Finn
“Goddammit.” Finn cursed as the second clip for the Camaro’s air filter box broke between his fingers. He glanced down and watched the broken pieces slip down inside the engine block, and sighed. This was getting ridiculous. When a few drops of blood followed the pieces down, he decided it was time to take a break. It was not the first time that morning something so simple had been too much for him to take care of.
“You okay, buddy?” a gruff six-pack-a-day voice called out from the next bay over.
“Yeah, Uncle Bill, I’m cool.” Finn waved his hand to show the blood that was making a red line through the grease on his fingers and puddling in the cup of his palm. “Just cut my hand. I’m gonna wash up. Is it cool if I take an early lunch?”
Finn didn’t actually need to ask his uncle if he could take a break. They were partners at the body shop, fifty-fifty. They didn’t have to ask one another if they could go on break or take the day off, but they both did anyway. Finn liked to think it was because they were family, but Bill said it was just common courtesy. There was a chance they could both be right.
Bill Marks stood up and gave the clock in the shape of Bettie Page a long look. It had less to do with the shapely pin-up girl smiling down like some angel of a bygone era and more to do with the fact that Uncle Bill refused to get himself the glasses he sorely needed.
“It’s eleven fifteen.” Uncle Bill shoved a nearly black cloth in the front of his equally dark work overalls. His eyebrows, which looked as thick and fuzzy as caterpillars, danced up his forehead. “Can’t say that is much in the way of ‘early, seein’ as how you came in at six.”
Finn heard the unasked question and stretched until a few of the vertebrae in his back popped. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Uncle Bill, who had injured one eye in an accident years before Finn was born, rolled his good eye in the general direction of his nephew. The other stayed firmly in place, looking like a brown marble floating on top of a glass of milk. His smile was slow and knowing. “New lady in your life?”
Finn shook his head and made for the wash sink. He used his foot to hit the floor pedal to start up the wash. It took a while for the water to get warm. “Been watching over Oliver, making sure he doesn’t go and do something stupid.”
“That boys suffers from shit parents,” Uncle Bill said solemnly. He wandered slowly away from the VW Bug he had been working on and leaned his prodigious bulk against the wall next to the sink. “His momma’s been shit since she popped out of her momma, but his daddy went to hell when he laid eyes on that woman.”
For some reason, it never dawned on Finn that his uncle might know a thing or two about the Andersons’ life. “Didn’t you go to school with them?”
“Oh yeah,” Uncle Bill answered, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a thick cigar. He didn’t smoke anymore—he hadn’t since around the same time he’d injured his eye—but he still carried around a stogie out of habit. He wound it around between his fingers as he thought back. “That was many damn years ago now. Back when this was a warehouse and not an auto shop. Sammy, she was a handful way back then. She liked to be wild and angry and cause problems. Lots of talk about who she was and who she ran with. Might be they say the same things about Oliver nowadays.” He tucked the stogie in his mouth, his lips wrapping familiarly around it.
Finn nodded. That sounded like her. It also sounded a little bit like Cora. “What about his sister?”
“Cora?” Uncle Bill asked, his caterpillar brows knitted to form a single line as he frowned. “I haven’t seen that girl since…shit…since I was still working at the diner. I was a good dishwasher. Could flip a burger, too.”
Finn nodded. His uncle was master of the odd jobs and hadn’t even started learning how to be a mechanic until the middle of his life. He’d been a Navy officer first, wanting to see the world as most young men do when they are young and grew up in the middle of nowhere. When he’d come back, Uncle Bill had taken turns working at half the stores up and down Main Street. Never been fired, so far as Finn knew, just had a habit of wandering to the next thing. As far as Finn could tell, Bill Marks could do just about anything and everything, and most of it fairly well.
Bill plucked the cigar from his mouth and shook his head. “Cora, though, I didn’t know her well. Rumor was that she was headin’ down the same path as her momma before she got fed up with it all and lit on up out of here.”
Another piece to the puzzle, Finn thought as he pumped some lava soap into his hands and gave them a good hard scrub. Bits and pieces of stone rubbed across his callused palms, working the layer of grease off in a pitch-colored lather. The cut on his finger stung as he did it, and the bleeding started all over again. There was a first-aid kit around here somewhere, he was sure. Besides, tending to himself gave him time to think.
It wasn’t just that Cora didn’t want to go back to being the wild girl she had once been. It was that she didn’t want to end up like her mother. It was the story of a hundred thousand other women, but when it came to Cora he couldn’t blame her. Samantha Anderson was a pain in the ass.
“She’s watching over Oliver.” Finn took his foot off the pedal and let the faucet go dry as he wiped his hands off on a fairly clean towel. He reached for the first-aid kit, but his uncle slapped his hand away and tugged it off the shelf.
“I thought you were doing that,” Uncle Bill said as he opened the kit and pulled out one of the fingertip Band-Aids. He used his stogie to point toward one of the barstools they kept scattered around the shop for slow afternoons. Finn found himself smirking as he got his finger bandaged up like he was five years old again. Uncle Bill was a good man, and soft about helping Finn out.
“We’ve both got a vested interest.” Finn cleared his throat.
Uncle Bill’s good eye roamed over Finn in the wise fashion of older men. “She was pretty back then, if I remember correctly.”
“She’s hot stuff now. But she’s not interested in me.”
Uncle Finn laughed, and the sound boomed through the shop. “Is that what your problem is, nephew? You so used to women pawing all over you and throwing their titties in yo’ face that you don’t know what to do when a lady isn’t impressed?”
Finn felt his cheeks flush. “I can’t remember the last time a woman threw their tits in my face.”
“All right. Whatever you say. Go on, get out of here and bring me back an Italian sub when you wander on back.” Uncle Bill plopped his cigar back into his pocket with a wistful sigh and brushed his hand through the air as if clearing it of dust. “Go on, get.”
Finn gave his uncle a bemused salute and wandered out of the shop.
# # #
It was a nice day for Nevada. The sun, a relatively familiar sight around here, was high overhead, and it couldn’t have been more than seventy-two degrees. There was just enough cloud cover to keep it from getting too hot, but it didn’t look like there was going to be rain either. Rain, he thought, wouldn’t be a terrible thing, but it would be hard to walk around in.
There weren’t a great many shops down Main Street. The body shop took up one corner near the very end. The Deli, as it was creatively called, was all the way down at the other. There were a handful of other businesses in between: a fashion boutique, a salon, a dentist, and so on. Most of the places had been around for a while. Carson City was just small enough to have that close-knit feel that most other places didn’t have, but it was getting bigger and bigger every day. Some people hated it, but Finn? He liked to see the changes, the slipping from one thing into another. He watched as a real-estate agent showed a young couple into one of the empty storefronts. He found himself wondering what they might do. He liked to daydream; usually it calmed him. Not today. Today he felt a need to wander, so he did. He took the chance to stretch his legs and get Cora out of his mind.
It was her damn fault he kept messing things up at work. He kept finding his brain wandering toward her. Not just the way her breasts pushed up against her suit tops, or how she had looked in those silk pajama pants with wine soaking into them. He wasn’t even focused on the way she kissed…though good goddamn, that woman could lay down a kiss. It was more than that.
Cora Anderson was a force of nature. She could look like a billion dollars while she wore a cheap dollar-store robe. He had watched her, during those nights he spent parked out in his old Chevy, as she wandered around the apartment. The sliding glass doors gave him an excellent view of the living area.
Sure, he probably should have asked if it was all right, but he’d known exactly what she would say.
Cora blamed him for Oliver going bad. Maybe Finn had a little to do with it, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something else was pulling Oliver along. Finn knew it was up to him to figure out what and how he could handle it.
That’s what the good guy did, right?
Was that what he was trying to be? A good guy? He just barely kept himself from snorting. He’d never thought of himself as anything but Finn. Not really good and not really bad. Sure, the law and him weren’t what you might call friends, but what did that really matter? He did what he had to do to keep himself going and tried not to screw up too bad. It wasn’t a terrible way to go about life.
His phone went off and Finn glanced down at the screen. Speak of the demon—it was Oliver.
My sister can’t cook, the message said. Please save me from another night of takeout.
Finn laughed out loud, causing several heads to turn in his general direction. Some of the looks said plainly that they didn’t think he had any right to laugh. One lady, her arms heavy with shopping bags, even crossed the street and shot him a full-on glower. He thought that was a bit dramatic. Sure, when he wasn’t running the shop he was an enforcer for the Violent Spawn. He even had the jacket to prove it. The title wasn’t half as impressive as it sounded. All it really meant was that, from time to time, their boss sent him out to bash some heads together. He didn’t sit in for meetings, he rarely went on gun runs, and he never made decisions for the club. He just got to play muscle when it was needed. The gun he’d bought many ages ago was gathering dust in a safe back at his place.
Being a criminal wasn’t nearly as interesting as all the television shows made it out to be, especially when someone ran the club with the no BS standards the boss did. It made Finn’s job easy enough that he had to work the auto shop to make ends meet.
Anyway, what did he care if people saw him as good or bad? It was not as if he was running for office or anything. No reason anyone would have to go through his closet and poke around for skeletons. He was just a man trying to live life.
Then he saw her, and he remembered exactly why he was beginning to care.
At first, he didn’t recognize Cora Anderson sitting at one of the little glass-top tables the Deli used for patio seating. For one thing, she was wearing jeans, rather than one of her snappy business suits. For another her hair wasn’t styled or primped, or whatever it was they were calling it now. It simply sat around her face in a series of natural asymmetrical curls.
Her long legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle, showing off a pair of strappy shoes that left her feet playfully bare. Her toes wiggled just a little as she stared at her computer screen, her toenails as manicured as her fingers. He’d never understood the appeal of feet until that moment. For a woman who kept herself as covered up as Cora did, getting a little glimpse of her toes made him wonder what everything else looked like.
Though, if he were being honest, he’d been wondering about the “everything else” since day one.
For a moment, she wasn’t aware of him. Her eyes were focused on her laptop. Her lower lip was seized between her teeth as she puzzled something out. He watched her as she read and reread a line on her screen, her eyes dancing back and forth. The perfectly plucked lines of her brows gathered together in frustration. Then her lips formed an O of understanding, and she clacked away on the keys with enough enthusiasm that he could hear her typing from halfway across the street.
She was so caught up in her work that she didn’t even notice him walking up. With her problem solved, she popped out of her chair and wandered into the Deli. Finn thought she was either very trusting or very distracted to leave her laptop sitting out here. Since trusting was not a word he would use to describe Cora, he was going to have to settle for the latter. Then again, maybe she had the kind of money that she was okay throwing it out there for anyone to have.
He caught a glimpse of what glimmered on her screen as he walked by, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. If he had been pressed, Finn would have called it a spreadsheet—he used plenty of those at the body shop for ordering and business—but it was the most complex-looking spreadsheet he had ever seen. Besides, what was on the computer wasn’t nearly as interesting to look at as the woman who owned it.
She was standing in line, her arms crossed over her chest. The sunlight was hitting her hair just right to bring out the red hue in it. When he stepped up behind her, he could smell the honey-and-lilac scent of some frilly shampoo. Of course she had expensive shampoo. She had expensive everything. He bet the jeans she wore were some exclusive brand that washed them in some factory to make them look worn.
She ordered the crab roll special and a coffee large enough to drown in.
“You know,” Finn said, stepping up next to her, “that much caffeine is bad for you.”
She jumped enough that she nearly dropped her wallet. Finn had a short moment to enjoy the way she scrambled to look like she wasn’t bothered as she fumbled for her credit card. It was as black and shiny as he assumed it would be. Her fingers shook as she handed it over to the cashier. It was interesting to see her so…frazzled. There was even a blush on her cheeks. Was he finally having an effect on her?
“You don’t want to be around me unless I’ve had about a gallon of it,” she fired back. It didn’t quite have the heat of her usual snappishness, and her lips were curled into a smile. Maybe the problem he had seen her solve had left her in good spirits. Maybe seeing him was putting her in good spirits.
“You’re in a good mood,” he said companionably.
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
He stepped closer to her, his arm brushing hers as he put in his own order for a steak-and-cheese sub, and an Italian to go.
It wasn’t until he handed over the cash for the order that he realized the girl behind the counter was smiling at him. It wasn’t the professional smile of a person who clocked in to wear an apron. It was the genuine grin of an interested woman. Her big brown eyes were sparkling hopefully.
“Hi, Finn,” she said, leaning over the counter. For a moment, Finn could remember his uncle talking about women throwing themselves at him. Was he that bad? Maybe.
If she knew his name it meant he had seen her somewhere before. He gave her another long look, wondering what her bleached blonde hair would look like out of that ponytail and without the hat. After a moment, a memory surged to the forefront of his mind.
“Annie!” he said as the name popped back into his head. “Hey, how are you?”
She waved a hand. “Not bad. I’m only back in town for a few weeks before heading back East.” Her gaze was expectant.
He wracked his brain. She was a model, right? Or maybe she wanted to be a model. Finn couldn’t quite remember which it was. He knew Annie never stuck around long and liked to be entertained while she was in town. She had the cutest butterfly tattoo on her back…and yet, for all that, he had absolutely no inclination to ask her out.
“That’s cool,” he said, taking his change and plunking a portion of it in the little tip container at the front of the counter. “Stay safe.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. For a second she looked dumbstruck. Then she gathered herself back together and leaned across the counter. He knew what she was doing—they both did. Usually this kind of thing worked for him. Aggressive women with simple needs, he had once said, were a godsend. “Oh, uhm…I am clocking out in like, three hours. Maybe I could swing by the pool hall later?”
He gave a nod. “That’d be cool. I’m sure Speed or Titan or someone would love to see you. I won’t be there. I’ve got a previous engagement. But it was nice to see you again.”
Annie looked shell-shocked, but not nearly as much as Cora did. The pretty redhead stared up at him like she hadn’t quite seen him before. He gave her a grin. Her jaw hung open for a few moments before snapping shut, and she turned away from him. It was easy to watch her walk away. He didn’t care how much those jeans had cost her; they were worth every little penny.
Did she know how pretty she was? Probably. A woman like Cora couldn’t look into the mirror and not know exactly what she looked like. Even in simple clothes, with her arms crossed she seemed to command the entire attention of the Deli. Or at the very least, the attention of Finn. She waited in silence for her order to come up before plucking it off the counter and heading back out to her table.
A minute later he plopped down next to her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, figuring she’d prefer the direct approach to beating around the bush.
“She wanted you to go out with her.” She dragged her pretty nails through her prettier hair, and he had the singular pleasure of watching it all fall back around her face. He found himself wondering if she looked better with it up or down. Down she looked softer, which was a lie. Very little about Cora Anderson was soft. With it up, he had been able to see every bit of her face.
He laughed in amusement. “Ohh, I’m sure she wanted a whole lot more than that.”
“Well, why didn’t you?” She hadn’t touched her food. Instead she was watching him with those clever eyes.
He took a moment to push his straw out of the wrapper and plunk it into his cup. The grate of plastic on plastic sounded louder than it should have. He took a long drink of cold soda before he finally shrugged and shook his head. “I didn’t want to.”
“You have before. I could see it in the way she watched you.” Her tone wasn’t quite accusatory, but it rode the line pretty close.
He nodded. If this were another woman he might have lied, but it had been made very clear to him that this particular woman did not forgive deceptions, even the polite kind. “We did. She is some kind of model. Does a lot of work for resort pictures, I think. You know the kind they splash all over traveling websites to make it look like only pretty people have fun at those places? She’s one of those. She comes back here between jobs because she’s got a sick aunt or old grandmother or something. I dunno.”
“A model?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “A model. Why?”
Her mouth was hanging open again. He sat back in his seat, puffing his chest out with pride. Is that what it took to get her to look at him? Turn other women down? He could do that. Hell, he could do a lot of that if it meant she gave him her undivided attention.
“I don’t understand.” She plucked at her sandwich wrapper. A few flecks of white crabmeat fluttered against the table. She plucked them up and set them in a neat pile on the edge of her napkin. He didn’t have a ruler, but he was pretty sure they formed a perfect line. “You should have gone with her.”
“Are you telling me I missed out?” He unwrapped his own sandwich and took a bite.
“That’s not what I meant. I mean…you are the kind of guy who would have jumped on that opportunity. I fully expected you to…go for it.” She waved one hand dismissively, crossing and uncrossing her legs as if she couldn’t get comfortable.
“Hey,” he said, putting a hand on her knee to steady her movements. “I know you don’t think a lot of me, but give me some credit. I don’t jump on every offer that’s thrown my way.”
“I can hardly give you much seeing as how you’ve admitted to sleeping with her before.”
“Yeah.” He held his gaze on her until her eyes caught his. They were like a smoky sky behind polar ice caps, frigid and glorious. “But that was before I met you.”
For a moment, she stopped breathing. Her lips parted in an oval of surprise, and her gaze lingered on his mouth as if she was trying to focus on what he’d just said. “Me?”
His hand splayed across her knee, the palm cupping her leg as he swept his thumb over the inner seam, dancing across the denim that was clinging to the roundness of her thigh. He felt the muscle twitch beneath his touch, and a thrill went through him. That small response did wonders for his pride. She wanted him, he was sure of it.
“What are you doing?” A light breathiness ruined her normally demanding tone.
“Touching you,” he said. “Do you want me to stop?”
Her eyes fluttered as his thumb skipped another inch forward. He could almost feel the heat of her through the cloth. It was too easy to know she was damp inside her pants. He wanted to roll them down her legs and show her just how good he could be. He was just beginning to form the words to ask her to spend the afternoon with him when she reached down and gripped his wrist, halting his progress.
“Yes, I do. I want you to stop.” There was no breathlessness this time. Only the cool certainty he now associated with Cora. Her eyes, however, were filled with something he hadn’t expected: a dollop of fear. “Please.”
He pulled his hand back slowly. Finn was a lot of things, and he broke a lot of rules. But making a woman he liked, and even respected from time to time, afraid of him was not something he enjoyed. “All right. I’m sorry.”
Her gaze lingered on his face again. She looked like a doe who had spotted a hunter. “You’re right. I really don’t know a damn thing about you.”
“I’d like you to.” The offer was genuine, and he hoped he sounded it.
“That’s a really bad idea.” She shook her head and repeated, “A bad idea.”
“So what’s the problem?” He wanted to know. Despite what his uncle and probably a large portion of Carson thought, Finn did not pursue every woman, and he certainly did not get every woman he pursued. Plenty had told him no, and he had been more than happy to take his charms elsewhere. So why Cora? What was it about her that had him continuing to try?
She took a long swig of coffee before answering. “Would you prefer them alphabetically or chronologically?”
“Is there that many?”
“Of course there is. We can start off with the fact that you are exactly what I shouldn’t be getting involved with. If I were a kinky coed with aspirations of getting my picture taken for a living, then you would be my first choice. But I’m not. I’m a businesswoman who has very clear goals in mind for my future, and you simply aren’t in them.”
“I’m not asking for a marriage proposal.”
She held up one hand. “Well, that’s certainly one of the problems.”
He frowned. “You want me to want to marry you?”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Not you in particular, Finn. However, I no longer wish to be involved with a man simply for the fun of it. I want commitment, building for the future, all of that. Explain that one away all you want, but you can’t deny that we have a far more important task at hand.”
He didn’t need her to explain that one. Understanding swamped him, and he took another healthy bite of his sandwich. “Oliver.”
She nodded in agreement and opened the bag of chips that had come with her meal. The crinkle of plastic filled the silence that spread between the two of them. It wasn’t until after she finished her second chip that she said, “Yes, Oliver. There is something going on with him. I’m sure of it.”
He had to admit he was sure of it, too. “He doesn’t talk to me as much as he used to.”
“What do you mean?” She dumped her chips into a neat little pile next to her half-eaten sandwich and plucked at them without much appetite. He hated to see her not eat. He wondered if Oliver’s text had been true. Could she not cook? Sure, she had money now, but he knew she hadn’t come from wealth. How had she not learned to cook?
He pushed his own nearly finished sandwich aside and opened the cookie he had gotten in lieu of chips. “I mean he used to come by and sweep up the shop, or learn something about cars. Uncle Bill had taken him in first. He’s like that with kids, did the same with me. I was okay with it because Oliver seemed like a cool kid, and before I knew it he was my friend. We’d spend a few hours there more days than not, yacking about everything while fixing something.”
Her chin dipped just a little. “Part of that is my fault. It’s part of the agreement we have with the department that he comes directly home from school.”
“No,” he said, tilting the cookie at her in offering. “That’s not it. He was coming by less and less before you showed up. He was getting distracted and everything. I thought he was just bored, maybe a little distracted because of that girl he had been talking about. But I dunno. This goes beyond being girl crazy.”
She lifted a brow and broke off a small piece of the cookie for herself. She ate it with slow mouse-like nibbles, as if eating smaller pieces meant she could savor it. “Girl crazy? Is that similar to being boy crazy?”
He laughed and pushed the rest of his cookie toward her. She eyed it for a moment before shrugging and picking it up. “Yeah, a little. Just tends to be stupider when it’s a guy.”
She smirked at him and tilted her head to the side so her hair made a curtain of color on one side of her face. “I find myself wondering just how stupid you have been for a girl.”
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” he teased. It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. The small amount of comfort they had gained in the sharing of a meal and talking about Oliver had evaporated in a snap.
“Fair.” She finished off her own food and crumpled the paper up. “So what are we going to do?”
He thought about it for a moment. “I mean, I could keep sleeping in the car, making sure he doesn’t skip out on you.”
“How is that working for you?” she asked, crossing her legs, comfortably this time.
“Terribly,” he admitted, reaching up and rubbing the back of his neck. “Backseats were a lot more fun when I was a teenager.”
The chair scraped as she stood up and plucked the garbage off the table, then plunked it in the outdoor container. She used a napkin to sweep the crumbs into her palm and sent them chasing after the other detritus. “What other options do we have?”
“We could put a car alarm on his bedroom window.” He jerked his thumb in the general direction of the body shop. “I have like thirty of them.”
“That seems a little extreme.” She plopped herself down in the plastic chair and began to arrange her things back into a neat little order. He wondered if she liked to organize everything just so. Probably. She seemed like one of those type A personalities. “Besides,” she went on, “I’m fairly sure that’s against my temporary lease.”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. We could download one of those apps to his phone that let us know when he’s not where he should be.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, clearly not comfortable with that. “I…I don’t know. I understand the why. I just don’t think I agree with the how. It feels a little like I am trying to control my brother.”
He nodded. “I get that. You want him to be free. You also want him to be the good kid.”
“Yes,” she said, conviction making the words into a prayer. “I do.”
“Problem. He’s already proved he isn’t being the good kid. He’s done some stupid shit and worse, he’s gotten caught doing it. That’s hard. So we will put the app on his phone. He’ll have to know about it.”
“Well, we don’t want him to think we are spying on him.”
“We are, a little bit, but yeah. Besides, he’ll see the app on his phone anyway.”
Cora sighed. “I’ll agree to the phone thing, not the car alarm. How are we going to tell him?”
“Together,” he said. He hefted himself out of his seat and stood up. He wanted to sit here all day and talk with her, maybe find out what it was that had taken the light out of her eyes and made light teasing into something that made her freeze up. He wanted to, but knew that pushing right now would only get her guard up again. “I’ll still swing by and check on things.”
“Deal.”