Chapter 2
“That’s the last of it, MissCromwell.”
The sweaty man in charge of the moving crew closes the truck, gesturing for his co-workers to climb into the cab, and Eleanor relaxes incrementally. The morning has been loud and a little overwhelming with the loading and unloading of boxes and the long drive from the city. She’s looking forward to a bit of solitude.
“Thank you,” Eleanor says, politely ignoring the dampness of the hand he extends. The handshake is brief, at least, and Eleanor resists the urge to wipe her palm afterward. “I appreciate all of your hard work.”
What Eleanor wishes more than anything is for this conversation to be over. She’s paid them and the job is done, and now he’s trying to make small talk when all Eleanor wants is to go inside, lock the door, and not interact with another human for as long as possible. It’s a great relief when he finally climbs into the truck and trundles back down her long gravel driveway.
Once the smell of truck exhaust has eased, Eleanor takes a deep lungful of clean air. The May warmth around her is nice without being too hot, there are birds chirping, and she can hear the soft sound of the nearby water lapping at the shore behind the house. Besides that, no other sounds permeate the woods—no car horns, no wailing sirens, no loud voices.
It’s quiet.
This whole endeavour feels a little hare-brained. Kayla and Ash theorized that the only way to force Eleanor to take a vacation would be to give her a project to do while she’s away, and the need for someone to do a feasibility study presented the perfect opportunity. Eleanor had agreed not because she intends on vacationing but because it’s as good a way as any to make sure this gets done right . If she’s going to succeed in her goal of pushing her environmental projects through, she’d rather oversee every step of the process than leave it up to someone who might screw it up.
The house she’s decided to rent is rustic and simple, a reddish-wood-cabin exterior with a bright and lofty open-concept design on the inside. The large windows at the back face a gorgeous bay fed by a wide river. The property is mostly engulfed by woods, and the back porch has a long set of rickety stairs leading down to a small private dock and an empty boathouse. It’s also stunningly isolated. The closest neighbouring house is several kilometres down the road in either direction.
Eleanor toured dozens of similar cottages while she prepared this trip. For some reason, this is the one that stuck. There’s nothing particularly special about it, or about Riverwalk, the closest piece of civilization to the house she’s renting. In fact, the town is completely, totally unremarkable. It looks like it never quite left 1998 and probably saw its peak in the ’80s. Around the time, in fact, that CromTech still operated in the area. It has potential, though. Before she’s even started her study, Eleanor can imagine a dozen improvements that could make life better here.
It’s small and anonymous and perfect. An ideal place to disappear.
* * *
Eleanor’s transition into her newfound isolation is bumpy at first.
At Kayla and Ash’s prompting, and despite what she’d told herself about using this trip for work, she gives herself some time to relax before she plans to start her survey, but by the end of the first day, she comes to the realization that she might have forgotten how . She sits in the fresh air, tinkers with old research and designs she hasn’t had time to look at in years, and cooks for herself rather than living on takeout, but by the third day, the guilt of such prolonged unproductivity is eating her alive.
Since this trip is supposed to be a vacation with a small project to keep her busy, there are no meetings for Eleanor to attend. No day planner, no phone ringing off the hook, nobody knocking on her office door. She doesn’t even need to leave the house for a few days, and yet she still calls Kayla or Ash every few hours to check up. She insists on being kept in the loop, now filling her usual working hours with research on local construction or pricing labour and materials.
Even so, it feels good to have a routine that doesn’t involve sleeping at the office. Every day, Eleanor wakes up to the warm, yellow-painted walls of her new bedroom, makes coffee, and has breakfast on the porch overlooking the sunrise on the water. She works until her body protests as per usual, but she falls asleep with a book in her hand instead of at her laptop.
It’s a comforting little cycle. It’s significantly healthier than her routine back home, at least, with much less human interaction, and that’s enough of an improvement.
As much as Eleanor enjoys her solitude, it’s only so long before she needs to leave it. She’s running low on food by the start of the third week, and so, armed with a credit card and a grocery list, she ventures into Riverwalk.
The supermarket is tiny, all fluorescent lights and linoleum flooring that looks like it’s been there for generations. Eleanor explores it aisle by narrow aisle, lamenting the limited produce selection, and once she’s filled her cart, she checks out with the only available cashier—a bored-looking teenager chewing gum with gusto as she expertly zips Eleanor’s groceries across the scanner.
The girl is only halfway through the cart when, out of nowhere, she points at Eleanor’s hands, her tone startlingly accusatory.
“You a fan of CromTech?”
Eleanor’s stomach drops.
“What?” Eleanor glances down at where the girl is pointing—where she has her wallet in one hand and her keys in the other. She’s infinitely grateful that nobody else is in the store on a Monday morning. The last thing she needs is to fumble this impromptu interrogation in front of an audience.
She’s already regretting leaving the house.
“Your key chain says CromTech,” the girl says, glowering at her as she types in the code for Eleanor’s tragically unripe bananas. “That company’s a sore subject in Riverwalk.”
“Oh,” Eleanor says, swallowing past the tumult happening in her stomach. She tucks her keys into her purse, branded key chain and all. “No. I…got it for free. They give them out at conferences.”
It’s not a total lie—it is the same key chain CromTech uses at tech fairs, and Eleanor put it on her keys so long ago that she’d completely forgotten it was there. She could kick herself for forgetting to remove it.
“Yeah, well, half the town lost their jobs because of them,” the cashier says, shoving Eleanor’s groceries toward her. “Lost their homes, lost everything. Piece of advice—if you don’t want people to assume you support ’em, take the key chain off.”
“Right,” Eleanor says. She takes her bags quickly after tapping her card, giving the girl a polite nod as she prepares to bolt. She’d known that the company might be less than beloved here, but this level of dislike, even so many years later, is unexpected. “I will. Thanks.”
Eleanor rips the key chain free as soon as she’s in the car. She shoves it into the glove compartment under a pile of napkins, making a mental note to add a line to her report— PR intervention needed.
* * *
After restocking her pantry and fridge and taking a little time to calm down from the confrontation, Eleanor sets out on her first preliminary inspection of the area.
The county is even more beautiful than she first thought. The forests are blooming in the late-spring weather, and she even drives with the windows down to breathe in the fresh air until a stray wasp flies through and she spends ten minutes shooing it out of her back seat.
From the aerial maps Eleanor has studied, three old manufacturing buildings remain on the land that CromTech still owns. Two are abandoned but intact while the third and closest to Riverwalk seems to have been damaged at some point and is mostly just the foundation. A sale record shows a huge parcel of land nearby that was bought by a foreign development company ten years ago before it was abandoned. It might end up being a useful purchase to add to CromTech’s portfolio, but the GPS signal is so unreliable out in the woods that even after a full day of searching with the coordinates in hand, Eleanor can’t actually locate it on the ground. Everything is overgrown. Eleanor’s rental house is similarly isolated for such a gorgeous location, with few people taking advantage of the scenery.
Overall the township is underutilized. Rife with potential.
As beautiful as it is, though, it’s also run-down. Many of the back roads connecting the various townships in Bracken County are unpaved and littered with potholes, with some of the street signs that might have helped Eleanor find her way either missing or faded. With strategic incentives to the county to fix simple things like that in preparation for construction, Riverwalk’s locals will no doubt welcome the coming improvements, even if CromTech is behind them.
By the time she’s finishing up for the day, Eleanor feels both accomplished and deeply frustrated. She’s starving, her feet are sore from hobbling across gravel in heels to squint up at the road signage, and her contact lenses are drying out. She wants nothing more than to curl up with a book and a glass of wine for dinner.
So, naturally, Eleanor’s car breaks down on the way home.
“Great,” she sighs, turning the key in the ignition repeatedly, only to hear a weak sputtering. “Just fucking fantastic.” Thankful for the complete lack of other vehicles on this back road to witness her embarrassment, Eleanor unbuckles her seatbelt.
“Stupid piece of overpriced junk,” she mutters, kicking the front tire with her Jimmy Choo as she walks by to prop the hood up and do a cursory glance at the engine. Nothing looks immediately out of place, which means that it lies outside of her abilities. If given some time and the right research materials, she could probably figure it out, but right now, looking at a sea of oil-caked and smoking parts, Eleanor needs help.
A slow and begrudging internet search provides her with one mechanic within a fifty-kilometer radius, conveniently located in Riverwalk. Her Porsche is hooked onto a battered tow truck bed soon after by a tall, stocky man with dark-brown skin and a neat goatee whose name tag introduces him as Owen . He looks to be about Eleanor’s age. He’s wearing a cap over his bald head with a sports logo on it, and he removes the hat politely before he shakes her hand and then hitches the car.
“You new around here?” Owen asks when Eleanor has climbed up into the raised truck. His voice is a deep, friendly baritone. He brushes a few empty pop bottles onto the floor and turns the radio down a few notches while Eleanor settles gingerly onto the seat. A country song she doesn’t recognize is playing.
Small talk and country music. Fantastic.
“Yes. I moved in a few weeks ago,” Eleanor says, hoping her short answer will deter further inquiry.
Unfortunately Riverwalk tow truck drivers seem to be tenacious. Owen nods, his large hands resting responsibly at ten and two on the steering wheel. “Where you from? We don’t see a lot of visitors here anymore.”
“Toronto.”
“Big city, eh?” Owen says, flashing a bright smile. His tow truck takes the uneven roads better than Eleanor’s poor car. It’s still bumpy, but the bumps are less uncomfortable than the awkward conversation.
“Mhmm,” Eleanor says, unsure of what else to say in response. Her voice is made uneven by the truck’s movement. Owen resumes speaking almost before she’s finished.
“You here on a vacation? Got a cottage up the road?”
Eleanor drums her fingers on the seat. There’s a hole near the seatbelt clasp that feels like a cigarette burn. It reminds her of the passenger seat of her father’s favourite vintage Cadillac—he’d been partial to cigars, and there had been a similar singed hole in the leather that Eleanor used to dig her finger into when he took her on long drives. That car was his favourite place to remind her that she wasn’t meeting his expectations.
Eleanor digs her fingernail into the burn, twisting it through the aged seat padding. “Something like that.”
It’s nice that Owen is trying, but Eleanor has never felt confident befriending strangers, and especially after her encounter at the grocery store, she’s not feeling comfortable now. She’s been told enough times that she comes off as rude, so she doesn’t see the point in trying to pretend otherwise. She’s not even sure how she ended up with the two friends she does have.
The auto shop is technically on Riverwalk’s main road but tucked away near the town’s edge. Eleanor stares out the window to avoid conversation, and as they drive, she sees details that she hadn’t noticed before: a few of the shops they pass have For Lease signs in the windows. The rest—such as an off-brand pizza place, a single restaurant, and what Eleanor suspects might be the last actual video rental store still in existence—need work done on the exteriors. Not quite shabby, but obviously aging, with old bricks or faded signs.
The building they pull up to is exactly what Eleanor was expecting. It’s old, too, but well-maintained—exposed cinderblocks covered with white paint just on the edge of starting to peel. Two garage doors are thrown open to reveal the mess of cars and parts piled inside. Above the chaos, a faded baby-blue sign reads Cooper’s Tire and Auto .
All Eleanor can do is sincerely hope that someone here knows what they’re doing.
“One of the owners is finishing up with another job,” Owen says once he’s parked the truck and guided her into the building. “It’ll be just a minute.”
Eleanor’s first impression of the person Owen points out is one of surprise, as much as she’s ashamed of herself for it.
The mechanic is a woman.
It’s not that Eleanor is surprised that female mechanics exist. She’s dealt with enough skepticism over her own qualifications to last a lifetime. But she’s never met one, let alone one who co-owns her own shop, and she especially didn’t expect something out of the norm in a small, rural town like this. Eleanor can’t see much beyond the thick, dark-blonde ponytail visible between the woman’s shoulder blades, but she seems very capable as she finishes putting on a new tire.
When the woman turns around, Eleanor has to smother her second reaction, as shocking as it is.
The mechanic is also hot .
It’s not in the way Eleanor is used to, exactly. Eleanor’s type has always been strictly defined, governed by her own self-imposed rules as well as her father’s expectations. Clean-cut, presentable, and educated. Discreet and unattached enough not to expect much from her. Once she finally decided to do one small thing for herself and started dating women exclusively and openly, that criteria didn’t change, although it seriously narrowed her dating pool.
This woman is so far the opposite of every point as to be almost comical.
She’s wearing a jumpsuit, for starters. An army-green mechanic’s jumpsuit—horribly stained and unbuttoned so that the sleeves hang around her hips—with a similarly dirty ribbed white tank and a scuffed blue ballcap. Eleanor idly wonders why one would even bother wearing white in an auto shop, considering it’s almost not recognizably white anymore, but before long she’s distracted by what’s underneath the shirt.
Beneath her tank top and faded tan lines, this mechanic is muscular. And sweaty. And, frankly, broad . She’s taller than Eleanor by a few inches, and solidly built in a way Eleanor isn’t used to. Her wide shoulders and thick midsection are offset by the slight swell of her hips under the jumpsuit when she strides forward. When she reaches up to remove her hat and wipe at her brow with her forearm, a defined bicep flexes appealingly.
Eleanor tries very hard not to be affected by that, or by the adorable red line the cap leaves across the woman’s forehead.
“Hi! I’m Dani. Owen said your Porsche gave out?”
Dani reaches a grimy hand out to shake, and Eleanor hesitates only for a moment before taking it in her own. She expects it to be sweaty from the warmth of the garage, but despite the dark shop residue staining Dani’s pink fingertips, they’re dry and just a tiny bit calloused.
“I’m…Nora,” Eleanor manages to say. She pulls her hand back when Dani lets go, clenching it at her side.
Eleanor hasn’t gone by Nora since she was seven, when her father told her it sounded too common. She’s Eleanor . She’s named after her paternal grandmother, a woman her father made sure to remind her was the reason he grew up to be so strong-willed. A woman whose ambition was halted only by the restrictions of her time, who instilled that ambition into her son, and whose name shouldn’t be tarnished by nicknames.
It’s a name Eleanor has never quite been able to live up to.
Once Eleanor has said it, Nora feels like the right choice in the circumstances. She doesn’t need anyone recognizing her by name, as unlikely as that might be. Part of her project here is to determine if the locals could be persuaded to welcome CromTech’s presence or if they’re going to need to fight against a reluctant population, and given the grocery store clerk’s reaction to a simple key chain, Eleanor would rather not pursue that question further right now.
“Nice to meet you,” Dani says, seeming unbothered by Eleanor’s attitude.
“You as well.” Eleanor clears her throat. “Can you fix it?”
“I can fix anything,” Dani says with a wink.
Eleanor swallows hard. Dani’s eyes are a startling greyish blue, and her smile bright and earnest. There’s an uneven black smudge across her cheek, curving down to the strong line of her jaw. Her hair is coming loose from its ponytail and sticking to the side of her neck. When she puts her hat back on, Eleanor can see that its bill is frayed and dusty.
She’s not Eleanor’s type in the slightest.
And yet.
“She’s not lying,” Owen says, startling Eleanor out of her thoughts. “I’ve never seen Danielle Cooper find anything she can’t put back together with her bare hands.”
Eleanor tries to ignore the accompanying image. She absolutely does not need to know what Danielle Cooper can do with her bare hands.
Eleanor gives Owen a tight smile and follows Dani across the shop floor, ducking under a row of hanging tools and picking her way across stacks of tires and piles of oil-stained rags to where Owen has backed the Porsche into the garage. Dani moves easily—as if navigating the chaotic layout is second nature rather than a gauntlet of tripping hazards—and Eleanor can’t help but focus on the rhythm of the mechanic’s movement.
Dani takes up space. She leads with her shoulders, shifting her body around obstacles without engaging much in her hips, and, yet, never losing balance. A confident, grounded way to move through the world.
In contrast, Eleanor has almost fallen three times before she makes it to the car.
Dani lets out a low whistle when she approaches the Porsche, tapping a gentle finger on the hood. “Sweet ride. Not often that I get to treat something this expensive.”
“It gets me from A to B.”
“I think we have very different A’s and B’s,” Dani says, grinning as she reaches inside the open window to pop the hood. Her shoulders shift under the ribbed tank. “Let’s take a look, eh?”
Eleanor’s hand clenches hard around her keys.
The diagnosis goes quickly. Dani explains the issue in a way that lacks the condescension Eleanor is used to from most mechanics, and she seems pleasantly surprised to find that Eleanor can keep up. The problem is the transmission, apparently. Luckily the part required is generic, and Dani can take care of it right away.
“Pretty rare that we see a machine this nice come through Riverwalk,” Dani says, sliding out from underneath Eleanor’s car on what looks like a wide skateboard. Eleanor hands her keys over to Owen and tries not to wince as he climbs onto her leather seats in his shop-stained pants to back the car onto the hydraulic lift.
“It seems like it’s mostly trucks and tractors out here,” Eleanor quips. She’s oddly gratified when it makes Dani laugh. Dani’s teeth seem brighter against her smudged skin. The bottom ones are crooked, but the imperfection only makes her more endearing.
“Mostly! It’s nice to handle something so fancy for a change.”
Eleanor knows that Dani is referring to the car, but when she says it without breaking eye contact, it’s hard not to feel an answering twitch at the thought of all the very fancy things Dani could handle.
According to Kayla and Ash, this rural venture is supposed to be Eleanor’s summer of rest and relaxation. An easy project with a distant deadline and a chance to decompress in relative isolation. Not, emphatically, a chance to fuck the town mechanic in the tiny village she’s ended up in.
No matter how much Eleanor tells herself that, she can’t stop looking at Dani’s capable hands and imagining all of their practical applications.
In the end, Dani fixes the transmission in less than an hour. There’s no waiting room at the shop, just the open floor and a small office area at the back, so Dani chats away to Eleanor about what she’s doing as she works; she shows Eleanor the tools and parts she’s using and even encourages her to peer through the hood and help with the installation as Dani highlights the broken part with a flashlight.
By the time Eleanor’s payment is being processed, she’s pretty sure she could fix the issue herself next time. Looking down at the receipt Dani hands her, though, Eleanor frowns.
“This doesn’t seem like very much for all the work you did,” Eleanor says, hesitating before signing her name at the bottom of the invoice.
“Oh, I only charged you half for labour.”
Eleanor’s pen veers off the paper at the end of her signature. “What? Why?”
“First-time customers get a discount.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Eleanor insists, trying to give her card to Dani to charge more, but no matter how hard she tries, it still ends up back in her own hand. “I can pay.”
“Don’t worry about it. You did half of it yourself, so consider it wages for your hard work,” Dani says, flashing a quick wink. Her grin is altogether too charming. “See you around, Nora.”
Dani squints at the invoice before she puts it in the cash drawer. As her eyes dart over Eleanor’s signature, over her full name spelled out in black and white, a thread of fear winds its way around Eleanor’s ribs. The girl at the grocery store had been so confrontational—Eleanor doesn’t want to think about what it would be like if Dani looked at her with that kind of disdain.
But Dani doesn’t react. She shoves the paper into the drawer with the same friendly smile she’s had since Eleanor arrived and sends her off with another handshake, making no mention of Eleanor’s last name.
Eleanor leaves the shop relieved, with a car that runs better than ever and a sensation in her stomach like she’s missed a step on the stairs. And in idle moments over the following days, she keeps thinking about Dani Cooper. More than she should.
Eleanor thinks about that friendly grin and Dani’s surprisingly light regional accent. She thinks about the light sheen of sweat that covered Dani’s skin under her thin tank top. She thinks about Dani’s hands, strong and calloused under layers of oil and engine grime. She thinks about wide shoulders and the strength in Dani’s arms as she hefted heavy car parts effortlessly.
She thinks about full lips, a bit chapped but probably still soft, and exactly how they might feel against her own.
It must be because she’s going stir-crazy. It’s been months since her last tryst with Lydia. She’s been on edge ever since she turned the most recent proposition down, and now she’s cooped up in the middle of nowhere. It’s perfectly natural to casually fantasize about the only attractive woman she’s seen in this town.
But even a week later, when Eleanor has run into several other attractive women—the spitfire redhead who runs the local restaurant, for example, or a stern but striking auburn-haired woman at the grocery store who sports oil-stained hands just like Dani’s—she still only thinks about one.