Page 5 of It’s Only Love (Citrus Pines #1)

“And you brought her here for a quickie? And they say romance is dead,” she muttered, rolling her eyes.

He sighed deeply. “Christy, look I want to apologize.” She stopped walking and turned to face him.

“I was only kidding around last night, I’m sorry.

I didn’t mean to upset or annoy you,” he finished, smiling down at her, dimples popping, and she melted slightly before remembering who he was and her blank expression resumed.

“Apology accepted. Now, excuse me, I need to get back,” she said tightly, turning away and continuing to her car.

He uttered another protest, but she picked up the pace, eager to get away from him and back to her shower.

She made it to her car, and got in. She looked up through her windshield and saw him walking towards a red pickup truck parked on the other side of the lot.

She sighed with relief, put her key in the ignition and turned.

The engine sputtered but didn’t roar to life as expected.

She tried again and the same thing happened.

“Come on, baby, don’t do this now. Mama really needs you,” she crooned, hoping the gentle tone would elicit some compassion from her clapped-out old car.

She was wrong.

She turned the key again and pressed down on the accelerator hoping to rev the engine to life, but again the car just sputtered and didn’t start. She caught movement outside her window and glanced up. Dean had stopped walking towards the truck and was watching her.

“Shit, shit! No, no, no don’t come over,” she moaned, ducking below the steering wheel in a ridiculous attempt to hide.

“Come on please, I’ll buy you anything you want.

New wiper blades, huh? How does that sound?

Full service, all your nuts-and-bolts cleaning?

Filters changing? If ever there’s a time to work, it’s now!

” Christy whined frantically, turning the key in the ignition.

A shadow fell over her then she heard a gentle tap on her window.

She sighed and looked up, meeting Dean’s eyes through the glass.

Pasting a smile on her face she wound the window down.

Yes, that’s how old her car was. He had both hands braced on the roof of the car, leaning forward with a stupid, smug smile on his stupid perfect face.

Goddamn dimples, don’t they ever give up? !

“Having some trouble?” he asked smoothly, and she instantly bristled at his tone.

“I’ll be fine, just takes a moment to get her going. You can leave.”

He pulled her door handle and the car door popped open easily. “You should really lock the doors once you're inside your vehicle, to stop strangers from being able to do that.”

“I was going to, but I literally just sat...” She didn’t bother to finish, annoyed with herself for letting him get under her skin.

“Want me to take a look and see if I can help?” he offered.

“Why? What are you going to do, poke around and then suggest taking it to a garage?” she replied tartly. She hated herself when she got like this. She felt like a teenager again, constantly needling him because he made her feel inadequate.

“You think I don’t know anything about cars?” he asked, looking hurt.

“I think I’ll stick to asking a professional, thanks. If I need someone to kick the tires, I’ll let you know. ”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, just stared at her. The air between them growing tense, their eyes clashing together, but she refused to back down and look away first. Then his expression changed, becoming cool and impersonal.

“There’s a garage in town, I’ll call them for you. They’ll be here in thirty minutes,” he said flatly, slamming her door shut, abruptly turning and walking back to his truck.

Great, now I’m a bitch and he’s Mr. Wonderful, as usual. A wave of guilt hit her. She didn’t mean to be a bitch, he was just trying to help her, but she couldn’t stop herself reacting to him that way. It was her defense mechanism with him.

“Uh, thank you!” she called after him, but he didn’t acknowledge that he heard her. She sat back and watched him speed out of the parking lot. He didn’t even look her way as he drove past.

While she waited, she started thinking about the past, which was always a minefield in some way or another.

She thought back to Dean as a teenager. They had spent some time together at first, with him being her best friend's stepbrother, he was always around. But then she heard what he said about her, and she didn’t want to spend any more time with him.

She shook her head as old humiliation suffused her and she decided that she didn’t want to take the trip down memory lane after all.

She sat in her car and waited, making a mental to-do list for the funeral.

A short while later, a tow truck appeared and pulled up in front of her car.

A giant of a man climbed out and came over to her, he was at least 6’4” with broad shoulders and a wide chest. His dark hair was wild around his head and he had a big, bushy beard that covered a majority of his face.

She could just make out his dark eyes, so pretty with thick, dark lashes.

He grunted at her that his name was Bear.

Very apt , she thought, but he seemed nice enough.

He had a quick play around with her car, declared it would need to go back to the garage, and began hooking it up to the truck.

She ignored the irony screaming in her face about what she said to Dean.

The sun shone down on Christy, a breeze tickling her skin gently.

The citrus scent was fresh in the air, energizing her.

When Bear said he was ready to go, she insisted on walking back to town as it wasn’t too far, and such a lovely day.

She was too late to make it to the house viewing now anyway, so she might as well take her time.

Bear gave her a business card for the garage in case she needed to contact them, then drove off.

As she walked back along the road, her mind tried to drift back to her childhood again.

This time she gave in and let it. She didn’t want to focus on the time shortly after her mother died; her father’s withdrawal was still too painful, so she thought back to her later years spent with Taylor and Justine.

She thought about Dean and their strange history, seeing him at school and then knowing him as Taylor’s stepbrother, the new stepbrother Christy had a giant crush on.

She had been so nervous around him and he always seemed so confident and sure of himself.

Beautiful girls were always fawning all over him, his bedroom practically had a revolving door at one point.

Christy knew how she looked compared to the other girls, she was frumpy, clumsy and awkward.

She was an insecure teenager whose heart got trampled on one day by the hottest guy in school.

She had been at school late one evening, studying in the library and generally avoiding going home.

Things with her father were difficult, so she tried to avoid being around him as much as possible.

She needed to hand in her absence note to her gym teacher, her period started and she had cramps so bad that swimming was a no-go.

Since her father was incapacitated most of the time, she had to forge his signature to make the note acceptable.

The last thing she needed was another unauthorized absence for them to contact him about.

She hurried down the halls, hoping it wasn’t too late to hand in the note.

The gym teacher, Mr. Fitzpatrick, was also the coach for the school football team, and they usually had practice after school midweek.

It should have finished half an hour earlier, so hopefully he would still be there.

She rounded the corner close to his office and stopped as she saw the football team, including Dean and his best friend Beau.

Practice must have run over if they were still hanging around.

Christy didn’t know what to do. She needed to get past them and into Fitzpatrick’s office to at least leave the note on his desk. As she stood there deciding what to do, hoping none of the boys would notice her, she overheard their conversation.

“Seriously? You wanna ask out Christy?” Dean said, disbelief dripping from his voice.

“Yeah, she’s so freakin’ hot, don’t you think?” Beau replied.

Dean scoffed. “Hell no, you need to get better taste ASAP, dude!” he joked, high-fiving one of the other guys, his laugh piercing right through Christy, shattering her heart.

“Are you kidding me? Do you have eyes? Those curves, that mouth!” Beau cried.

Christy couldn’t feel appreciation for Beau’s words, her mind still reeling from what Dean had said about her .

“Nah, man. She’s what I call a ‘boner killer’, you feel me?” Dean laughed again, and the group of boys joined in, cackling away.

Christy felt sick with humiliation, her cheeks flaming, tears stinging her eyes.

“You’re a jerk, you know that?” Beau retorted.

Christy didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, Dean’s words playing over in her mind. He found her that disgusting? She knew that she didn’t look like the other skinny, pretty girls he dated, but she never thought he was the type of boy to think like that.

She had never felt uglier than in that moment.

All the insults that ran through her mind constantly, that she worked so hard to ignore, flooded through her again.

She tried to hold back the tears, but they wouldn’t be stopped, a sob escaped her lips.

She clapped a hand over her mouth and the boys all turned to face her.

Their laughter dying on their lips, the silence was deafening.

Dean had the decency to look ashamed and took a step toward her, holding his hands out, palms up as though he were trying to placate a wild animal.

“Christy, I...” he started, but she didn’t listen.

She turned and ran, the pounding of her footsteps echoing off the walls.

She ran away from the hurt she felt at his words, the mortification fusing her cheeks and pushing her on.

She didn’t stop until she found herself outside her house.

Her dad wasn’t home, thankfully, so she went straight upstairs to her room, threw herself onto her bed, pulled the covers over her head and let the tears fall.

That was the moment that had changed things for her and Dean.

She could no longer be around him or talk to him normally knowing how he felt about her.

He probably knew she was practically in love with him.

He tried to seek her out at school, but she avoided him as much as she could.

Every time she caught sight of him coming towards her, she felt sick and terrified, like a caged animal.

She didn’t tell anyone what happened, she definitely couldn’t tell Taylor.

She loved her friend and didn’t want to put Taylor in an awkward position with her brother, so Christy kept quiet.

She couldn’t avoid him forever though. He was a huge part of Taylor’s life, and she couldn’t ignore him without drawing attention to herself.

She would be civil but nothing more. She would show him you didn’t need beauty if you had brains.

She was super smart, and she knew he was struggling in his classes.

She would show him how smart she was. She became icy, detached, and borderline rude to him whenever they spoke.

Eventually, they didn’t speak at all unless she was making a snarky comment.

She felt guilty but couldn’t get past her embarrassment and couldn’t bear the thought of him thinking she was obsessing over him like some pathetic, lovestruck kid.

What better way to throw him off than to act like she couldn’t stand him?

Then he would never know how much he had hurt her.

Christy was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t realize she had made it into town. She was going to stop a passer-by to ask for directions to Iris Motors, but she spotted the place as she walked along.

It was a typical small country town. Shops and offices lined each side of Main Street.

It hadn’t changed one bit. Ruby’s Diner was still there with the same red and white striped awning.

The old police station and laundromat had been spruced up a bit, but were still in the same spot.

Iris Motors was new, but otherwise, everything was as it had been all those years ago .

As she walked up onto the open forecourt of the garage, she spotted Bear and headed over to him.

“Hey, Bear, thanks for getting her back so quickly.”

He shrugged. “When you’re a friend of the boss, we work quickly,” he replied gruffly.

“The boss?” Christy didn’t know anyone here. Bear hiked his thumb over his shoulder pointing to an office in the back of the garage. She headed over to get a closer look and she really should have known karma would screw her.

Dean was sitting behind a desk inside the small office, reclined in his chair, talking on the phone.

As if he sensed her, he looked up, and their eyes met through the glass.

His electric blues flashed angrily at her, and her heart thudded in her chest. She remembered what she said to him this morning and her cheeks flushed in humiliation.

God, she could be such a bitch sometimes.

Not wanting to disturb him, she broke their eye contact and turned away, going back to Bear and watching him tinker with some tools.

“So, do you know what’s wrong with her?” she asked.

She heard from behind her, “Your spark plugs just need changing over. Been a while since your last service?”

She turned to see Dean standing with his arms folded across his chest, his expression unreadable.

“Oh, Dean, hi...” she started, but he interrupted her.

“But what do I know?” He smiled humorlessly at her.

“Dean, I’m sorry I was so rude. I’m tired, hungover, and...” She tried again but he turned around.

“Bear will finish her up for you,” he called over his shoulder, went back into the office and slammed the door.

He was pissed. She had really upset him.

She would wait for him to calm down before she tried again.

She asked Bear how much longer it would be.

He offered to give her car a service, which it evidently needed, and they agreed she would come back in an hour.

With a sigh, and a final glance towards Dean’s office, she left.