Synopsis:
First loves, dark pasts, and fast cars collide in this high-octane adventure.
Eva Lynn Rodgers, the daughter of a mechanic, grew up with a need for speed. So did her best friend, and later boyfriend, Nathaniel Vellanova. But when Eva left the drizzling rain of Portland, Oregon, for a high-powered career in New York, she left both Nathaniel and her past behind.
Now Eva's back, and her BMW—like her life in general—could use a little love. Her new mechanic is the right man for the job, but he's got some scores to settle with the girl who peeled out for the East Coast when he needed her most.
It's time for Eva and Nathaniel to confront their demons. Passionate and dangerous sparks ignite as Nathaniel's brutal youth rises up and pulls Eva Lynn back to him—forging a bond that, this time, won't be denied.
CHAPTER 1
Freedom? It was never free.
The memories of that final day came unbidden, as they always
did—and slippery. That day he was twenty-seven and holding the phone to his
ear, listening to a foreign sound. His father’s sobs echoed over the line; they
begged him home. To please come, it was his mother… These sobs, from the man
who met every sobering morning with a toast of his golden can of Olympia and
every sunset with his fist in his wife’s face.
Could the son have known then? He’d always ask himself that.
Was there any way to know what his father had in store for him when he returned
home, for his mother, for the man who was his father? The scars on his skin and
the wounds within that had yet even to scar told him not to go, but he had
unfinished business with the old man. He’d go, and maybe this time it would be
a different.
Nate opened the door to the dark apartment he’d once called
home. It was after work, the sun had gone down, his boots were slick with the
rain he had just come in from. They slipped on the linoleum floor. A smell rose
up and enshrouded his body like a cloak. It clung to his nose and at the back
of his throat, tangy rusty tincture of blood. Warm, as if it were being pulsed
from the veins of a being. Automatically he reached for the light behind him,
his stomach clenching, his mind telling him no.No. NO!That was when the memory got slick. Even now his mind recoiled, and the details of that night faded back into the black mist.
Eva, he thought to distract himself. Where are you now, Eva?
Her name rolled around in his mouth softly, whispered to no one. An entirely
different set of emotions consumed him as his parents faded away once more. She
was seven when he was ten, and she was there for him every time he showed up
with a black eye or a new burn. She’d shown him his first fast car, and later
he taught her how to fix them, to make them go faster. At sixteen she rocked
his world in a way he would never recover from.
The years had passed like lightning after that day, each one
spent with Eva more mind blowing than the next. But as everything in his life
tended to do, that too would come to an end.
The pain, now cathartic, motivated, consumed him. His dark
past closed up shop and faded away, leaving him with his future. His future,
where he was in control.
CHAPTER 2
The rain hammered down on the windshield as my assistant
Jenny and I made our way to our recently discovered import garage. I had been
relieved to find a BMW mechanic that wasn’t too drunk or too deaf to hear that
I just wanted the oil changed, not a forty-minute hollering hand-gesture
session about how he wanted to replace my brakes. I’d bought the German sedan
used from a California Craigslist ad, and she was perfect—aside from needing
regular repairs.
Though my car was going to reap the rewards and I would come
to blissfully claim at least partial credit for the mechanic find, Jenny and
her precious Peugeot were technically the sole heroes in the discovery. On
Monday, I’d been in my office ostensibly reviewing the recent shoot for May’s
cover, but really wallowing in the current state of my life. I knocked the
old-school desk light to motivate it to work and thought of the fashion
rag—particularly the office—I’d left in New York City. That office had been
wide and luxurious—plush gray carpeting and dark paneling, furniture handpicked
from a sleek and modern designer catalog—and I’d bitten and clawed my way to
that corner palace thirty-four floors into the Manhattan sky in just seven
years. Now I felt like I was perpetually crouching low under the Portland,
Oregon, cloud cover. My fourth-floor office’s midcentury décor had nothing to
do with design resurgence; rather, it simply hadn’t been touched since Mad
Men’s inspiration had been reality. On top of that, I had chosen this new life
and had a magazine to run, which included advertisers and subscribers who
didn’t care what my current office looked like. In other words, I had made my
own worn-out bed, and I was having to work hard just to keep that.
Jenny, my Rose City Review intern and sometimes guest writer,
came waltzing in that morning and flopped down on one of the chairs in the
semicircle in the middle of the office. “You would not believe what I found,”
she said smugly.
Jenny was five foot five inches in her comfy ballet flats, a
well-rounded, good-hearted person whom I truly enjoyed—and wanted to trade
lives with. She had a huge extended family and a stable and relatively
stress-free job that allowed her to scrapbook and knit to her heart’s content.
We were both still single and looking, though I suspected I chose the more
stressful, cynical path in that realm, too. Jenny blissfully believed the
perfect men in the books she read—the men who looked beautiful naked and who
always kept their women in the throes of an orgasm—really existed, and the reality
she’d met hadn’t dissuaded her of that belief. I couldn’t enjoy those books—not
since I’d witnessed the creation of a cover photo. Cover models were sprayed
down with baby oil to mimic sweat, their chests were taped or air brushed so
they popped like they did, and one body was simply replaced with another if a
different set of abs worked better with the shot angle.
“What’s that?” I bit on Jenny’s bait. “And please don’t tell
me it’s a new yarn color.”
Jenny rolled her eyes. “That wasn’t a new yarn color—it was
a whole new type of yarn made from Himalayan alpacas—and it cost me a mint!”
“Right,” I said feigning that I even comprehended what she’d
just said.
“Anyway, so you know how I’ve been on this trek to find the
best import repair shop in the city, right?”
“Please tell me that your ancient Peugeot has found one,” I
said with a laugh and returned to my work, editing pen in hand.
“I did…and they do all years of BMWs.”
“Yup, and the one guy is a lush and the other is deaf,
right?” I asked, not looking up. “Nope. Young guy who seems to have it together
in a newly opened shop off Sandy.”
“I just saw that the other day—European Pro Auto? Pro Euro
Auto? Something like that? I thought they only did Ferraris and stuff.”“Nope, they do the high-end stuff but they also do other Euro cars. And the best part?”
“They offer scrapbooking while you wait?” I asked, eyes on
the cover choices.
“The mechanics are H-O-T,” she pronounced, ignoring my
snarky comment.
“Lusciously Latin, you mean?”
“Yeah,” she said with a mildly dreamy look before she came
back to the point she was trying to make. “The head mechanic actually owns the
place and he’s not really hot per se, but he has that air about him that I
thought would be perfect for you.”
“Perfect for me, huh,” I repeated. “And what’s that?” I was
now thoroughly engaged with what she had to say.
“Unavailable, uninterested, sort of dark—with a past, you
know? But I imagine that with him you sort of feel like you could take over the
world.’”
I arched a brow at her. “Quite the brief first encounter.” I
looked back down. “If you’re right, you just described complex to a T, my
friend.”
Jenny laughed, like a chiming bell tower, loud and ringing.
Another thing I loved about her. “Yes! That’s totally it. Anyway—didn’t you say
your door has a leak?”
I dropped my car off the next afternoon, leaving the keys
with their front desk woman, who wore glaring orange and was the same age as my
father, and not a single luscious or brooding mechanic was in sight. There were
four work bays, from which noise screeched, and a parking lot full of fancy
Euro cars, except for two. They were a red Toyota family car and an black
two-door monster. Though I was unsure of its heritage from this distance, the
black monster screamed: fast. Something I once knew a lot about.
Through the sheeting rain, from the comfort of the dry
interior of Jenny’s car, I saw the watery glow of my car idling, parking lights
on, directly in front of us, beside the main office. I hoped the water seal on
the rear door was indeed fixed; otherwise, my baby was now officially a fish
bowl.
"Wanna borrow my umbrella?” Jenny asked.
“No, I’m good—I’ll just run inside. I have to say”—my hand
on the door handle—“I’m impressed already that they have the car running. I bet
the heater’s on, too. “We’ll see after I get the bill if I’m still appreciating
the attention to detail. See you tomorrow and thanks for the ri—”
Jenny grabbed my arm. “Omigod.”
“Wha?” I said, leaning to the side, trying to see what had
made her gasp—probably the Luscious Latin—but at that moment only my car and
its exhaust and lights were visible through the sheet of water on the
windshield. Then the wipers cleared away the water, and I noticed what had made
her gasp.
He stood tall in slate-colored work pants and an open
rough-hewn jacket with the company logo embroidered over his heart. Leaning
against the building under the scalloped awning, he smoked a cigarette like it
was the last one he’d ever have. His features were shadowed under the awning,
but it could have been pitch-black and I’d still have known who he was. And he
was looking straight into the car—and into my eyes.“Lord…” I said like an oath under my breath.
“I know, right?” Jenny said, misinterpreting me.
“Wish me luck,” I whispered to her and to no one and got out
of the car.
Nathaniel Vellanova pushed away from the wall and in one
smooth movement opened the massive golf umbrella that had been leaning next to
him and strode toward me.
Behind me I heard Jenny reverse out the driveway, leaving me
to my past. CHAPTER 3
Nathaniel Vellanova stubbed his cigarette out and closed the distance in a few strides, effortlessly getting up in my space, covering us both with the umbrella.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said, the hint of nicotine
still on his breath. “This is your car, and this is the work order for the job
that was done. Rear passenger door seal was leaking—it’s fixed.” He flicked the
paper in his hand at me. “I did the work personally. There’s no charge, and
here are the names of two other mechanics in the area that I recommend for BMW
owners.”
I was dismissed.
I could feel warmth rise up in my cheeks, making me forget
that it was raining in April in Portland and I should have been chilled.
My mouth opened and shut without my permission; my mind
flooded with questions and observations. There was a change in the boy I
knew—that was, he was a boy no longer. His strong Italian heritage was
displayed in his high, wide cheekbones, firm jaw, and jet-black brows and
lashes around chocolate-and-whiskey colored eyes. His long lashes had always
made him a pretty boy, the kind who got his hair ruffled by old ladies, the
kind little girls would befriend, thinking nothing of showing him what was
under their dresses. Most unsettling were his eyes: When we were together many lifetimes
ago, they communicated everything that his mind was thinking. Now, they were
carefully in check, challenging even in their impenetrability, and yet I still
couldn’t find my voice—and that was a problem I rarely experienced.
I looked down at the paper in my hand, cold complete text
detailing parts and labor, came to a total of zero at the bottom.
“I’m not sure what to say, Nate…Thank you…I—”
“Not interested in what you have to say, and I don’t want
your thanks. Good-bye, Eva.” He turned, taking the umbrella with him, and
wrenched open the front office door, tossing the collapsed umbrella to the
side.
The rain drizzled cold and wet down my neck and slithered
down my back. I stood alone and dazed in the parking lot as I recovered from
colliding into my past. After years away from here, I had learned to
successfully control my words, making them say courteous and rational things.
But in my old world, Nate made me a very irrational person.
I walked. Wrenching open the front door, in imitation of the
way Nate had, I crossed the linoleum floor, my two-piece business suit and hair
dripping but my heels clicking satisfyingly, echoing against the sparsely
decorated room.
“Ma’am!” said the woman behind the massive welcoming desk,
startling me, her expression one of mild bewilderment.
I briefly registered her as the woman I’d dropped my car off
with. Today her dark skin was adorned with jewels that matched her hot-pink
nails and crisp blazer, which covered her ample bosom. It was immediately
apparent that I’d just stepped into her territory. Nate could run the things in
the shop, but she ran everyone who came through the front door.
Ignoring her, I strode for the closed door that I would bet
my next paycheck led to Nate.
Despite her age and size, the older woman moved like
lighting, coming out from behind the desk, putting one hand up. Her pink nails
were like a warning flare in my face. “Oh no, unh-uh. You are not going back
there.”
“I just need to speak to the owner.”
“Who are you?”
“Does that matter?”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “The only time I’ve seen that
man put his fist through the wall was when we first opened and someone stole
half our shiny new equipment. He came right in, closed that door, and beat the
tar out of that wall. Got three holes in it, and now? It’s probably got ten.
Who the hell are you and where the hell in his past did you come from because
you don’t look anything like the women he takes up with now?” She placed her
other hand on her wide hip.
I squinted. “Thanks? And that is where I came from, his
past. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a couple things I’d like to say to him to
bring him into the present.”
“Well now, look who is handing out candy at the angry
parade.” She said, looking me up and down, “Don’t give me your sass. If you go
back there, where do you think that’ll get you? Because I can tell, you got
that look on you that says you’re about to do something that you’ll regret
later.”
“I doubt I’ll regret it,” I said, moving to the side.
She moved with me. “Not in my office.” She nodded toward the
front door behind me. “Go, while I still like you.” She leaned, keeping part of
her weight in front of me, to pull a card out of the holder. A pen came with
it, and she scrawled something across the top of the card before handing it to
me.
I looked down at the card. It was Nate’s business card, and
the woman had added in tidy handwriting what I guessed was Nate’s personal cell
phone number.
“What’s this for?” I asked, and she used my distraction as
time enough to put a hand at my back, ushering me to the door. “He’s right in
there; I don’t need his number.”
“Oh yes, you do. If this is still important in the morning,
you can call him and talk about it.”
CHAPTER 4
The dream came to him again. He was ten, standing on the sidewalk under the tall fir trees that stood between the road and the apartment complex that he and his parents lived in. His pops getting drunk and busting up his mom. Some days he thought his mom’s mouth was going to get her killed. She never seemed to know when to shut up, know when Pops was on a bender, know when it was better to let him sleep it off, not shake him awake to tell him what a lousy piece of shit he was. Or what she graduated to doing, leaving little hatch marks on his arm with the kitchen knife to remind him that he’d gotten so drunk she could do that and he’d not wake up.
Eva, three years his junior, ran up to him. All skin and
bones, knobby knees and stick arms; Marvin’s daughter. He felt his pulse
quicken. She was a weird girl; she was like a guy, his best friend. Her nails
were dirty with paint or grease; she had smudges on her face and arms, bruises
on her shins from playing rough.
“Hey!” Eva yelled. “Where do you think you’re going?” She
skidded to a stop just in front of him.
“Home, dumb ass,” he said nonsensically, since he was
standing outside his apartment building. “Why don’t you go play with dolls and
leave me alone.”
She cocked her head to one side and looked at him, as if she
knew he didn’t mean the words he’d spoken.
“I’m not a dumb ass—you’re the dumb ass. You forgot to tell
me you were leaving.”
“I don’t have to tell you shit.”
“My dad says not to swear.”
“Yeah well, still, I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“I know, but I meant to give you this before you left,” she
said, and in the dream everything became slow, his subconscious lingering. In
his dream, he replayed those handful of seconds when her skinny arms wrapped
around his waist in a hug. When she held tightly to him, squeezing him in his
dirty white tank top and torn jeans, careless of who saw, careless if even he
cared.
After a while he felt his hands come around her—the feeling
so foreign to him but also so good. Happiness roared through his system, making
him feel lightheaded and something else that he’d not felt but a handful of
times in his life up to then. It was the feeling of being loved—he would learn
later.
She stepped back from him, looking up at him; Nate’s voice
cracked when he asked, “What the hell was that for?”
Her face screwed up tight. “Retard. It’s your birthday.”
The dream faded as Nate woke slowly to the orange glow of
the city lights pouring in through the floor-to-ceiling windows of his studio
apartment atop an old refurbished brick flourmill.
He sat up and scrubbed his face and double-checked that he’d
sent his date home already. His bed stood alone in the middle of the cavernous
space. The developer sold it to him at half the cost when the housing bubble
burst. It was considered unfinished, with no interior walls or ceiling lower
than the one twenty feet above him and open to all the industrial HVAC. Not
that Nate cared—the view was good and in a central location, just down the
street from the new nightclub he helped get off the ground, Festivál, and just
over the bridge into the east side of the city was his garage. The hardwood
floors still shone and the widescreen against the brick wall was well used, but
the gourmet kitchen gleamed with unused appliances.
Nate lay there, not knowing what had pulled him from the
dream or what had made him dream of her again.
Only, he did, of course. Seeing her again that day had him
reburying her in his mind, only his subconscious was putting up a good fight
against that.
His phone chirped. Reaching over, he grabbed his phone off
the floor and slid his finger across the screen. Two unread e-mails. The first,
which had probably woken him, was from European Forged Parts, and the second
was from the district attorney’s victim advocate department.
Fully awake now, heart hammering in his chest, Nate clicked
the alert. It was simple text, an automatically generated electronic
notification that said one Stephen R. Vellanova had been released on the third
of the month. If there were questions, Nate could contact the issuing district
attorney’s office at the information below.
Nate felt his palms go slick. He knew he was coming up for
parole and that good behavior and crowded prisons meant early release was
possible, but he had also been told it was highly unlikely. And now the
unlikely was done, and his father—the man who had sliced his mother to
death—was out.
Becky Banks grew up, like the generations of Bankses before her, in the Hawaiian Islands. With the Islands as her roots, Becky was raised within the time-honored tradition of “talking story” amid a backdrop of grassy fields, blue waters, and cloud-clad mountains. She moved to the mainland after high school to attend Oregon State University, where she studied forestry, natural resources, and science education.
She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Keith.
Becky’s
first novel, The
Legend of Lady MacLaoch,
received Night Owl Reviews’ Top Pick Award and achieved #8 on the Amazon
Bestsellers list for Historical Romance.
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