Joy Ride(4)

I laugh. “I don’t know. I didn’t check to see how that added up for them.”

“Nor did I. My focus was always on the work.”

“As well it should have been.”

“That’s what you taught me.”

“I’m glad you learned that lesson.”

“I learned so many lessons from you.”

I take a deep breath and change directions. “What was up with the badass tiger comment out of nowhere? Couldn’t you just wait till I was done to say hello?”

She winks. “C’mon. I was just having fun.”

“Fun? More like trying to get involved in everything.”

She feigns shock and dances her fingertips along the hood of Wagner’s car. “I was merely being helpful and trying to land you a client. Don’t you remember? I was always trying to help you.”

I park my hands on my hips. “Why do I feel like you’re here more to taunt me than to deliver generous humanitarian aid?”

She clasps a hand to her chest. Her ample chest. “Taunt? Me? I was just excited to say hello to my former mentor. Forgive me for my exuberance,” she says, in a too-sweet tone. “How are you these days?”

“I can’t complain.” I don’t know what to make of her, and I don’t know that I want to let her in. “What about you? It’s been a while.”

“Five years. Three weeks. And two days. But who’s counting?”

“Sounds like you are.”

She shrugs as if it’s no big deal, then pops up on the hood and parks her sweet ass on Wagner’s car. Wagner won’t care. He likes pretty ladies, especially when they’re on his prized ride. The problem is he’ll probably want to bang Henley when he returns from signing autographs, and that’s not going to fucking happen on my watch.

Not that I have any control over who she’s banging. But I’ll do everything I can to make sure it’s not a client of mine who gets his hands on her.

“What brings you to this neck of the woods?” Last I heard from her she’d gone back home to Northern California to work with a rival builder there.

She points her thumb in the general direction of Clint Savage, a burly, bearded, foul-mouthed motherfucker who kills it with some of the hottest custom rides on the planet. “I’m just booth bitching at Savage Rides,” Henley says.

“Yeah?” That surprises me, but I don’t let on. Henley had never been just a pretty set of legs and tits at a show. She was under the hood, working on the engine, getting her hands dirty.

She nods and smiles. “He has me pose on top of the cars. We clean up like that.” She snaps her fingers.

“Is that so?”

She runs her eyes up and down my body. Checks out the tribal bands on my biceps. Lingers on my chest. Well, my T-shirt. I’m not some ass who parades shirtless at a car show. I save that for when I drive with the top down. No, seriously. Do I look like a douche? I don’t drive shirtless, either.

She straightens her spine and hops off the car. “No.” That’s all she says, but that one word comes out exactly like “No, you idiot.”

I sigh. She still fucking hates me. “What are you doing here, then?”

She narrows her eyes. “You think you’re the only game in town? I run a shop now in New York.”

I didn’t keep tabs on her when she walked away in a cloud of black smoke, and I figured it was best for me not to stalk her. I needed to stay away from the kind of temptation she brought to work every day. “Good for you.”

She sets one hand on her hip and stares at me defiantly. “You really thought I was a booth babe?”

“You said you were here as one.”

She huffs. “You never thought much of me, did you?”

You don’t want to know the half of it. You don’t want to know how much I thought of you and how much of it was vastly inappropriate.

“Henley,” I say, keeping my tone measured, “you were the most talented apprentice I ever worked with. I thought the world of your skills, and you know it.”

She sneers, and then she pokes me. She stabs her index finger against my chest, her red-polished nail scratching me and instantly stirring up not-safe-for-work fantasies of her nails down my chest then my back.

“Actions speak louder than words. And yours made it clear you never thought I was good enough,” she says.

I let my gaze drift away from her eyes, down to her neck, then to her shoulder. She follows my path, then I say, “I see you haven’t had that chip removed yet from your shoulder. I know a doctor who can take care of that for you.”

Her eyebrows shoot into her hairline, but her voice is even. “Thanks for the tip. I’ll be sure to think of you first when I’m ready to take it off, seeing as you’re the reason I have one in the first place.”