LITMIR.BIZ

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as fast as hers, but she could also feel him fill his lungs with air.

      “Breathe in. Breathe out.” Vince was big and warm and calm, and completely different than Dan. He’d never be a slave to fashion. He’d never take credit for someone else’s work. He’d never put his hands on a woman with intent to do damage.

      In a distant part of her brain, somewhere where things weren’t pounding, Harley’s mother recited one of her Southern lectures. Life is hard, baby girl. You need to find yourself a big, strong man to lean on when times get tough.

      Finding big, strong men was something of a specialty of Harley’s. It was finding the ones she could lean on forever that eluded her.

      “That’s it,” Vince reassured her.

      Vince was strong, too. He looked like he could play tight end for the Houston Texans. He smelled of fresh-cut wood and hard work. And he sounded the way Disney princes should—reliable, honorable, understanding.

      Two out of three...

      “Your hair lies,” she murmured. It promised empathy and happily-ever-afters.

      She should never have broken the no coworker rule in her dating handbook. But Vince had that hair and that smile and that self-confidence slightly older men with their act together seemed to have.

      “Are you dizzy? Nauseous? Bleeding?” His fingers explored the back of her head and found—

      “Ouch.” She held her breath until the pain passed. “Give...me...a...minute.” And then she’d ask Vince to stop touching her.

      “Take as long as you need.”

      She was afraid she’d take as long as he let her, which just wouldn’t do. She was Harley O’Hannigan. She was tough, independent and wasn’t the kind of woman who expected flowers or pretty words or who waited for men to open the door.

      Harley sighed and put some space between them. “Thanks.”

      “My pleasure.”

      She shot him with a sideways scowl.

      “I meant...” Vince held up his hands, revealing scraped and bloodied knuckles. “I haven’t had a good fight in a while.” He grinned. It was lopsided and devilish, and made her girlish fantasies flutter foolishly inside her chest.

      Mr. Carrots was a fighter? How had she not known this?

      I didn’t know him at all.

      “You should press charges.”

      A new sensation banged around her chest. Embarrassment. “I can’t afford the time off from work to fill out police reports or show up in court.” What a flimsy fib. “Which makes me sound—”

      “Practical.”

      There he went, being nice again. This time it sent tears to her eyes. She didn’t want his pity or his kind words. That would destroy the carefully constructed image she had of herself as The Woman Who Could Do Anything.

      Which in hindsight was a lie, too.

      “How about we call it a day?” Vince stood and offered a hand to help her up, flashing that grin that’d gotten her into trouble a few weeks ago. “Pack your tools and let’s get out of here. First beer’s on me.”

      Harley shook her throbbing head, pushing to her feet with the aid of the wall. “Thanks for the offer, but we both know that’s not happening.”

      “No worries.” The grin disappeared and, just for a moment, she thought he looked disappointed. “But we are getting out of here. Pack up your tools. I’ll lock up.”

      Agreeing with Vince that she’d finished for the day, Harley loaded her tools into a bucket and headed for the driveway where she’d left her tile saw. It’d been hot inside the house, but it was hotter outside in the sun. It beat down on her head as if its goal was to melt her out of existence.

      Speaking of existence, the table she’d clamped the tile saw to had been upended. And dragged. And shoved half into the bushes.

      “No. Oh, no.” Harley’s stomach fell and fell and fell, all the way to the pavement. Her bucket clattered next to it. She needed that saw to make a living.

      She righted the saw, which was still plugged in, and turned it on. It ka-clunked a bunch of times and began smoking. She shut it off and stared at it, unable to move.

      “That doesn’t sound good.” Vince approached her, carrying a bulky black tool bag. His eyes narrowed. “I wondered what all that racket was when he left.”

      “Dan... He smashed it.” The same way he’d sort of smashed her.

      “There are two things a man needs,” Vince said. “Pride and honor. This Dan has too much of one and none of the other.”

      Harley nodded miserably.

      Vince peered at the saw. “This is totaled. You sure you don’t want to press charges against your boyfriend?”

      A weight dropped on Harley’s shoulders so hard and heavy she didn’t correct his presumption about Dan. “I... Can’t you fix it?” By tomorrow when she had to tile the outdoor kitchen? Vince was always fixing something for Jerry, their boss.

      Vince set down his tool bag and examined her saw. “See those dents in the casing? When it collapses like that, parts inside get damaged.”

      “I can’t afford a new one.” She’d gone from a starting architect’s salary to a tiler’s paycheck. And she’d just put a new truck transmission on her credit card.

      “You can take it to that shop on Polk. They’ll give you money for whatever parts they can salvage and apply it toward the purchase of a new one.”

      She couldn’t afford that, either, not without a second job. Until then, she’d be cutting tile with a low-tech manual saw and nippers. “Thanks for the advice.”

      Demoralized, Harley released the base from the table and carried the dead saw to her truck, returning for her tool bucket and the worktable.

      If only she could figure out how to make playhouse balconies float on air.

      Vince was still loading his stuff into his truck’s lockbox when Harley opened the creaky door to her hot cab and climbed in. She missed her Lexus. She missed auto-start and powerful air-conditioning. She turned the key in the ignition.

      Nothing. Not so much as a tick of the starter.

      She missed reliability.

      “Not today,” she muttered. The truck was finicky. It didn’t like to run when the temperature dropped to the thirties or in thunderstorms, but the day had been hot, the skies clear. “Come on, baby,” she chided the old vehicle.

      Don’t leave me stranded with Mr. Carrots and that grin.

      Vince locked up his tools and leaned on his truck, staring at hers.

      Still nothing. Her backside was growing damp with sweat.

      Vince came forward. He walked with the swagger of a man who knew what his purpose was in life. And, right now, that purpose was to rescue a damsel in distress.

      “Pop the hood.”

      She did, hopping out and joining him at the grille. Not that she knew anything about engines. Her mechanical ability stopped at turning power tools off and on.

      Vince tsked and gave Harley a look that disapproved and teased at the same time.

      “Hey, don’t judge,” she said. “It runs.”

      “It’s not running now.” He drew a blue rag from his back pocket. It was the kind of scrap mechanics used to wipe their hands and touch hot engines. “You might want to spray your engine off every once in a while.” He used the rag to check battery connections, hose connections and to prod the engine compartment as if he knew what he was doing.

      “I

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