Don’t overreact, I told myself as I placed one foot in front of the other, heading to the main floor of the shop and looking around at the eight different cars parked inside at the moment. There were four “lanes.” Each lane had two cars on it. Three lanes were usually reserved for cars that were getting mechanical work done, usually a car involved in a collision. One lane was always set aside for whatever car or cars Ripley happened to be restoring.

Sure enough, most of the mechanics for CCC had left for the day, but I still spotted two heads on the floor that weren’t Rip’s brown and silver mix.

At the lane furthest from where I stood, I could see him taking the seats out of a GTO that I hadn’t seen before lunch.

Why? Why had I screwed up today? Crap, crap, crap.

I had done it. There was no hiding it. I couldn’t go back in time and change my mistake, as much as I would have wanted to.

Own it. I had to own it. Lying was bad—most of the time. Pretending to be stupid was worse.

I repeated all those things to myself as I crossed between the cars, purposely ignoring the glances I got from the two guys still working as I made my way toward Rip. It wasn’t unusual for me to come out on the floor, but it wasn’t that normal either.

Maybe I could get him to talk to me in his office or in my room.

How could I have screwed up like this? Realistically, I knew that people made mistakes. The man who had taught me everything he knew had messed up all the time.

Okay, it had never happened while Rip had been at CCC, and it had never been a mistake of this size. When the old lead painter had messed up, it was picking out the wrong color tone or not noticing that something had needed an extra coat of clear. It wasn’t a chunk of a car being the wrong color.

You will not cry, Luna. You will not cry. He’s not going to hit you, and if he yells at you, you can take it better than anyone else here. If you get fired, it’s your own fault. You can’t blame anyone else but yourself. You’ll be fine. Thea, Kyra, and Lily are almost all self-supportive. One day you’ll be able to laugh about the day you screwed up big-time. It might just take a decade to get there. You’re a decent person and you try to do what’s right, even if it sucks.

It was with that thought that I marched my butt toward the man who had ducked back into the car. I couldn’t see his head or his body as I got closer. I could handle it, I promised myself.

Then I made it.

Rip was taking the bolts off the driver side seat like I had expected, so I walked around to that side and stood there, watching him on his knees, half of his upper body inside the car, the other half kneeling on a dirty towel on the concrete floor.

He didn’t see or hear me.

Knowing him, he might just be pretending he didn’t.

So I said, loud, “Hey, Rip.” He was going to know something was wrong, I just knew it.

He didn’t stop working, and if he rolled his eyes, I had no idea, but I caught his reply of “What?”

What? Not what do you want or what do you need. It was a white day. What did I expect?

“Can I talk to you?”

“Talk,” was his simple reply.

I could do it.

“Can we talk in the office or in my room?” I practically croaked, wincing and hoping he’d miss it.

Only then did I see his arm stop moving, but I heard his voice clearly as he rasped, “Busy, Luna. What’s up?”

What’s up? Okay. That was a decent sign.

But I still couldn’t manage to say anything more than, “Did I tell you that your hair looks nice today?” The way he had it parted did look extra nice today. I wasn’t lying.

Just stalling.

“Talk, Luna,” he clearly grumbled, aware I was full of it. “I don’t got all day. I need to get this car stripped. What’s up?” my boss, the same boss I had been planning on baking a cake for this weekend, the same boss who had already lost this patience with me when I didn’t give him an answer at seven in the morning when he asked what favor I wanted from him, and then again when he’d caught me with my eyes closed during a meeting, asked, not giving me a second to think of what I could say to get out of this.

Why? Why couldn’t have I screwed up with something Mr. Cooper had ordered me to do? He’d be disappointed in me, but at least he wouldn’t give me the death glare. He wouldn’t get rid of me.

On the other side of the Eclipse parked next to me, I spotted my two coworkers looking over at me, being nosey as shit. Owen and Miguel weren’t even trying to hide that they were eavesdropping. I wasn’t even sure what Miguel was doing here so late, much less why he was helping Owen, but oh well.

I forced myself not to curse Jason’s name. It was kind of his fault that this was even happening. If he had done his job, I would have already started painting the car by the time Rip had come to find me in the break room.

But at the end of the day, I could still only blame myself for not double-checking the work order.

I waved at my coworkers. “Owen, tell your daughter I said happy birthday!” I called out.

They both grinned, but it was Owen who gave me a thumbs-up. But they didn’t look away. Whoever had spread the rumor that women were worst gossips than men had never worked with a group of men on a regular basis before.

“Luna, what the fuck is up?” Rip asked, his tone finally genuinely taking on an impatient streak to it.

Now or never.

“Umm,” I trailed off some more, forcing myself to look away from Miguel and Owen and look down at the hint of an elbow that had started moving again inside the GTO.

“You gonna say something or not? This needs to get done,” he kept going, sounding even more aggravated and impatient.

I could do it. I had to.

“Luna,” Rip drew out my name, any and all ease finally gone from his voice.

“Rip,” I started, closing both my eyes for a moment. “I screwed up.”

There was a pause, and then he asked, slowly, so, so slowly I wasn’t a fool enough to assume he hadn’t heard me. “What’s that?”

He was going to make me do this. Of course he was. “I screwed up,” I repeated. I didn’t deserve to wince. This really was my fault. And Jason’s. “I picked up the wrong work order for the Thunderbird. Instead of the Brittany Blue, I did the Silver Mink that had been on the original form, and I already started before it hit me.” I did it. I had freaking done it. I knew it was pointless and didn’t mean a thing, but I still threw in, “I’m really, really sorry.”

At some point, his elbow stopped moving. Hell, I was pretty sure he even stopped breathing because the two inches of his upper half that weren’t hidden inside the car weren’t moving either. Oh, hell.

“It’s my fault. I just… I spaced. I should have double-checked the system and I didn’t. I’m so sorry.”

Still, he said nothing.

Crap.

“I can stay late tonight to start fixing it. Monday I can do the primer, and if I stay late, I can get all caught up again….”

He’d stopped listening. I could tell. So I stopped talking.

His body had started to move as I had blabbed on. First I noticed more of his abs, then his upper chest, followed by his neck, and finally his head came out from inside the car he was gutting. Those intense eyes zeroed in on me from a carefully blank face I had seen before, usually from a distance. Usually as an observer and not the focus of it.

And I knew. I freaking knew…

He was going to ream me.

Lucas Ripley didn’t let me down. His voice was calm and almost cold as he said, “I specifically asked you if you needed to write that shit down. ’Member that?”

Oh, man. It was going to go bad.

What else could I do but nod?

Those almost green-blue eyes didn’t even flicker. “I asked you if you needed me to write it down and you said no,” he kept going, staring at me with that furious face that was so roughly handsome, I didn’t want to look at it, not then. His voice got even cooler, if that was even possible, and I swear I could feel the skin on my back prickling. “And I’m gonna have to pay you overtime for work that was already done?” He narrowed those intense eyes. “I have to pay you to fix a mistake you did?”