Slater slammed it closed. “Who’d you say your family works for?” he queried coolly, thinking this woman might be just a little too savvy to suit him.
“I didn’t.”
“What’s under those tarps? Hijacked car parts?”
Kat couldn’t believe she was standing in raindrops as big as hippos, talking to this insensitive lout who didn’t have sense enough to get out of the weather. “Do you want help,” she asked tersely, “or do you intend to stand around all night kicking your tires?”
Slater felt a flush creep up his cheeks. He’d been keeping this design under wraps for two years. He had a federal government General Services Administration contract to replace ten thousand agency cars, to be shipped in the not-too-distant future—which meant nothing unless he rolled them off the line on schedule. If not, the company founded by his family might well go belly-up, throwing hundreds of local men and women out of work. The last thing he needed to top off a bad week was some tomboy grease monkey psychoanalyzing him.
Except…that wasn’t entirely true; he did need her to deliver a message.
“Look, sorry to sound ungrateful,” he said contritely, flashing her a smile calculated to bring her around. “If I give you the name and phone number of my mechanic, would you mind calling him when you hit town?”
Unimpressed, Kat raised a brow. “You have a mechanic on tap at ten o’clock at night? My, my. Yet you don’t carry a cell phone? Aren’t you lucky I stopped?”
Slater yanked open his car door and dug around in the center console until he found a notepad and a pen. If he answered her sass the way he’d like to, he’d be stuck here forever. He’d been so anxious to test the latest attempt to correct the car’s fuel-line problem, he’d dashed out without a jacket, never mind a cell phone. Slater ignored the water dripping from his hair, even though it slid off the hand-stitched leather bucket seats and soaked into the Special’s plush gray carpet.
At a glance Kat took in the car’s rich interior and the man’s obviously expensive gold pen. She scooted in for a closer look and whistled softly between her teeth. Test driver, maybe? They tended to be arrogant, and possessive of their new toys.
Silently Kat accepted the note he ripped out and handed her as he rudely backed her away and shut the car’s door in her face. Local phone number, she saw. She hitched up her yellow slicker and stuffed the paper into her back pants pocket. “Who shall I say is demanding this mechanic’s lowly presence way out here on such a ghastly night?”
Slater let his gaze travel up a slender denim-covered leg that peeked out from beneath her oilskin slicker. Damned well-shaped for such a small woman, he thought, taking an unexpected jolt to the stomach. Tearing his gaze away, Slater reminded himself she was too smart-mouthed for his taste, even supposing he liked women with boyish haircuts—which he didn’t. “Name’s Slater. Tell Dempsey I’m stalled south of the twelve-mile marker out on the proving grounds with the Flintridge Special.”
Kat felt a sudden flicker of interest. He worked for Flintridge Motors? Come Monday, she’d be starting there as recreation specialist. It was a new position, and the personnel director had hired her from a resume and phone interview. The job had given her a legitimate reason for coming home. Kat was grateful to her sister-in-law for sending her the newspaper ad. Pop was no dummy. Without this job, he’d have known right away that she’d been called home to deal with what the family referred to as his childish post-retirement behavior.
“Was there something else?” Slater asked with a faint air of exasperation as he clicked his ballpoint pen.
“What? Oh, no.” Blushing, Kat turned and trotted off. “I’ll phone this guy the minute I hit town,” she promised over her shoulder. Then, because she thought it might be nice to know by name at least one person from work, she paused with her hand on her vehicle’s door and called out, “O’Halloran. My name is Kathleen O’Halloran. It’s such a small world, I’m sure we’ll see each other around.”
Before Slater could recover from the shock of hearing a name that stuck in his craw, she’d climbed in her Trooper and tootled off.
Coincidence or fate? Not that it mattered, Slater decided, sliding into the Special to strip off his soggy tie as the truck’s taillights disappeared in the sluicing rain. He wouldn’t go out of his way to see anyone with that last name. He had enough trouble these days. A revolutionary natural gas engine—great in theory but less so in practice. Employees hounding him to provide recreation opportunities because his competitor across town did. And now his dad’s sudden passion for playing the ponies. Ponies and poker. He had an Irish rabble-rouser to blame for that particular problem. One O’Halloran. Timothy O’Halloran.
Disgusted, Slater tried wringing water out of his shirt, then gave up and settled back to wait. The most he could hope now was that Miss Fix-it had more integrity than Tim of the same last name.
AS GOOD AS HER WORD, Kat stopped at the first convenience store on the outskirts of Flintridge and delivered Mr. Slater’s message to Gordon Dempsey. The mechanic swore, then apologized and offered a simple thank-you. He disconnected so fast, Kat couldn’t decide if it was the news itself or the name of the person needing his services that had made Dempsey swear. However, she gave only cursory thought to the man she’d left out on the highway. Everything soon took second place to the excitement of coming home.
The big old house with the full front porch where Toby Flanigan had given Kat her first kiss looked exactly as she remembered. And Kat knew before she went inside that in spite of the late hour, her mother’s kitchen would smell of coffee and her own favorite raisin-oatmeal cookies. Pop was the only one in the family not expecting her. Kat wondered what excuse they’d made for this evening’s gathering of the clan.
Heart filled with joy in anticipation of seeing everyone again, she hauled Poseidon out of the Trooper and burst through the front door.
Her brothers Matt, Mark and Josh—good biblical names as solid as the men themselves—hoisted her off the floor and tossed her from one to the other. She’d always loved this when she was a kid. She hugged each man in turn.
Her poor dog barked and jumped at them until Kat’s mother demanded order.
Mary, Kat’s most thoughtful sister-in-law, Joshua’s wife, relieved her of the wet slicker and thrust a mug of hot coffee into Kat’s chilly hands. The other two women, Erin and Shannon, were married to Mark and Matt respectively. All talking at once, the women exclaimed over Kat’s new, shorter haircut and how trim she looked. Preliminaries over, the family settled down to ask about her trip.
“Long and boring,” Kat replied. “Uneventful outside of a flat tire in Montana. Where’s Pop? Did he go to bed?” Kat knew how much flak she’d take if she mentioned her attempted roadside rescue. So she didn’t bring it up.
Still, her mom acted uneasy, and Mark scowled as he turned away to pick up the coffeepot.
“It’s poker night at Spud Mallory’s,” Josh explained.
“Ah.” Kat nodded. “Well, that’s okay, isn’t it? Pop and Spud go back a long way. I can remember begging them to teach me how to play poker.”
“They never played for money before,” Mrs. O’Halloran said, digging for a tissue to hide a sniffle. “I tell you, Katie, your father has taken leave of his senses.”
“How much money’s involved?” Kat asked warily. “Not high stakes.”
