Page 81 of Turn Up The Heat

The cordless phone, still flashing a dull green in a pile of socket wrenches on the floor, snapped Shane’s stare back into focus. Grady must have dropped it there after he’d called nine-one-one. He should put it back on the hook, in case anyone tried to call the garage. Yeah. It wouldn’t do to leave it off the hook like that.

Having that one small purpose honed Shane’s focus, forcing his boots to move over the buffed concrete floor toward the lift. Okay. He could do this. He could figure out a way to deal with his father, to help Grady get better, to fix everything with Bellamy. After all, fixing things was what he did.

Who the fuck was he fooling? He couldn’t fixthis.

“Shane?” The sound of Jackson’s voice rattled through Shane’s thoughts, and he swung around, blinking.

“Jackson? What are you doing here?”

His friend’s sheepish smile looked faded and tired. “Too jacked up to sleep. I thought a drive might clear my head, plus I figured someone should come out here and make sure everything was locked up.” Jackson shut the side door behind him and stuffed his hands in his pockets.

“Thanks.” Shane picked up a socket wrench from the cold concrete. “I’m going to stick around, finish up with this tranny.”

“You’re gonna need some decent muscle to mate that thing to the bell housing, you know,” Jackson said, pulling his coat off to toss it on the workbench.

“Yeah. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

“Lucky for you I know just the guy to help you out. Hand me that input shaft, would you?”

Shane stopped, overwhelmed again by everything flying around in his mind. “Thanks, man.”

Jackson lowered his arms from the Miata’s undercarriage. “You want to talk about it?”

He meant to say no. He meant to just work on the car, get his mind good and straight, and come up with all the answers. But instead, when Shane opened his mouth, the whole story came bubbling up.

“When I was a kid, my parents would host these fancy parties in the city for Philadelphia’s up-and-coming socialites. They were no place for me and my sister, so we’d come up here to spend long weekends with Grady and my grandmother, Ella. We thought it was the coolest thing in the world to come play in the garage bays, eat homemade chocolate chip cookies and stay up past our bedtime to look at the stars. I used to peek under the hood of every car that came into this place, and Grady helped me memorize the makes and models while Ella played with my sister in the fields out back.”

Jackson’s brow twitched in thought. “I don’t remember Grady ever being married.”

Shane exhaled on a small, sad smile. “You moved here when you were eleven, right?”

Jackson nodded, and Shane went on. “She died the summer I was nine, and my sister and I never came back. By the time I was old enough to realize it wasn’t Grady’s grief so much as my father’s strained relationship with the old man that kept us away from Pine Mountain, I was in high school.” Shane shook his head. “For a couple of years, Grady came up to the city to visit at Christmastime, but my dad was always conveniently in court on those days. After a while, the visits just stopped. I didn’t see Grady at all when I was a teenager.” The guilt in the words hung in the air, full of regret.

“So, then you just went to college and law school? How’d you end up back here last year?” Jackson asked.

The smile that crossed Shane’s lips grew a little bigger, and he tipped his head toward the Mustang. “On an impulse, I bought the car the summer after I graduated from college. It pissed my father off something fierce, which was half the reason I did it. But in the end, I’d earned the money by grunting it out at the firm, so there was nothing he could do about it.”

Recognition flickered in Jackson’s eyes, and Shane could see him starting to fit the pieces together as he finished.

“I kept the car at a hole in the wall garage outside of Princeton, fixing it up whenever I could, but I didn’t know my ass from my elbow and I got in way over my head. I called Grady, just for a pointer or two, and do you know what he did? He showed up in Princeton three hours later.”

Jackson chuckled. “That sounds like something Grady would do.”

Shane shifted his weight, squinting through the harsh fluorescent glare of the garage. “We never talked about the ten years we spent apart, not that weekend or any of the others when he came to Princeton to help me with the car, but it always ate at me that I wasn’t there for him when I should’ve been. Even when I graduated and passed the bar, I still stayed close with him, even though my father never knew it.”

“And that’s why you came last year.”

He nodded, a single dip of his rough chin. “Yup. It was a no-brainer. I couldn’t let Grady lose his business. Not when he loved it so much. My father scoffed at the idea, even though he grudgingly agreed to let me have the time off. We both thought it would be temporary, but as soon as I spent one day back here, I knew I wouldn’t ever go back to the city.”

Jackson cleared his throat and looked at his boots. “So, uh, will you now?”

Shane’s heart sped up in his chest. “No. Nothing’s changed. I meant what I said in that hospital. This is who I am. I belong here.”

“And what about Bellamy?”

The sound of her name sent a jolt through Shane, and he instinctively reached up for the bell housing on her transmission, itching to keep his hands busy so his brain would slow down. “I don’t know.”

Seeming to sense that Shane was nearing the end of his rope, Jackson backed off. “Right. Let me grab a rubber mallet. We’re going to have to pound the hell out of this input shaft to get it back in there right.”

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