The Thunderbird, I decided, was an awesome fucking car. It needed work on just about everything, because it had obviously been sitting parked and rusting somewhere for years, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. In between working on cars for actual paying customers at Riggs Auto, I’d sneak over to it and spend half an hour here, an hour there, tweaking and caressing it. It was ugly and it wasn’t classic, but the metal trim and that fucking V6 were sexy as hell. It was growing on me. I’d never had a car that was my baby before, but this one sure was.

I was under the hood working the engine when Luke came over. “You got a delivery,” he said.

I pulled my head out from under the hood and frowned at him. “What?”

“Delivery,” Luke said again. He was wiping his hands with a rag, his coveralls off and stowed in a locker. We were almost done for the day. “Up front. You have to sign for it. They won’t let me do it.”

There was nothing I could think of that it could be, but I wiped my hands on my coveralls and unzipped them—it was freaking hot back here, airless in the day’s heat. I was wearing a T-shirt that showed my tatted arms, and I let the coverall drop to my waist as I walked to the front of the shop. There was a courier there, a young redheaded woman with an envelope in her hand. “Are you John Riggs?” she asked when she saw me.

I tried not to wince. The only time I heard my given name was at the doctor’s office or in court. Even my parole officer called me Jace. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Sign, please.” She handed me the envelope and a pen. I signed the slip, and when I handed it back to her, I saw that her cheeks were pink. “Thanks,” she said. “Have a nice day.”

I frowned as she walked out the door, but Luke, who was standing in the doorway, only laughed softly. “She was totally into you, man.”

“She doesn’t know me,” I pointed out.

“That’s not how it works,” Luke said. “You see someone before you know them. See?”

“Thank you, O Wise One,” I said, turning the envelope over in my hands. It was stamped from the Michigan Correctional System. Yeah, this was going to be fun, whatever it was.

“If you paid attention, you’d get laid more often,” Luke pointed out, ignoring the envelope I was holding. “Women dig you, Jace. You have that soulful poet thing going on.”

“I look like a con,” I said absently, staring at the envelope. I’d already signed for it. Did I even want to open this thing?

“Sure, don’t take my advice,” Luke said. “There are women everywhere, you know. Single women. Good-looking women. If you just got your nose out of a book or from under the hood of a car, you’d clean up.”

I looked at him, finally distracted from the fresh hell that was probably this envelope. “Maybe I already clean up,” I said. It’s a reflex when you have three brothers. You can’t show weakness.

“You live in the guest house out my window,” Luke said. “You don’t clean up. I would know.”

For some reason, the first thought that came to my mind was Tara Montgomery. The way she’d brushed her mouth over mine. Watch me. I tried to remember the last time a woman had put her mouth on mine, and it was so far back it was too depressing to contemplate.

“What’s it to you?” I asked Luke. Deflecting, Tara would have called it. “Why do you care how often I get laid?”

Luke shrugged. “I’m just trying to help you out.”

“Dude, you were hung up on Emily Parker for eight years. You’re hardly an expert in playing the field.”

Score one for me. Luke hadn’t been celibate for those eight years—he’d never discussed it, but I’d bet my sweet Thunderbird on it—but he wasn’t about to dispute the fact that he’d been hung up on the one and only love of his life. “Okay,” Luke said, “if you don’t trust my advice, you should ask Ryan. You know he’s banged most of the female population of Westlake between the ages of twenty-five and thirty.”

True. Ryan had cleaned up during his high school years, in a big way. But then he’d gotten a girl pregnant and had a kid at twenty, and four years later she’d dumped their son on his doorstep to raise, so all of that had put the brakes on Ryan’s big-league sex life. “At least he knows more about women than you do,” I said to Luke. “Or maybe I should ask Dex.”

We both laughed at that. Dex was crazy—do-not-pass-Go, flat-out fucking crazy. Every woman who had the balls to go near Dex had been crazy too. The few brief dating relationships he’d had had ended up in screaming fights and tears, thousands of phone calls on repeat and threats to call the cops. Something about Dex made women absolutely lose their shit, and not in a good way. Maybe it was something he put in their water.

“Okay, do not ask Dex for dating advice,” Luke said. “But go after that courier and ask her out. I’m telling you, she’ll say yes.”

“Or here’s another idea,” I said. “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want, just like I always do.” But damn, he was right. I was starting to see that. I was twenty-five, for God’s sake. I was out of prison, and I wasn’t dead. I’d started to think it, but now I was getting more convinced. It was time.

Tara Montgomery made me think it was time.

Except I wasn’t going to have Tara Montgomery. Not now, not ever.

She saw me as a project. Even though she wasn’t my counselor anymore, she saw me as someone to fix, someone to save. And it wasn’t going to work. I knew that already—because I wasn’t fixable.

“What’s in the envelope?” Luke asked, breaking me out of my thoughts.

Shit. The envelope. I ripped it open and pulled out the letter inside.

It stated that the Michigan Correctional System had ruled that my parole obligations had been discharged in full. I no longer had to report to my parole officer. I no longer had to follow the stringent rules and report in. I was finished with the correctional system entirely. I was a free man.

My hands went numb. My vision blurred for a second, and I couldn’t breathe. Then I forced in a breath and blinked.

I owed you that, Tara had said. I wasn’t stupid. I knew full well that I was getting this letter because of the report she’d written about me and sent up the line. The report she’d written after the second time we’d had an argument in session. If she hadn’t written that report, and sent it so quickly, I would still be stuck in the gears of the system, waiting for something to happen.

She was trying to fix me—but for a second all I could see was Tara. The way her dark hair fell over her shoulders, her slim body, the line of her lower lip, the way her eyes flashed when she was mad, the way she looked at me sometimes in a way I couldn’t fathom. The way she smelled of pure, sweet female skin.

We were done. I’d already known that, but this paper made it official. We were over.

But because of this paper, we were not fucking over.

At the very least, she deserved a thank you.

Maybe I needed to give her one.