Salvaged. Jay Crownover

around her was me trying to get her to move closer to me. I pushed her to take steps that she needed to take in order for her to be comfortable around me. I wanted to see if there was any way she would be open to something more than our current tense friendship.

      I wanted her, but I wanted her to want me back even more. Partly because I knew I was a safe bet for her once she was ready to jump back into the dating pool. I wouldn’t take advantage of her and had every intention of handling her like I did one of my classics that was on the verge of falling apart. I would tread lightly and deliberately until all the parts were in working order and then I would prime her and make her purr the way she was always meant to. I wasn’t scared of the work and I had every confidence that the end result would be a thing of pure beauty and something that was priceless.

      The phone rang for a long time, and just when I was about to hang up and send a text, the call connected and her breathless voice rushed out a quick “hey.”

      I frowned at my reflection in the side of my car and trapped the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I unlocked and opened the door. “Are you okay?”

      She gave a brittle-sounding laugh. “Uh … I’m fine. I ended up alone in an exam room with a male patient for a little longer than I was comfortable with because the doc had an emergency in another room. The guy’s dog could sense my anxiety and had a little meltdown. You actually called at the perfect time.” She exhaled and I could practically hear her entire body shaking in the way her voice quivered. “You gave me an excuse to get out of the room. I don’t usually freak out so badly at work. I guess that near miss with the guys from the apartment yesterday has me a little on edge. My therapist is going to have a field day with me during our next session. I always think I’m getting better, but then the universe decides to show me that I’m not.”

      I heard a dog bark and she called to someone that she needed five minutes. I hated that she was so hard on herself when her reactions were totally normal considering everything she had been through. “You let me into your apartment last night even after those guys scared the piss out of you. You voluntarily stood in the kitchen with me and you shook my hand. You wouldn’t have done any of those things a couple months ago when we met.” She was moving in the right direction even if she couldn’t see it because she was still looking over her shoulder.

      She breathed out again and her voice was very soft when she told me, “I think that has more to do with you than it does with me.”

      Her words made my heart stutter and skip a beat. I wanted her to trust me but her handing that information over so quickly was unexpected. I didn’t think I’d done a thing to earn her trust yet. I had to clear my throat before I could reply. “I was hoping we could meet up after I get off work tonight and start to work on some kind of schedule with Happy.” I couldn’t hold back the grin when I said the puppy’s name. “I’ll order pizza and make sure you eat dinner.” She went quiet on the other end of the phone and I wanted to kick myself for pushing too hard too fast with her. “I can always come to your place if you’re more comfortable with that.”

      She sighed. “It’s not that.”

      I scowled at myself in the rearview mirror and reminded myself that this was all about the long game with her. She was a good distraction at the moment but I wanted her to be around long after the dust of my currently imploding life settled. “What is it then?”

      I could picture her tugging on her lip and shuffling her feet nervously because her nervous habits were becoming as familiar to me as my own. So hurriedly that the words smooshed together and were barely discernible, she admitted, “I don’t like pizza.”

      Stunned that she was worried about telling me something as simple as that, I found it was my turn to sigh. “Is that all? I’ll order Mexican or Chinese food. Hell, I can even whip up some sandwiches or some mac and cheese.”

      She gave another one of those laughs that sounded shrill and slightly hysterical. “I don’t eat tomatoes. I hate them.”

      I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. “Okay, so pizza sauce is out, but they make white pizza, we can always do that instead.” Getting to know this woman was like walking across a minefield. Every step I took toward her felt like the ground below me might detonate and throw me a thousand steps backward, injured and unable to keep fighting my way toward her.

      She whimpered a little bit and I felt it like a kick in my stomach. I hated how hard something as simple as telling someone else what she did and didn’t like was for her. If her shitbag husband wasn’t already six feet under I would have gladly helped put him there.

      “Oliver loved pizza. He told me it was unnatural and ridiculous that I wouldn’t eat it. He’d demand that we order it for dinner once or twice a week and I’d have to sit and watch him eat while I sat there starving. He always told me if I didn’t want to eat what he provided then I could go hungry.”

      I swore and curled the hand that wasn’t holding my phone around the steering wheel so tightly that my knuckles turned white. My voice was gruff and uneven when I told her, “I’ll feed you whatever you want to eat, Poppy.”

      She made a strangled noise and then cleared her throat. “I have to get back to work. I have a group meeting after work tonight, so I won’t be by your place until after seven or so.” She hesitated for a second and then quietly handed over, “My favorite is cheeseburgers. I could eat them every day of the week.”

      She didn’t look like she’d had a cheeseburger in years but if that’s what she wanted I would make sure she had the best one Denver had to offer. “Cheeseburgers it is. I’ll text you my address and see you later tonight.”

      She mumbled a hasty good-bye and I hung up, anger at everything she’d had to suffer through coursing thick and heated through my blood. She deserved so much better and I was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that I really wanted to be the one to give it to her.

      Thoughts firmly on Poppy and what other kinds of horrors she’d had to endure through the course of her marriage, I drove through downtown Denver and made my way to my garage.

      Back when I was younger and Zeb and I had too much time and too much youthful curiosity on our hands, we’d spent many a night at illegal parties held in this very same building. The place had history, both personal and collective, so it meant the world to me that I’d been able to save it. The ancient brick had been slated for demolition so that some developer could come in and build more trendy condos and shops to cater to the LoDo sprawl. I’d scraped together enough money from the sale of my first full rebuild outside of school. It was a 1970 Barracuda that was still winning medals at car shows across the country, to lease the space for a year. I continued that pattern for five years—build, sell, pay for the lease on the building, barely getting by until I got hooked up with Nash Donovan and Rowdy St. James. It started out as a mutual admiration for muscle cars and ink and turned into something that allowed me to get my hands around a major part of my dream. Those two introduced me to Rome Archer, who came at me with a business offer I would have been a fool to turn down. Rome wanted to be a silent partner in the garage. He helped me buy the building outright and set me up so that instead of bleeding money back into the business, I could actually start earning a real living. Rome was the only reason I was able to finally afford a down payment on a house. I owed those Marked Men more than they would ever know.

      I parked in the spot that was designated for my Caddy. There was a small office attached to the garage where customers could wait and where the gal that handled all the paperwork and scheduling of projects worked. I’d tried to set Kallie up in that position, thinking the garage could be ours, that we could make our dreams come true together, but she barely lasted a week before I’d had more than one of my guys threaten to quit if she wasn’t gone. She hated how dirty the garage was and she didn’t give two shits about the classics we worked our asses off to breathe new life into. The girl drove a freaking Audi, for God’s sake, even when I offered to find her and build her whatever she wanted. I should have known then it wasn’t meant to be. It was a beautiful car but it had no soul and no story.

      Snorting at the thought, I stopped short when a baby-blue Hudson Hornet