Page 1 of Asking for Trouble

BLUE

Lots of stuffhappens in convenience stores and at gas stations.

Most of it bad.

Especially on the Sea to Sky Highway, miles away from civilization, where drug running and human trafficking were known occurrences.

A young, decently attractive woman working the night shift was asking for trouble, but I was the kinda girl born and raised in chaos, who walked the razor’s edge of risk like it was my daily commute to work.

I could handle myself.

Once, when a tweaked-out meth head wandered into the store, knocking over a rack of potato chips on the way to the till, he took out his junk to pee on the glass partition separating us, and I’d handled it. A calm call to the cops dispatched of the pervert without much fuss or fanfare. Cleaning the piss off the glass was another thing entirely, but bleach worked wonders.

Another time, when two drunks had started a fight in the back next to the fridges, I’d called the cops, grabbed my baseball bat, and kicked one asshole in the knee when he didn’t heed my warnings. The snap of a tendon in his leg was grimly satisfying.

I’d been taking care of myself long before I’d left my family home, and I refused to take anyone’s shit since that day.

Few people took tiny me seriously. It was a little hard to blame them when I was five foot two with cobalt blue and black hair and massive blue eyes that lent me an expression of eternal innocence.

It’s funny how biology can tell lies much more eloquently than our mouths.

I looked sweet and younger than my twenty-five years.

The truth was, I’d lived on my own since I was seventeen, including a stint on the streets for a year or so. I was intimately acquainted with all seven of the deadly sins. They were my dear friends, like Snow White and her merry band of dwarves.

Some drunk idiots, strung-out addicts, high school wannabe rebels, and rich jerks with too much money and zero mannerscouldn’t put me off working at Evergreen Gas Station. Not when it was putting me through cosmetology school.

Besides, Grouch Pedersen was the kindest man I’d ever known.

When I was eighteen and he caught me stealing from the station, again and again, he didn’t turn me in.

He gave me a job and paid for my room at the Purgatory Motel for a month.

Truthfully, I was set to graduate from my beauty program in three weeks, but I was anxious about quitting Evergreen Gas. The retro-looking gas station and convenience store had become my home more than anywhere else. Maybe it was sad that rows of junk food and the whirr of a Slurpee machine were as familiar to me as most people’s backyards and living rooms, but it was the first place where I’d felt in control of my life in too many years to count. Even the dangers of working the graveyard shift at a highway gas station were oddly comforting, familiar from my childhood.

I was reminiscing about exactly that when the bells over the door jingled in greeting. My gaze immediately lifted to the newcomer, an instinct born of self-preservation after years of working there.

My breath caught in my throat like a stuck lozenge threatening to choke me.

He was beautiful.

Like something out of the magazines I studied for inspiration.

Like someone who was paid to look that way.

Only he was too rough for that. The bright tattoos on his neck under the shadow of a days-old beard as black as spilled ink across his jaw. The worn-in leather jacket opened over a white tee with a small Hephaestus Auto Garage logo stitched ontothe breast. The tee was too tight, his muscles almost obscene beneath the thin fabric.

I choked a little, trying to cough without making a fool of myself.

Of course, it was just my luck that he noticed me then, as I was coughing quietly, desperate for air behind a shaky hand covering my flushed face.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

This guy was perfection.

The swoop of thick black hair falling over a tanned forehead into eyes the colour of whiskey held over a flame. The wavy locks tangled in his long lashes, and when he reached up to brush them away, I noticed the bright tattoos on the back of his hand, the letters on the base of each knuckle, and what looked like an owl with its wings spread over the sides of his throat. There were thick silver rings on his fingers and a heavy silver chain around his throat. I wasn’t a girl who usually went for jewelry on men, but something about the glint of metal against his warm olive skin made my throat dry and my thighs tingle.