Page 17 of Diesel’s Desire

Penny’s watching me walk up. Doesn’t look away, doesn’t do that cop thing where she pretends she wasn’t already tracking me the second I stepped off the curb. Color’s rising along her cheekbones, high and pink. It’s not the blush a woman gets from sunshine or iced tea.

I know that blush. I put that blush there plenty of times, back when we were kids who didn’t know any better. Back when I had no idea how many years I’d spend without her.

She’s not seventeen anymore. She’s a grown woman with a badge and a gun and thirty-five years behind her, and she’s blushing at me across a lunch table like she can’t help it any more than I can help watching her do it.

“Hey.” Sasha’s grinning like she already knows something I haven’t figured out yet. “Didn’t expect you.”

“Figured I’d save the prospects the trip.” I keep my eyes on Penny while I say it. “Penny.”

“Diesel.” She says my road name carefully, intentionally.

I let the silence sit there a second too long, long enough that Sasha’s grin widens into something closer to a smirk, and I finally drag my attention back to her before I do something stupid in the middle of Main Street with witnesses.

“Give me a minute,” I tell Sasha. “Wanna ask Penny something.”

Sasha’s eyebrows go up, delighted, entirely too pleased with herself, a woman who just got handed information she absolutely intends to use later. “Sure.” She’s already gathering her purse, sliding her chair back. “I’ll wait in the truck.”

“Truck’s unlocked.”

“Obviously.” She stands, brushes past me with a look I choose to ignore, and calls back over her shoulder, “Bye, Penny. Lunch again soon, okay?”

“Okay,” Penny says, still watching me.

Sasha’s footsteps fade toward the curb. The waitress clears a plate two tables over. Somewhere down the block, somebody’s dog barks twice and goes quiet, and none of it matters, because it’s just me and Penny now, a café table between us instead of a gravel parking lot, except this time I’m not holding out a ring I already know she’ll say no to.

“You didn’t have to come pick her up yourself,” Penny says. “You’ve got prospects for that.”

“I know.”

“So why’d you come?”

I pull out the chair Sasha left empty and sit down across from her without asking, because if I stand here much longer I’m going to do something with my hands I haven’t earned the right to do yet.

“You know why,” I say.

Her jaw tightens. That cop stillness she wears so easily now settles over her. “Evan.”

“Diesel,” I correct automatically, even though I miss hearing her say my real name something fierce.

“Fine. Diesel.” She says it sharper this time, frustration cracking through the careful control. “Why’d you come?”

I lean forward, elbows on the table, close enough now that I can smell her perfume again.

“Have dinner with me,” I say.

She blinks. Doesn’t answer right away, and I watch a dozen different arguments cross her face—her job, the years apart, whatever version of me she’s built in her head out of small-town rumor, the guns she probably suspects we still run through the state and beyond.

“That’s not a question,” she says finally.

“Have dinner with me.” I say it slower this time, quieter. “That better?”

“Evan—”

“You called me that at the wedding too.” My hand finds the front of my shirt without meaning to, two fingers pressed flat over the empty spot where a ring used to sit, and I make myself drop it before she notices what I’m doing. “You keep using a name I haven’t answered to in longer than you’ve been gone.”

“Maybe I’m not asking for Diesel.”

That lands somewhere low in my chest, and for a second neither of us says anything, just sit there in the noon heat with a green awning throwing shade across half the table and the other half catching sun straight on her face, catching the gray in her blue eyes.