Page 37 of Stay in Your Lane!

“Excuse me?”

“Coffee.” He motioned to the cup in my hands. “You made fresh coffee and you didn’t bring me some?”

I stared at him, baffled the way I often seemed to be when talking to my brother. “You didn’t ask for any.”

“I shouldn’t have to ask for coffee.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Coffee is life! And I’m taking that John Doe on an eight-hour car ride to another state this afternoon, so I need to be fortified.”

I pulled my coffee away from his grabby, greasy hand. “That’s not what I’m here about. I want to talk to you about Penny.”

Stuart’s look went from snarky to spooked in a second. “Oh shit. Did you find it?”

“Find wha?—”

He gripped the front of my shirt, smearing engine grease on the polo fabric. I would have objected, but I’d never seen quite this level of panic in his eyes before.

“Did you say something to her? You didn’t say anything to her, did you? Shit, shit, I knew I should have hidden it better but I didn’t think—and I already told her to—and I?—”

“Dude!” I grabbed his shoulders. “Is this about your mecha porn?”

He blinked at me. “Fuck, you know aboutthattoo?”

“I mean, you don’t actually go out of your way to hide it, but?—”

Stuart shook his head. “Never mind. No, this is about the engagement ring! I hid it in your room so Penny wouldn’t find it when she came over. You’ve got so many layers of crap in there that I figured it would take years for anyone to unearth it, butif you randomly decided to excavate one of your piles of papers and found it, I figured you might mention it to Penny since the bag has her name on it.”

“It does?” Confusion turned into excitement. “Wait, holy shit, you’re planning on proposing to Penny?”

“Keep your voice down,” Stuart muttered, finally letting go of me. “I don’t want Leanne to hear.”

“She would be happy for you,” I said.

My brother laughed in a not-so-funny way. “Not right now she wouldn’t. Not after what happened with her and Theo.”

“Oh. Right.” Yeah, with a newly broken engagement, she might not take that so well. “Good point.”

“Yeah. Plus…” My brother went to scratch his head, then thought better of it after glancing at his hands. “It’s—look, can you keep a secret?”

“Um…”

“Yeah, stupid question.” He shook his head and turned back to the hearse. Just a week ago, I might have agreed with Stuart that I was in fact terrible at keeping secrets, but that was something I’d learned about myself, thanks to looking into Ricky’s death. I could keep a secret if the stakes were high enough, and given what Colin had said…they might be even higher than I knew.

“I can.”

Stuart glanced at me. “Right. You?—”

“I can,” I said firmly. “Talk to me. I won’t say anything to anyone else.”

He took a longer look at me. “Uh…okay. Fine, but I’m serious, you cannotsay anything to anyone else yet.”

“Deal.” I waited patiently—well, not super patiently but as patient as I could be when I was desperately curious—while my brother closed the hood, wiped his hands, started to pace… I was about to tell him not to stress about it when he finally snapped.

“I’m planning on leaving the business.”

Oh. That was…wow. That was not what I’d been expecting him to say. I was so stunned I literally couldn’t speak, which was good because once Stuart got started he just kept going.

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