She blinked and then her cheeks bloomed pink in a way that was absolutely adorable. She spoke to her shoes. “It’s what I do. I’ve got tools in my car. A couple of spare screens.” She sighed and looked around at the windswept hillside. “But I can’t do anything until I get some place I can work. Let me message my brother.”

She dug in her backpack, found her phone and typed furiously. A moment later, there was a chime as a message came back. “Sugar!”

Sugar? She must have been raised not to curse. I felt myself grin. She just kept getting more and more adorable. “What?”

“He’s out of town. I sort of…didn’t tell him I was coming. He’s back later today. I don’t want to tell him I’m here and make him rush back.” She looked around at the freezing hillside and then down the slope to the town.

“I’ve got a place you could work,” I blurted. “You could fix your laptop while you wait for your brother to get back.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t—Thank you, but—If you could just give me a ride back to the café, I’ll stay there, I can just—” She glanced down at the smashed laptop and broke off, her shoulders slumping: with her laptop gone, she had nothing to do. “I’ll be fine.”

I stared down into those big blue eyes, thinking fast. A feeling was forming, hard to put into words but…it felt like the day I went for selection for the army, my only shot at staying out of jail. Like something really important was in front of me, something I only had one shot at.

If I dropped her at the café, I’d never see her again.

“My place,” I said, “is a garage. It has this big workbench…really big, so you can spread out” I mimed the width of it with my hands. “And it has really good light.”

It was like her ears pricked up. We might be very different, I might work with socket sets and spark plugs instead of a soldering iron and circuit boards, but we both appreciated a good workspace. She looked tempted. But then she bit her lip again, just like she had when I told her to get into my car. She didn’t know if she could trust me.

Hot rage bubbled up inside me and I sucked in a lungful of freezing air to try to cool myself. I wanted to kill all the men who’d left her feeling that way.