The Breakers Code Read Online Free PDF Page B

stood bent under the open hood, soaked to the bone. I pulled over beside him and lowered my window. If possible, he looked even more out of sorts than he had this morning. Water ran off him in sheets, dripping from his hair and face down to the engine below. He looked frustrated, which made sense. Not only was he stranded in the rain but, given what I knew about Owen, he’d have a better chance of cajoling that car into starting than he would of fixing whatever was wrong with it.
         “Owen!” I yelled over the rainfall.
         “Cresta?” He seemed shocked to see me. He leaned into my open window, dripping all over the door. “Thank God. I’ve been here for twenty minutes. Would you believe you’re the first person who’s come by?”
         In this metropolis, who’d have thought?
         “Get in,” I told him.
         “Are you sure? I’ll ruin the upholstery.”
         “I don’t care about the upholstery. You’re gonna catch pneumonia,” I swatted at him.
         I rolled my window up and he ran to the passenger side door and hopped in. He shivered and, for a second, I thought he was going to shake the water off like a dog that had just come in out of the rain. Instead, he put his hands in front of the heater and started rubbing them together.
         “It’s freezing out there,” he looked at me. Even in this state, looking like a drowned rat in his gray fleece hoodie and jeans, he was pretty cute.
         “Not your day,” I smiled.
         “The moon’s in Capricorn,” he said, as though it was an explanation. “Do you have a blanket or something?
         “Actually,I do.” I reached into the backseat, where Casper kept all of the overnight necessities and handed him the fluffy blue blanket with floral prints that Casper had owned since way before I knew him. “Keep in mind, it’s Casper’s. So…”
         “Noted,” he said through shivering teeth. He stripped off his gray jacket. The rain had seeped right through it and the black t-shirt he wore underneath was wet and clung to him like skin. I tried not to stare.
         “What’s up with the car?” I asked, picking at my steering wheel cover. I always did that, fiddled with things when I was nervous. To date, I had ruined half a dozen sweaters, two laptops, and my grandfather’s dog tags, which made it through Korea but couldn’t survive the standardized testing jitters of ’07.
         “I think it’s the fuel pump,” he answered, snuggling into Casper’s blanket.
         “What makes you say that?” I asked.
     
         “Cause the guy at the garage said it was the fuel pump,” he shrugged. “I was on my way to Cold Creek now to pick one up. But, like I said, Capricorn.” He pointed to the sky. “I’m so glad you came by. I have zero cell signal out here.”
         “I know what you mean,” I glanced at my own useless phone sitting in the cup holder.
         “What are you doing out here anyway?” He asked.
         “I-I had to bring my mom some stuff,” I stuttered. Owen wasn’t like the other kids at DeSoto. I didn’t think he would look down on me for going to therapy or anything, but I still didn’t want him to know about it. I wanted him to think of me as a girl who had it together, who knew what she was doing, who was confident and maybe even sexy. I certainly didn’t want him thinking of me as broken.
         “I can give you a ride back. You can call Triple A when you get back into coverage,” I suggested.
         “You’re a saint,” he smiled. The heat was giving him a little of his color back, putting a flush in his cheeks. He turned to me as I pulled back onto the road. “What did you want to talk to me about something this morning?”
         I hoped he would attribute the flush crawling up my cheeks to the heater as well. I looked at him, with his expectant blue eyes staring back at me. This was it. This is where I was going to