The Don's Bride

*Leave it on the lift and don't touch anything.* Colt pushes through the glass door and a bell jangles somewhere overhead. The smell arrives first: motor oil and petrol and something metallic like welding slag, layered over the sour tang of old coffee. A radio crackles at the back, classic rock too low to identify. The place is a disaster. Tools across every flat surface, wrenches and screwdrivers, a torque wrench balanced on the edge of a tyre. Parts bins overflowing with bolts and gaskets and things he could not name. A lift table empty in the centre bay, and in the bay beside it a stripped-down frame with the engine hanging from a chain hoist. Bent over that engine is a woman with short red hair that catches the fluorescents and turns almost orange, coveralls hanging loose and stained dark across the chest and one thigh, forearms lean and muscled in a way nothing at a gym produces. Brynn does not need his business and says so twice before she takes it. Colt has a brother who did not come home last night, a house his father built with his own hands thirty years ago, and a clubhouse full of men who have started measuring him against a standard he never agreed to. What follows: a bike that costs everything, a lie he refuses to tell, a church of steel and smoke, grease that does not come out from under fingernails, a man who watches rather than acts, a devil who knocks rather than kicks, blood on her hands, and the taste of it on his. *I don't care what Rafe said.* *Fine. But we're not done.* *I know.* He has the club, the garage, the brother and the name. Now he has to convince a woman who has spent her entire adult life refusing to belong to anybody's world that she is being asked into this one, not claimed by it.