Chasing Dreams. Cara Colter

he didn’t know better he would have called it hunger.

      She had poked a rather delectable tongue out between lips that he’d already been misguided enough to touch. Those lips had been plump and sensuous, and that had been before she licked them.

      “Sheesh,” he said to himself.

      From the size of that rock on her finger, she was very engaged.

      Dumb was bad for an office manager, but complicated was way, way worse.

      And complicated was his mind insisting on asking questions that were none of his business. Like why did a girl wearing a ring like that look so, well, not in love? None of that telltale glow and way too interested in a man who was not her fiancé zipping up his pants. Plus chocolate before nine in the morning? That woman was not happy.

      Rich women were never happy.

      His mother had been the first to teach him that lesson, but he’d insisted on repeating it several times, most recently with Kathy-Anne Rice-Chapman.

      Besides, the plain fact of the matter was, even without the complication of Jessica being Jake King’s daughter, Garner did not consider himself good at reading the intricacies of the female of his species, with the possible exception of Aunt Mattie. Though he’d even misread his good aunt. He’d thought she was staying forever, pure and simple. Though his daddy had warned him, a long, long time ago there was no such thing as a woman who stayed forever, and Garner’s mother had been a case in point.

      Jessica King had been here only moments, and Garner realized he was contemplating the most miserable moments of his life. It was not a good omen.

      Garner Blake was good with cars. He read cars the way scholars read books. He could rebuild an old one until it purred like a kitten. He could ferret out the most elusive of mechanical problems. When parts didn’t exist he could manufacture them. There was a science of sorts to cars. As far as he could tell, women did not come with the same predictable set of rules as the mechanical workings underneath the hood.

      He had spent two days getting out every old box of files and bills he could find to scare Jessica King right off his place. Now he had upped the ante by daring her to last more than two hours. Of course, hearing the mousetrap go off under her desk had made him up his bet.

      “Rich girls do not like rodents,” Garner said cheerfully. He consulted his watch. One hour and fifty-one more minutes to go.

      Garner sank down at his desk, took a sip of coffee and winced. As ungrateful as Clive would be for it, he felt responsible for Clive’s child, or at least for the livelihood of that child’s father. He had not missed the veiled threat in Jake King’s voice during that last phone call. But if she left on her own, gave up, tossed in the towel…

      He sighed. He had his own lawyers researching documents now, but it didn’t look promising.

      “You want what?” his lawyer had said. “Garner, those documents were likely signed two or three decades ago. I don’t think this firm handled it.”

      So why was Jake King digging up decades-old dirt? Garner had known, of course, that Jake owned half the building. Years ago, as soon as he’d cleared up the wreckage of his father’s mismanagement, he’d offered to buy Jake out. The offer had been rejected without explanation. Now this. Did Jake really have a say-so in how Garner ran his business? Did Jake own more than half the building?

      Thinking of the legal tangle that could cause made Garner’s head hurt.

      What was that old devil, Jake King, up to?

      And why on earth would he send his daughter here, straight into the camp of the enemy?

      Maybe he doesn’t like her, Garner mused, but Jessica King did not have the look—or the attitude—of a child not liked. He suspected she had been adored.

      With relief, he remembered he had to look at her damaged car. If she was only going to be here another hour and forty-nine minutes, there needed to be no hitches to her leaving. He abandoned the coffee happily and began to whistle the moment he got behind the wheel.

      Chapter Two

      Jessie glanced at the clock and tried not to moan out loud. It was only ten-thirty. She was exhausted. So far she had made more coffee than Starbucks on a busy morning, and despite the fact she knew darn well it was not particularly good coffee, it kept disappearing.

      She had driven two clients, who were leaving their vehicles at K & B for the day, back to their homes. It had given her an intriguing look at a lovely small town, which she might have enjoyed more if the shop truck, a big and finicky Dodge Diesel, didn’t stall on a hair. Upon delivery to his home, one of the customers had glared at her, slammed the door and limped away holding his neck. Rattled from that, she had gotten lost on a back road of Farewell.

      She’d finally returned to find a description of her job on her desk. As she was frowning over that page-long list of duties, a mechanic, Pete, had come in and wanted a part ordered. Another, Clive, arrived with a work order for a brake job for which she was supposed to figure out the charge. Clive had helpfully showed her an ugly and nearly indecipherable book called the labor book.

      She had not made any headway on the mess, on a pile marked “urgent” apparently by one of her predecessors or on any of the leaning stacks of paper. The phone rang without letting up. To complicate matters more, every time the door opened from the work area, some traitorous part of her clenched in anticipation. It might be him.

      Jessie considered her mind exceedingly disciplined, but this morning it was playing the traitor. It was conjuring visions of Garner Blake’s dark, sardonic eyes, the line of his lip, the broadness of his shoulder. It was hard enough learning a new job without the distraction of a man like that. And even allowing herself to think of him made her feel guilty, as if she was being unfaithful to lovely, sweet, intelligent Mitch.

      So she invented a little game. When Garner Blake’s rather formidable male form crowded into her mind, she would call it a name.

      “Insensitive boor.”

      “Neanderthal.”

      “Self-centered lunkhead.”

      “Poster boy for Mechanics R Us.”

      Of course, she really didn’t know very much about him, but men like that were so easy to read. Self-assured, self-centered, self, self, self, selfish.

      As entertaining as her little game was, the sheer amount of chaos she was trying to dig out from under was making her feel overwhelmed and utterly defeated. She was in way over her head and even felt disturbingly close to tears.

      On the other hand, when she snuck another look at the clock she realized she had only twenty-three minutes to go before she’d won the bet! Though the heat made it unlikely, she was beginning to hope Garner Blake wore long johns, not boxers. After she’d seen him keep his part of the bargain, she could phone her father and tell him she wasn’t staying.

      She had just stripped off her suit jacket, found the Impala in the labor book and figured out how many hours a brake job was slated to take, when the outer door to the shop swung open.

      An elderly gentleman, looking very dapper in his hat and matching sports jacket, came in. He had a dog on a leash. He smiled shyly at her, helped himself to coffee and pulled a stool up to the counter. “I’m Ernie,” he said after a moment, “and this is my dog, Bert. I did that on purpose. Ernie and Bert.”

      “Nice to meet you.” She wasn’t quite sure that it was. He had let go of Bert’s leash and the dog was on her side of the counter, pressing his wet snout under her skirt.

      “Er, can I help you with something?” She tried to push the dog away.

      “Yes. Is there any cream?” Ernie asked shyly, apparently unaware his dog was being exceedingly rude.

      Was there any cream? Was it part of her job to fetch cream in an auto