with herself.
“There’s no problem so great a good mind can’t solve it,” she said to herself, quoting Mitch. With new confidence she picked up the ringing telephone.
Okay, she might be in the shadow of her gorgeous younger sister, Chelsea, who the world and the press could not get enough of. And she was definitely in the shadow of Brandy, who was so bold and adventuresome.
But Jessie had her talents. She was the brainy princess, and K & B Auto—and Garner Blake—were about to find that out! That good-looking oaf didn’t think she could do it. She couldn’t think of a pleasure greater than proving him wrong.
“So, uh, Garner, what do you think?”
He didn’t have to ask, “About what?” Clive, the best mechanic in his shop, looked like a biker and was as mild and shy as a groundhog fresh out of its hole. He and his wife had just had their first baby. Garner had been named godfather.
“She makes lousy coffee,” he said, couching his answer in carefully diplomatic terms. What he was thinking was I hate rich girls.
In just a few moments of acquaintance she had called him mucky and tacky. The business he had spent his whole life building had been reduced to a mess and a mistake. She hadn’t even known she was being insulting. She’d just been exercising that unconscious superiority of the very rich.
“I like the coffee,” Clive said with just a touch of stubbornness. “Garner, you try being nice for a change, or she’ll up and quit like all the rest of them.”
We can only hope. Garner had chosen not to mention to these guys that their new office manager was one of those Kings. It would bring up a whole lot of questions that he didn’t know how to answer.
“I ain’t working here another week if you keep on trying to do all the jobs, including billing, booking and answering the phone.”
Garner tried not to groan. Clive was going to make his stand over this girl, the one he needed to get rid of? Resentfully, he reminded himself that his loyalty to this man who was threatening to quit was part of the reason he found himself in this predicament in the first place.
“Look, I’ll run the business, you pull the wrenches.”
“I miss your aunt,” Clive said glumly.
Garner’s aunt Mattie had done the office managing since he was a child. She was old and efficient and not the least distracting. Imagine her abandoning K & B for the dubious pleasure of marrying Arnold Hefflinger and moving to Quartzsite, Arizona! She’d given fair notice, but somehow Garner hadn’t taken her seriously, or understood exactly how much she did and how hard she was going to be to replace, until it was too late.
“Them last two gals left in tears,” Clive said, faint warning in the look he sent Garner.
But Garner could only hope it had been good practice for getting rid of this one. Though even as he thought it, he knew he didn’t ever want to see Jessica King’s big green eyes filming with tears.
Spitting with anger was another thing altogether.
“The second one looked awful good in a miniskirt,” Clive remembered wistfully.
Garner sighed. Something they weren’t going to have to worry about with Jessica King. She wasn’t the miniskirt kind. In fact she looked like she had taken a wrong turn on the way to finding her kindergarten class—not what he’d expected at all. But those rich kids could be real good at that—the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing game.
Still, he’d expected, as a King princess, she would have been a whole lot flashier. Manicure, makeup, clothes, hair, jewelry. Jessica’s hair had been a pretty color, but short, flattened to her head in a very unflattering manner. The boxy, refrigeratorlike design of the suit had successfully disguised any lines beneath it, which was a good thing. Her nails had been neat and filed. The only jewelry had been that ring.
She had the attitude, though, in spades. Mucky, tacky and messy, he reminded himself.
“I hope she brings cookies to work,” Clive said.
“That girl hasn’t ever baked a cookie in her life,” Garner said.
“What would make you say that?” Clive asked innocently.
Garner stifled a snort. One thing he knew for sure: Rich girls did not bake cookies.
But Clive saved him from having to reply by shuffling off to his bay, where Mrs. Fannie Klippenhopper’s thirty-year-old Impala was up on the hoist.
Aunt Mattie, of course, had provided cookies. Cookies and comfort. She had been part den mother and part drill sergeant and the sad fact of the matter was she was going to be irreplaceable as the office manager of K & B Auto.
He was willing to bet Jake King’s daughter not only hadn’t ever baked a cookie, she hadn’t ever canned peaches, ridden a public bus or worried over a bill, either. Despite her rather surprising academic achievement, normal—like working the front end of a garage—would not be in her life experience. Normal to her was probably denting a very expensive car and walking away from it with a shrug and an oh well.
Unwillingly, the look on her face when he’d zipped up his coveralls in front of her came to mind.
If he didn’t know better he would have called it hunger.
She had poked a rather delectable tongue out between lips that he’d already been misguided enough to touch. Those lips had been plump and sensuous, and that had been before she licked them.
“Sheesh,” he said to himself.
From the size of that rock on her finger, she was very engaged.
Dumb was bad for an office manager, but complicated was way, way worse.
And complicated was his mind insisting on asking questions that were none of his business. Like why did a girl wearing a ring like that look so, well, not in love? None of that telltale glow and way too interested in a man who was not her fiancé zipping up his pants. Plus chocolate before nine in the morning? That woman was not happy.
Rich women were never happy.
His mother had been the first to teach him that lesson, but he’d insisted on repeating it several times, most recently with Kathy-Anne Rice-Chapman.
Besides, the plain fact of the matter was, even without the complication of Jessica being Jake King’s daughter, Garner did not consider himself good at reading the intricacies of the female of his species, with the possible exception of Aunt Mattie. Though he’d even misread his good aunt. He’d thought she was staying forever, pure and simple. Though his daddy had warned him, a long, long time ago there was no such thing as a woman who stayed forever, and Garner’s mother had been a case in point.
Jessica King had been here only moments, and Garner realized he was contemplating the most miserable moments of his life. It was not a good omen.
Garner Blake was good with cars. He read cars the way scholars read books. He could rebuild an old one until it purred like a kitten. He could ferret out the most elusive of mechanical problems. When parts didn’t exist he could manufacture them. There was a science of sorts to cars. As far as he could tell,
