Page 6 of Pick Me This Time

3

STERLING

Ididn’t like surprises, and seeing Daphne waiting at the airport to pick me up had been a monster of one. Ticked off at Eric for not even giving me a heads-up, I strode into his garage on the warpath, but he either didn’t notice or he just didn’t care.

When he walked out of the storage room in the back and saw me, a wide grin broke out across his face and he waved before he pulled a dirty rag out of his pocket and wiped his hands. He strode over and slapped me on the back, and I almost cringed at the thought of what that oil on his palms had to be doing to my shirt.

“Sterling! Bro, how are you? It’s good to see you. It’s been too long.”

Whatever. It’s just a shirt. I’m not in the financial district anymore and he’ll never stop giving me shit about complaining over a dirty shirt.

“Yeah, man. It’s good to see you too.” I clasped his offered hand for a shake and tugged him to me for a quick hug. “Thanks for helping me out with wheels for the trip.”

“Anytime,” he replied easily.

Instead of laying into him about sending his little sister to pick me up, I decided to let it go. He hadn’t said anything about it, and I wasn’t going to bring it up and make it into a bigger deal than it needed to be.

Because if I did, I would have to explain why it had annoyed me so much to see her—and I wasn’t about to tell him that it’d caught me completely off guard to see how much she had grown up.

She was hot now.

Drop dead gorgeous actually. She’d always been pretty, but now, she was so jaw-dropping that I’d barely been able to look at her in the car for fear of accidentally—or on purpose—flirting with her.

She was still Eric’s little sister and she was still completely off limits.

Just like she always had been.

And so, I’d been annoyed because I couldn’t touch her. I couldn’t put the moves on her. I couldn’t even look at her the way I’d wanted to and I’d had zero time to prepare myself for it.

It’d been a fucking decade since anyone had been off limits to me.

Give a guy a chance to get his damn bearings before you ambush him with something like that.

I drew in a deep breath, stepping out of Eric’s half embrace. Then I got my first look at his business and let out a low whistle, distracting myself from Daphne by focusing on the life he’d built for himself instead.

There were half a dozen cars in here at least, all in various states of repair, but it was clear that the guy was busy. Through the wide open garage-door sized opening in the back wall, I could see a dozen more cars out back.

For a town the size of Allisburg, this business was clearly booming.

“Good-looking place you’re got here,” I said, eyeing the relatively neat shelves against the wall and a decently sized office in the corner. “When you told me you were a mechanic now, I pictured you as the backyard variety. I thought you were mostly still coaching the team.”

He shrugged. “I am coaching the team, but it’s a high school football team, bro. They don’t exactly pay as much as the big leagues. I had to pay the bills somehow. Plus, I’ve always liked fixing shit and old Gus was ready to retire, so I bought the place from him and figured that this way, I’d have the best of both worlds. Football and cars.”

I chuckled, but my mind was lingering on his sister. I wondered what she was still doing in Allisburg, but I didn’t ask. I wasn’t going to get involved. I was only here for a few weeks and that was Eric’s baby sister.

If I expressed any sort of interest in her or her life, he was likely to punch me. It’d been a while since I’d been in a fight and it wasn’t a streak I cared to break. Especially with a friend.

“You’ve made a lot of improvements since it belonged to Gus,” I said, realizing that the garage was at least double the size I remembered. “Did you do the expansion or did he?”

“I did,” Eric said proudly. “Coffee?”

“Please. I’m dragging ass.”

He laughed, waving me toward his office. “I don’t have the good shit I’m sure you’re used to, but I bought a nifty little machine last year that makes it better than the old percolator I used to have.”

“Anything with caffeine in it would work for me right about now,” I said. “Seriously though, man. This place is nice. I’m impressed.”

“Says the Wall Street investment banker,” he joked, clapping me on the shoulder before we walked into his office. “How are you? You look like hell, man.”