Page 8 of Her Bad Boy

It was more like having a high school crush, and that was definitely not good for someone in her position. Not good at all.

So, when she was sitting on the hood of her car late one afternoon in the relatively deserted parking garage of the courthouse, waiting for AAA to arrive since she had a flat tire and the one lesson her father gave her in how to change a tire went just about as far as the one about how to change her oil, she was busily scrolling through her phone when she heard his voice. The one that she knew she shouldn't be able to recognize so easily. The one that made her heartily wish she was wearing something more substantial than a thong beneath her short pencil skirt.

"May I be of assistance, Miss Barstow?"

She hopped down quickly, but not before he offered her his hand to help her, which she blatantly ignored. "No, thank you, Mr. Bove. Triple A is on the way."

He looked dubious, checking his watch. "It's rush hour. How long did they say it would be?"

Two hours, but she wasn't about to tell him that. "It doesn't matter—I'll be fine here."

Lucas frowned. He knew she didn't want to be around him—she'd made that glaringly obvious. But this was not a safe place for her to be, so he would do whatever he needed to do to make sure she got on her way. "Is there a spare in the trunk?" he asked, putting his briefcase on the ground and shucking out of his suit coat.

"Yes." One of the few advantages to driving beaters is that she had an actual spare tire. "But there's no need for you to do that, thank you. I'm perfectly happy to wait. I've got my phone and unlimited data, so—"

Just when she thought that nothing she was saying to him was getting through, he sprinted away from her, but he'd left his stuff behind. Seconds later, a surprisingly small, older model car came into view, and he parked it a couple spaces over before unfolding himself from behind the wheel, chuckling at the look on her face, which clearly said that she wouldn't have been at all surprised to see twenty other clowns come out after him.

"Not what you thought I'd drive, huh?"

She colored to have been caught staring. "No, I have to say you're right there."

"My father made me earn nearly everything except my room and board and my education. I've paid for everything about every car I've ever owned, and I was—before I got too busy to do it and manufacturers deliberately made it impossible to fix your own car—a fair shade tree mechanic." He leaned a bit closer to her to impart the information like it was a state secret, "This was my first car—bought it when I was sixteen with money I got working at an ice cream stand over the summer. Unfortunately, I bought it before I shot up about six inches—I had to remove the back seat in order to keep driving it through college!"

Against her will, Allie found herself laughing at—and with—him, but worse, being impressed by him.

Then he proceeded to unload things from his trunk that made her feel woefully inadequate as a car owner—can of fix a flat, an actual jack—not one of the toy ones the car makers include—and a tarp, which he proceeded to spread out near the tire in question before gathering all of the tools he'd need to change it and putting them readily at hand on the tarp.

"You really don't need to do this—" she tried again.

He looked up at her as he dropped gracefully to his knee on the clean material while rolling up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. "Yes, I do. My grandparents and my parents would all come back from the grave expressly to beat me about the head and shoulders if I left a young lady such as yourself alone and stranded in a place like this."

With that, he set about changing the tire while Allie tried not to watch the play of muscles across his back, the way his biceps strained against the fine material of his shirt when he was removing the lug nuts, or how his butt looked when he bent over. Unfortunately, there wasn't a thing on her phone that could compare to the show that was playing out right before her eyes.

Of course, he got it done in less than fifteen minutes, including the cleanup, and there was nary a speck of anything on his shirt that hadn't been there beforehand, either.

Another reason to hate him. If she'd been able to do it all, she knew she'd've been covered in dirt—or, looking at the floor of the garage, worse—by the time she was done.

"Thank you very much, Mr. Bove. I appreciate it enormously. Can I pay you—" She knew it was ridiculous to offer, but it seemed terribly impolite not to, considering what he'd just done for her. But the look on his face made her stop dead in the middle of her thought, lest she offend him and he upend her. It was that kind of highly improper look, delivered with his chin down and from beneath heavily drawn brows.

"You most definitely may not, and I should swat your bottom for even thinking of it," he threatened, but with the hint of a smile from where he was standing at the trunk of his car.

Allie's eyes went round, and her mouth dropped open at what he'd just said.

"In fact, I want to give you something."

It was a can of fix a flat that he was holding over his arm, as if he was presenting her with a bottle of expensive wine.

"2016 was a very good year for aerosol tire inflators," he quipped.

"Why didn't you use this rather than going through changing the tire?"

"Well, I figure you work yourself to death and it might be a while before you're able to actually get to a mechanic to get the tire fixed, and I didn't want you to have the hassle of having to deal with another flat, because that stuff isn't really good in the long term." He leaned towards here again, conspiratorially. "Besides, I wouldn't have been able to show off in front of you if all I did was stand there and hold a can."

Allie found herself laughing—and blushing—hard at that.

She took the can he was offering, but reluctantly. "But won't that leave you short?"

He had the audacity to wink at her. "I'm too tall for anything to leave me short, Miss Barstow."

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