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The waitress brought their food and they dove in.
“Mmm, this is good.” Cassie licked a drop of sauce from her lip. When she met Mike’s gaze, his eyes were fastened on her mouth and the heated look in them caused a flurry in her belly.
He gave a slight groan and took a big bite of his barbeque. The sexual tension broken, she chewed her food.
“You were telling me about your muscle car.”
“When I was a teenager, I got a part time job working in a mechanic shop. The owner had a Mustang and I wanted to buy it. My dad said I could get the car or go to college. And I better make the right choice. Which was his way of telling me to forget the car.”
“So, you went to college?”
“Yep. But I never forgot about that car. After I graduated from Penn State, I went back to that garage looking for that car.”
She dropped her bun in its basket and leaned forward, bracing her forearms on the table. “What a great story. You bought it after all those years?”
“No. It was gone. He sold it.”
Her smile turned down to a frown. That sucks. “That is not a good story. I expected a happy ending.”
He gazed at her under heavy lids. “There’s a happy part. The shop owner offered to hire me right away.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good. I guess.” She’d expected him to be upset, but his shrug told her he was okay with the car being gone. She would have been devastated.
“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life and I hadn’t gotten a job yet, but I knew I wanted my own Mustang. I went to work for him, saved my money and one day this guy pulled in with a flat bed and guess what was sitting on the back.”
“Your Mustang.”
“The very same. The guy was hauling it off to auction.”
“To auction? Why?”
“Turns out, right after the man bought the car all those years ago, he got a divorce. Said his wife sucked him dry. Lost his house, his wife thought the car was a piece of junk so she let him have it, but he no longer had a garage to keep it in. Friends covered it up and kept it behind their barn. He didn’t have the money to restore it, so finally decided to get rid of it. Wouldn’t start, needed work, so he was taking it to auction. I bought it right then and there.”
“What a stroke of luck.”
“Never put much stock in luck.”
“You have to admit the timing was extraordinary. Tell me. What did it look like?” Cassie asked, then stuffed some fries in her mouth.
“Not like that.” He nodded toward the window.
“I didn’t think so.” She shook her head. Cassie knew from her uncle that it took a good deal of money and a lot of work to make a car look like that.
“A rust bucket with a torn cloth for a roof. I had to replace just about everything. Starting with the engine.”
“You buy one or build it?” she asked, popping another fry into her mouth. His brows rose in disbelief.
“A mechanic in a mechanic shop. What do you think?”
She’d suspected the answer before she asked. Still, she had to laugh at his expression. “From scratch?”
Mike nodded with his mouth full. He took a gulp of his drink to wash down his food.
“I sanded down the engine block and rebuilt the engine piece by piece.”
Cassie thought back to an image she remembered of her uncle standing in the middle of a Mustang frame where the engine should have been. At the time, she’d been stunned. She couldn’t get over seeing the empty space. Since her dad never took an interest in older cars or restoration, she’d spent a lot of time with her uncle.
“I bet it took you a long time.”
