I’d managed to go maybe an hour without thinking about Suria.

Maybe.

I’d been doing good, though, getting some work done – finally – not brooding about how she’d been gone when I woke up. Brooding for not getting her phone number. Brooding that I hadn’t heard her leave.

Then that damn song came on. The song that had been playing at the club when I kissed her. And now it was like I was reliving the whole damn night all over again.

I couldn’t figure out why each word felt like a punch in the gut.

Women didn’t get to me like this.

Sure, I enjoyed them. I was healthy, straight, and fairly normal. Why wouldn’t I?

But last night should have just been another hook-up, a woman to have fun with for a little while, then forget about. I had no doubt I was the same for the ladies I’d hooked up with – a guy to dance with, maybe grab a bite to eat, then hit the mattress with for an hour or two before we went our separate ways.

I wasn’t a manwhore or anything.

It wasn’t like I had two or three – or more – hook-ups a week, but I wasn’t unfamiliar with how things went.

This had all the markings of a classic.

We met at a club, danced a bit, had fun, the chemistry was there.

As the song came to a close, I tried to push her out of my head so I could finish the job on the Cabriolet. The owner had been given an estimate on having the job done – end of the week. I always overshot by a little, because I preferred the wiggle room, but if I could get my head out of my ass, I might be able to finish this tomorrow. The custom rims for the two front tires, both damaged in the wreck, had come in, and Gus had finished the final coat on the paint job over the weekend. We were good to go. A few more things here and there, get her cleaned up and we were–

“Son of a bitch!” I swore as my hand slipped off the wrench, smacked into the pavement. Skin split and blood appeared. Swearing again, I got to my feet.

“You get an owie, boss?” one of the guys called out in a sing-song voice.

I flipped him off with the hand that wasn’t bleeding as I made my way over to the well-worn, well-used first aid kit. After digging out a bandage and slapping it on, I turned to see Donut in the doorway. He was watching me with a grin and a sucker in one hand.

“I always get a sucker after I get an owie,” he told me.

“I got something you can suck,” I growled back.

A couple of hoots broke out as Donut made kissing noises at me. Rolling my eyes at him, I turned to the guys behind me and shouted, “Don’t you all have work to do?”

They all broke out into laughter as I headed back to the Cabriolet. “Let’s try this again, old girl,” I murmured to her, getting back down on the ground, wrench in hand.

That Cabriolet wasn’t going to be finished tomorrow. I’d almost slipped with the wrench again, and if I kept it up, I was going to chip that fresh coat of paint, so in self-defense and out of respect for a beautiful piece of machinery, I’d retreated to my office. I’d rather fuck up paperwork and let Donut sort it out than fuck up a car.

Of course, all it took to start thinking of Suria again was the simple, elegant, beautiful word…fuck.

And there I was, thinking about how good it had been to fuck her, to dance with her. To lean over a table as she sipped her drink and laugh with her as she pointed out some of the professional douches – as she’d called them – who had been trolling the dance floor at the club.

Everything about her had been…good.

Better than good, really.

Not that I was one to wax poetic or whatever the saying was.

I wondered if she’d be at the club again tonight.

Of course, it was Monday. What normal person went clubbing on a Monday?

I was thinking about it though. Did that mean I wasn’t normal?

Did I even care about the answer to that?

“Hey, boss? We got a car you need to take a look at,” Donut said through the door.

“I told you I wanted to get some paperwork done,” I shouted back at him as I stared at the paperwork I hadn’t even started.

“Well, then maybe you can tell the guy driving the wrecker he should come back…whenever.”

I scowled, because that wasn’t how I liked to do things. “We didn’t get a call about getting another car,” I said, getting up and going to the door. “We barely got room in the bay for what we have.”

“I know.” He jerked his head over his shoulder. “The client is out there too. Looks familiar.”

I glanced past him, caught sight of a familiar face and groaned.

“Yeah, yeah…”

Autobody shops probably had frequent fliers, the same way airlines did. Only instead of getting people from point A to point B, we fixed the cars they used to get from point A to point B. And this particular person had delivered his busted car to my shop no less than four times in the past year.

“Kenny, the wrecker guy, told me that the car owner is already talking about how he’s got to have this car fixed by next week and how you always know to speed things up and blah, blah, blah…”

“This isn’t going to be no rush job,” I said. “Sooner or later, that douche is going to kill somebody.”

But I headed out there to take a look at the damage.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the car was a beauty, a McLaren 675LT, I’d almost tell the guy to go find somebody else. But if I did that…well, hell. I had to drive the car once it was finished to make sure it handled right, didn’t I?

And I wasn’t an idiot.

Who was going to say no to the chance to drive a McLaren?