Daddy's Little Liar - Maren Smith Page 0,6

did her best not to make a sound as she carefully nudged her injured foot out of her shoe. It wasn’t just her ankle swelling like a balloon. Her foot was swelling as well, which meant she was going to have to work to get her shoe back on, but for a few minutes—the instant rush of relief that accompanied the soft thud of her shoe falling over empty until that eventuality—it was a little less painful.

Very little.

No sooner had she lowered her bare foot to rest on the floor of the truck cab than the low, wounded throb started up all over again, the pulse radiating up her leg. It hurt, not just in her ankle, but in her knee, her hip, her freaking teeth—probably because she couldn’t stop gritting them.

Pulling her purse into her lap, she fished out a bottle of aspirin and took three. She had nothing to drink, so she swallowed them dry. She spent the next few minutes watching through the windshield as Daddy popped the hood of her red Camaro to poke around the engine. It took less time for him to diagnose the problem than it did for the car to break down.

“Good news or bad news?” he asked, coming back to hoist himself into the driver’s seat beside her.

“Good,” she said. At this point, she desperately needed it.

“I can fix it,” he decided with such confidence, she couldn’t help but believe him.

“Okay.” She braced herself. “What’s the bad news?”

“You’ve blown your head gasket. You’re looking at about a thousand plus labor. Does your insurance pay for tows?”

A thousand? Georgia froze, then her stomach rolled. Just the sound of that monetary amount felt like a physical blow.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Do you want me to fix it, or do you want me to tow you somewhere else? The next nearest town with a mechanic I don’t mind recommending is thirty-seven miles down the highway, but I guarantee they’re going to charge you more than I will. No pressure, but I can do the work, and I can do it right. What I don’t have is the part, but I can probably get it delivered by tomorrow morning. Barring any problems, I can have you back on your way by early afternoon. So, what do you want to do?”

She wouldn’t make her interview tomorrow morning, but she might salvage it with a phone call to reschedule for later in the day. So that was one problem taken care of.

Problem number two…

“You can do it,” she heard herself say, but her stomach sank. She didn’t have a thousand dollars plus labor to pay him or more to pay someone else. She’d used the tow policy on her insurance once before. They only paid for the first twenty miles. She didn’t know how much an extra seventeen would cost her, but she was pretty sure it was more than what was sitting in her bank account. She folded her arms, covering her mouth. She felt sick.

“Okay, then. Let’s get you back to the garage, so you can put your foot up.”

She needed to tell him she couldn’t pay for it. At the very least, she ought to ask him if he would work on credit or if she could make payment arrangements. Some mechanic places were linked with banks that offered repair loans. She hadn’t seen a bank in town, but that didn’t mean some sort of arrangement couldn’t be made.

Maybe he’d be nice about it.

Maybe he’d stop the truck right now, mid-backup, and instead of getting ready to load her car up, he’d tell her to get out because he didn’t work for free, and it wasn’t fair to expect him to. Small town mechanics had bills, too. They needed to eat like everybody else, and he probably had kids because who else would call him Daddy from time to time? That meant he had a family to support, and men with families didn’t play knight in shining tow truck armor to damsels in vintage muscle car distress. She had a fully restored ’69 Camaro. He’d never believe she was as broke as she honestly was.

She really ought to say something, but letting him load her car up, she salved her conscience with the knowledge her insurance would pay for at least this much of his labor. She wasn’t taking advantage of him.

Not really.

Not yet.

The longer she held her silence, though, the worse this felt. Still, Georgia held her silence all the way back to his