I hadn’t been prepared for the question that came out of his mouth almost immediately. “You old enough to work here?” he’d asked in what I was pretty sure was the closest thing to a rumbling voice I’d ever heard in person.

I couldn’t help but glance at my longtime boss, but that was because he’d asked basically the same thing right before offering me a job when I’d been seventeen. So I smiled even wider when I put my attention back on the man with dark-colored tattoos that went up to his jaw. “Yes.”

He didn’t miss a beat, and those blue-green eyes, which seemed to pop beneath short but super curly black eyelashes, narrowed again. “How long you worked here?”

I didn’t miss a beat either. “Six years.”

That got me a blink before that deep, raspy voice asked, “What do you know about paint?”

What did I know about paint?

I’d almost lost my smile then, but I had managed not to. He wasn’t the first person to ask me that kind of question. I was one of the few females I’d ever met who did auto body paint. As a kid, I would never have thought that painting cars and parts was what I would end up doing for a living—much less, that I would grow to love it and be pretty damn good at it, if I did say so myself—but life was crazy that way.

So I told this man, who was making the same mistake just about everyone I had ever met had made too, the truth. “I know everything about paint.” And I’d smiled at him because I wasn’t being cocky. I was just telling him the truth, and I didn’t miss the way Mr. Cooper smiled as I did it.

The new man blinked again and his voice got even lower as he raised thick, dark brown eyebrows at me. “What do you know about bodywork?” he’d shot off next, referring to the act of fixing minor or major physical imperfections or damage to a vehicle.

I had still managed to keep my smile on my face. “Almost as much.” He hadn’t known it then, but Mr. Cooper had gotten me started on bodywork before moving me over to paint years ago. I’d been pretty good at it too.

But this man who had become my new boss had glanced at Mr. Cooper sitting on the other side of the desk for a moment before returning his gaze to me and asking in a tight voice I wasn’t sure what to think of, “What do you know about classic cars?”

And, shit.

Even I glanced at Mr. Cooper, but he was busy looking over at the other man to see that I wanted his attention and support. So I had said the first thing I thought of. “Some. Not everything, but not nothing.”

The man I had thought was gorgeous moments before pressed that not-thin but not-full mouth together. Then he’d asked, “Do you know how to weld?”

Did I know how to weld? I had narrowed my eyes at him. “Is this a test?”

This man I had barely met didn’t hesitate to repeat his question the exact same way he had originally presented it.

And I knew, I knew he was testing me. So I had shrugged and told him the truth. “I know the basics.”

That mouth twisted to the side as that big, bulky body leaned back in the chair he sat in. A chin covered in dark brown stubble with hints of silvery gray mixed in tipped an inch higher than it had been a moment before, and that confirmed he was still trying to test me. “If you were doing bodywork and found lead, what would you do?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Cooper sigh and cover his eyes with his hand. It was the first of many, many times I would watch him do the same thing over the next three years, but that’s another story.

Luckily—and I’d known right then how lucky I had been to know the answer because I was pretty sure he would have fired me if I hadn’t—I told him the right answer. “You can’t weld over lead. You have to burn it out.”

The man had leaned back in his seat, crossed his arms over his huge chest, and said, totally seriously, totally condescendingly—the same way he would a hundred times over the next few years—“You’ll do.”

I’d do.

And I had.

* * *

That had been years ago, and since then, I’d figured out how to deal with Lucas Ripley, or Rip, or Ripley, as he had told us to call him way back then.

So when he asked me if I understood him or not regarding his policy on taking a nap, I said the only thing I could have. “I get it.” And I said it about as happily as I could, even knowing that my response was going to irritate him even more than he already was.

But life was all about the little things, and getting a rise out of Rip without exactly pissing him off was a game I liked playing more than I should have. Every once in a while, if the situation was right and he was wearing his navy-colored compression shirt, I could get a smirk out of him. And on really rare occasions, I might sneak a quick half-smile out of him that was gone in a blink of an eye later.

And if my little heart sighed over that sneaky little smile or smirk, it was nobody else’s business but mine.

And my siblings.

And my best friend.

But that was it.

I didn’t let myself think too much of getting him to make an expression that wasn’t a scowl, a mildly annoyed one, or an eye roll. I definitely wasn’t going to think about the blank face he made that I might have kind of loved and hated at the same time. Nope.

But anyway.

It had only taken him two days of working at CCC for him to ask—with a grumpy side look—if I always smiled all the time. But it had been Mr. Cooper who had answered him that I did. Because I did.

In that moment in the break room though, I opened my other eye and full-on smiled at the man wearing a long-sleeved, almost turtleneck shirt that clung to every enormous muscle on his barrel chest. “But I wasn’t sleeping. I heard everything you said,” I finished explaining.

I wasn’t surprised when the man who had honestly only gotten more attractive over the years, even as the crease between his eyebrows had gotten deeper and the grooves bracketing his mouth had gotten more pronounced, shifted that nearly forty-one-year-old body toward me even more. “Yeah? What’d I say?” he tried to challenge.

He could be such a pain in the butt sometimes; he really did deserve me messing with him. Someone had to.

Slightly to the side of him, Mr. Cooper looked up at the ceiling, and I swear he started mouthing the beginning of an Our Father. Two of the guys sitting around the table started muttering under their breaths. I caught a hint of “micromanaging asshole” come out of one of them, and Rip must have too because his eyes immediately swept around the room like he was looking for whoever said it.

The last time he’d done that, two people had gotten fired, and I had liked them.

“First you talked about lunch breaks taking too long,” I blurted out. “Then you were talking about how the shop vac needs to be emptied after it’s been used because it isn’t your job.”

Cutting in must have done the trick to get him to forget what he’d been doing, because I’d only gotten a few words in by the time I was back to being the focus of his mostly unwanted attention. And that was because he was wearing that white shirt, and I usually had a 40 percent success rate of getting out of conversations with him not griping at me on white days. Gray shirt days were about 70 percent. Navy shirt days were about eighty-five. On navy days, I knew I could slap him on the back and not get even a side-look. Those days were my favorites.

I made my smile widen and even raised my eyebrows at him, hoping for the best. “Is that good enough, or did you want me to try and give you a word-by-word replay of what you said? Because I probably can, boss.” He could suck on those facts.

That face that I snuck glances at way more often than I had any business looking at didn’t change at all. He didn’t even blink. Then again, he should have known I hadn’t been lying. To be fair though, I didn’t think Rip trusted anyone at the shop. Not even Mr. Cooper, if the arguments I had overheard meant anything, and they had to mean something. The last time I’d been around people who argued that much, they had genuinely hated each other.

I let my lips pull back so I could show him my teeth as I forced a big fake smile at him, and beside me, my coworker snickered.

My boss—this boss—still wasn’t amused.