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To his surprise, she lit up. “Your therapist and mine should get together. Except I’ll warn you—mine is a stickler for writing in special notebooks. Ordinary paper won’t do. We have to have individual journals for both the girls’ court-mandated counseling sessions and our group ones. That’s eight notebooks to keep track of, and she gets pissy if you accidentally bring the wrong one. It’s a little ridiculous. Does yours make you keep a journal, too?”
Bryce followed him to the BMW, stepping into his field of vision, one hand on her hip. She wore jeans and a brown sweater that clung to her curves, and instead of her usual black sneakers, she had on a pair of brown boots that hugged her calves and were hot as hell. She was so distracting, he’d missed a good portion of what she’d said—something about therapy and notebooks?
Disguising the fact that he hadn’t heard all of what she’d said, he pivoted to his toolbox, opening the top. “Okay, let’s talk about this rattle. What is it and when do you hear it?”
She snort-laughed in derision, and he quit rummaging through his tools to look at her. She was smiling the way women sometimes did when they were anything but happy.
“Man, you rock at dodging conversational chitchat. Me? I see lags in speech and am compelled to fill them, usually by oversharing. Sorry.” She glanced toward her nieces playing with the boxes. “Apologizing. It’s what my entire existence has become, a big-ass apology to everyone for everything. Okay, moving on. This rattling noise: it’s mostly when I accelerate, but sometimes when I turn, so I don’t think it’s a belt problem. It sounds like a pebble tumbling in the dryer. Like when I don’t empty Cecily’s pant pockets before washing them.”
Ryker felt frozen, like a computer given two combatting commands. He knew he should address the first part of what she’d said—comfort her or empathize in some way. But damn, he wasn’t like Zander, all comfortable with talking about feelings. Instead, he focused on the second part—the actionable part. He could do actionable all day long.
Snagging his black-and-green padded creeper, he lay on it and scooted himself under her BMW. His mechanical side took over, hands testing bolts and fittings, then, to probe further, he reached into his chest pocket for a tool…and found nothing.
Swallowing a curse, he rolled half out. “Forgot my wrench.” Before he’d positioned his prosthetic leg under him to stand, Bryce was poking through his toolbox.
“You want a three-eighths?”
He nodded and wiped the surprise off his face as she handed it to him.
Right. Her dad was a trucker. She drove everything,andshe knew all about tools.
He kicked the creeper under the car, then allowed himself to smile as his hands went to work on the underside of her yellow BMW.
She was so freaking hot.
After checking that everything looked normal and finding no obvious reason for the rattle, he rolled out and had her pop the hood. She gazed under there with him, and he tried not to notice that she smelled delicious, like lemons and rosemary. He forced his brain and mouth to work together.
“Answering your earlier question, I don’t use notebooks in therapy. Dr. Kirkland at the VA was a kicker for Notre Dame. He knows better than to assign a jock turned gearhead a writing assignment. I’d never come back.” He barreled on, feeling her gaze on him like a spotlight. “Working on civilian encounters—that’s my therapy homework. Being in the real world. That’s my struggle.”
She was quiet for a beat, and he looked studiously at the work his hands were doing as he checked the caps for the oil filter housing and the power steering, as well as the clamps for the air filter cover. They were tight and weren’t the source of the rattle.
“For what it’s worth, I’d give you an A-plus. Thanks for what you said to June. I forget she has all these grown-up thoughts and feelings. It was easier when the girls were tiny.” Bryce nudged him with her elbow, her expression playful. “Fair warning: your little Lisi is going to be a handful soon, so enjoy these days while you can!”
He’d opened his mouth to tell her Elise wasn’t really his handful when Cecily came running over.
“Hey.” She tugged on his coverall’s belt loop. “Can I see under the car, too? Please? I’ll be super careful, and I promise not to touch anything.”
Ryker gave Bryce a questioning look, and when she shrugged, he led the girl around to the side where he’d left the crawler. After giving instructions on what she’d see under there, he guided the crawler under with her on it. When she wheeled out, her hands were covered in the salty grime kicked up from driving on the here-now-gone-again snow on the March roads.
Bryce clucked her tongue. “So much for her not touching anything.”
“Daddy said that dirty hands were a sign you worked hard,” Cecily said, looking defiantly at her aunt. “And I’m not washing it off.”
“Dirt and grease are my best friends at work, but I do my best to get some of it off when I’m done.” He tossed her a shop towel, demonstrated how he wiped his hands, and she grudgingly copied his movements. He’d put a hand out to lift her from the creeper when his gaze caught on the front wheel of the BMW. The beginnings of a smile crept over his mouth, and he grabbed another tool from his box. Snagging his rolling stool, he wheeled himself closer to the car. “Cecily, take a look at this front wheel. Tell me what you see.”
Cecily obeyed, her thin brown hair a riot of static electricity from lying on the creeper.
“Hey, it’s missing a thingy here.” Her dirty finger pointed to the lower point of the star-shaped pattern of lug nuts surrounding the blue-and-white BMW logo.
“Fu—dddge,” Bryce breathed, revising the curse word in mid-utterance. “They didn’t tighten the lug nuts when they did the tire rotation. That’s what I’ve been hearing—I can’t believe I didn’t think to check. I don’t suppose you have an extra lying around?”
The next half hour, Ryker was in mechanic’s heaven. He got to jack up the car, get out his lug wrench, and do what he did best: fix shit. He checked the owner’s manual stuffed in Bryce’s glove box, and he happened to have an extra twelve-millimeter lug nut to replace the lost one. He put on the lug nut and allowed first Cecily, then Addison, to get the feel of tightening it, and, finally, June, who came over to shyly try her hand at securing the nuts on all the wheels using his lug wrench. A couple more were loose, and Ryker felt the back of his neck getting that prickly hot feeling that meant he was steaming mad.
“I’m not going to ask which mechanic you went to,” he prefaced his words to Bryce as he replaced his wrench in his toolbox, “because I’d be tempted to go over there and rattle their cage. Someone didn’t do their job right. You don’t let someone drive away with loose nuts.”
Bryce winked. “Ha, you know it.” She lowered her voice, checking that her nieces weren’t within listening range. “I’ve got a better one. What does a mechanic do after a one-night stand?”
Ryker shook his head.
