Well, I’ll be damned.
Beau Rodney couldn’t resist drinking in the sight of the woman he thought he’d seen the last of six months ago. How in the world had she ended up on his doorstep? She was as beautiful as ever, but she looked . . . different. He’d never seen her with a single hair out of place, or a nail unmanicured, or even without her trademark pearl earrings, yet there she stood, hair wind-whipped, fingernails polish-less, and earlobes naked.
It was damn sexy. Like seeing a woman in her bathrobe on her front stoop—everything’s covered, but you feel like you’re seeing something you shouldn’t.
“Beau,” she said at last, her eyes wide and her voice almost raspy. She looked as though she’d seen the Ghost of College Past. Well, he supposed she had. “What are you doing here?” In what he imagined was belated self-consciousness, she smoothed a hand over her rebellious blond hair, tucking a few wayward strands behind her ears.
He pushed to his feet and grabbed the rag from his back pocket, hardly able to believe she was standing right there in front of him after all this time. “This is Rodney Automotive, sugar,” he said with a tip of his chin toward the decades-old sign on the back wall. “What do you think I’m doing here?”
She blinked a few times, clearly not grasping what she was seeing. Not that he blamed her. She’d only ever seen the polished side of him. The Birmingham spit-shine, his mother liked to call it.
“But...you’re a lawyer!”
He paused in wiping the grease off his hands to raise an eyebrow at her. Was that horror he heard in her normally refined tone? “And you’re a Junior League member driving a broken down car through backwater Alabama.”
She snapped her mouth shut with an audible click. Her cheeks, already pink with heat, turned almost crimson as she wrapped her arms around her waist. “I didn’t mean—that’s not to say,” she stopped herself and took a deep breath. “That’s not fair, Beau. It’s a shock to see you here. I only meant that the last time I saw you, you’d just finished your final semester of law school with a much-coveted job already lined up on the other side.”
Shrugging, he stuffed the rag back in his pocket. “Things change.”
It was the understatement of the decade.
But he didn’t need to justify to Miss Perfect why he was back in his hometown, toiling in the family business after he’d spent the past eight years working toward his law degree.
Instead of huffing indignantly or storming back to her car, Delaney shook her head and gave a small, self-deprecating huff of laughter. “Yeah, tell me about it.”
Curiosity surged, but caution prevailed. He didn’t need to have some sort of heart-to-heart with the woman. The last one of those they’d shared had ended very, very badly. “I don’t think either of us have the time for that. So why don’t you tell me what I can do for you.”
Memories from the years they’d known each other were starting to crowd in—both the good and the bad. No matter how attractive he found her, he needed to rekindle his friendship with her like he needed a hole in his head. He had a text message from her saved on his phone to prove it.
Swinging her hand in a grand gesture toward her car, she said, “The ‘broken down’ car was just fine when I left town this morning, but decided to up and die on me along the way. Officer Brantley very kindly sent me in your direction.” Looking him straight in the eye with her piercing sky-blue gaze, she said, “I’m prepared to throw myself on your mercy to get this thing up and running as soon as humanly possible.”
“In a hurry?” he asked, despite his resolve to be cautious. What the hell was Delaney Hart—make that Spencer—doing in Honeysuckle Hill in the first place? They were three hours from Birmingham on a good day, and it was hard to imagine her going half so far outside of her little sphere of society.
“You have no idea. Can you help me?” She set her hands together in a pleading gesture that lifted his eyebrows.
He leaned against the truck and crossed his arms. “My, how the tides have turned. You can’t really be begging me to help you. Why don’t you just put in a call to dear old Carlton and have him rescue you?” Of course, having that call answered would depend on whether or not the asshole was with one of his other women.
Her lips mashed together in displeasure as her hands dropped to the sides of her tiny little yellow shorts. “I don’t remember you being such a jerk, Beau. First of all, my cell isn’t working, and secondly, I haven’t spoken to Carlton since May, so I doubt he’d be too anxious to come ‘rescue’ me anytime soon.”
Beau’s heart slammed against his ribs for a few beats at that bit of news. She’d ended the engagement? Or had Carlton? His gaze darted to her left hand, where the golf ball-sized rock she’d worn for the past year was conspicuously missing. She was just full of surprises, wasn’t she?
He swallowed and adjusted his position against the truck. “Glad to hear that you finally came to your senses about that guy. But in case you didn’t notice, I’m a bit busy at the moment. If you want to come back tomorrow morning first thing, I might be able to squeeze a diagnostic in.”
She gaped at him, her big blue eyes almost comically huge. “Squeeze a diagnostic in? Tomorrow?” Her brow furrowed ferociously as she balled her fists at her hips. “Damn it, Beau, do you think I’m here for my health? Until that car gets fixed, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Then I suggest you get comfortable in the office, because I have paying customers who aren’t going to look kindly on a line-jumping debutante delaying my work.”
“I’m not playing the wheedling debutante here. I am stranded in the middle of God knows where with a dead car and a driving need to get back on the road as soon as I possibly can. Pun not intended,” she added evenly.
“Not the wheedling debutante, just more important than Mr. Combs, who has no alternate vehicle to work his farm with while I fix his twenty-year-old beater truck? Or Ms. Alice,” he said, swinging his arm to indicate the early ‘90s Cadillac in the next bay over, “who needs her alternator replaced before her husband’s next dialysis treatment tomorrow afternoon?”
She pressed her lips together, clearly stymied. Sighing hugely, she settled her gaze squarely on his, giving him no choice but to meet her eyes. “I don’t want to put anybody else out, Beau. But I don’t know what else to do. Don’t you have a coworker you can call in to help?”
“Not only do I not have anyone else to help here, but Malone’s Garage from the next town over is closed for a month thanks to Jim Malone’s hip replacement, so we have more business than ever.” Swiping his sleeve over his sweaty forehead, he shook his head. “Believe me, Dee. If there was anyone else who could be doing this job right now, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.”