in good shape, probably a runner like Aiden. Sadie pretended to straighten the shelf next to her as she watched them.
The woman held up a black and pink T-shirt and posed for him. Aiden nodded his approval. Was he attracted to her? Was this the type of woman he wanted? And why did seeing them talk to each other make Sadie’s skin crawl?
They chatted all the way to the cash register, where Aiden rang up her purchase and handed over the receipt. The woman didn’t leave immediately, lingering at the counter, flirting. Sadie knew flirting when she saw it, and the way the woman tilted her head and rolled her shoulders back to push her chest out was definitely flirting. She had a small chest. At least Sadie had her in the boob department.
When the woman got to the door, Sadie felt her shoulders relax some. Good. Keep walking, honey. Until she returned to the counter and Aiden held out a pen. She took it, jotting something down on the back of her receipt and handing it to him.
Sadie’s jaw went tight. And a little tighter when Aiden smiled, exposing the dimple low on one cheek. Dammit, that was Sadie’s dimple.
Before she could rationalize her way out of it, Sadie was marching full steam ahead toward the counter—to do what, she had no idea. Scold Aiden for talking to a woman?
The woman left, and as the door swung shut, Aiden called after her, “Thanks, Sonya.”
The sound of his voice stopped Sadie short. When the red spots cleared from her vision, she noticed Aiden watching her expectantly. Her eyes darted to the sheet of paper on the counter—yep, there was a phone number on there—to the pen in his hand. She snatched it from him and forced a tight smile. “Can I borrow this?”
Without waiting for an answer, Sadie pointed her frustrated, jealous, and clearly insane self in the direction of the warehouse and didn’t look back.
* * *
Aiden narrowed his eyes at Sadie’s retreating back before allowing a ghost of a smile to sneak onto his face. If he wasn’t mistaken, Sadie did not like that Mrs. Sonya Rollins had slipped Aiden her husband’s phone number a moment ago. How else was he supposed to alert the couple when their special-ordered leather saddlebags came in?
Sadie had practically been foaming at the mouth as she crossed the room. Aiden half expected her to snatch the receipt and tear it into a million pieces. This was the woman who’d fed her wedding invitations through a shredder, after all. If she could obliterate expensive card stock without a second thought, the thin sheet of thermal paper in his hand didn’t stand a chance.
And what did she need his pen for, anyway? His eyes went to the full cup of ink pens on the corner of the counter. She hadn’t grabbed one of those.
Yeah. Something was up.
For the last few days, Aiden had watched her work. She came in when the store opened, or just before, and stayed for two or three hours to arrange, and help sell, the parts she’d dug out of the warehouse. Aiden helped, referring customers to the clearance display and explaining they were making room for new inventory.
In the case of parts the clearance rack didn’t hold, Sadie had equipped Aiden with a Midwest brand price sheet with their most popular items on it. Yesterday when she’d overheard Aiden say a certain Midwest part would need to be shipped, Sadie had run out to her car and dug the part out of her trunk.
She was driven, no doubt about it.
Aiden smiled at empty doorway leading to the warehouse where she’d disappeared in a blur of blonde, pen-wielding beauty. Sadie was about to become number one in sales thanks to the Axle’s contract. In pursuit of the goal, she wasn’t about to let any detail fall by the way.