“You came in here back in November all piss and vinegar. I’ve watched you go through a hell of a lot more than most twenty-year-old girls would ever deal with—”
“I’ll be twenty-two in January.”
“Yeah, yeah. Twenty. Twenty-two. Same difference. You’re still a kid.”
“I don’t feel like a kid. I don’t feel like I’ve been a kid in a really long time.”
“I didn’t say you act like one,” Tate said. “Just that you’re a hell of a lot younger than me. You’re tough and you’re strong. I admire the way you’ve handled all this shit. But I’ve seen the doubt creep in. I’ve seen you grapple with your conscience. It’s natural. It’s what makes you human. You still love your old man. No crime in that. Someday you need to go down there and visit him. Put this thing to rest.”
I had no idea that Tate saw all that. Maybe he had observed a lot more than I’d expected, yet he had kept it under his hat all this time. “He won’t want to see me. He’ll never forgive me.”
“You don’t need his forgiveness. You need to find a way to forgive yourself. You can’t do that by running away.”
I let that sink in for a minute. It sounded familiar. “Is this the kind of stuff you told Connor?”
“Close enough.”
“You only hired me because of Connor.” An abrupt change of subject, my specialty.
“And I only keep you on because you’re good at your job.”
It was the first time he’d ever acknowledged that, and it meant a lot to me. “Thanks, Tate.”
“No problem.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “You wanna tell me about the black Escalade?”
“The black Escalade?” I cleared my throat. Playing dumb wouldn’t fly with Tate. “We don’t need to talk about that.”
He raised his brows. Maybe he thought I was in trouble. “It’s not…I’m not doing anything illegal.”
I mentally rolled my eyes. I sounded like a dork.
“Well, thanks for the chat, Tate.” I returned the orange chair to the corner and opened the office door behind me. “I need to get to work. My boss is a slave driver. So yeah, I’m just gonna go now.” I backed out of the office with a little wave.
His mouth twitched with amusement. “Okay, you do that.”
“Okey dokey.”
“And Keira?”
I poked my head back in the doorway.
“I’ve got a job for you.”
Oh, no. No, no, no. Please don’t let it be what I think it is.
He stood and gestured that I should go ahead of him and sure enough, he steered me toward a black Porsche 911 that had been brought in earlier.
“I need you to detail it.”
Was this punishment? Was he trying to make a point?
“Martin does all the detailing,” I pointed out. Unlike me, Martin loved detailing cars. I craned my neck, looking for Martin to come to the rescue and claim this job as his own. But he was nowhere to be seen.
“Martin ain’t here. I’m busy. Pete’s busy. Phil’s busy. So that leaves you. You good with that?”
It was a rhetorical question, but I answered anyway. “Yeah, sure.”
I wasn’t good with that because detailing cars was my least favorite job in the garage. Detailing a Porsche 911 that looked almost identical to the one I borrowed from my father, except for the color, made the prospect even less appealing. But I wasn’t a spoiled princess from Miami, and I wasn’t about to act like one, so I hooked myself up to my music and got to work without grumbling about it.
