Page 4 of Duke's Rescue
I sat with that for a second, my coffee going cold on the workshop bench, my wrench loose in my other hand.
“I’m coming in for lunch,” I said.
“Somehow, I figured you would.”
I walked into Rosie’s just after noon. The bell jangled. The lunch crowd was thin today, a couple of truckers at the counter, old Hank in his usual spot with his newspaper. The place was warm, grease and coffee and the particular hum of a diner that had been running long enough to wear grooves into its own rhythm.
She was behind the counter.
Reaching for something on the top shelf, up on her toes, one hand braced on the counter for balance. The stretch changed the shape of her. Pulled the fabric of her shirt tight across her back, outlined the width of her hips, the full curve of her ass in those jeans. My brain produced a thought so vivid and so unhelpful that I had to look at the floor for a second and remind myself I was a grown man in a public place.
She turned with two mugs in her hands and saw me and something moved across her face. Quick, controlled, put away before it had time to settle. Recognition, then warmth, then the automatic retreat of a woman who’d trained herself out of showing things.
“Hey,” I said. Because I was a man of stunning verbal range.
“Hey.” She set the mugs down. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
She poured. I sat at the counter and watched her hands, the efficiency of them, the way she moved behind the counter with the competence of someone who’d figured out the job in days and made it look like years. She remembered Hank’s coffee was black with two sugars. She remembered the trucker at the end wanted his eggs over easy. She was paying attention to everyone, all the time, and the precision of it said everything about how she’d been living.
You got that good at reading people when your safety depended on it, and everything about her told me at some point it had been a useful skill.
I stayed through lunch. Ordered a burger I didn’t feel hungry for, a second coffee I definitely didn’t need, and told myself I was just checking in because the club had towed her car and that made her loosely our responsibility, in a completely professional way that had nothing to do with the fact that I couldn’t stop watching the way her hips moved when she walked to the kitchen window.
She was built in a way that kept pulling my attention. Full through the hips and the thighs, a softness to her waist that her work shirt couldn’t hide, breasts that filled the front of it in a way I was trying very hard to be respectful about and failing. I was mesmerized by her body and it made me hard just thinking about putting her breasts in my mouth whilst gripping those hips. She moved with an unconscious ease, unhurried, practical, and every time she turned to grab an order and the fabric shifted against her body, the back of my neck went hot.
I didn’t do this. I fixed engines and I rode highways. I deflected feelings with jokes and kept everything at arm’s length. I did not sit in a diner with my coffee getting cold because a woman with curvaceous hips reached for a coffee pot and her body did something that made my hands want to be involved.
Her little girl appeared halfway through my burger. She came down the stairs from the apartment above, still in her pyjamas, the stuffed teddy dangling from one hand. She stopped at the bottom of the staircase and looked at me with the direct, unblinking stare of a child who hasn’t learned to edit herself yet.
“You’re the bike man,” she said.
“That’s me.”
“Your bike is loud.”
“Yeah. It is.”
She considered this for a moment. Then she walked past me to her mother, climbed onto the stool beside me with the determined, graceless effort of someone whose legs were about a foot too short for the job, and sat there with her teddy on the counter and her feet swinging above the floor.
“Can I have juice?” she asked her mom. But she was sitting next to me, and the choice of stool hadn’t been random. The easy way she’d planted herself beside me shifted something in my chest I wasn’t prepared for.
Trixie poured the juice. Her eyes met mine over Ruby’s head, just for a second, and I could read the whole complicated thing in her face. Grateful, cautious, a tenderness underneath both that she covered by turning to wipe the counter.
Rosie caught me on my way out. She was in the kitchen doorway, arms folded, a cloth over her shoulder, the expression on her face the same one she’d worn for as long as I’d known her.
“She needs people,” Rosie said. “She won’t ask for them, won’t let herself need anything, but she does. The girl’s been on her own a long time, Duke. Even when she wasn’t alone I think.”
That last part sat in me for the whole ride back to the compound.
Even when she wasn’t alone.
I called her that evening. Rosie had given me the number for the landline in the diner apartment, the old wall-mount phone that came with the room.
“Hey, it’s Duke. I was thinking,” I said, when she picked up. “You and Ruby should come out to the compound Saturday afternoon. Let the kid run around, see the place. There’s space for her to wear herself out and Rosie says you haven’t had a day off since you started.”
Silence. The kind where someone is deciding something.
