Sins of the Past (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)

in them and if she had gone to change, he would have thought she did it because of him. She had one rule and that was to never let them see her sweat. To never let anyone see her embarrassed because that only made matters worse. The townspeople were like wolves. They preyed on the weakest, and that was definitely what they considered her.
    Lorna hadn’t met her new neighbor yet, but she had seen him coming and going. He had been there over a week so she was pretty sure that was enough time for the locals to warn him about how close he was living to the daughter of the town whore. The bad thing about it was she couldn’t even deny the accusation. Even she had to admit her mother was no stranger when it came to sexual relationships. To say that her mother was promiscuous was a huge understatement.
    What Lorna didn’t understand was how the locals automatically assumed she was guilty by association. Because her mother was a whore, she was considered one as well. They were all assholes in her opinion. The summer before her eighth grade year, Lorna went from being flat-chested to having c-cups. That was when the boys started noticing her, and the girls started hating her. From then on she was told she was going to be just like her mother. The sad thing was she was nothing like the woman. Sadly, Lorna was a twenty-nine-year-old virgin.
    Laughing out loud at the irony, she pulled up to her shop and went to unlock the door. She began unloading the parts out of the trunk of her car, organizing them as she went. She didn’t want to mess up her orderly place. Her car may have been her pride and joy, but she wouldn’t have it if it wasn’t for her shop. The shop was the only other thing she could say was completely hers. One of her mother’s boyfriends, or Lorna’s “uncles” as her mother liked for her to call them, had left the shop to her when he died. She loved Uncle John like he was her real father and he had treated her like a daughter. Instead of yelling at her for following him around and getting in his way, at nine years old, he began to teach her everything he knew about working on cars.
    The day Lorna came home from school and found all of Uncle John’s things gone, she had cried for hours, cursing her mother. She knew his leaving had to have been her fault. He had lasted two years with her mom, which was a record, and Lorna had started to hope her mother had finally found the one . Seeing his belongings gone had devastated her. She packed her bags and ran straight to Uncle John’s shop. Of course, he had made her return home, but he never turned her away after that. Lorna started showing up every day after school. She spent more time at the shop than she did at home. Needless to say, after the words she had with her mother, they barely tolerated each other from that day on. She never forgave her mother for cheating on Uncle John, and she had a feeling her mother resented her for her relationship with the man.
    Lorna looked around her shop and sighed. “Since I’m already here, I might as well get to work.” The next project on her list was restoring an old 1952 Volkswagen Beetle. The owner had found it sitting in his father’s garage and wanted it fixed up to give to his daughter as a sweet sixteen present. Lorna smiled, thinking of her own sixteenth birthday present. It certainly wasn’t a car. The car was cute, but Lorna was more of a fan of American muscle cars. She wasn’t about to turn the money down, though.
    Through hard work, she had taken her Uncle John’s body shop and turned it into a restoration shop. Business was doing so well that she was able to stop doing auto repairs altogether and only focus on the restorations. People were normally shocked and skeptical when they first talked to her, but her work spoke for itself and most of her customers came through word of mouth. Requests came in from all over the country and Lorna was able to do what she loved to do best, which was take an old abandoned car and return it to its former glory. The fact that she got paid for her work was just icing on the cake.
    Looking at all the parts she had already collected for the Volkswagen, Lorna made a list of everything else she was going to need for the project. The hardest part of her job was finding original parts. Once she had everything she needed, then actually putting the car together was a piece of cake. With her list made, Lorna booted up her computer and got to work.
    The whole time she