Down n' Dirty

  Down n’ Dirty

  Darcy Dawes

  Copyright © 2019 by Darcy Dawes

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Chapter One

  Callie

  Most girls have childhood crushes. The boy next door. The kid that picks on her in kindergarten. The cute senior in high school. The moody teen who works at the drive-thru. Her dad’s right-hand man…

  Okay, maybe that one was just me.

  “Callie, are you ready for work?

  “Just a moment, Dad!” I called back down the stairs.

  “Des might be running late so we need to get in quickly, if you don’t mind hurrying it along.”

  My heart leapt at the mention of Des. Desmond Rivers was ten years older than me and worked as the lead mechanic at my dad’s garage. Or auto shop or whatever. My mom was English and always called it a garage. I thought it sounded posher, so that’s what I called it too.

  I first spied him when I was twelve. He’d been working for my dad for a couple of years already, but dad had never let me near his shop before because it was ‘too dangerous’. Hah! As if I hadn’t learned more than most car-loving boys my age by virtue of being his only child.

  Desmond either genuinely never noticed me or didn’t seem to care. I mean, I got it. I was a scrawny little kid, and he was a super-hot, ‘dark hair and blue eyes with perfect stubble’ kinda guy. He was always wearing filthy overalls, and somehow that made him even hotter. My adolescent brain went wild thinking about him.

  I didn't spend much time around the garage when school got serious and I had to study for college. I wanted to get out of my sleepy home town, after all. Desmond was a happy distraction from the banality of it all. A fantasy I could get lost in before I fell asleep.

  And then I got into college. A business course in New York. I adored it, and the city. I reveled in the fashion of the place, always ensuring to keep up a perfectly professional air for the sake of my career. Well-fitting clothes. Flattering make-up. Bouncy, shiny hair. I'd gotten attention back at high school, of course, but I'd always ignored it (much to dad's relief).

  It was nothing compared to the attention I got in New York once I transformed myself.

  The men there were endlessly more exciting than the boys at my high school, and with just a glance at my ass in a pencil skirt and my immaculately painted lips quirking into the smallest of smiles they fell for me. I could make them do most anything. It was intoxicating.

  And yet still, it felt hollow. I wasn't satisfied. I didn't want to make just any guy fall for me.

  I wanted Desmond Rivers.

  So I went home to work with my dad at the end of my first year of college—to get firsthand experience of how to run a small business (though I knew most everything he could teach me already).

  I could seduce Desmond. I knew I could.

  I failed.

  Okay, let's call it a setback instead. For though I swished my skirts and walked through the filthy garage in stiletto heels and pretended I wasn't watching him from my dad's office, Desmond remained resolutely unaffected. He bantered with me and responded to my jokes as if I were one of the guys, or his little sister, but there was little and less I could do to make him notice me as a woman. The other guys in the shop noticed, though, but they weren't the ones I was trying to attract.

  So I went back to college feeling entirely put out. Just what had I done wrong? Did he not like me? Desmond seemed to have gone out of his way to avoid me. Part of me decided he was scared of my dad and that's why he left me alone.

  That made me feel better.

  When I reached the end of my second year of college and my twentieth birthday I wasn't sure if I was going to work for my dad again or simply go home for a few weeks to see my parents. But, to my surprise, dad specifically asked me to help out. Clearly he had an idea about me taking over the family business that I had no interest in, but he was paying me so how could I say no?

  And besides, it gave me a second summer to try and lure in Desmond. There would not be a third; I already had an internship planned in New York the following year. This was my last chance.

  I had to make it count.

  Which was why I couldn’t head into work with dad until my make-up was absolutely perfect. Light, smoky eyeshadow in peach going into chocolate brown. Highlighter and bronzer accentuating the planes of my face. Just a hint of apricot staining my lips.

  I wasn’t a child anymore, and I damn well wanted the world to know it. Especially Desmond.

  “You don’t have to dress like you’re back in New York when you’re here, Callie,” dad commented when he spied me coming down the stairs, though mom smiled when she saw me. She was from London. She got why I wanted to dress up.

  “You look lovely, Callie,” she said. And then, to my dad, “Remember you’re taking her out for lunch today, alright? No burritos in the garage.

  He winced as if he’d been caught out. He glanced at me. “Is the diner okay?”

  “Hardly high-class cuisine, but it’ll do,” I grinned. In truth I loved the diner. There were some things about small town life that would always been great—to come back to, not permanently.

  Dad sighed in relief, then waved me out the front door.

  “Love you, mom!” we both said as we left. Dad usually called mom by her name—Janice—but ever since I was in middle school and left at the same time as him every day he’d gotten into the habit of calling his wife ‘mom’ simply to simultaneously say good-bye to her with me. It was sickeningly cute.

  I brushed down the front seat of his pickup truck. Dad could afford a much nicer car than this but he resolutely refused to buy one. Even when I’d politely inquired into getting a car for my sixteenth, then seventeenth, then eighteenth birthday, he’d refused. I was heading to the big city, he’d said. What did I need a car for?

  He was right, I supposed, but at least if I’d had a little Fiat or Corsa or Clio I’d be able to drive myself to work.

  “So…” my dad said after a few minutes, tone a little awkward. He turned down the radio, which I’d put on to a classic rock station I knew he enjoyed. “First day back this summer. How’s it feel?”

  I knew where this was going already. He wanted me to say I was excited. That I had gone to college specifically to prime myself for taking over the business side of the garage. I smiled at him. “It feels good. You know I like working. An entire summer of doing nothing would kill me.”

  Dad nodded approvingly. “That’s my girl. Now, I took on a couple of new guys this year you won’t have met, but I think one of them went to high school with you.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What’s his name?”

  “Jason Nichols.”

  “Ugh, okay.”

  He frowned. “You don’t like him?”

  “It’s…not that I don’t like him,” I said, a little hesitantly. In truth Jason was nice enough, and handsome to boot. But he’d asked me out one too many times in high school and, when he finally got the message that I wasn’t interested, began spreading rumors about me being a frigid bitch.

  I wasn’t. I never had been. I simply had my eyes set on someone far cooler than Jason Nichols.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter, dad. It’s all in the past, anyway. How’s Des?”

  Dad’s eyes lit up. He loved his right-hand man like a son or a brother, though Desmond had only just turned thirty and dad was forty-three.

  “You know what he’s like,” he replied happily, just as we turned into the parking lot of the garage and came to a stop. “
Keeps all the lads in the shop happy. Still no girlfriend, which is a shame, but I suppose he works such long hours for me it would be hard to keep a girl satisfied.”

  “He might be gay, you never know,” I quipped once we exited the car. Of course I didn’t believe that Desmond was, but it was fun to tease my dad.

  “I’ll have you know I’m a red-blooded, very straight man, Callie De Luca.”

  That voice. That low, husky, good-humored voice could only belong to one man.

  I turned; Desmond was standing right behind me, arms crossing his chest and decidedly not late. He looked me up and down; I resisted the urge to blush.

  “Nothing wrong if you were gay,” I replied, smiling slightly as I made my way past him into the garage, dad close in tow. “Homophobia has no place in modern-day America, after all.”

  “You’re hilarious.”

  “And you haven’t changed.”

  Dad burst out laughing. “Oh, this summer will be fun, I think. We need someone round here to match Des’ wit.”

  “What wit? I don’t see any.”

  Dad chuckled good-naturedly as he made his way into his office, leaving me with the man I was hoping to finally seduce.

  Desmond didn’t look at me as took his overalls off a hook on the wall and slid into them. I very much appreciated watching the well-defined muscles in his arms and shoulders ripple in the light of the garage as he pulled the garment on. “Dressed appropriately as usual, Callie,” he murmured after a second or two.”

  “I spend most of my time in the office or meeting clients,” I replied, flinging my perfectly bouncy hair over a shoulder. “I’m dressed perfectly appropriately, Mr. Rivers.”

  “Oh, it’s ‘Mr. Rivers’, now?”

  “You’re my employee,” I joked, “I can call you what I like.”

  Desmond rolled his eyes. “In your dreams, little girl.”

  I bristled. “I’m not so little anymore.”

  There was a pause that I hadn’t expected. Desmond still wouldn’t look me in the eye though I badly wanted him to. I hated that he seemed to deliberately be avoiding doing so. It unsettled me—twisted my stomach up in a way that was both pleasant and horrible.

  “No,” he murmured. “I guess you’re not.”

  And then he left me standing there to start working on a car that had been in the shop overnight. I couldn’t stand the erratic beating of my heart. I was the one who was supposed to be in control over summer, not Desmond. I was the one who’d seduce him, not the other way around.

  So why, with just one throwaway comment, did I feel like I was in for a rough summer of being swayed by every little thing Desmond said?

  I sighed, running a hand through my hair before joining my dad in his office. I had to keep my cool. I could keep my cool.

  Desmond would be mine, and it would be on my terms.

  He just didn’t know it yet.

  Chapter Two

  Desmond

  I loved my job. I loved working with cars, and using my hands all day, and tapping my foot to classic rock while working on an engine. I liked that I could get dirty. I liked the people I worked with. I really liked my boss.

  Yet it all had nothing on how much I liked the look of the boss’ daughter.

  Call me a stereotype but I wanted nothing more than to get my filthy hands on prim-and-proper Callie De Luca. Last summer, when she’d first sauntered in to work for her dad after her first year of college, had been torture. A sweet, delicious torture that resulted in me jacking off more than a few times in an empty store cupboard, but a torture nonetheless.

  Now she was back for a second summer, and if anything she was even more gorgeous that the year before.

  I didn’t know how I was going to behave myself for the next three months.

  “Hey, Jason, stop slacking off!” I yelled over to Charles De Luca’s newest recruit. The guy was about his daughter’s age; I had to wonder if they knew each other well. The local high school wasn’t all that big.

  Jason didn’t seem to have heard me. He was too busy watching something with another one of the guys, David. I had to wonder what was so interesting the both of them would be so distracted.

  Then I realized they were watching Callie in her dad’s office as she rummaged through a metal drawer of files. She was wearing a peach-colored button-down dress that, to be honest, screamed ‘button me down’, even though it wasn’t too short or revealing. But it clung to every one of her ample curves, making the dress far less innocent than it was supposed to be. Callie had the kind of body that made any outfit indecent.

  That was part of my problem. If a stick-thin woman was walking about Charles’ shop dressed like Callie then I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. But fuck was Callie curvy, like a fifties pin-up model with her lipstick and perfect hair.

  She’d been blonde last year, but now she was growing it out; much of her hair was back to brunette now, with only the ends still pale. I think it was called a dip-dye or something. Either way, I liked it on her.

  I whacked Jason over the head with a newspaper, then David. “Stop staring at the boss’ daughter, you idiots,” I chastised them both. “She’s here to work, and so are you.”

  Jason grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, Des. But come on. Callie is fucking gorgeous. You know I must have asked her out, like, a hundred times back in high school.”

  David frowned. “And she said no? I thought you were pretty popular back then.”

  “I was! But Callie was just…not interested. To be honest I don’t think she went out with anyone in school. I always thought she was pretty frigid because of that.”

  “Might be fun to see if I can ‘warm her up’, then,” David replied, a glint in his eyes I did not like in the slightest. “She never went to school with me, after all. Maybe she liked older guys.”

  David was twenty-six and had moved to the town last autumn, so Callie would never have met him. He was a pretty handsome guy, to be fair—as was Jason—but I knew that would never be enough to satisfy Callie.

  I also knew frigid was the last word to describe her.

  Liking older guys isn’t far off the mark, though, I mused. Through the glass of her dad’s office Callie caught my eye. I just barely saw her smile before I whipped my head away.

  I knew Callie liked me. I’d suspected since she was sixteen. I’d known for sure last year, when she’d come to work for her dad. And damn if I didn’t like her back. I was going crazy for her.

  But she was Charles’ daughter, and ten years younger than me. I couldn’t go near her. And yet still…

  I’m not so little anymore, she had said. And it was true. Callie was an adult. A smart, organized, funny, sexy-as-all-hell adult sent to torment me to the end of my days.

  “Callie is off-limits,” I finally told Jason and David. “Leave her be. She’s only here to get work experience, and hell if she’d be interested in the two of you idiots, anyway.”

  Jason grinned. “Oh, that burns.”

  “Maybe we could get her out for drinks and see just how cold she is,” David said, decidedly ignoring me.

  I glared at him. “Callie just turned twenty. No booze for her.”

  “Oh come off it,” Jason protested. “I’m the same age as her and we got out drinking all the time.”

  Jason, annoyingly, had a point. I couldn’t hold Callie to one standard and Jason to another simply because she was a young woman and Charles’ daughter.

  “If you ask her out for drinks you are not allowed to do so with the purpose of getting her wasted and trying it on,” I ended up saying, not quite knowing how else to voice my protests. I wanted to tell them to keep the hell away from Callie. That she wasn’t theirs to toy with.

  That she was mine.

  But I couldn’t, so I didn’t.

  I spent the afternoon beneath the chassis of a Honda Civic, which had been damaged when the owner ran over a deer. The driver hadn’t realized the deer was still attached to the car for at least a minute. Personally I
’d hoped the damage would be irreversible, since the prick clearly had no regard for wildlife and, indeed, signs that specifically warned for crossing deer on the very road he’d run it over.

  When I spied a pair of long, tanned legs in black high heels standing beside the car it was like a bolt of electricity ran through my body. Callie knocked upon the car, signaling her already-obvious presence to me.

  “I brought you back some apple pie from the diner,” she said, voice muffled by the fact I was currently underneath the car. “I know you like it.”

  God, the girl was good. I was very much a man whose way to his heart was through his stomach. I resisted rolling out from beneath the car to talk to her directly.

  “Thanks, Callie,” I said. “Just put it in your dad’s office so the boys don’t touch it.”

  “My dad’ll eat it for sure if it’s in there.”

  I chuckled. “Cover it up with something, then, You and I both know your mom will be mad if Charles eats too much sugar.”

  A pause. “Noted.”

  I risked a glance at Callie’s legs and immediately regretted it. From my angle on the floor I could see up her dress, and now I was looking I couldn’t stop. Her panties were black and barely-there, hardly covering anything at all. It wasn’t long before I had a raging hard-on that I was very much glad was covered by an entire car.

  She pressed her legs together as if she knew I was looking. I thought of how it would feel to have those thighs pressed around my waist, instead, and my dick throbbed. Fuck, this was only day one of Callie working in the shop.

  I had to endure three months of this? I was going to die, for sure.

  “Callie, what is it?” I asked, coughing slightly to clear my throat.

  To my surprise, she bent all the way down to look at me beneath the car. Her green eyes glittered with mischief, which was both a great and a terrible sign.

  “You were looking up my dress.”

  I shook my head. “Why would I look up a brat’s dress?”

  She pouted. “You’re lying, Desmond.”

  “And how would you know that?”