His Unlikely Lover (Unwanted #3) (30 page)

“That was a stroke of genius.” He nodded in approval. “She loved it, even though she tried to pretend that she didn’t.” He gave Gabe a perusing glance before sighing and removing his filthy baseball cap. He rubbed a hand briskly back and forth over his short, messy hair before sticking the cap back onto his head.

“Can’t say I ever liked you,” he admitted, his voice gruff. “With your fancy suits, always waiting outside on the rare occasions that you picked our girl up from work. Figured you were scared of getting your posh shoes and pretty clothes dirty. I can’t trust a man who’s afraid of a bit of grease . . .” Gabe strove to remain unoffended by the less than sterling character assessment, hoping that there was a “but” in there somewhere. “But I reckon you’re not so bad.”

Gabe waited for the rest, but Craig seemed to be done talking. Well, faint praise was better than no praise he supposed as he watched Craig turn back to the car. It seemed that the man was done talking to him and, feeling comprehensively dismissed, Gabe walked over to the where the youngest guy, Sean, was working.

“He-ey,” the young man said with the exuberance of a puppy. “It’s the boss’s boyfriend. What’s up, bru?”

He unselfconsciously held out a grease-covered hand and Gabe took it with barely a flinch. He reminded himself that he had hand-sanitizer in the car and if he was going to be squeamish about this stuff he’d lose major points with Bobbi and just prove her point about them being unsuited.

“Listen.” Sean was leaning in conspiratorially. “I was thinking: Miz R loves chocolates and dried fruit and stuff. You should totally consider sending her stuff like that.” Gabe bit back a laugh at the transparency of young Sean’s ploy. He was just hoping for the bounty to spill over onto him, as it no doubt had with the flowers.

“Did you give the flowers to your girlfriend as well?” Gabe asked, smiling, and Sean grinned before nudging Gabe with a friendly elbow.

“I have three girlfriends, and they all loved the flowers.”
Three
. Gabe could barely cope with (or
keep,
for that matter) one. Ah, the vitality of youth. He stifled a laugh and glanced up to see that surly Pieter guy staring daggers at him. Wondering what that was all about, he excused himself and walked over to Pieter’s workstation.

“Have I offended you in some way?” he asked directly.

“Yeah, the boss is a nice lady; she don’t need some player playing her!” The words were delivered with a bit of heat and a
lot
of ice.

“I assure you, I’m not playing her,” he told the skinny man, who had a three-inch height advantage on him.

“You can use your fancy words and all, but she’s too good for you.”

Gabe reflected on his previous sentence, wondering which of the seven words had been too “fancy” for Pieter.

“I agree,” Gabe said. “She
is
too good for me, but I’m trying to become someone worthy of her.”

Pieter’s pale-blue eyes narrowed assessingly, and Gabe kept his stance open and his eyes level. Gabe watched the fight go out of the other man’s bearing.

“You should stop sending her flowers. It’s not her thing,” Pieter said. Yet another guy who thought he knew Bobbi better than Gabe did. If Gabe weren’t so heartened by the fact that her employees obviously liked and respected her enough to fight for her, he would have been beyond annoyed. Besides, Bobbi had never received flowers from anybody precisely because they thought that she wasn’t someone who would appreciate them. But she was a woman underneath the overalls, he knew that better than anybody else, and despite everything, he suspected that deep down inside she had loved the flowers—maybe not the excess of them, but definitely the sentiment behind the gesture.

“It’s been mentioned before,” he said. He heard her voice and leaned to the side to see her past Pieter’s lanky bulk. She was leading the customer out of her office, her voice brimming with excitement. He wasn’t close enough to hear her words above the noise of the shop but whatever she was saying, she was damned enthusiastic about it.

She shook the man’s hand and waved him off as he climbed into his car and drove off. After the car had turned the corner that would take him out of sight of the shop, she pumped her fist in the air and did a happy shimmy.

He could tell exactly when she first caught sight of his car, because her body language tensed immediately. She turned slowly and even with the light behind her he could see her flinch.

“Gabe,” she said, her voice wobbling a bit.

“Can we talk?” he asked without preamble, and she nodded warily, indicating that he should follow her into her office. He dusted off the same chair he’d occupied the last time and saw that his handkerchief came away slightly less grimy this time. He noticed, as he sat down, that she had put the tool bouquet on a low filing cabinet next to her desk. She saw his attention drift to the basket and cleared her throat awkwardly.

“Thanks for the tools,” she said. “But I can’t keep them. They must have cost a fortune.”

He laughed. “I
have
a fortune.”

“Yes, but I don’t want you to spend it on me. That’s not your place.”

“I don’t want to get into this right now,” he dismissed. “I’m not taking the tools back; I wouldn’t know what to do with them. Use them or don’t. Give them away to your employees like you did the flowers, although I don’t imagine they’d be happy using pink tools.”

“There were way too many flowers,” she said, blushing guiltily. “I had to do
something
with them.”

“Well, the men certainly appreciated them. Did you know that kid has
three
girlfriends?” He shook his head in disbelief, and she grinned in spite of herself.

“He’s going to get caught at some point and it won’t be pretty.” She laughed, sounding so much like her old self that his heart constricted with longing. She caught herself and the laughter faded in her throat. “So what can I do for you?”

“My car needs a tune-up,” he lied, and her eyes flew to the Lamborghini. She had been itching to get her hands on—or rather
inside
—it for months now. He could see that she was torn. He had never used her shop in the year that it had been in business and even before that, when she had been tinkering with cars just for fun, he had never allowed her to lay a finger on any of his vehicles.

“And it’s making this weird knocking noise every time I change gears.” Another lie. The car handled like a dream, but he was willing to let her take it apart from top to bottom if it would make her happy and score him more brownie points with her.

“Is it like a hollow clunking sound?” she asked with a thoughtful frown.

“Yeah?”

“Hmm, it
could
be worn gear linkage, but that seems like an unlikely problem for a car under a year old,” she speculated. “And it’s not like you’ve ever tested her capabilities much on the road, so it can’t be from wear and tear.”

“So you’ll take a look?” he asked, trying not to sound too eager. Her eyes were watchful but she nodded.

“I’ll get Craig to have a look,” she told him.

“But I’d rather
you
did,” he said, because he knew how much she was itching to.

“I have other things to take care of,” she maintained, her eyes filled with longing as they tracked back to the car. But it was clear that she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of accepting this latest gift—because that’s what it was. He was giving her something that she had dying to have for months and . . . she was throwing it back in his face.

“What if I told you that I trusted only you to take care of my car?” he asked softly.

“I’d tell you that it’s too late . . . you should have placed your trust in me long before now.”

“Why are you being this way?” he asked in frustration. “What the hell did I do to you that was so damned awful? Okay so I wanted to keep our relationship a secret at first, I handled the situation badly, but punishing me for having human failings is petty as hell!”

“Do you really think
I’m
being petty? When you were
ashamed
to admit that you found me attractive and that I was your lover?”

“Let’s just be completely honest here, Bobbi! You’re punishing me because I’m not in love with you. I have the audacity to
want
you without craving all that romantic and sentimental bullshit as a side dish to the incredibly hot sex. I respect you and I care about you, but that’s not enough for you. I don’t love you the way you want me to so to hell with me, right?”

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I expected too much from you. But, what do you want from me, Gabe?” she asked gently. “Why have you been sending me flowers and poems and presents?”

“I wanted to . . . romance you, I guess,” he admitted.

“To what end?” she asked logically, and he watched her mutely. He wasn’t sure how to answer that question. “To get me back into bed? To get me to forgive you for hurting me? To apologize for what you said at the football match?”

“All of that.”

“And let’s say you succeeded in romancing me, what would the next step be? We go to the ball together, right? And then start a relationship that we both know would be doomed from the start.”

“Stop this,” he suddenly hissed. “Stop talking to me like I’m a preschooler. Yes, I wanted to romance you, I wanted to apologize, and I wanted to have a proper relationship with you. One that involves spending time together, enjoying each other’s company, and
sex
. Because I believe that we can be good together. And if it doesn’t last, it’s because that’s the way relationships go sometimes. Grow up, Bobbi. Sometimes all a couple has going for them is the sex, which can grow into mutual fondness, which can then become that damned Grand Passion that all women seem to aspire to. We’re lucky, we
used
to have a pretty good friendship to build a solid foundation on, in addition to better sex than most people have in a lifetime. Everything else will either fall into place or it won’t. But you want that happily ever after
right
now. And if you don’t get it, like a petulant child, you’re hell-bent on spoiling the chance we have to explore something that could actually be quite good between us.”

He had a valid point, Bobbi realized. So he wasn’t in love with her, but he
did
love her and that really was more than most couples had going for them. He looked hurt and disgusted with her and she could understand how he felt, but all the concerns that she had voiced that night in her room were still there. There was the fear that he would expect her to change too much in order to conform to his idea of the feminine ideal. The fear of more heartbreak—but she acknowledged that the chance of heartbreak was a risk in every relationship—it was part of life. But while most other relationships had a chance of ending well, this one was almost doomed to failure, despite Gabe’s grand talk about it possibly growing into something more. But balancing out the fear was the hope that even when it didn’t work out, the relationship would die a natural and relatively painless death and leave them both still with a mutual respect and love for each other. Gabe wanted to try and despite all her misgivings—Bobbi now knew that she wanted to try as well.

“I
have
been punishing you,” she admitted, and his eyes jerked up to hers. “You mean the world to me, Gabe, and I hated that
I
didn’t mean the same to you. I just . . .” She choked up and bit her lip as she tried to get herself under control again. “Let’s go to the ball together and see where that takes us, but I’m not promising anything beyond that.” He nodded, his face remarkably grim for a man who had just received what he wanted.

“The
other
thing I can’t promise you is some major change in appearance,” she warned. “If we’re going to do this, you’re going to have to accept me the way I am.”

“Bobbi, you’re beautiful the way you are,” he assured her. “You always have been. I apologize if I ever made you feel less than that. But I hope you’ll deign to wear a bra at the very least—there will be a lot of stodgy old men in attendance, and we wouldn’t want any coronary incidents.”

That startled a laugh out of her and he looked pleased. Which sparked an epiphany in her: all these years of trying to make Gabe laugh or smile and she only now realized that he had put an equal amount of effort into surprising laughter and smiles out of her as well. And, she acknowledged to herself, he enjoyed doing so.

“So do you really want your car checked? Or was that just an excuse to come here?” She asked, and he smiled. One of those full-on, genuine smiles that she loved so much.

“Well, I wanted to see how you liked the tool bouquet and the car was my foot in the door. Besides, I know you’ve been itching to get your hands on it.”

“So you don’t want her checked?” She couldn’t quite hide her disappointment and Gabe’s smile gentled.

“Of course I do. I hear you have quite the reputation for restoring and fixing vintage and exotic cars,” he teased, and she felt a surge of pleasure at his words.

“Did you
see
her?” she asked him.