COMPLETE ✓| Charlotte Hastings found herself between a rock and a hard place when she aged out of the foster system. With only a car to her name, she set out on the open road, hoping to find long lost relatives. Winter hits her hard. When she meets...
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CHAPTER NINE | BROWN TEDDY BEAR
Elijah Blackwood
After I dropped Lottie off at the diner for work, I raced to the shop so I could beat Joe and get a jump on my work for the day. I was trying to get enough done that I could take a break for supper and go to the diner. Lottie lingered in my mind the whole day as I ran through diagnostics, changed the oil, filed paperwork, and other equally exciting parts of my job. By 11 am, Joe was already getting on me to speed up.
"Eli," he shouted from across the shop. "What am I paying you for?"
"Making cotton candy and popcorn at the annual town parade," I shouted back, my head under the hood of the car I was working on.
"No!" He laughed at my joke. "Okay, well, yes. But also to fix the cars, not to dream about pretty young ladies we find on the side of the road."
I backed up out of the car so fast that I stumbled backward over a hose and tripped into a garbage can filled with very dirty rags. Before I could reply to Joe's assumption, I was flat on my back on the floor of the shop, covered head to toe in trash.
"Great." I sat up and brushed myself off. "I'm a mess."
"Hazard of the job, Eli." Joe threw me a towel from a few feet away. "Go wash up and take your lunch. See you back here in half an hour."
I mumbled various profanities under my breath as I walked towards the bathroom to wash off my face and hands.
"Leave your suit in the wash pile, Eli," Joe shouted before I opened the door to the bathroom. "Don't spread that mess around any more than you already have."
I shrugged out of it, revealing my tee-shirt and jeans, before washing and heading out to lunch.
"Coat!" Joe called after me as I pushed open the front door. "Honestly, Eli, you'd forget your head if it weren't attached. Figure out whatever's going on there or you'll be run over by your own truck."
"Yeah, thanks." I threw on my coat and ran out the door and across the lot to my truck. No way was I going to see Lottie looking like this, so I ate the sandwich I had packed while I sat in the backseat of the truck.
When I did go back into the shop, Joe pretended he hadn't seen me eating in my truck and sent me back to work for the remainder of the afternoon.
It was all going fine until we were about to close up. As I walked past Lottie's car with the last of my paperwork, I had a sudden urge to look inside. I desperately wanted to learn everything about her, and looking in her car seemed like a great way to do it.
I walked around the car and popped open the driver door before I started to question myself. Should I really be looking? Part of me felt like it was fine because she had left the car with me, but a much larger part was screaming out that this was a huge invasion of her privacy. I had no reason to look in the car except to satisfy my own curiosity.
