reassert himself in that space, but all he got was disorientation akin to what he’d felt in the hospital upon waking after being blown up by that mother-humping frag...
“Kyle?” Harmony’s gaze had zeroed in on his. She stilled.
All trace of relaxation was lost. So taut was he from head to toe, he felt like a live, loose electric line, crackling and precarious.
Yellow lights were flashing behind his eyes. Danger Ahead, the signs read, one after the other. He tried to get the message across to his body. Half of it was log-jammed by panic. The other was need-bound and gluttonously wondering still what that strawberry would taste like if he leaned forward...and nibbled...
You sick bastard.
The words were in his head, but they sounded doubly like Gavin.
Unlocking the breath trapped in his lungs, he exhaled tumultuously. Her honey-crisp eyes were out of focus, but they were there, framed by thick black fringe he’d never noticed before. There was a tiny beauty mark trapped like a tear beneath her right eye. How had he missed that?
Invoke ninja smoke. “Thanks, I gotta go.” One sentence rear-ended the other as he stood, removing the towel she’d draped over his shoulders before the trim.
Harmony rose, too, and touched the collar of his shirt. “I didn’t nick you, did I?”
“No. You’re fine. I’m fine.” He nearly ran into the jamb of the doorway that led from her kitchen to her living room.
One forbidden mouth. Years of training, instinct and self-awareness in the toilet.
“You forgot your hat,” she pointed out, chasing him with it.
“Thanks.” He squashed it down over his new do. Don’t follow me, woman. If you know what’s good for you, you will not follow me.
“You’ll come back, right?” she asked from the door as he found the screen door of her porch.
Doubling back, he asked, “Come back?”
“For mac-and-cheese,” she reminded him. “Bea’ll be devastated if you don’t.”
“Ah, yeah. Rain check on that.” Because she waited, he realized how rude he was being. It wasn’t her fault he hadn’t been with a woman in so long his testosterone had gone loafing after her. Holding the screen wide, he leaned against the rising wind that wanted to rap it shut and trap him in her comely circle. “I owe you.”
“You’re back,” she said in answer. “A haircut and macaroni are small change compared to Bea’s Kyle home from battle.”
It snagged him, the thought of Bea dreaming her dreams and climbing up on his shoulders to touch the moon. “Tell her I’ll see her. Tomorrow night. You’ll need to get your shutters up.”
“You let me worry about the shutters,” she told him, “and get your butt over here for dinner. Deal?”
Kyle nodded. “You all right, Carrots? Out here alone?”
The slant of her eyes narrowed further. “Locked and loaded.” And with a salute, she added, “Petty Officer, sir.”
“That’s Chief Petty Officer to you, ma’am.” Kyle touched the brim of his hat and backed down the steps when a laugh answered. It was a laugh timbered in brass like the tubes of the wind chimes she’d hung from the eaves of the porch tossing against the rising wind. It was a “crazy person” laugh. A “don’t give a damn” laugh. It was his favorite laugh in the world.
It was one of the myriad items he could add to the list of the sexy things he’d never noticed were sexy about Harmony. And that was bad. Real, real bad.
* * *
BRACKEN MECHANICS DIDN’T look like much, but the family business had been Kyle’s home away from home for most of his existence. In case the building itself didn’t draw enough attention, the vintage lineup of cars outside did. Shiny, waxed—they were just a few of his father’s many toys. But the garage itself was modest, a block structure made of rust-colored brick crowned only by the Bracken logo.
Kyle had learned everything there was to know about car engines, domestic and foreign, under its unpretentious roof. Long before training courses at Coronado, he’d learned how to maneuver in a stick shift versus an automatic, how to draw as much horsepower out of a car’s engine without overworking it and how to fix most motorized problems known to man.
When restless nights following deployment stalked him on land, there was one last vestige of peace to strike at. That was suiting up in a pair of coveralls and getting greasy beneath the hood of whatever the motley crew his father had long-employed was working on at the garage.
“Manifold’s cracked,” Murph “Hickory” Scott said, the words muffled somewhat by a wad of Copenhagen. He snorted, giving Kyle an earful of nasal congestion. He was Marines, retired, hard as hickory—true to his moniker—and still carried Vietnam with him behind the patch over his left eye. The shrapnel bugged him at the onset of rain, so today he was more ornery than usual. “Distributor cap, too.”
“Made in America.” Kyle leaned against the open hood, elbows down. “Parts’ll be easy to come by. It’s just cleaning her up. That’ll be the trick.”
Wayne “Pappy” Frye beamed at the thought. “Yes, sir. Needs everything down to seat cushions.” He didn’t look it, but Pappy was approaching eighty, a hobby-man who had taken the job alongside Hick in Bracken Mechanics’s early years, not because he needed revenue but because he worshipped cars. Like all Bracken employees, Pappy was as good as family. But as Kyle’s ex-fiancée’s grandfather, Pappy and Kyle had nearly been family by law.
Pappy kicked the treads of the old Trans Am. “Good tires.” He caught Kyle’s eye. “Have you heard about her mystery origins?”
“A lady of intrigue?” When Hick grunted and chewed, Kyle pushed up from his elbows to the heels of his hands in interest. “Don’t keep it to yourselves.”
Pappy and Hick exchanged glances. When the latter raised his brows, Pappy took it upon himself to illuminate Kyle on the subject. “Two days ago, Mavis came in early for some filing business and found this beaut waiting patiently outside. A Trans Am wasn’t on the roster, so she called your dad up to ask if he knew anything about it.”
“Did he?” Kyle asked.
“She said he was as surprised as she was,” Pappy elaborated, “but asked no further questions, insisting on seeing it for himself. Later that morning, we found him standing much as you are now having a look under the lady’s bonnet. I asked him if he knew whose car it was. He would only say it belonged to an old friend.”
“He’s got a good many of those,” Kyle speculated. His father had once worked the underbelly of the GTA circuit. Then after getting cleaned up, he’d worked for NASCAR, among other things, before returning home to Fairhope and building a respectful name for himself through small business.
“Yes, but this one seemed...sentimental,” Pappy continued. “We’re guessing this old friend isn’t an old rival at the poker tables.” He exchanged another look with Hick. “We were hoping you might settle the mystery. If he’s bound to tell anyone other than your mother, it’s you.”
Kyle pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes as he stood back from the car. He crossed his arms, feet spread. James wasn’t in the shop today; he was out at the airfield. Kyle might’ve liked to have been there if last night’s conversation hadn’t lingered. The walk after hadn’t quite done what it was supposed to, and, despite the brief clutch of tranquility he’d felt at Harmony and Bea’s, the odd turn of events there had made him doubly agitated.
He was barely fresh off a homecoming, but he needed to get his head right before he returned to The Farm or his family. Maybe most especially to Harmony and her strawberry-shaped mouth.
Goddamn. He shifted slightly when the image hit and made him taut in the