Using the back of my arm to wipe the grease-tinged drops of sweat from my brow, I duck out from under the hood of the Chrysler 300 and turn to grab my— Where the hell is it? Damn it, I hate it when I can’t find my shit. I start pulling open every drawer in my tool bench, one after the other. Knowing that what I’m looking for isn’t in the bottom drawer full of miscellaneous crap I never need, I squat down and open it to rifle through the contents anyway.

I shove aside a roll of paper towels, a mug of pens, a few dirty rags that I should really take home and wash…and then I freeze. There, in the back corner, is a small black box. The kind that a woman in love would freak out over. Except, if a woman opened this particular box, she’d be sorely disappointed. Any woman except for the one I’d intended to give it to, anyway.

The dust covering it is evidence of how long it’s gone untouched—half a dozen years, maybe more—but I know every detail of what’s inside without even having to open it.

I pick up the box and swipe my thumb over the top, displacing the dust as my brain displaces the mental lock on that part of my life. Memories of a distant place and time flood my mind like a dam breaking under the pressure. Cornflower blue eyes, long hair the color of maple syrup, and a musical laugh I’ll never forget as long I live.

When I was a boy, I thought she was my forever adventure. But just as they have a beginning, adventures also have an ending, and she had other things to explore. She wanted me to go with her, but even then, I knew there was nothing for me outside of Neverland. So she left, I stayed behind, and I did my best to bury her memory and avoid the ache I feel in my chest every time I think of her.

Fuck. Without opening it, I toss the box back into the drawer and slam it shut. Growling, I turn my agitation to my original problem and call out through the garage. “Which one of you assholes didn’t put my 7/16ths wrench back?”

A man with black hair, short on the sides and long enough to curl on top, sticks his head out from the customer service area next to my bay. “Sorry, boss.”

I roll my eyes. Even as a grown-ass man, his childhood habit of taking the blame for stuff is ingrained in him as it ever was. “It wasn’t you, Carlos. You’ve been manning the front desk all day.”

A boyish smile breaks across his face, popping the dimples in his cheeks that make every female customer swoon. “Oh right. Never mind.”

The heavy metal being pumped across the four garage bays from the huge speakers makes it hard for any of the others to hear me, so I make my way down the line.

“Nick, you take my wrench?”

The muscles in his arms bunch, and a sheen of sweat covers his dark brown skin as he drags a wheel from the Jeep on his hydraulic lift and drops it to the ground. “Nah, I’ve done nothing but new tires and rotations today. People out here acting like it’s about to snow in the middle of July or something.”

“They can act however they want as long as they’re spending money here and not over at Croc’s place.”

“I hear that,” he says, grabbing the wheel to haul it over to the tire changer. “Good luck finding your wrench, man.”

I know the next two bays will come up short as well. Thomas is our resident technology geek. Anything that has wires, computer chips, and mother boards, he’s our guy. In the shop, that usually means custom sound systems on a fun day or aftermarket alarms or remote starts on a boring one. Either way, I know Thomas won’t have my wrench. He has the strictest moral code of anyone I’ve ever known. He’d never take anything that wasn’t his without asking first.

Then there’s Silas. He’d never take anything that wasn’t his either, but for an entirely different reason. He’s an arrogant jackass—and I say that with nothing but love for the guy—who believes he’s just a hair better at everything than you are and all his things are of slightly better quality. For lack of a better term, Silas is a one-upper. It usually annoys the shit out of other people, but we accept it as one of the many individual idiosyncrasies that make up our group.

Silas and I are two of the three body work specialists in the shop, but it’s rare we get the opportunity to flex our skills. Pulling dents out of doors is child’s play when you can take a rusted POS and turn it into an award-winning, custom beauty. But if we don’t do the mundane crap that pays the bills, we won’t ever have the money to open up the custom rebuild business we’ve been wanting forever. Something we’ll get around to doing someday, but not anytime soon.

“Si,” I say with a nod as I pass.

He gives me a chin lift and his signature smirk before going back to sanding the bondo on a Chevy Malibu’s quarter panel.

I can hear the arguing before I even get to the next bay, which is nothing new when it comes to the twins. I find them standing underneath a lifted Toyota, one working on the exhaust and the other replacing brakes, their blond hair sticking up in different directions from running their hands through it as they do when working.

I stop in front of them and cross my arms over my chest, raising an inquisitive brow. “What’s the argument today, boys?”

“Hey, Peter,” they say in unison.

The one fitting the new exhaust pipe pauses to say, “Numbnuts over there says that a Camaro SS would beat a Mustang GT in a quarter mile.”

His brother points a wrench—not my missing wrench, I notice—in his direction. “If they’re both stock? Absofuckinglutely. Now if you’re talking aftermarket mods, that might be a different story.”

“What do you think, Peter?” they ask.

The creepy twin thing is something they do often, but I guess when two people are inseparable, it’s bound to happen. They do everything together—including women, which is about the only thing they don’t argue about. And they can easily turn around a job that has multiple issues in half the time with their tag-team approach, so I’ve never made them split up. We don’t have enough bays for all of us to work separately, anyway. Carlos and Thomas share a bay and switch off with front desk duties since they’re the best at customer service.

“Well, in my humble opinion—” There’s nothing humble about it because I know everything there is to know about cars. “If you’re talking stock and you’re driving a Mustang GT, you might get him off the line, but his SS would smoke your ass before you get halfway down the track. So…” I glance at the embroidered name patch on the coveralls of the twin on the left. I wish one of them would dye their hair a different color for chrissake. “Tobias is right this time. Sorry, Tyler.”

“Aha! Told you, asshole!” Tobias continues to rub his victory in a grumbling Ty’s face as I move onto the last bay in our shop.

A pair of shapely legs in jean cutoffs sticks out from underneath the front of a Dodge Challenger, one black combat boot tapping along to the heavy beat of the music.

“Tink, you wouldn’t happen to know what happened to my 7/16ths, would you?”

She rolls out from under the car, a huge smile on her face and a familiar wrench in her hand. “You mean this 7/16ths?”

I arch a brow down at her. “That’d be the one, yeah.”

She raises her free hand up to me, and I help pull her up to her feet. She’s wearing a tank top with a chopped-off bottom, leaving her stomach bare except for the grease smudges. I gave up telling her to wear a pair of coveralls years ago. She claims she can’t work in restrictive clothing, and honestly, it doesn’t hurt business when guys bring their cars in for unnecessary oil changes or diagnostic checks just to get a chance to chat up Tink. It’s not like her Daisy Dukes and crop tops are distracting any of us. Tink’s always been a non-sexual entity in our group, though we stopped referring to her as one of the boys after she nailed Si in the balls for it when she was twelve.

“Sorry, Peter, I couldn’t find mine,” she says, looking up at me.

“You need glasses, Tink?”

She furrows her brow under the longer fall of her blond pixie cut. “No, why?”

“Because yours is right there on your workbench.”

She follows to where I’m pointing. Her skin flushes as she bites on the inside of her cheek, making the thin gold nose-ring glint in the light. “Well, would you look at that,” she says with an embarrassed chuckle. “I swear it wasn’t there earlier. But now that I’ve got you here, Peter, I wanted to ask you—”

“Boss!”

I turn to see Carlos gesturing wildly at me like it’s a life or death situation. Shit, I hope the computer isn’t on the fritz again. We can’t afford to replace it. “Sorry, Tink, hold that thought.”

“That’s okay, I’ll walk and talk,” she says, falling into line as I make my way back across the bays, the bell she keeps on a long chain around her neck tinkling with every step. “I was wondering if you wanted to go to the Pitt County car show next weekend and pick out a custom project we could work on together. You know, to sell afterward as another way of bringing in money.”

“We don’t have the time or space to devote to a project like that right now. We need all our bays operational for the daily stuff that’s paying the bills.”

“No, I know. But we could make space for it in the pole barn and then after work—”

“Tink, what have I always said about after work?”

She sighs. “When work is done the fun’s begun.”

“Exactly. We only work as much as we have to, and after that, we work hard at having fun,” I say, dropping my wrench off in my bay as we pass. “Which, correct me if I’m wrong, makes me the best boss on the planet.”

“You’re absolutely the best boss, Peter. You’re the best at everything.”

I smile down at her. “Won’t get an argument from me on that one.” We stop in front of Carlos, and I put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “It’s a good idea, Tink, just not for right now. Someday, we’ll be able to do stuff like that without pulling overtime hours. Until then, let’s keep doing what we’re doing.”

“Boss.”

Carlos is practically bouncing in place as I finally turn my attention to him. “What is it?”

“There’s someone who wants to talk to you about a custom rebuild.”

I arch a brow in Tink’s direction, but she holds her hands up. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t talk to anyone but you about that.”

“Tell him we don’t do custom rebuilds right now, but we can refer him to someone who does. Hold on, I think I have a number for J.R. at the Toy Shop in London…” I fish my phone out of the pocket of my coveralls and pull up my contacts.

“It’s a her, Boss,” Carlos corrects. “And trust me, you’re gonna want to talk to her.”

“Trust me,” I say, scrolling through the names in my phone. Did I save it under the J’s or the T’s? “I’m really not.”

I hear the door to the waiting area open just as Tink whispers, “Holy shit,” making me look up from my phone…and my heart stops.

“Hello, Peter.”

A woman with cornflower blue eyes and long hair the color of maple syrup steps into the shop. Her smile is shy, and her small hands twist together in front of her like she’s unsure of her welcome. So much time has passed since I’ve seen her, and yet, she’s just as beautiful as that night I saw her standing on her balcony, wearing only a nightgown and rays of moonlight.

“Can you believe it?” Carlos says excitedly. “Wendy’s home!”