It had been two days since Suria left me alone in the office with that sassy wave.

I was officially an idiot, because I still hadn’t gotten her phone number.

She had tracked me down, and I couldn’t so much as remember to ask her for a few digits to reach out and call her.

Dumbass, I thought, not for the first time.

I cursed myself every time I was in my office and caught the ever-fading scent of her perfume. Hell, chances were good that it was my imagination. The scent was more than likely completely gone by now, but I wanted to smell it, so my mind was going to play tricks on me.

“Knock, knock,” a husky voice said at the door of my office.

I looked up and saw a woman standing there, somebody I didn’t know.

“Can I help you?”

She slid inside and shut the door. “I was told you were good at handling…customer complaints,” she said with a sultry smile. At my blank look, she offered a name. “She’s a friend of mine. She told me you could…help me out.”

The name sparked a memory, and I thought of the woman who came by the week before I met Suria.

Then I glanced at the door and thought about how Suria had pushed her hands into my hair, kissing me like she never wanted to kiss anybody else or have anybody else kissing her.

“If there’s a complaint, we can fill out a form,” I said blandly. “But my office manager can assist you with that.”

“I…no,” she said after a pause. “You’re the one I want.”

I debated on whether or not to keep up with the charade and decided it wasn’t worth it. “I’m no longer helping with such…complaints, ma’am. I’m sorry you wasted your time coming down here.”

That got the message across. Her mouth folded into a tight line, and she turned on one spiked heel and stormed through the door, slamming it shut behind her.

I stared after her, but not out of any regret.

I kept seeing Suria, pressed to that door, her hair wild and free around her shoulders, her eyes big and dark and hungry.

I wanted to have that again, feel her again.

“Then why didn’t you get her number?” I muttered.

Shoving thoughts of her out of my head, I focused on the ordering that needed to be done for the repair jobs we had for the week. It was taking twice as long as it should because my mind kept straying, but finally, I finished inputting the rest of the materials we’d need and closed down the browser. As I was getting to my feet, there was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” I said.

Donut opened the door and came inside, brows arched. “That pretty chick who came in to…file a complaint actually stopped to talk to the office manager. She said she was going to post a review on Yelp about how unhelpful the owner is.”

I snorted. It figured. I didn’t say anything to Donut though.

I’d screwed more than a few women here in the garage, and the guys had to know it, but none of them had ever given me grief over it. Hopefully, this wouldn’t turn out to be something that screwed me – and the garage, therefore them.

“What is she going to complain about?” I asked, deciding not to worry about it. “She’s not a customer, hasn’t ever been one.”

Donut cocked a brow at me, clearly waiting to see if I was going to continue.

No. I was not.

When I didn’t, he shrugged and turned away. “Anyway, I figured you should know. If we have any more…complaints of that nature, should I deal with them?”

“Just tell them the boss is out,” I said. “Indefinitely.”

Once the door closed behind him, I kicked my feet up on the desk and stared up at the ceiling. A good brood was forming, and it had a name. Suria.

I’d just turned down sex with a beautiful woman.

Why?

Because I had another beautiful woman on my brain.

I’d told my mother about her.

What man did that?

He did it because he had her on the brain.

What kind of messed up shit was this?

I still didn’t even know her number. I might be able to track her down. I had a cop friend who might do it for me. Maybe I wasn’t the whiz at Google that Suria was, and hell, I couldn’t remember anything she’d given me besides her name. I wasn’t even sure how she spelled it.

I could always plug the various variations that came to mind into a search engine and see what came up, but without a last name, in a city like LA? Who knew what I’d come up with.

I’d be better off asking my cop friend. He was a regular at the garage, and we sometimes ran into each other at a bar I liked to hit after work when I just wanted a quick meal and a quick drink. We talked and got along. He might do a favor for me, and it would be a lot better than a fruitless search on the internet.

But I didn’t know if I should go that route.

I could just see her face now.

Wow…how did you find me…you had a cop look me up? That’s…creepy.

Would it be creepy?

The fact that I couldn’t decide was problematic, which told me it would probably be a little on the side of creepy, but I wasn’t going to brush it off entirely. I’d hang out at the club where we’d met this weekend. She’d gone there looking for me already. Maybe she’d do so again. Maybe she was a regular, and we just kept missing each other.

My phone rang, and I picked it up, grateful for a distraction.

It was Eric out in the bay. “Need you out here, boss. Lennie cut himself, might need to go get some stitches.”

“It ain’t that bad,” somebody said in the background.

“I’m on my way,” I said, interjecting my voice into the argument before Eric could respond. He was hotheaded, to say the least, but if he was suspecting a trip to the hospital, then that was probably what would happen.

On my way to the door, I kicked something and out of habit, I bent to pick it up.

It looked like a business card. Without checking it out, I shoved it in my pocket and kept on walking.

A trip to the hospital was necessary.

Thirty minutes later, Lennie sat next to me grumbling while I filled out the paperwork as best as I could, asking him questions when I didn’t know the answer – which was a lot. I would have avoided talking to him at all, if I could. He was a bit of a chickenshit, it seemed, when it came to doctor and nurse types.

I made that decision based on the fine film of sweat that broke out on his forehead the minute we got inside the ER, and that sweat got profusely worse the longer we were there.

“Any allergies to medicine?” I asked, shifting in the hard chair. They were specifically designed to numb the ass and kill the back, I’d decided. An experiment in polite torture.

“No. Look, boss, we don’t need to be here. A few band-aids, I’ll be fine.”

In response, I pointed at the red still seeping through the rag that was wrapped around his hand. “It hasn’t stopped bleeding. It happened at work. You’ve got workman’s comp. Don’t worry. I’ll put in a good word to the boss for ya,” I said, reaching over to lightly punch his shoulder.

“Tell the boss he can suck my…” He stopped, both of us eying the kids in front of us. “Uh…tell him thanks,” Lennie finished.

I snorted.

His name was finally called, and I turned in the paperwork then went to slump back in the seat. My back didn’t much appreciate it so I straightened back up. My belly growled, reminding me I hadn’t gotten around to eating lunch. Spying a sign that said, Cafeteria, I got up and headed in that direction. Lennie wouldn’t be done for a good half-hour, if that.

I could grab a bag of chips and some soda, at least.

I found the card while digging for change to get that bag of chips.

Vaguely, I remembered pulling it from my pocket after picking it up from my office floor.

Art by Suria.

Running my thumb across the raised font, I felt a smile spreading across my face.

She must have dropped it when she swung by the other night, but for all I cared, it had fallen from the sky.

I had the damn thing, and it had an address on it, and a phone number.

Hot damn.