Page 74 of The Millionaire's Mechanic

Startled, she twisted, her eyes swollen, cheeks streaked with tears. She took one look at him and crumpled. Rainer came around the bench, sitting before wrapping her in his arms.

Georgia pressed her face into his shirt front, weeping openly.

“Shh,” he soothed, grateful that she wasn’t trying to push him away. “It’s going to be okay. You’re safe now.”

Her little hand fisted against his chest. “But you’re the one in danger. Mack—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “We caught him on the warehouse security cams. We knew his face from Ephraim’s pictures.”

She looked up at him, a little pucker between her brows. “You have cameras outside, too?”

“Some,” he admitted.

They would be adding a hell of a lot more, too. He didn’t tell her that, but he would eventually. Rainer and Georgia were a team. He wasn’t going to hide anything from her.

“We can continue this conversation at the apartment,” he told her after another uniformed cop—a woman this time—paused at the stairs of the entrance to give him the hairy eyeball.

“But I came to turn Mack in for faking his death,” she said, wiping her cheeks with both hands.

“And you have no idea what that means to me.”

Rainer squeezed her tighter until she was almost another layer he was wearing. “But Powell tells me that it will start a pissing match between the local cops and the FBI agents that he has helping with his investigation.”

“Oh.” Georgia passed a hand over her mildly puffy face. “I should have thought of that.”

He rubbed her back. “It’s okay. You’ve had a shock. Why don’t we go home and talk some more? We’ll come up with some sort of game plan.”

Her lips parted, and she sucked in an audible breath. “Oh, shit. Ephraim is going to have an aneurysm when he hears the news. How the hell am I going to tell him?”

Rainer winced. “Very carefully?”

He deserved the incredulous glare she shot him. “Sorry,” he apologized. “We’ll figure something out.”

Pulling her into his arms, he led her to the car, soothing her the entire ride back.

But it turned out they didn’t have to break the news to Ephraim after all. One of Powell’s men had taken care of it for them, or so they were informed in front of Ephraim’s apartment.

They had gone there instead of summoning the older man upstairs, deciding he needed to know about Mack immediately.

Rainer covered Georgia’s ears when the junior security man told them what he’d done. “Damn it, you could have given the man a heart attack. You should have let us break the news.”

“It’s okay.” Georgia tugged his hand away, clearly having heard him. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

A grunt his only answer, he ushered George inside to see how her father was taking the news.

As expected, Ephraim wasn’t handling it well, or at all. Despite the photographic evidence laid out on his coffee table, George’s father refused to accept that his son was alive.

“These can’t be him,” he insisted, offering alternate explanations that ranged from the video being doctored or spliced with old footage, to Mack having a doppelgänger who had decided to impersonate him.

“ItisMack. He talked to me, told me to stay away from Rainer,” Georgia said gently, sitting next to him so she could wrap her arm around his stooped shoulders. “He lied dad.”

But Ephraim was hard to convince. Georgia shut down his irrational arguments with a gentleness and grace he hadn’t expected from someone still reeling from the same devastating blow.

Rainer had cradled her distraught form against him the entire car ride back. But here she was, comforting another, being his rock. His little love was one of those people capable of digging deep, maneuvering past her own pain to do what was needed.

She probably had no idea how rare that was.

His brain fast-forwarded a few years, and he could see Georgia with their kids, soothing them after they skinned their knees or had a fight with their friends at school.

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