Page 7 of Rio (Redcars #3)

Devlin gave a weak laugh, but his ears turned red.

Good. I waited for him to say he was taking the car elsewhere and to ask me where my manager was.

Well, Logan was with Gray in San Diego, along with Tudor, on pretty much a permanent basis now, so I’d have to get Jamie to pretend to be in charge, and that wasn’t going to be pretty.

Last time he did that, he pushed the arms of his long T-shirt up, then flicked his lighter and tried to talk like an extra in a gangster movie.

Ended up scaring the hell out of a couple of clients, which didn’t help when he told them to fuck off.

Needless to say, Enzo and I hadn’t used him to act as manager again.

“I was thinking about dinner…” Devlin said, touching my arm again.

I pushed his hand away. “Why? ”

“What?”

“Why are you thinking about dinner? It’s only ten a.m. Are you hungry?”

Devlin considered. Not a lot going on between his ears—but then again, he didn’t need much with Daddy’s trust fund backing him up. What must it be like, I thought, to coast through life knowing one call could get you anything you wanted.

One call about Lyric and Redcars would have millions in the bank.

Fuck my brain.

“That was a euphemism ,” Devlin said, glancing around to see who else was listening.

“A what now?” I asked and pasted a puzzled expression on my face as if I didn’t understand.

He was smug, as if he’d confirmed I was exactly what he thought—nothing more than a body with a price tag. “You know another word for you splitting me open with your dick. How much will it cost me?”

My stomach turned. Not from the offer itself—I’d heard worse, been offered worse—but from the way he said it. As if it were normal I might have a price.

I didn’t even look at him when I said, “What the fuck?” He opened his mouth to reply, but I cut him off. “I don’t fuck for money, and definitely not for a guy who thinks waving cash is the same thing as being worth a damn.”

That shut him up. My temper was rising now, hot under my skin, and I didn’t bother hiding it.

I could feel it in the way my shoulders squared, in the way the space between us seemed to shrink.

He took a step back, eyes flicking over me as if he’d just remembered how much bigger I was—how much damage I could do if I wanted to.

And he was right to be nervous. I knew I was intimidating. I’d made myself that way. Built for it. A wall of muscle and fury, and right now, I wasn’t in the mood to play nice.

“Have you ever thought about actually driving your car instead of staring at it as if it’s a goddamn piece of art?” I crowded him into a corner.

He laughed nervously, eyes darting around the garage as if he was hoping someone might step in and rescue him. There was no one but me, the quiet hum of tools, and all that space he didn’t know how to fill with anything but fear.

“I uh-I d-drive it occasionally.”

“Occasionally,” I repeated flatly. “You mean when you move it from one side of the garage to the other, so the sun catches it differently? ”

I stepped away from him, wiped my hands, and reached for the new gasket from the workbench.

Devlin backed off, finally, with a forced smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He adjusted the cuffs of his expensive shirt as if I hadn’t shoved his ego face-first into the concrete. Good.

I turned back to the car, picking up the gasket and lining it up. The next step was easy—clean the old sealant, reset the mount, and torque the bolts in sequence. Work that made sense. Work that didn’t talk back.

Behind me, Devlin sat heavily in one of the folding chairs we kept for clients—usually unused—and scrolled through his phone. For a blessed moment, there was silence.

Then, he answered a call on speaker.

“No, Celeste, I said dove grey, not oyster. Oyster is warmer, and I want cool undertones in the dining room, not that Mediterranean slop you sent last week.”

I paused, grease-slick wrench in hand, and stared at the car as if it could protect me from the bullshit coming out of his mouth.

I turned up the radio and waited for Devlin to ask me to turn it off, anything to be able to throw it at him.

Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” echoed tinny and triumphant off the metal walls, the kind of ridiculous contrast that made it perfect.

Her voice bounced across the bay in a blessing from the gods of petty vengeance.

Devlin twitched in his chair, and I grinned without looking at him.

If he so much as opened his mouth to complain, I was going to hand him the wrench and tell him to go find the mute button himself.

“My ride’s here. I’ll be back at five. Make sure it’s ready,” he called over his shoulder, with all the flair of someone used to barking orders and being obeyed.

Then, he sashayed out as if we were extras in his reality show, disappearing toward a sleek black town car that practically screamed Daddy pays my bills.

I exhaled through my nose, finally alone again, and got back to work.

I checked everything over twice. No rush, only focus. Steady, methodical. This part of the job was the reward, the calm after the storm.

Once everything was torqued and clean, I slid back, wiped the sweat from my brow, and gave the engine a once-over. Done.

Not just patched up. Done right.

“You finished?” Enzo asked and scared the living shit out of me, given I was lost in the satisfaction of a job well done.

I whirled to face him, hands clenched, but he didn’t flinch as he thumbed up the stairs.

“You’re up, go relieve Jamie. Robbie made cookies, and there’s coffee in the kitchen.

Take some up for him.” What did it mean that I instantly felt as if I was some hunter-gatherer ready to help out someone who needed me?

I’m not a carer.

“He awake yet?”

“Lyric?”

“I didn’t mean Robbie, asshole.”

“Meds knocked him out.”

I wiped my hands on a rag and took a breath.

The churning in my stomach wasn’t just about going upstairs to sit with a guy we still didn’t know if we could trust. Robbie had sat with him.

Jamie had. Even Enzo. Although, with the way Lyric had flinched and shifted in his sleep—as if he was always calculating an exit, always half a heartbeat from bolting—I’d caught Enzo watching him more than once.

Maybe the same suspicion I felt ran through him too.

Lyric didn’t give off victim vibes. He exuded survivor energy—the kind that was dangerous.

The kind that waited for cracks to open up so he could slip through them.

That didn’t make me trust him. If anything, it made me want to keep him closer.

But me? I’d been avoiding it since last night, pretending grease and bolts were more important than a human being upstairs recovering from god-knows-what.

But now, it was my turn to watch him.

I grabbed a still-warm cookie, gave the job details to Robbie for him to add to the invoice, told him to add another twenty percent for unspecified extras, then made my way to the stairs, every step feeling heavier than it needed to be.

Time to face what I’d been avoiding.