breathed out again and her voice was very soft when she told me, “I think that has more to do with you than it does with me.”
Her words made my heart stutter and skip a beat. I wanted her to trust me but her handing that information over so quickly was unexpected. I didn’t think I’d done a thing to earn her trust yet. I had to clear my throat before I could reply. “I was hoping we could meet up after I get off work tonight and start to work on some kind of schedule with Happy.” I couldn’t hold back the grin when I said the puppy’s name. “I’ll order pizza and make sure you eat dinner.” She went quiet on the other end of the phone and I wanted to kick myself for pushing too hard too fast with her. “I can always come to your place if you’re more comfortable with that.”
She sighed. “It’s not that.”
I scowled at myself in the rearview mirror and reminded myself that this was all about the long game with her. She was a good distraction at the moment but I wanted her to be around long after the dust of my currently imploding life settled. “What is it then?”
I could picture her tugging on her lip and shuffling her feet nervously because her nervous habits were becoming as familiar to me as my own. So hurriedly that the words smooshed together and were barely discernible, she admitted, “I don’t like pizza.”
Stunned that she was worried about telling me something as simple as that, I found it was my turn to sigh. “Is that all? I’ll order Mexican or Chinese food. Hell, I can even whip up some sandwiches or some mac and cheese.”
She gave another one of those laughs that sounded shrill and slightly hysterical. “I don’t eat tomatoes. I hate them.”
I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. “Okay, so pizza sauce is out, but they make white pizza, we can always do that instead.” Getting to know this woman was like walking across a minefield. Every step I took toward her felt like the ground below me might detonate and throw me a thousand steps backward, injured and unable to keep fighting my way toward her.
She whimpered a little bit and I felt it like a kick in my stomach. I hated how hard something as simple as telling someone else what she did and didn’t like was for her. If her shitbag husband wasn’t already six feet under I would have gladly helped put him there.
“Oliver loved pizza. He told me it was unnatural and ridiculous that I wouldn’t eat it. He’d demand that we order it for dinner once or twice a week and I’d have to sit and watch him eat while I sat there starving. He always told me if I didn’t want to eat what he provided then I could go hungry.”
I swore and curled the hand that wasn’t holding my phone around the steering wheel so tightly that my knuckles turned white. My voice was gruff and uneven when I told her, “I’ll feed you whatever you want to eat, Poppy.”
She made a strangled noise and then cleared her throat. “I have to get back to work. I have a group meeting after work tonight, so I won’t be by your place until after seven or so.” She hesitated for a second and then quietly handed over, “My favorite is cheeseburgers. I could eat them every day of the week.”
She didn’t look like she’d had a cheeseburger in years but if that’s what she wanted I would make sure she had the best one Denver had to offer. “Cheeseburgers it is. I’ll text you my address and see you later tonight.”
She mumbled a hasty good-bye and I hung up, anger at everything she’d had to suffer through coursing thick and heated through my blood. She deserved so much better and I was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that I really wanted to be the one to give it to her.
Thoughts firmly on Poppy and what other kinds of horrors she’d had to endure through the course of her marriage, I drove through downtown Denver and made my way to my garage.
Back when I was younger and Zeb and I had too much time and too much youthful curiosity on our hands, we’d spent many a night at illegal parties held in this very same building. The place had history, both personal and collective, so it meant the world to me that I’d been able to save it. The ancient brick had been slated for demolition so that some developer could come in and build more trendy condos and shops to cater to the LoDo sprawl. I’d scraped together enough money from the sale of my first full rebuild outside of school. It was a 1970 Barracuda that was still winning medals at car shows across the country, to lease the space for a year. I continued that pattern for five years—build, sell, pay for the lease on the building, barely getting by until I got hooked up with Nash Donovan and Rowdy St. James. It started out as a mutual admiration for muscle cars and ink and turned into something that allowed me to get my hands around a major part of my dream. Those two introduced me to Rome Archer, who came at me with a business offer I would have been a fool to turn down. Rome wanted to be a silent partner in the garage. He helped me buy the building outright and set me up so that instead of bleeding money back into the business, I could actually start earning a real living. Rome was the only reason I was able to finally afford a down payment on a house. I owed those Marked Men more than they would ever know.
I parked in the spot that was designated for my Caddy. There was a small office attached to the garage where customers could wait and where the gal that handled all the paperwork and scheduling of projects worked. I’d tried to set Kallie up in that position, thinking the garage could be ours, that we could make our dreams come true together, but she barely lasted a week before I’d had more than one of my guys threaten to quit if she wasn’t gone. She hated how dirty the garage was and she didn’t give two shits about the classics we worked our asses off to breathe new life into. The girl drove a freaking Audi, for God’s sake, even when I offered to find her and build her whatever she wanted. I should have known then it wasn’t meant to be. It was a beautiful car but it had no soul and no story.
Snorting at the thought, I stopped short when a baby-blue Hudson Hornet came pulling in through the open gates. It was a ’53 if my guess was right, and I was pretty sure that it was. It was an incredibly rare year, so rare that this was the only one I’d seen outside of a hot-rod magazine or a car show. I watched the car roll to a stop next to the Eldorado and took a minute to admire it. I was named after this car, at least that was what my mom told me in one of her few lucid moments when the drugs and demons I couldn’t see loosened their hold on her.
A man stepped out, tall, with salt-and-pepper hair, silver sideburns, and expensive mirrored sunglasses covering his eyes. He was dressed in jeans and a dark canvas coat much like the one Happy had ruined last night over the unofficial almost-winter uniform of all Coloradans, a button up flannel over a thermal. I thought he looked vaguely familiar but so many people came in and out of the garage, a lot of them just wanting to look, that I couldn’t be sure we’d ever met before.
I lifted my chin in greeting. “Nice ride.”
He repeated the gesture. “If that’s yours then I return the sentiment.” He indicated the Eldorado with the flick of his fingers.
I shrugged. “It’s mine. She was the first rebuild I ever did. My high school shop teacher felt sorry for me and let me buy her for a song right before graduation. He helped me finish her up and to this day he stops by once a month to see how we’re both holding up.”
The man made a face that I couldn’t read and shifted his weight on his feet. He seemed nervous but I didn’t have time to stand around chatting about my Caddy. I had a Wayfarer that I was trying to restore and finding parts for the old girl had proven to be a real bitch.
“If you need something specific, go in and talk to Molly, my receptionist. She can point you in the right direction. I can tell you now I don’t have any original parts for a Hudson on hand but I know a guy that is a wizard when
