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John said.
    She unlocked the trunk. “It’s your fault I have to drive it.”
    “Steal it from a junkyard?”
    “No, stealing would be
your
thing. If you must know, I borrowed it from my father.”
    “So what did you do to your father to warrant a punishment like this?”
    “Just put my luggage in the trunk, will you?”
    He’d just finished loading up the car when Tony came around the corner of the building and handed her the bottle of wine. “Here you go, sweetheart.” He looked at the car, wincing painfully. “Yours?”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    “For the love of God, John. Nobody should have to drive a heap like that. Give her back her car, will you?”
    “So you’d like to make up her back payments?”
    “Uh . . . no.” He turned to Darcy. “Sorry.”
    She smiled at him. “You’re still a very sweet man.” Then she shot John a look that said,
And you’re not.
    “I’m real sorry about what your husband did to you,” Tony said. “What are your plans now?”
    “I’m not completely sure,” Darcy said. “But I’ll manage.”
    “That’s going to be a tough thing to do with no job,” John said.
    “Some people work hard,” she said smugly. “Other people work smart.”
    “I’m surprised you’re interested in working at all.”
    “If you are,” Tony said, “we have a job opening here.”
    John whipped around. “No, we don’t.”
    “Yeah, we do,” Tony told Darcy. “John fired our clerk yesterday.”
    “Well, thank you so much for thinking of me,” Darcy said, showering Tony with that glowing smile again. Then she turned to John, and the glow vanished. “But I’m afraid the management here is a little overbearing for my taste.”
    “I’m quite sure it is,” John said. “And you couldn’t handle the job, anyway.”
    “Handle what? Picking up a phone and saying hello? Pulling open a file cabinet and stuffing folders into it?” She made a scoffing noise. “I can’t imagine the person who
couldn’t
handle it.”
    “Well, in that case,” he said with a deadpan expression, “the job’s all yours.”
    “And I’ll take you up on that,” she said, “the day hell freezes over.”
    With that, she circled around, got in the passenger door of that god-awful car, and shimmied over to the driver’s seat. It was a hard thing to pull off gracefully, and John had to admit she did a pretty good job of it.
    Tony grinned. “She’s one of a kind, isn’t she?”
    That was the understatement of the century.
    John watched as she stuck her nose in the air and motored out of his parking lot, that crappy old car gasping for every inch of ground it covered. As much as she drove him nuts, he couldn’t help being curious about how she was going to pull herself out of the hole her husband had dug for her. It would be an interesting thing to watch. From a distance, anyway. Wearing body armor. With a weapon in each hand. And his brain on full alert.
    No matter how beautiful she might be, behind that pretty face was a woman who could turn any man’s life upside down before he even knew what hit him.
    That man was infuriating.
    Darcy fumed most of the way home, wondering how she’d had the misfortune not only to have her husband leave her penniless, but then to have a man like John Stark pop up to make life hell for her. Thank God she finally had her luggage back, which meant that from now on, Lone Star Repossessions would be nothing more than a very bad memory.
    It was time to concentrate on other things, such as where Warren was and how she could get back some of the money he’d taken away. She still couldn’t fathom why he’d disappeared the way he had. While their relationship had never been overly warm, they’d never been hostile to each other, and taking everything they had and leaving was just about as hostile as it got.
    She’d met Warren when she went to work for the big manufacturing company where he used to be an accountant. He had just made the leap to upper management about