Can't Shake You

by Molly McLain

  “Please tell me there’s another option.” She frowned, looking so damn adorable with that pout on her face.

  “I have a friend at a little family-owned store over in Hastings. I don’t work with her very often because she’s so far away, but she does a hell of a job and she’s always good for a deal.”

  Carissa nodded eagerly. “Enough said.”

  “I’ve already taken some measurements. I just have to call her to set up an appointment. I imagine you’ll want to come along, since it’s your money being spent,” Josh said, hoping against hope she’d pass.

  “Absolutely.”

  Of course. Just the two of them. Alone in a vehicle for two hours one way. Friggin’ perfect. “When’s good for you?”

  “I live and breathe this house right now. I can go whenever.”

  Josh inclined his chin. “Good. Hopefully we can get there early next week. That way we won’t be rushed with a last minute installation. I’d go tomorrow, but I volunteered to courtesy drill with the unit in Omaha this weekend.”

  “Sounds good.” She gave him a small, sincere smile, then reached out and squeezed his hand. “Thank you again for doing this. You’ve obviously got a full plate.”

  Josh glanced down to where their fingers touched and nodded. “You don’t need to keep thanking me. I got it.”

  When he lifted his gaze back to hers, her smile brightened. “I just want to make sure you know how much—”

  “Well, well. Already things around here look better than the last time I dropped by.”

  Both Josh and Carissa started at the sound of Fletcher’s voice near the front porch. Carissa jumped away as the screen door slammed shut and their friend crossed the threshold with his requisite clipboard in hand.

  She shot a questioning look to Josh.

  “I asked him to drop by to verify permits.” Though now he wished he hadn’t, seeing as he was still half hard.

  “Oh. I didn’t think of that.”

  Josh lifted a shoulder as Fletcher made his way into the kitchen, his button-down shirt rolled up to his elbows and his Cartier watch catching rays of sunshine streaming in from the open window. With his product-styled blond hair and khakis, Josh wondered, not for the first time, what the appeal had been for Carissa. Style-wise, he and Fletcher were polar opposites.

  You were the one-time, bad boy romp, remember? Clearly, not her preferred type.

  Fletcher curled an arm around Carissa’s shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “Good to finally see you in a pair of capable hands, angel.”

  The back of Josh’s neck began to burn like he’d spent a day on the lake with no sunscreen. Would he ever be able to stand in the same room with the two of them and not feel like he carried around a sign that read “I balled your girl and I wanna do it again”?

  “Good ole Josh.” Carissa chuckled lightly, her head tipping to the side and holding his gaze. “Always saving my butt.”

  Fletcher flashed an inquisitive grin. “That so?”

  Josh pulsed his jaw and snuck a sidelong glare at the woman who seemed intent on getting him strung up by the ‘nads his second day on the job.

  She pursed her lips cleverly. “Remember the road trip to Lincoln? The Shinedown concert? When Staff Sergeant Hudson here flashed his military ID and sweet talked that female trooper out of giving me a speeding ticket?”

  “That’s right!” Fletcher threw his head back and howled. “I thought for sure she was going to arrest him just so she could get him alone in her patrol car.”

  Josh fidgeted with the tie on his tool belt and allowed himself to laugh as well. Fake it ‘til you make it, right? Besides, he remembered that night too, and it had been damn funny. He’d barely been home a month and the whole newly-returned-hero bit had proved to be one hell of an aphrodisiac for the ladies, including the tough-as-nails Nebraska state cop.

  The only woman his hero status hadn’t seemed to affect however was Carissa. And he could only assume it was because of one—or both—of two potential reasons—the “been there, done that” effect or because she’d been too caught up in sharing his best friend’s bed.

  “Good times, good times.” Reed shifted his clipboard from beneath his arm. “But let’s get down to business, shall we? It looks like everything is pretty much in order. I’ll just need to issue Tony a permit to take over the electrical.” He filled out the temporary permit and handed Josh Tony’s copy. “Let me know when he’s got everything up to par.”

  “Will do.” Josh nodded his head and had just pocketed the piece of paper when his cell chirped. Ryan. Holding a finger to Fletcher and Carissa, he took the call. “What’s up, Ry?”

  “We’ve got another situation.”

  His blood ran cold. “What do you mean?”

  “The stained glass for Henry’s study?”

  “Which is in storage at the shop...”

  “Right. It is. It’s just no longer in one piece.”

  “You’d better be kidding me.” Josh scrubbed a hand down over his face. The imported Italian glass had cost over twenty grand and been a real bitch to get his hands on.

  “Wish I was. We came over to pick it up for installation and found the lock on the stall cut.”

  Motherfucker. “And?”

  “At least they left the baseball bat behind. Might be able to lift some prints.”

  “A friggin’ baseball bat? Jesus Christ.” Josh stalked toward the open kitchen window for air, sucking in deep breath after deep breath. Who the hell was doing this and why?

  “I’ve already called the sheriff,” Ryan added. “He’ll be here in about five.”

  “Fletcher and I’ll be there in twenty.”

  ***

  “We’ll run the prints from the bat and the door through the system, but it won’t do any good at this point unless whoever’s out to get you has a record.” Mark Dunn, Tony’s cousin and the Cameron County Sheriff, gestured toward the storage stall where his deputy was hard at work with his dust kit.

  “I’d really like to know what I did to piss this prick off.” Josh swiped a hand over his hair. He had a good reputation and, for the most part, he was a well-liked guy. The only real enemies he’d ever acquired, he’d left behind in the desert.

  “Unless there are other contractors that haven’t come forward, it looks like he’s definitely targeting your business. Off the record, I’d say it’s either someone on the inside or someone who stands to benefit from all the damage,” Mark said.

  Fletcher nodded. “My gut’s leaning toward an inside job, too.”

  Josh shook his head. “No way. None of my guys would do something like this.”

  “So far, it’s not happening to anyone else, Hudson,” Fletcher reminded him. “And how the hell did this jackoff get into the Henry site and now here so easily? Who the hell would have even known about the glass, except your men?”

  An uneasy feeling stirred in Josh’s gut. He couldn’t imagine any of his guys sabotaging him. Every member of his crew took pride in their work. It was why he’d hired them and why he kept them on. He was good to them, too. They were paid well and their benefits were better than most.

  “You piss anyone off lately? Deny vacation or a raise?” Mark asked.

  Josh thought about it for a moment and came up with nothing. Everyone received a decent raise a couple months back and he’d always been flexible with vacations, since he had plenty of hands. And he understood the need for time off, too, since three years ago he’d needed an extended leave himself.

  His mind went back to the wiring incident. Whoever sliced everything to shit had to know what they were doing. That had only been last weekend. The weekend of Dan and Maddie’s party.

  When he’d broken up Carissa and Tony.

  No way. No way in hell could Tony be behind this. His foreman had been more embarrassed than angry and, aside from a few awkward moments on Monday morning, he seemed to have completely forgotten the altercation.

  Josh shook his head. “Nah, I got
nothing.” It wasn’t Tony. It couldn’t be. It was such a ludicrous idea to begin with, he wasn’t about to make the matter worse by throwing the possibility at his cousin for consideration.

  “All right.” Mark sighed. “But if you think of anything, you know where to find me. And if your insurance company decides to give you grief over the additional damage, I’ll have the reports in order by the end of the day.”

  Josh shook the sheriff’s hand and let him get back to work. He and Fletcher sauntered back to his truck.

  “This guy’s serious, bro. I hate to freak you out, but you gotta think of your other jobs too. The clinic. Carissa.”

  Josh tensed. It hadn’t crossed his mind the perp might hit the flip.

  “The house is peanuts compared to the other sites, so I’m sure it’ll be fine. It wouldn’t hurt to be cautious though,” Fletcher said.

  “I’ll have Mark add a couple nightly drive-bys to the schedule.” He felt bad enough about Henry’s place being messed with, he couldn’t imagine how he’d feel if something happened to Carissa’s house. Especially with the eviction looming over her head.

  “Things going okay with you two?”

  Josh froze, his guilty conscience rearing its ugly head. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Things seemed a little tense when I walked in earlier. Though you’re both so damn thick-skulled, I can’t say I’d be surprised if you were butting heads already.” Fletcher chuckled.

  “Just ran into an unexpected expense.” And a few inconvenient erections.

  “I know I’ve said this before, but I’m damn glad you took over for Kelly. Rumor has it he roughed up a dancer in Grand Island a couple weeks ago. She didn’t press charges, but the thought of him working with Car...” Fletcher shook his head, an expression of disgust and concern crunching his features. “I would’ve killed the SOB if he so much as looked at her the wrong way.”

  Josh craned his neck from one side to the other until it cracked. He shared his friend’s sentiments, but if Reed knew the way he’d been looking at Carissa, he’d want to kill him, too. Probably in a pretty tortuous manner.

  Was that going to stop him enjoying the view? Probably not. No harm in looking, right?

  Besides, the fact that Carissa had been his before Fletcher’s—if only for one night—still prickled like a horse hair at his conscience. He knew it was wrong to wonder what it might be like to have her again, but a small part of him couldn’t stop thinking he was somehow entitled to those wayward thoughts, the timeline considered.

  Fletcher clapped him on the back. “There’s no one I trust more with her, Hudson. No one.”

  Josh’s gut twisted into an impossible knot, reminding him that no matter how he tried to rationalize his crazy attraction to Carissa, nothing would change the fact that his best friend had loved her and maybe even still did. That Josh slept with her first couldn’t hold a candle in the wind to what Fletcher had given her.

  That his own chest ached at the thought was something he completely refused to contemplate.

  Chapter Eight

  Behind the discretion of her sunglasses, Carissa took a slow sip from her margarita and casually watched Andrew make idle conversation with Dan and his father, Jack. All three of the men lounged against the back railing of the latter Hudson’s patio, tipping back bottles of beer.

  Andrew was handsome in a shaggy, Ashton Kutcher sort of way. He was rougher around the edges than Dan, but their brown eyes shared the same confident and clever lawyer’s glint. Dressed in designer jeans, a white button down with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of boots that were no doubt Gucci, Andrew would easily catch her eye at any of the local establishments. But for all the wrong reasons.

  He was simply far too pretty and polished, and he’d stand out like a sore thumb among the local men, whose delicious ruggedness came from hours of hard work out in the hot Nebraskan sunshine, not from a salon or a gym.

  Of course, there wasn’t anything wrong with Andrew either. He just didn’t get her heart racing or her blood boiling the way the hometown guys did. Or rather, the way one particular hometown guy did.

  Unfortunately, there was also a familiarity in her indifference to Andrew that didn’t sit well—her reaction to him reminded her of her first impression of Reed, complete with comparisons to the man she really wanted.

  As if he felt her staring, Andrew cast a glance her way, a small grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. She forced a smile in return and crossed one leg over the other, fanning herself with a hand and cursing the humidity. The heat was certainly not conducive to a girl keeping her cool. Literally or figuratively.

  Flirting shouldn’t be this difficult...

  “He’s totally into you,” Maddie whispered beside her. “And did you see that ass?” She mouthed a silent ‘wow’ and fanned her own face.

  “He is quite the looker,” Nancy Hudson chimed in and, holy crap, if it wasn’t just plain weird talking about a guy with Josh’s mother. “He’s a good man too,” the older woman added. “Catholic, which is hard to come by these days. You should snap him up.”

  Carissa bit back a laugh, both at the idea and the woman. “You think so?”

  “Absolutely. A man who goes to church is one to hold on to.”

  Angling toward Nancy, curiosity lightened Carissa’s otherwise tentative mood. “But your boys don’t go to church.”

  Nancy’s exaggerated single eye roll made her look like she’d had a momentary stroke. Obviously she had significant feelings on the subject. “Don’t remind me. At least I can get Dan there for holidays. But Joshua? It’s been years. Lord knows that boy worries me the bejesus out of me.”

  “Why is that?” Carissa gave a soft laugh, enjoying the maternal concern etched in the older woman’s features. She also noticed that Nancy and Josh shared the same deep indigo eyes and an unexpected wave of adoration pulsed along her nerves, spreading foolish warmth through her already overheated body.

  “He works so much, for one. Gives too much and doesn’t take anything for himself.” She gave a worried sigh. “And those tattoos? He’s such a handsome young man. I don’t know why he’d do that to his body. I sometimes wonder if he even believes in God anymore. He seems so inside himself. I don’t know what it is. Maybe he’s just too much like his father. Or maybe he’s an atheist.”

  Maddie giggled, but Carissa found little humor in Nancy’s scattered words. The atheist comment and the tattoos aside, she shared his mother’s sentiments. In fact, the same things had bothered her about Josh for a while now too, but she’d never let herself fully consider why. History had long ago taught her that too much thinking about Josh Hudson was bad for her conscience. And her heart, too.

  She reached out and squeezed Nancy’s hand. “Josh is a wonderful man. And I agree he is probably more his father’s son than he’ll ever admit. But I don’t think he’s an atheist.”

  The woman’s eyes brightened. “Really?”

  “Really. I—”

  Before she could finish, the patio screen slid open and the subject of their conversation leaned forward in the doorway, big, inked arms braced on either side of the frame, his broad chest pushing forward. “Don’t tell me I wasn’t invited to the party.”

  Carissa’s breath hiccupped at the sight of him like she’d been deprived of the guilty pleasure for months. In reality, they’d parted ways at the flip less than three hours earlier. She noticed that he’d showered and cleaned up since calling it a day at work, and he’d swapped his jeans and dusty t-shirt for a pair of low-slung, camo cargo shorts and a light gray, sleeveless t-shirt. A t-shirt that rode up a bit as he stretched, exposing a delicious sliver of smooth, muscled abs. Yum. He’d also traded his requisite work boots for a pair of Nike’s with no socks and he was sans baseball cap, showing off a spiky mess of dark, sexy hair that had her fingers itching to touch.

  Now this is how you’re supposed to feel at the sight of an attractive man. And just how long had he been standing inside the door anyway?r />
  “Honey!” Nancy hurried across the deck and the flutter in Carissa’s stomach turned to a full on swarm when Josh wrapped his mother up in a hug and kissed her cheek.

  “Hey, Mom. What the heck’s going on out here?”

  Heck? Heck?

  “Andrew came for a visit,” she explained and before she could point out Dan’s old friend, Andrew stepped forward to greet Josh. The two men were about the same height, but Andrew had nothing on Josh’s superb upper body. Hell, even Josh’s calves were hot. God, how had she never noticed how toned and amazing his legs were before?

  “Good to see you again, man,” Andrew said, extending his hand.

  Josh accepted the gesture and nodded. “For sure. Been a long time.”

  Dan acknowledged his brother with a brief chin nod, but Carissa noticed that Josh and his father didn’t so much as make eye contact. Did that old rift still run strong?

  “I hear your contracting business is doing well,” Andrew said to Josh.

  “Can’t complain.” He smiled, but it didn’t quite meet his eyes. Eyes that, as far as she could tell, hadn’t noticed her yet. Or if they had, their owner seemed to be making a concerted effort to not shift them her way again.

  Jack stepped forward, chuckling, and Josh’s posture tensed along with the line of his strong, bristled jaw. “Putting up buildings isn’t exactly law, but it’s an admirable field. At least I can rest at night knowing my boy here learned something from his old man, if his popularity is any indication.”

  Andrew and Dan both laughed, but Josh merely stuck his tongue in his cheek and grabbed himself a beer from the cooler.

  “Joshua, you have to stay for dinner. I’ve made enough food to feed the county and your brother’s going to get the grill started in just a minute.”

  “Uh, Ma, I don’t know,” Josh hedged, looking decidedly torn between denying his mother and maintaining his own comfort, which made Carissa curious about why exactly he seemed so overtly uncomfortable. Was it Andrew? His father? Or was this about the vandalism?

  And he still hadn’t looked at her. Was he worried she’d try to talk his ear off about the house if he acknowledged her? She understood his need for personal time, geez. After all, she was trying to enjoy a little R & R herself.