He Chose Her. I Left Carrying His Heir. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Dutch

A mechanic tows her to his garage and gives her the room upstairs on his terms, and he knows Cade's name before she says it.

He winched my truck onto the flatbed in the dark and didn't say a word about the cost.

I sat in the cab of his tow truck with my duffel on my lap and my feet on a toolbox.

The cab smelled of motor oil and coffee that had gone cold hours ago.

"I'm Dutch," he said, when we were back on the road.

"Ruby."

"Okay, Ruby."

That was the whole introduction, and I was grateful for it.

I watched his hands on the wheel.

They were big and scarred across the knuckles, with the nails cut short and square.

Nobody had ever driven me anywhere without asking what had happened, and I waited for the questions to start.

They didn't.

Twenty minutes later he turned in at a long low building with a hand-painted sign over the bay doors: DUTCH'S GARAGE & FEED.

A single light burned over the office door.

He backed the flatbed up to the second bay and dropped my truck on the concrete, slowly and level.

"I'll look at the radiator in the morning," he said. "You can't stay in that thing."

"I've got forty dollars," I said. "I can get a motel."

"The nearest one's twenty miles, and it rents by the hour."

I didn't have an answer for that.

He walked to the back of the shop and opened a steel door beside the parts shelves.

Stairs went up behind it, narrow and steep.

"There's a room," he said. "Bed, hot plate, bathroom with a door that sticks. I lived in it when I opened the place. Nobody's in it now."

"Why would you give a stranger that?"

"Because it's two in the morning and you've got nowhere to go."

He said it flatly, and it was not a kindness he expected thanks for.

At the top of the stairs he switched on a lamp.

The room was clean, with a quilt on the iron bed and a window over the road.

A calendar from a seed company hung beside the door, and nothing else was on the walls.

"Here are my terms," he said from the top step. "You stay until you've seen a doctor and found a place of your own. You don't ask about my past. I don't ask about yours."

"A doctor," I said. "I'm not hurt."

He looked at me for a moment, and I felt my face go warm.

"You went white getting down from the cab," he said. "I'm not asking. I'm saying a doctor, when you're ready."

"Fine," I said. "Those are fair."

"The front office is mine. Don't come down into the shop before seven. There's eggs in the little fridge if you want them."

Then he went down, and I listened to the steel door close.

I lay on top of the quilt with my shoes on, and I thought I would lie awake until morning.

I was asleep in minutes.

When I woke, the window was grey and the smell of frying bacon was coming up through the floor.

I found him in the corner of the shop behind a half-built carburetor, in a clean flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.

There was a plate waiting on an upturned crate beside him, with eggs, toast and bacon.

"I told you not to come down before seven," he said, without looking up.

"It's seven-fifteen."

"Then sit."

I sat and ate everything on the plate, and he pretended not to watch me.

"Your radiator hose split," he said. "I'll have the part by noon. Twenty dollars and a day's labor, if you want to work it off."

"What does the labor look like?"

"You tell me what you're good at."

"I'm a vet tech," I said. "I can hold a cow still and draw blood from a goat."

For the first time, his mouth moved slightly at the corner.

"We sell feed to half the ranches in this county," he said. "Somebody who can tell me which ones are lying about their herd's health could save me a lot of money."

"That's a real job?"

"It's a real problem."

I was smiling into my coffee when the sound reached us from the road.

It started as a low drone, and then it rose to a roar.

I knew it before I saw it, because I had lived inside that noise for eight years.

A long line of motorcycles went past the shop on Route 9, heading for the lake, two by two with their headlights on in the morning.

Dutch put down his wrench.

He walked to the front office, flicked off the light over the counter, and stepped back from the big front window until the wall hid him completely.

He stayed there with his back against the paneling until the last bike had gone by.

I stood up from the crate.

"Do you owe them money?" I asked.

"Eat your toast."

"Dutch."

He came back and picked up the wrench, and he wouldn't meet my eyes.

"Cade Chitwood has a lot of friends on Route 9," he said. "Stay upstairs today."

I stood very still.

I had told him my first name and my father's truck and the forty dollars.

I had not said Cade's name, or the club's, or anything about a husband.

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