2. Chapter 2
Beau pulled his red shop rag out of his pocket and wiped off the fingerprint of grease he’d left on the intake manifold.
That’s how Sutton had always liked it, shining and clean, so that when they were out and someone asked to see under the hood he could present it like it was on a showroom floor.
Beau preferred his cars honest—the sharp smell of oil, the shining parts marked by the hands that kept them running.
Twelve years Beau had been working on Sutton’s car, and he still struggled to keep it up to Sutton’s standards.
He straightened, and his back and knee revolted with sharp aches. Christ, he was getting old.
“Merc!” Liam popped his head into the garage, his white backwards cap smudged with grease. “Can you come sign off on this repair? Client’s a dick. Won’t take it if the shop owner doesn’t look at the finished product.”
“Mhmm.” Beau zipped his jumpsuit back up over his Pink Floyd shirt. As he passed Liam, he knocked the hat right off his head, exposing his sweat-flattened brown hair. “How many times I gotta tell you not to wear white caps in my shop? You look sloppy.”
“Aw, but it was from my mom.”
At only twenty, Liam was the youngest in the shop. Whiny as hell, too, but he was a good kid.
“And you’re taking care of your mama’s gift by ruining it?”
They crossed through the back hall and into the empty lobby, where a glass door led to the commercial garage out front—the one not haunted by ghosts and a mean smile and a revving engine.
All four of his employees were gathered around the brand new SUV Liam had been working on.
Piece of shit car, if you asked him. All looks and no substance.
“How many of this exact model this month?” Beau asked as he stepped up to the hood.
Xavier and James moved to the tool bench to get out of Beau’s way, their phones out.
“Oh, fourth, probably.” Liam leaned his hip against the front of the car, and Beau stared until he held up both hands and moved away again.
Camila put her hand on the top of the raised hood. “Fifth. Janette just traded in her Prius for one and brought it by for us to look at this morning.”
“Mhmm.” Beau leaned in to inspect the work even though he knew as well as Liam did that he was just pandering to the customer. He didn’t hire workers without talent. “Pumped ‘em all out at once, made ‘em pretty, and now these bugs are worming their way to the surface.”
“Holy shit,” Xavier whispered. His voice echoed across the garage anyway. “Did you see that? James, look at this shit. I’m gonna go back and watch it again.”
There wasn’t much to look at on the car. It was as perfect as it was going to get. He tested the tension on a few parts and shrugged. “Looks great, Liam. Now, tell the customer—”
“Go, go, GO!!!” Xavier whooped. James joined in, and Camila turned to glare at them.
“I just know you boys aren’t wasting time in my shop,” Beau said evenly as he wiped his fingers with a shop rag and turned to look at them. Camila threw up her hands. “It’s alright, Mila, I know you’re the only responsible worker I’ve got.”
“Hey,” Liam protested as he slammed the hood shut. “I was working, too.”
“Boss, come look at this.” Xavier snatched his phone out of James’ hand. “You won’t believe this guy. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“I don’t have time to—”
“No, really,” James said as he rubbed his buzzed hair and shook his head. “The way he handles that car. The cops couldn’t catch him for twenty minutes, boss. And he just—you gotta see.”
“Seriously.” Xavier bounded over and handed Beau the phone. “Just watch. It’s crazy.”
Beau worked his jaw and took the phone. Easiest way to get these two to stop was to indulge them. Unfortunately, he knew from experience.
“Merc, you really don’t need to.” Camila crossed her arms and chewed her lip, and Beau raised both eyebrows at her. She flushed. “It’s…you won’t like it.”
“Don’t ruin it,” James sighed.
Xavier pressed play, and the video started with a dash cam view of a car going way too fast down an interstate road on the north side of town.
The car weaved between vehicles like they were traffic cones, every move clean and effortless.
The kind of movements that spoke of skill and a helluva lot of practice.
“Oh, shit,” a breathless voice laughed over the video. “It’s the fuzz.”
The sirens wailed, red and blue reflecting off the dash. This kid was a moron.
That same moron whooped as a cop car came at him from the side and he evaded it, and he was still hollering when one of the officers used a P.I.T. maneuver on him.
The screen split, and one half was taken up by the cab of the Nissan GT-R and a man.
A gorgeous young man in his late twenties with a head full of curls and deep dimples.
All that gorgeous was negated immediately by the vicious, cocky smile he tossed the camera as he raised his middle finger. Laughing just like—
Sweat drizzled down Beau's neck from beneath his helmet as a car came up on his left. His headset crackled with a familiar, deep laugh, and he turned to see Sutton, grinning like a fucking moron with his middle finger raised.
‘Christ, Sutt, you think we're on a Sunday drive? Put both goddamn hands on the wheel.’
Sutton laughed again. ‘Don't be such an old man.’ He looked ahead again, his grin slipping into a smirk. ‘Later, Beau.’
Then he was gone, his engine growling as he caught his opening and left Beau in the dust, and—
“Hey.” A soft hand landed on his forearm, and he blinked the garage back into focus. Camila pushed pause on the video. “You okay?”
He looked back down at the phone, the picture frozen on that cocky shit-eating grin as the kid was shoved shirtless into the back of a cop car. His tattoos stood out starkly against his pale skin, everywhere else pink with adrenaline. One arm, half his chest, and one leg entirely covered in ink.
“What a legend,” Xavier sighed.
Scowling, Beau turned off the screen and handed the phone back to Xavier. “Gonna be a dead legend before he’s thirty-five.”
“Nah, he’s too good,” James insisted. He pulled out his own phone and started the video over.
That fucking laugh.
“If I hear that video in my shop one more time, the poor sucker playing it is gonna be scrubbing oil off the floor for the next three weeks,” Beau said, low and measured, as he walked back toward the lobby. “Go home.”
Whispers followed him out of the room as his crew packed up their things and put their tools back where they belonged.
It wasn’t their fault he was a cranky asshole about it.
Every twenty-something who liked fast cars watching some cocky boy pulling a stunt like that would see the glory. The thrill.
It was good that they didn’t see the rest of it.
That they didn’t know that the sound of rending metal dug into your eardrums like something physical.
Like claws. Didn’t know that smoke burned your throat until you tasted copper.
How your screams ripped you open while you dragged yourself from a heap of parts toward the heap that had slammed into you.
The lights of the lobby were stark white.
They burned his eyes as he stopped with his hand on the doorframe.
He took a long breath. Behind him, Liam laughed and James shouted something Beau didn’t catch.
Swallowing, Beau made a fist and rubbed his knuckles.
Tried to press the shake out of his fingertips.
He walked back through the lobby and tried not to feel like his boots were leaving their grit on white tile. Slick oil dripping from his memories.
At his bench, he picked up a bucket of clean rags.
Pliers. A ⒈／⒉ inch ratchet wrench, ?, 1 inch.
The same set every time. By this point, he didn’t need tape and a marker, though he used them anyway.
Everything went right back into the same places it had gone since the first time he’d ripped everything out twelve years ago.
He’d cried then. Wiped tears from his cheeks with his shoulders because his hands had been covered in fluid. This time, he had a rag ready to keep his hands mostly clean when he removed the first hose.
By the time the carburetor was out and sitting on his rolling bench, the crew had gone home. Camila had turned out the lights at six fifteen while James and Xavier piled into the same car, and Liam started up the little Kawasaki motorcycle he’d saved for months to buy.
The only sounds in the shop were his—the soft scrape of metal, the click of a spring, the jitter of a hose being set down on cloth-protected wood.
The crickets that lived in the bushes outside the bay doors went silent as he wiped down a greasy spring, which meant the floodlights had kicked on.
An alleycat or a person had to be outside, and his money was on a person because the coyotes had been patrolling these alleys more since it had gotten hotter.
“We’re closed,” he rumbled, setting a float down in its place next to the other parts. A shoe scraped through gravel. “And this ain’t the customer garage. Come back in the morning and go round the front.”
“Are you Merc?” the person asked, loud and confident.
“Mhmm.” Beau set down the pin he’d just pried loose. “Go away, boy.”
“I’m not a boy,” the stranger insisted, sounding every bit like a boy. “Look. I heard from some guys I know that you drive like a pro. And I have this job offer. Only, I need a coach, okay, and—”
“Are you deaf and dumb, or just a special kinda stupid?” Beau asked evenly.
I heard you used to race.
How the holy hell had he heard that? Beau had been careful here. No one knew so much as his first name.
The footsteps came closer, echoing across the cement floor. “Merc, please. Hear me out.”
Beau stood up straight and wiped between his fingers. He turned his hand in the light from the flex lamp he had on his workbench to make sure he’d gotten the last of the grease. Then he set the rag down and turned.
And the floor ceased to exist.
Like someone had taken his waking nightmares and spit them out on his garage floor, that cocky little shit from the video was standing there in low-slung jeans and dirty sneakers.
The floodlights lit him up from behind, Beau’s flex lamp casting a soft glow on his bare arms — one of which was covered from throat to fingertips in tattoos.
Both dimples were out as he smiled like he hadn’t just wrecked the careful peace Beau had been building.
“Get out.”
That smile slipped, and the kid looked up at him—at least a foot shorter than Beau’s six foot six—frowning. “Wait. Wait, please. Will you just hear me out? Racer to racer, yeah?”
“You’re not a driver,” Beau snapped. He crossed his arms. “You’re a walking death wish. And I want you out.”
“Excuse you, you don’t even know me. And I just got a call from Liberty Speedworks offering me a try-out, so, yeah, I think I’m a racer.
” The kid frowned, squinting at Beau. “Just because I haven’t been on an official track doesn’t mean I’m not a racer.
I’m the best street racer in the tri-county area.
Street racing is still racing. Right there in the name and everything. ”
Beau took a step forward, pulled himself to his full height and made sure that the first look this little shit got of his face showed just how Beau felt about him.
“A try-out offer because you got arrested for being a reckless idiot isn’t a real offer.
It’s a cash grab. They’ll show pony you around, call you a Development Driver, and never let you in a single race. ”
There was a temper lurking under that flippant bullshit attitude. But if he’d been hoping to trigger it and make the kid leave, he was disappointed. Just as if he hadn’t heard Beau at all, the kid was staring up at him with wide, violently green eyes. Beau took another step forward.
“Can you take a hint?” he snarled.