Page 6 of Daddy's Little Liar
Chapter Two
She should have stayed in the garage and put her foot up.
Alone in the cab of ‘Daddy’s’ tow truck, she clung to the door with one hand, the edge of her seat with the other, and did her best not to make a sound as she carefully nudged her injured foot out of her shoe. It wasn’t just her ankle swelling like a balloon. Her foot was swelling as well, which meant she was going to have to work to get her shoe back on, but for a few minutes—the instant rush of relief that accompanied the soft thud of her shoe falling over empty until that eventuality—it was a little less painful.
Very little.
No sooner had she lowered her bare foot to rest on the floor of the truck cab than the low, wounded throb started up all over again, the pulse radiating up her leg. It hurt, not just in her ankle, but in her knee, her hip, her freaking teeth—probably because she couldn’t stop gritting them.
Pulling her purse into her lap, she fished out a bottle of aspirin and took three. She had nothing to drink, so she swallowed them dry. She spent the next few minutes watching through the windshield as Daddy popped the hood of her red Camaro to poke around the engine. It took less time for him to diagnose the problem than it did for the car to break down.
“Good news or bad news?” he asked, coming back to hoist himself into the driver’s seat beside her.
“Good,” she said. At this point, she desperately needed it.
“I can fix it,” he decided with such confidence, she couldn’t help but believe him.
“Okay.” She braced herself. “What’s the bad news?”
“You’ve blown your head gasket. You’re looking at about a thousand plus labor. Does your insurance pay for tows?”
A thousand? Georgia froze, then her stomach rolled. Just the sound of that monetary amount felt like a physical blow.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Do you want me to fix it, or do you want me to tow you somewhere else? The next nearest town with a mechanic I don’t mind recommending is thirty-seven miles down the highway, but I guarantee they’re going to charge you more than I will. No pressure, but I can do the work, and I can do it right. What I don’t have is the part, but I can probably get it delivered by tomorrow morning. Barring any problems, I can have you back on your way by early afternoon. So, what do you want to do?”
She wouldn’t make her interview tomorrow morning, but she might salvage it with a phone call to reschedule for later in the day. So that was one problem taken care of.
Problem number two…
“You can do it,” she heard herself say, but her stomach sank. She didn’t have a thousand dollars plus labor to pay him or more to pay someone else. She’d used the tow policy on her insurance once before. They only paid for the first twenty miles. She didn’t know how much an extra seventeen would cost her, but she was pretty sure it was more than what was sitting in her bank account. She folded her arms, covering her mouth. She felt sick.
“Okay, then. Let’s get you back to the garage, so you can put your foot up.”
She needed to tell him she couldn’t pay for it. At the very least, she ought to ask him if he would work on credit or if she could make payment arrangements. Some mechanic places were linked with banks that offered repair loans. She hadn’t seen a bank in town, but that didn’t mean some sort of arrangement couldn’t be made.
Maybe he’d be nice about it.
Maybe he’d stop the truck right now, mid-backup, and instead of getting ready to load her car up, he’d tell her to get out because he didn’t work for free, and it wasn’t fair to expect him to. Small town mechanics had bills, too. They needed to eat like everybody else, and he probably had kids because who else would call him Daddy from time to time? That meant he had a family to support, and men with families didn’t play knight in shining tow truck armor to damsels in vintage muscle car distress. She had a fully restored ’69 Camaro. He’d never believe she was as broke as she honestly was.
She really ought to say something, but letting him load her car up, she salved her conscience with the knowledge her insurance would pay for at least this much of his labor. She wasn’t taking advantage of him.
Not really.
Not yet.
The longer she held her silence, though, the worse this felt. Still, Georgia held her silence all the way back to his garage, listening with increasing guilt as he pulled into the driveway to make the phone call to order her new head gasket. The first place he called didn’t have one, but the second one did.
“Twelve fifty,” he said, briefly tucking the phone against his chest while he cleared the cost with her. “I’ll cut you a deal on my labor, but the total is going to run you about fifteen hundred.”
If she opened her mouth, she’d throw up. She nodded instead, keeping silent about her guilt and her lack of finances.
He helped her down from of his truck like a gentleman. She felt like such a fraud. This had to be one of the ugliest things she’d yet done in her life, but it just wasn’t so ugly to force a confession out of her before he’d repaired her car.
Enduring the white-hot agony of putting her heels back on, she followed him back to the garage, then steered her car into an open stall while he put his muscular back into pushing.
Her time to say things dwindled as he got his tools ready, then her hood was propped up, and he fit the first socket to the first bolt. The next thing Georgia knew, her engine was in carefully gathered pieces on the floor around her tires, her faulty head gasket was off, and her window to come clean upfront about her situation was gone.
