“Shit.” With every breath creating a foggy cloud in the frigid midnight air, Mads Daniels closed her eyes long enough to offer up a silent prayer. Then, as her teeth began to chatter, she turned the key in her Corolla’s ignition once more.
Vrrrrrrrrmm.
Vrr. Rrr.
Silence.
“Shit.” Furiously she hit the steering wheel with her mittened hand. When that didn’t help, she loosed another fog-creating breath and tried to think. Obviously she should have gotten this taken care of earlier, when she’d had trouble starting her car before heading into work. But at the time all she’d wanted to do was to get to House Of Payne so she wouldn’t let any of her clientele down. Now that her shift was over, and the employee parking lot was almost empty—and the temperature was now in that oh, so fun range where the term negative was a necessity—she could lament her shortsightedness at her leisure.
Damn, it was cold.
A sharp knock on her window had her nearly jumping out of her seat.
“Hey.” Breath fogging in the night lit by security lights, a scowling man bent to peer through the driver’s window. “You need some help?”
“Uh.” For a full second, Mads stared at the shadowy figure. Hulking shoulders, dark stubble that bordered on being a beard, seriously strong dark brows that Zachary Quinto would have killed for, and a black newsboy flat cap covering thick, dark brown hair. She’d only been working at House Of Payne for about four months, but this was one face she knew better than her own.
Sage “the rage machine” McCormick.
“Sage.” She said his name out loud for the first time ever, then wondered if she was crazy for thinking how good it felt tripping off her tongue. “Geez, you scared me.”
“What’s that? Roll down your window, I can’t hear you.”
One push on the window’s button told her what she already knew. Her car had died, and it was now nothing more than a big-ass paperweight.
Because of course.
“Fuck.” Grinding her teeth, she opened the car door and stepped out into the bitterly cold night. Dirty ice crunched under her booted feet, and she ducked her chin into her scarf in a feeble attempt to hide from the icy wind. “I said, you scared me. And, uh, my car won’t start.”
“And your windows won’t roll down, obviously.” He flicked a gloved hand toward the door she’d just closed. “Pop the hood. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
“Pop the…? Okay.” Trying not to sound too dubious, Mads crawled back behind the wheel, then took a second to figure out where the hell the Corolla’s hood latch was. Aha. “Not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything, but since when does a tattooist know his way around a car?”
“Since the tattooist in question spent his teenage years in a family-owned garage a few blocks off the Vegas Strip,” came the absent reply as he felt for the safety latch and hauled the hood up. “I was helping with tune-ups and oil changes at Woodbridge Automotive before I could drive. Your terminals are all corroded, by the way. How old is this battery?”
She climbed back out of her car to stare at him, her mittened fingers curling around the car’s doorframe. “Before I answer, I have a serious question. Do people usually know the age of their car’s batteries? Because I find that weird.”
“Translation—it’s old. Probably too old to safely give it a jump, considering all the corrosion build-up.” He stared into the mysterious depths of her car a moment longer before nodding once and dropping the hood back down into place. “Okay. Get your shit. I’ll drive you home.”
Whoa. “Wait, what? You mean it’s not fixable?”
“Don’t get excited, Daniels, it’s totally fixable. Just not at fucking midnight.”
Daniels? “Yeah, but…”
“But what? Hurry up, I’m freezing my balls off here.”
She stared at him, wishing she didn’t find his angular, scowling face so damn fascinating. “Look, don’t worry about it. I’ll just call a tow truck—”
“Yeah, good luck with that.”
She shot him a wary glance. “Care to explain that?”
“On a night like this, with subzero temps and the wind making it even worse, there’ve got to be hundreds of stranded drivers across the city, calling for help because of dead batteries. You’re going to be waiting here at least a couple hours for a truck, in the dark and in the cold. That is, if they can get to you at all. In good conscience, I can’t leave you here when I can just drop you