Daddy's Little Liar - Maren Smith Page 0,7

garage, listening with increasing guilt as he pulled into the driveway to make the phone call to order her new head gasket. The first place he called didn’t have one, but the second one did.

“Twelve fifty,” he said, briefly tucking the phone against his chest while he cleared the cost with her. “I’ll cut you a deal on my labor, but the total is going to run you about fifteen hundred.”

If she opened her mouth, she’d throw up. She nodded instead, keeping silent about her guilt and her lack of finances.

He helped her down from of his truck like a gentleman. She felt like such a fraud. This had to be one of the ugliest things she’d yet done in her life, but it just wasn’t so ugly to force a confession out of her before he’d repaired her car.

Enduring the white-hot agony of putting her heels back on, she followed him back to the garage, then steered her car into an open stall while he put his muscular back into pushing.

Her time to say things dwindled as he got his tools ready, then her hood was propped up, and he fit the first socket to the first bolt. The next thing Georgia knew, her engine was in carefully gathered pieces on the floor around her tires, her faulty head gasket was off, and her window to come clean upfront about her situation was gone.

He didn’t even know—if he had, she was pretty sure the things he’d be saying to her right now would not have been gentle or concerned.

“I wish you’d sit down. You’re not doing your ankle any favors, and you did promise you’d put your leg up.”

“I’m too upset to sit.”

He looked up from her disassembled engine block.

“I’ll be okay,” she said weakly. That felt like a lie, too, but as fiercely as the pain was throbbing through the whole of her, no longer contained to her horribly bruised ankle, the guilt felt worse.

Shaking his head, he finished what he was doing, gathered his tools, and set them aside.

“That’s it,” he said, wiping dirty hands on an equally dirty rag. “That’s as far as I can go until I get the part tomorrow. So…” coming around the hood of her car, he stopped directly in front of her, still wiping his hands, still smiling, but with a look in his unsmiling eyes that made her already queasy stomach flip and drop to the floor. “You want to talk about the elephant in the room?”

He knew. She’d never felt so caught, so relieved, or so sick and disgusted with herself all at one time.

“Sleeping arrangements,” he declared.

She hadn’t realized how far she’d come out from under that crushing mantle until the guilt came crashing back down on top of her again, even heavier than before.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m going to close up shop now,” he told her. “I figure if you had someone you could call, you wouldn’t still be standing here, and the nearest hotel is forty miles down the road.”

Georgia blinked. Her chest was so tight, she could barely draw a shaky breath. As consumed as she’d been with how she was going to pay for this, she hadn’t thought about what she was going to do from now until morning. She definitely couldn’t afford a hotel. Right now, she couldn’t see how she’d ever be able to afford anything ever again.

“I can sleep in my car.” She tried to smile, but her face was too brittle.

“My liability went through the roof the second I let you walk back here,” he told her bluntly. “If my insurance found out I let a customer sleep in my shop, I’d be canceled.”

“I won’t tell them.”

“No, you won’t… because I won’t let it happen.” Heaving a sigh, his eyes narrowed a bit as he studied her again. “Look, I get it, okay. I understand. You want to spend the night on the porch. I won’t pressure you otherwise. I could pitch a tent for you in the backyard and let you borrow a sleeping bag. Or if you want to take the risk and trust that I’ll conduct myself like the gentleman my mama raised, I have a fairly comfortable couch you can crash on. I also have some leftover lasagna in the fridge I could heat up and will even give you the local sheriff’s number. He lives two houses down, but I promise, if you need to call him, it won’t be because I gave you a reason to.”

She