Page 10 of Hold

She was too embarrassed to watch him leave, but when she heard a grumbling roar from the street, it was instinct that drew her eyes back to the truck. The street echoed with its vibrating growl. It did sound like a Corvette.

Thea glimpsed Liam’s outline through the window as he paused for a second, perhaps to let the engine get over the shock it seemed to be in at being inside a seventy-year-old truck. Then he shifted into gear and the behemoth pulled away, without the plume of black smoke she would have assumed that kind of antique would produce.

A teacher with a penchant for old cars. Or a plumber who wanted to get out of the business. Correction: who had gotten out of the business but was back in it again. Thea didn’t know what to make of him.

When she’d finished cleaning and went upstairs to bed, she was surprised to see Jake open his door. “Mom.”

Her mind immediately raced through all the things he might have told her about his schedule the next day that she’d probably forgotten. “Yes?” she said warily.

“That Mr. McConnell,” Jake said, not meeting her eyes. “I just thought… thought you should know what he did.”

Oh, God. What? What did that good-looking lumberjack plumber/teacher/motorhead do?A hundred scenarios flew through her mind, all of them involving smitten schoolgirls.

“He quit his job right in the middle of the school year. Left Mrs. McConnell—she’s a teacher there too—and just quit. He was supposed to coach basketball camp this summer. The team’s pretty pissed. And Mrs. McConnell always looks kind of… sad, and she yells at the students now. Well, kind of.”

Okay, phew. No schoolgirls.“He didn’t give any reason? That you know of?”

Jake shook his head.

“Well.” Thea pondered the news. “He must have had a reason.” But he seemed cranky enough to just drop everything if it pissed him off enough. “Shame about the basketball team.”

“Yeah. Mr. Price is going to run it now, and he’s not nearly as good as Mr. McConnell was.”

She cut her eyes sharply to him. “Not that you care, right? Because ‘you don’t care about basketball anymore.’ Right?”

Jake rolled his eyes at her. “Right.” And he went back into his room and closed the door.

“Good night!” Thea called.

A sound came from within that might have beengood night. Thea put her hand on the door, said, “I love you,” in a voice low enough not to carry, and went to her own room. She’d given Jake the master and Benji the next largest room, so hers was barely big enough for a double bed and a chest of drawers. She kept her hanging clothes in Jake’s room, which had the largest closet. The house had only the bathroom downstairs for the three of them.

Thea fought her way past the drying rack with her bras hanging over it and climbed over to her corner of the bed. Audrey had already taken over the other three-quarters. Thea had to change in bed because there was no floor space for her to do it.

The house was a mess, yes. Still, it was her mess, and she didn’t appreciate smug, redheaded ex-teachers coming in and pointing out what a mess it was.

She pulled the cat to her and buried her face in its back. “Maybe he was so horrified he won’t come back next week,” she told Audrey. “Maybe he can go back to ignoring me in class again.”

Audrey yawned and rolled onto her back, her front paw batting Thea’s nose. Thea had gotten used to going to sleep like this.

Those eyes, though.

Chapter 3

The toilet was unwieldy and wanted to drip down his jeans, but Liam corralled it with a garbage bag and carried it down the stairs. Strictly speaking, this was the apprentices’ job, but Liam wasn’t going to give anyone a chance to suggest he was sticking his nose up at his former profession.

Outside the house, he heaved the toilet into the dumpster, enjoying as always the satisfyingcrunchof porcelain disintegrating against the other debris, then began to walk back to tackle the floor tile. But the name on the side of a van caught his eye, so he changed direction.

The driver was on his phone but finished up as Liam approached. “Liam, my son,” the man said, sticking a hand out of the open window to shake. “I saw your truck, knew you’d be around here somewhere.” He nodded at the powder-blue Chevy, which stuck out like a fairy among beetles in the row of workers’ trucks at the edge of the property. “How the hell are ya?”

“Good, Sean, how are you?”

“Booming, thank you, bloody booming. All these flippers buying up dumps and getting in over their heads renovating. We get paid more to fix it than if they’d had us in to do it in the first place!” Sean O’Brien cackled, his ruddy face open and his eyes sparkling.

“Good to hear it.” Sean, who, if Liam wanted to guess, was about fifteen years older than him, was the general contractor on this house. Liam’s father and Sean had done a lot of business together over the years. Liam had overheard Sean tell his clients that they could trust Pat’s work, and when Sean had built his own house, Pat and Liam had done the plumbing work together.

“What are you doing here? I thought you’d left the business.”

“Yeah.” Liam had an answer ready. With the right amount of self-deprecating shrug, he put a hand to the back of his neck. “Between jobs, let’s say. My dad’s taken me on temporarily.”

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