11. Gabe
CHAPTER 11
GABE
W e eat breakfast in silence. I say breakfast, but it’s more like lunch at this point. Carly didn’t strike me as a particularly early riser, but I was impressed by the way I’d managed to go out to do everything I needed to do and get back again before she’d even got out of bed.
I suppose if I was being generous, I would remember that she drove here from Philadelphia yesterday, which isn’t exactly a short trip. But I don’t feel like being generous because she also stole my truck.
It’s going to take a while to forgive that.
Plus, she’s about to become an infuriating house guest. I saw the way she was looking at my military picture. She wants to know all about my time in the Air Force, I can tell. Maybe I will tell her eventually, but right now, I just want to enjoy my coffee and my bacon sandwich.
I should have fried an egg as well, but I was too busy keeping my eye on Carly, trying to stop her from snooping through all my stuff.
“Is your meeting really that important?” I ask eventually, my own curiosity getting the better of me.
She nods, tilting her head over so slightly, making her hair fall into her face, drawing my attention back to her bright blue eyes. I would love to say that I didn’t find her attractive, but I can’t. She is.
It’s not the reason why I let her stay. God forbid anyone ever think that I was that kind of man. But the fact that she’s easy on the eyes doesn’t exactly hurt.
What can I say? I have eyes, and she’s attractive.
She sweeps her hair behind her ear and shrugs, her cheeks flushing slightly. “I wish it wasn’t, but they pay the bills. It’s not that the clients themselves are particularly important. They’re just rich, and when I’ve promised to be on call twenty-four-seven to help them, they really expect that from me. The longer I’m out here, the longer I go without speaking to them, the more they’re going to want answers. When I talk to them again… nothing I can say will be good enough.”
“Can’t you just tell them you had car trouble?” I ask.
She grimaces. “That wouldn’t be good enough for them, and you know it.”
“I know,” I agree. I might not have lived the glamorous kind of life Carly has, but I have lived a life, and it’s made me cynical of other people.
“Why Philadelphia?” I ask. “To live, I mean.”
She thinks for a second, the furrow between her brows reappearing. “It’s a good city. It has everything you could ever want, all different types of people and different types of lifestyles. Plus, it’s close enough to New York that I can do business there without having to live anywhere near the city. I do a lot of consultations in the Big Apple.”
She chuckles awkwardly, like she was trying to make a joke that fell flat. I don’t smile.
“A lot of rich people live there who want to get married, but I travel everywhere,” she continues. “From LA to Boston and everywhere in between. Word gets out, you see. One pair of rich people like you, and they tell all their rich people friends, and suddenly your client base is tripling overnight, and you can barely keep up with the demand.”
I grunt in acknowledgment. Though our situations aren’t exactly the same, I do understand the value of a good reputation. “Couldn’t you, I don’t know, work online? Isn’t that a popular thing in the city these days?”
“I could go virtual,” she says, sipping coquettishly at her coffee. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she was doing it deliberately to wind me up. I look away before she catches me staring at the way her lips wrap around the rim of the cup, the way her eyelashes flutter as she closes her eyes from the steam.
“But people prefer the personal touch. I’m sure you know this too. It means a lot to people if you’re willing to go to them, and with the rates I charge and the amount that people are willing to pay for me, I’d be a fool not to go in person. It’s what I built my business on — the personal touch. It’s what people are expecting. I have no idea what these clients are going to do to my reputation.”
She sighs, slouching in her chair. There’s no doubt her nightmare situation of losing her job flashes through her mind.
“Come on,” I say, getting up so fast I almost knock over my chair.
“Where are we going?” She frowns at me. It looks more like a pout.
“Nowhere, but the fire is on in the living room, and I want to tidy in there before I entertain guests.”
“Tidy?” she echoes. “This place is spotless.”
“The kitchen is spotless.”
“Do you usually put your guests to work?”
“No, but most of my guests don’t have to earn their keep.”
“Wow,” she says, though there’s a glimmer of amusement in her eye.
We step through into the living room, and I suck in a breath through my teeth. What can I get her to do? Because she’s right, it is tidy in here. I just want to keep her busy enough that she stops digging into my life. “If you want to sort my CD collection, you can,” I say, gesturing to the player and the CDs that are scattered all around it.
I’ve been meaning to put them away for weeks, but I make it a habit to listen to an album every night. And when you want to listen to a different one every night, you end up with a stack very quickly.
“Okay,” she says, no doubt nosy about my music collection. She settles on the floor, then turns to look at me. “How often do you have guests?”
I furrow my eyebrows. “Does it matter?”
“No,” she says, backpedaling from her question. “I was just curious. That’s all.” I think the interrogation is over and I lean over the fire, basking in the warm crackle. Then she asks, “Have you always wanted to be a mechanic?”
I grunt again and poke at the flames. “It’s what I’m good at.”
Not ready to let it go, she asks a few more probing questions, and I give her equally simple answers. It’s not really any of her business who I am or what I do.
“I take it you have family who live here?”
The question catches me off guard, and before I can think, I snap back, “No.”
“No,” she repeats. It sounds like a statement, but I know it’s a question. I should leave it, but reacting has already given her more information I really wanted to, and fair’s fair. She answered me earlier.
“I grew up here,” I give her, hoping that will appease her curiosity. “Tidying by candlelight is something my great-grandma would have approved of.”
Carly chuckles at that. “It does feel a bit like we’re in 1870, doesn’t it?”
“I think they had invented lights by then,” I correct her.
“No,” she says with certainty. “They discovered electricity way before that, in the seventeen hundreds or something, but most people didn’t have electricity in their homes until the nineteen hundreds. Most people used gas before then.”
“How do you know that?” I ask slightly more snappishly than I mean to.
She tilts her head. “It’s just interesting.”
“I probably still have an oil lamp somewhere. My great-grandmother definitely had one.”
“Did you know her?” she asks.
“She died when I was young,” I mutter, staring at the floor. “But I met her. I remember meeting her.”
I trail off, realizing I’ve given away more than I wanted to. She grins knowingly at me, and I set my face in a hard neutral. This is none of her business.
“Come on,” I say, changing the subject. “It’s looking good in here. Let me check the state of your bedroom.”
“My bedroom.” She grins teasingly.
I don’t comment on it. It’s not going to be her bedroom for long. She might be an impressive young woman, but she’s not staying for longer than it takes to fix her car.
That much is fact.