Excerpt 1:

Forty-five minutes. 

Fiona Han discreetly turned off the alarm on her smart watch. It wasn’t that she was having a bad time, these were nice people. But they were people who knew far too much about her, and she was ready for this day to be over. With a small smile, she said, “I called an uber. Hilary, thanks for inviting me. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

Fiona blinked and stared at Tomas Alvarado. “Umm… Thanks, but I’m fine.” She waved her phone at him and put it into her purse.  

He stood and looked down at her. “I’ll drive you home.” 

Eep! 

She did not want to make a scene. He didn’t give off the axe-murderer vibe, and her friends were grinning at her like he was perfectly safe, but the man unnerved her. 

Marcia Ortiz, a woman in her mid-fifties, and best friend to Fiona’s mother in law Iris, touched her hand. “You’ll be fine,” she murmured. 

Fiona rose, tucked her purse under her arm and followed Tomas to the stairs leading from Hilary’s deck to the driveway. She glanced back at Marcia, who winked at her. 

Eep!

Descending the stairs, she was aware of the man behind her. It seemed that for the past two weeks, Tomas had been at her back, without saying a word. Reaching the driveway, she faced three white pick-up trucks bearing the logo for Keeney Building Supplies, the company Iris owned. With a hand to her elbow, Tomas guided her to the one in the middle, distinguishable from the others by the rosary hanging from the rearview mirror, and opened the passenger door. Fiona eyed the distance up to the seat of the truck, then down at her pencil skirt and heels. Then she was up. Tomas placed her gently on the seat and reached around to buckle the seat belt. 

“I’m not a child!” She glared up at him.

He met her eyes fully for the very first time. “I know you’re not.” He closed the door and walked around the hood of the truck. 

 Walk was the wrong word. Tomas prowled like a predator. Did that make her his prey? 

He climbed behind the wheel, his presence taking up all the air in the truck. Fiona wanted to open the window, to breathe, perhaps to crawl out. 

Placing a large hand on the back of her seat, he ignored her as he turned to back out of the driveway. She could smell him.  If she turned her head, ever so slightly, she could brush up against his hand and rub his scent all over her. Where had that thought come from? Fiona shook her head and stared forward. 

  “I live on Dunlop Street,” she told him.

“I know.” Tomas met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “I changed the locks on your doors last week.”

“Right,” she said in a small voice. To keep the douche canoe of her soon to be ex-husband out. Her eyes got big. “I haven’t paid you yet! I’m so sorry, I forgot all about it. I can write you a cheque when we get to the house. It’s just –”

“It’s taken care of.”

“Oh.” Tomas worked for her mother-in-law. Iris must have had him do it. “Thank you.” 

He drove in silence.

 Not knowing how to converse with someone who clearly didn’t like to talk, she leaned her head back, and closed her eyes. 

She awoke to see Tomas scouring the word ‘cunt’ off her garage door.

 Fiona threw herself from the truck, stumbling as she hit the ground. She righted herself and flew around the hood of the truck. Tomas whirled and grimaced. 

“Ohmygod. Ohmygod. Ohmygod,” she chanted, pacing back and forth in front of the garage. Scrawled in dripping red paint, each capital letter was at least two feet high. 

Eddie.

 He’d chosen a public and humiliating way to get back at her.

Excerpt 2:

Tomas’s big hands spanned her waist as he lifted her out of the truck. He leaned in to nuzzler her neck and Fiona pushed him back. “Uh-uh. You have a story to finish, my friend.” 

Grinning, he set her down, closed the truck door, and followed her up the stairs to her apartment. Unlocking the door, she pointed at a chair. “Sit and talk. I’ll make tea.”

“God, you’re bossy.” Tomas complied and plucked an apple out of the bowl on the table. He rolled it between his hands while she moved about the kitchen. “Carlos likes to fix up cars, and he’s good at it.”

Thinking about the beautifully maintained car Louisa drove, she smiled at the irony of both their mothers driving BMWs, although her mother traded in her car every three years; the woman wouldn’t be caught dead in one as old as Louisa’s. 

“He’d finished work on this cherry red Chevy Nova SS. The engine had this low throaty rumble, the interior was gorgeous. I’m getting a boner just thinking about it.” He laughed at Fiona’s glare. “I was pissed at him one night. I’d taken beer from the restaurant. Not the first time, either. This time, he chewed my ass out in front of a bunch of my friends. They laughed. I was humiliated. So I went home, found the keys to the Nova, and took off to Wenatchee for the weekend. On the way back, the cops pulled me over and arrested me for auto theft.” He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone.

Anger and frustration played across his face. She could only imagine his fear at the time. 

“I didn’t know Carlos had sold the car and he didn’t know I’d taken it. The buyer came to get it, Carlos opened the garage, and it was gone. They reported it to the cops.”

“And your stepfather got you sent to jail?” She moved closer and placed a hand on his shoulder. 

He shook his head. “Mom said he tried to talk the buyer down from pressing charges. But the buyer was seriously pissed. I was an angry punk then, which didn’t help matters. So, yeah, that’s how I wound up doing time.”

Fiona pressed into his side, running a hand down his arm to stroke the scarred knuckles of his big hands. Hands that built beautiful homes, designed delicate jewelry, and touched her like she was precious. “Was it…awful?”

He interlaced his fingers with hers. “Yeah. It was a minimum-security prison over in Forks. But I still got beat up a couple of times. There was a nurse who used to live in Keeney. His mom knew my mom, and was able to help me out by getting me a job cleaning up in the infirmary.

“The doc there figured out I had trouble reading. At first, he was a real jerk. Got pissed that I wouldn’t follow the instructions he’d written down. Thought I was lazy and trying to piss him off. I think he saw me staring at the paper, trying to figure things out, and he started asking questions about school and stuff. I had to tell him about my learning disorder. The prison had a rehabilitative program with a psychologist on staff. That doctor got me tested, and they figured out how to help me.”

He turned wary eyes her way. She didn’t know what he was expecting to see in hers, but he seemed to relax and continued speaking.

“I got pulled from the infirmary, which sucked because that nurse, Jaime, made the best cookies.” He grinned up at her. “They put me in school. I wasn’t thrilled, because school sucks when you can’t read. But it was time. If I was gonna have any kind of future, I had to put in the work. There were a dozen guys in the class. Like me, they had learning disorders, although we weren’t all the same. It was hard work, but it wasn’t like I had anything better to do.”

“And you learned to read,” she spoke softly, one hand intertwined with his, the other sifting through his hair, gently massaging his scalp.

“Yeah.” Now there was pride in his eyes. “I’m still slow. And I do better when I hear instructions instead of reading them. But I read something every day, to work at it, get better.” 

She cocked her head to the side. “What do you read? The newspaper? Sports stuff?”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “I like romance novels.”

“Really!”

“Yep.” Releasing her hand, he shifted so she stood between his legs, his arms caging her in between his hard body and the edge of the table. “They’re kind of like…instruction manuals.”