Page 9 of The Millionaire's Mechanic

His stooped shoulders rounded a touch more as if he were drawing into himself. Anymore and she’d have to convert a car door into a shell because he’d be a turtle.

“But some of those people have been with you for years,” she protested.

“And a few clients did choose to stay. As for some of the others, it may have been the push they needed to go elsewhere. There are newer, flashier firms in town. Our operation has never been trendy. We gained our clients mostly through word of mouth because we were steady…dependable. But we aren’t that anymore.”

Wishing she hadn’t eaten her entire meal, Georgia put her hands on her stomach. “Can you sell a house that is mortgaged?”

“Yes. And we should make enough from the sale to pay off the bank and put a down payment on a two-bedroom condo—if you still want to live with your old man, of course.”

Unlike Mack, Georgia had never lived on her own. And she wasn’t about to start now, not when Ephraim needed her so much.

“You’re kidding, right? Do you know how expensive rent is in this town? I’d never be able to afford my own place, not without a roommate—that may as well be my favorite guy in the world.”

Ephraim snickered, giving her a patently skeptical glance. But he didn’t suggest she go off on her own. They’d had the ‘young people need to live their own lives’ conversation before. He knew Georgia would never move out. She had inherited her stubbornness from Diamond, a fact he liked to remind her of despite the fact she and her foster mother didn’t have a drop of blood in common.

“What will you do about the office?” she asked.

“Close it.”

She winced.

He wiped his forehead with his tablecloth. “It’s not that bad. Without the office as overhead, things are more cost-effective. I can run a one-man operation out of our home with the clients who choose to stay.”

“What about your secretary? The other staff?” There were two other junior accountants in addition to Margaret, his longtime assistant slash receptionist.

“They’re already looking for new jobs.” Ephraim gave her a tight smile. “I wrote them excellent letters of recommendation. It was the least I could do.”

Knowing her father, he was ripping himself into little shreds for not being able to do more.But maybe you can.

“Dad…what about the Talbot?”

Ephraim blinked. “What about it?”

She took a deep breath. “What if we sell it?”

He reached over to pat her hand. “You’re the one who insisted on fixing the old clunker. It’s yours to do with as you wish—you never had to give it back to me.”

The Talbot had originally belonged to Ephraim’s grandfather. He’d passed the vehicle onto his son, who had promptly wrecked it. But Pop-Pop hadn’t disposed of it. Instead, he threw a tarp over it and stuck it in the back of his garage, always intending to fix it up one day.

When Mack had become a mechanic, Ephraim had hoped he’d start the restoration of the classic car. But while Mack loved to tinker on his own projects, his frequently adversarial relationship with their parents meant he rarely touched the Talbot, much to Ephraim’s disappointment. But he always held out hope Mack would change his mind, and it would be the thing that brought them together.

In many ways, Ephraim was naïve. But his once-placid and optimistic nature had taken too many blows.

Despite her intense desire to get her hands on the Talbot, Georgia hadn’t touched it until after Mack was gone. One day, she’d come home from work, removed the tarp before pushing the car to the center of the garage as a sign that she was going to start working on it. Then she’d gone to take a shower before Ephraim arrived home.

She’d held her breath, anxious over her father’s reaction. But he’d been so happy that she wanted to work on the car, he’d given it to her as a gift.

Georgia hadn’t accepted. No, the car was going to be a present to Ephraim for always being her home and her rock. A nerdy, socially inept rock, but her everything, nonetheless.

Except now the house was at stake.

“I might know of a buyer,” she shared. “One of Elite’s customers expressed an interest in the Talbot after he heard I was restoring one,” she said, deciding not to mention her harebrained visit to Rainer Torsten’s office.

It had been two weeks since she’d busted in on the man. She’d set up a Google alert on his name. The date of his appointment at the bank had come and gone without any mention of him in the news or gossip sites. Georgia assumed that meant he was all right.

There’s a separate God for beautiful people. The way she had gaped at the man continued to send her into a shame spiral even now, all these weeks later.

It was especially disconcerting because her reaction had been so damned unexpected.

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