Carter Bravo's Christmas Bride. Christine Rimmer

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СКАЧАТЬ don’t think it’s an incurable disease or anything.”

      “A disease?” That kind of freaked him out. “It didn’t even occur to me she might have a disease...”

      “Carter. Pull yourself together.”

      “Well, I’m worried about her, okay?”

      “She’s just feeling down about something.”

      “It’s not like her,” he grumbled.

      “Everybody feels low now and then. Eventually, she’ll tell you. She always does.”

      “Yeah,” he said, feeling marginally better. “Of course she will. She always does.” He knew everything about Paige, all the little things—that she thought she looked bad in purple and she liked ’70s rock.

      He knew that she’d been in love with a loser named Jim Kellogg when she was in college. She and Jim had been talking marriage, but he dumped her when her parents died. He said he didn’t want to follow her to some Podunk small town and help her raise her sister. Since then, she’d only dated casually.

      He asked Dawn, “What time did she say she’d be back from Denver?”

      “Five or six—and, Carter?”

      “Yeah?”

      “Let it go. She’ll tell you when she’s ready to tell you.”

      “You’re right. I will...”

      After breakfast, he took Sally home and then headed for Bravo Custom Cars, thinking about Paige the whole way. About him and Paige, about how they’d hit it off from the start.

      He’d met her at Romano’s Restaurant, where she’d started working after her parents died. He’d liked her right off and he used to eat there at least a couple of times a week, partly because Romano’s had the best Italian food around. But mostly because he loved to sit in Paige’s section and give her a hard time. He’d asked her out more than once. She’d turned him down over and over, but he kept trying.

      Finally, she’d told him gently and regretfully that she was never going out with him.

      She hadn’t told him why she wouldn’t date him. Not then. The truth had come out later, as their friendship grew. About how she was happier on her own, that her heart had been stomped on but good by that Kellogg creep when she was already in bad shape from losing her parents.

      But that was later.

      He could still remember her way back at the beginning of their friendship, still see her so clearly, standing by his favorite booth at Romano’s, her hands in the pockets of her waitress apron. “I don’t need a date, Carter. But I could sure use a friend.”

      “Then you got one,” he’d said.

      The overhead fluorescents had brought out red lights in her dark brown hair, and her soft mouth kicked up at the corners. “Does my friend need another beer?”

      When he opened BCC, she’d answered his ad for an office manager. He hired her on the spot and she got right after it, moving the furniture around in the office for better “work flow,” as she called it, setting up the front counter and the customer waiting area so she could see everything from her desk. He knew cars. Paige knew a whole lot about systems and how to set up the front of the shop. Not only did she seem to have a knack for running the place; she’d been a semester away from getting a BA in business when her parents died and she quit to come home.

      The woman knew her way around a spreadsheet. He’d figured out within the first few weeks that he needed to keep her around. So every year at Christmas, he gave her a percentage of the company as her Christmas bonus. Five years after they opened BCC, they were best friends and she owned 25 percent of the business.

      They had a good thing going. And somehow, now that she’d cut herself off from him, suddenly everything in his life seemed all wrong. Best friends were supposed to communicate. Paige knew that. Or at least, she always lectured him about communication whenever he got feeling down and wouldn’t say what was bugging him.

      He unlocked the gate at BCC and sailed onto the lot. Stopping the Lincoln in front of one of the bay doors, he climbed out and went around to the shop’s side door, where he turned off the alarm and let himself in. A button by the bay sent the accordion door rumbling up. He pulled the Lincoln into the open bay, got out again and shut the bay door. It was sunny out, but only in the midthirties, so he turned on the heat.

      The Lincoln, which he’d customized in a number of pretty cool ways, needed a little fine-tuning. He needed to let all this worrying about Paige go. She would talk when she was ready to talk. And when she did, he’d be there to listen.

      In the meantime, BCC was closed for Black Friday and he had the whole place to himself. He could get the Lincoln purring like a kitten and ready for the day trader from Boulder who’d commissioned it from him. And then he might even get started on the already cherry ’68 Shelby Cobra GT-500 Fastback that Deacon wanted pimped out with a whole new sound system and all the modern conveniences, including GPS. Deacon also wanted a rear spoiler, a modified grille and monster wheels with some really garish rims. It kind of seemed a shame to do that to a work of art like the Cobra. But Deacon didn’t pay him the big bucks to suddenly get squeamish over messing with the classics.

      Carter had a killer sound system in his shop. He turned on the radio to a hard rock station. As ZZ Top roared out, he zipped up his overalls and got down to it.

      He didn’t notice he had company until about an hour later, when he rolled out from under the Lincoln and headed for the inner door to the office and the little table in front of the window, where Paige kept one of those K-Cup machines. He had a nice hot mug of coconut mocha on his mind and had all but forgotten that he’d failed to relock the side door to the shop when he came in.

      Whipping a rag from his rear pocket, he wiped the worst of the grease from hands and switched off the radio. He loved vintage Bruce as much as the next man, but sometimes a little silence was good for the soul.

      As he turned for the front-office door, he registered movement out of the corner of his eye.

      And then he saw her: Sherry Leland, his ex-girlfriend.

      Sherry had taken the cover off the metal-flake candy-apple-red ’67 Firebird just back from the painter’s on Wednesday, and draped that killer body of hers across the hood.

      “Hello, Carter.” She gave him one of her come-and-get-me smiles. The smile matched her outfit: a red thong, a Santa hat and sky-high stilettos.

      It was a testament to how over Sherry he really was that his first thought had very little to do with her being nearly naked. His first thought concerned how those pointy heels of hers had to be screwing up the Firebird’s high-dollar paint job.

      “Sherry,” he said and tried not to sigh.

      “I thought you’d never come out from under that car.” She stuck out her plump lower lip in a sexy pout and tossed her long blond hair. “I’m starting to get kind of chilly.” She fluttered her eyelashes and glanced down at her bare breasts. Yep. She was chilly, all right. “Come on over here, baby,” she cooed. “Come here and warm me up.”

      “Sherry, I...” He really wanted to ask СКАЧАТЬ