by Ruthie Knox
“Who were you talking to?”
“The guy from the construction company.”
She didn’t know if he was technically the foreman or the owner or what. He seemed to boss a lot of people around, particularly another man who looked like a shorter, angrier, tattooed version of him, but he also did plenty of work.
She’d mentally designated him the foreman on the basis of the fact that he seemed to come and go as he pleased. He did half days sometimes and skipped other days altogether, which made her think he was off running the show at another site.
“You mean that man who keeps you late? You can’t go down to the basement with him.”
“Of course I can. I have to.”
“He’s a stranger.”
“Yes, but there’s a tornado.”
The storm noise died down as the door eased shut behind him.
His boots squeaked over the polished linoleum of the entryway, and then metal clicked on plastic as something hit the desk beside her.
She looked sideways. His belt buckle. Holy Toledo.
“I know there’s a tornado,” her mother was saying. “That’s why I called. But you can’t go running down into the basement with a man. It’s unsafe.”
“I think this is one of those situations where you have to pick your poison, Mom.”
“Ask him his name, at least, so if something happens I can report him to the authorities.”
“His name is Patrick Mazzara.” Her face got even hotter. Why not just wear a sign that read, I Know Your Name Because I Have a Huge, Inappropriate Crush on You? “I have to go.”
He shifted beside her. The buckle scraped over Formica.
“Mazzara? Is he the one who—”
“Bye, Mom.”
Amber hung up the phone and closed her eyes. Inhale, exhale, inhale, gosh darn it, she hoped he hadn’t heard that.
But she wasn’t any good at lying, even to herself. She worked the phone all the time, and she knew perfectly well that the volume stayed cranked up loud enough that it was possible to hear both sides of any conversation from several feet away. Rosalie was a little hearing impaired.
He wasn’t several feet away. He was breathing. Right next to her.
He cleared his throat.
She turned.
“Basement?”
She beamed as if she were offering him a cocktail. Because she was excellent with men. So very excellent and savvy. Not at all a flushing, bumbling Bible college graduate who’d lost the faith and misplaced her virginity but somehow accidentally managed to hang on to her air of dewy inexperience.
It was her face—her giant eyes and big round cheeks. She looked like Bambi. The kind of men who were attracted to her wanted her to be as sweet and innocent as her face.
“I’m not Patrick.”
Amber blinked. I’m not Patrick was the last thing she’d expected him to say. Though to be fair, she was hard-pressed to come up with a list of things he might reasonably have said.
I adore you, Amber.
I want to marry you.
Or maybe, I want to take you out to my truck and teach you what sex is supposed to feel like.
She wasn’t innocent enough to think it would be romantic if he said any of those things. Not at all. It would be creepy. And probably also terrifying.
“Patrick’s my brother,” he added. “My name’s Tony.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. People get us confused a lot.”
Patrick had to be the tattooed guy, then. The shorter brother, who didn’t do as much of the work or the bossing around.
Patrick the troublemaker.
Maybe Tony was the nice one.
Though if he’d looked like the nice one, she certainly wouldn’t have developed such a desperate, inadvisable crush on him. No, she liked his rough edges. The way his hair stuck out underneath his hard hat and clung to the back of his neck, a few weeks overdue for a visit with the scissors. The way his hands always looked so beat up when he held the door open for her—a dark blood blister under his thumbnail, a crack in one knuckle.
A man who worked hard, knew what he wanted, and didn’t take flak from anybody.
“I live over in Mount Pleasant,” he said. “Sunnybrook Lane.”
She flapped one hand and made a dismissive shape with her mouth, as if to say, No, no. Though what she was denying, she couldn’t say. That she’d wanted to know where he lived? That she minded going into basements with strange men?
She did mind. Or she would, normally. It was just that the tornado siren had short-circuited her brain.
And also, his voice was rich and dark and delicious. He wasn’t a big talker, and maybe that was because his voice was such a valuable substance, he had to ration it. She might actually be able to live on it for the next week.
“You need to know anything else to be sure I’m not gonna maim you?” he asked. “Social security number? Height and weight?”
She shook her head with too much energy.
He smiled.
Amber thought she just might die.
It was dazzling. Tony Mazzara had a dazzling smile. Like a toothpaste commercial dipped in a porn movie.
“Now we’re at the part where you tell me your name,” he said.
“Sorry?” She had an urge to shake her head and clear away the smile vapors, but she managed not to. Just.
“Your name, honey.”
“Amber.”
“Amber what?”
“Amber Clark.”
His eyes were laughing at her, but they were doing it kindly. He had nice eyes. Dark, dark brown eyes and wavy black hair. A face like his name, like it should have been chiseled out of marble, with a big Mediterranean nose, high cheekbones, and one of those brows that could go dark and menacing and make a girl shiver.
His mouth was probably illegal.
She needed to stop cataloging him, because it only made the blushing, perky thing worse. The guy she now realized was his brother gave her sly looks whenever the two of them passed her. Looks that said, I see the way you watch him. Everybody sees.
She wanted to tell him, It’s not like you think. I’m not mooning over him. I’m trying to figure out a way to drag him into my bed and tie him up.
But that was such baloney. She was mooning over him.
“And you live …?”
She pointed out the door in the general direction of her place. “Camelot Arms apartments. A mile or so over that way.”
“And if I go into that basement with you, you’re not going to attack me? Compromise my virtue?”
“I’ll call your mother and swear to it if you want.”
He huffed, half a laugh, and his mouth curved into a sideways kind of smirk that lit her panties on fire.
“All right, Amber Clark. Shall we go find ourselves a corner to huddle in?”
Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s
Flirting with Disaster
Chapter One
“Yes,” Katie said, gripping the steering wheel harder. “Uh-huh, yes, I get it.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, signaled left, and changed lanes. The traffic was getting thicker as they approached Louisville.
Her brother kept talking, his voice robbed of its customary power by the cheap speakers of her cell phone, which sat in a cup-holder mount and broadcast Caleb’s warnings upward at her head. “If you have the slightest indication that there’s danger attached to this threat, you’re going to call me, and—”
“Yesssssss,” she droned.
The drama was wasted on Caleb, who was going to give her this lecture for the seventeenth time whether she wanted to hear it or not.
It was wasted on Katie’s traveling companion, too. Sean didn’t react to anything she did. Ever.
Katie glanced at the man in the passenger seat of her Jetta, just to be sure. His expression as he stared out the windshield matched the bleak, featureless expanse of southbound I-71. He was like a human wall of granite, completely imperv
ious to everything about her.
A stern, gorgeous cliff face.
Suppressing a sigh, she tuned back in to Caleb’s speech. “—you to be in charge of anything along those lines, Sean. This is a trial run for Katie. I’m only letting her go because Judah insists she’s the one he wants to work with. You got that, Katie? It’s Sean’s show. I need you to play nice and stay out of his way.”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “I know the deal. I agreed to the deal. I am on board with the deal. Now can we stop talking about it, please?”
She flinched at the way her voice came out, sharper than she’d meant to sound. It was only because she was nervous about this trip. Her palms had gone clammy and slimed the leather wheel cover, so uncomfortable did it make her to venture into an unknown city to do an unfamiliar job with a man who didn’t like her.
She had a tendency to bristle when nervous.
One more bad habit she needed to make an effort to tame. Better to be professional. What Katie really needed to figure out was how to act cool and icy like some kind of Bond Girl assassin, slinking around and poisoning people by slipping strychnine into their drinks.
Except without the poisoning. Her goal was to win herself a promotion from office manager to agent for Caleb’s security company, not to become an assassin. Not unless her ex-husband strolled into town needing assassinating.
“We’ll stop talking about it when I’m positive you’re going to cooperate,” Caleb said. “Right now, you sound like you’re blowing smoke up my ass.”
“I’m not,” she replied levelly. “I promise. I understand that this is your company and Sean’s assignment, and I’m just a companion on this trip. I promise I’ll be quiet and helpful and learn things, okay?”
“I need you to be safe.”
She made a face, then immediately regretted it. Wrinkling her nose and pursing her lips in response to Caleb’s babying only proved she deserved to be babied. Not the way she wanted Sean to see her.
She flicked another glance in his direction. If he saw her at all, he gave no sign.
“I’m safe,” she said.
“I care about you, Katelet.”
“I know you do,” she replied. “I care about you, too.”
“And it’s only because I care about you that I’m going to say this again …”
Katie tapped her fingertips against the steering wheel and stopped listening.
She understood his worry. Ever since she’d confessed that she was married and needed to locate her spouse so she could get divorced, Caleb had become all concerned and brotherly. She kept waiting for him to go back to the way he’d been before, but so far, no luck.
Five years older than her, her brother was a born nice guy who had spent most of his adulthood in the Military Police before moving home a year ago to help take care of their parents after their dad had a stroke. Katie had been living in his house rent-free at the time, working as a bartender nights and spending her days in elastic-waist pants, moping and watching daytime TV. Her husband, Levi, had cleaned her out and dropped her like a bad habit, and she’d returned from the life they’d built in Alaska in defeat. She’d practically regressed to adolescence by the time Caleb pulled her out of her self-pity slump.
He gave her a job running the office of his new company, Camelot Security, and after the first month or so, Katie had started to feel useful again. Competent. She’d discovered she had some get-up-and-go left in her after all. That she actually wanted to do something with herself.
Caleb was also the one who’d encouraged her to enroll in a couple of online classes. He’d even appointed himself her personal trainer, helping her whip her body into its best shape in years.
He was a great brother, but Katie was done with the coddling. She’d turned over a new leaf. He needed to get with the program.
“Sean, are you hearing all this?” he asked.
Sean nodded. He was invisible to Caleb, but the two of them apparently had a man-telepathy thing going, because Caleb said, “Great. Give me a call after you’ve talked to Pratt. I want to hear the details of these threats he’s supposedly getting. And if you can, find out why he’s brought this case to us instead of giving it to his security team from Palmerston, because—”
“Caleb,” Katie interrupted.
“What?”
“Give it a rest.”
“I just—”
“We’ve been over this and over this. Sean gets it. I get it. We’ll call you. Now let us do the job.”
Her brother exhaled explosively, which made Katie smile a little. “Aren’t you supposed to be taking today off?” she asked. “Go home and help Ellen with wedding arrangements or something.”
Caleb and Ellen had met on a job and gotten engaged about six minutes later. He pretty much lived over at her place now, and he’d become more of a father to her son, Henry, than the two-year-old’s real father ever had.
“God, no. She won’t let me near any of the wedding stuff. But I did tell Henry I’d take him to the hardware store.”
“So why aren’t you doing that?”
Katie spotted an exit and swerved toward it, weaving nimbly through three lanes of traffic. The gas tank was getting low.
“I’ve got payroll to figure out first.”
She caught herself right before the words left her mouth. I can do that when I get back.
It was the kind of thing a self-sacrificing doormat would say, not a slick professional. A decade of specializing in being a doormat had left her rumpled and ground down, with boot prints on her forehead.
Time to stop jumping to the rescue.
“You should hire somebody else to do payroll, now that I have a new job,” she said instead.
At the end of the off ramp she turned—a little too fast, perhaps, because she got distracted by the fact that Sean was looking directly at her. Somehow he made looking look like not-looking. As though he could see her, but he couldn’t be bothered to see her.
How was she supposed to concentrate on Caleb talking about payroll when Sean was not-looking at her that way?
She didn’t know what the guy’s deal was. It seemed as if he didn’t approve of her—though what it was about her he disliked, she had no idea. Her personality, her being on the job, her existence?
Sean had been working for her brother since the summer, and in that time he and Caleb had grown thick as thieves. He spent hours every week in Caleb’s office, a solid panel of pine muffling the mingled sound of their voices as they bent their heads over some obscure security challenge and Katie tried to get her work done at the reception desk a few feet away.
Then he would come out, fix her with that blue stare, nod like a robot, and leave.
She’d tried being nice to him, reminding him they’d gone to high school together and sat by each other in Algebra II and Trig. She’d tried ignoring him. She’d tried glaring at him and even, one embarrassing day, flirting with him. Nothing made a difference.
He didn’t speak to her. Not at all, not ever, not under any circumstances. It was extremely weird, and it drove her nuts.
Caleb was way too casual about it.
Don’t send me to Louisville with him, she’d begged. He hates me.
No, he doesn’t, Caleb had said. I’m positive he doesn’t hate you. You two just need to work it out between you.
She didn’t know how to work it out, but she refused to let Sean get to her. This job was the big chance she’d been waiting for—her opportunity to get out of Camelot and see new places, rub elbows with interesting people, become somebody independent of Levi and Caleb. Her own somebody.
Judah Pratt saw her potential. The singer-songwriter had asked for her specifically. And okay, yes, maybe Judah’s interest in her was largely carnal, but an opportunity was an opportunity. She’d only been in his Chicago apartment for half an hour when it arrived: he’d announced that he would hire Camelot Security, but only if he could have Katie.
He’d said it just like that, too. Only if I ca
n have Katie. A week later, the memory retained the power to send shivers skittering up her spine.
Or it usually did. It was a little hard to get swept up in her Judah fantasies with Sean sitting next to her, emanating stony disapproval of … something. Her being assigned to work with him. The way she breathed. Her boots. Who knew?
“Katie?” Caleb interrupted her reverie.
“What?”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Sure.” She rewound her brain, hoping to locate some phantom memory of what he’d said when she wasn’t paying attention. Nada. “What did you say?”
“When did you stop listening?”
“Uh, payroll?”
“Never mind. The upshot is, you’ve still got your old job when you come back.”
“Yeah, but after I completely blow your socks off, you’ll need someone else to do my old job.”
“Please don’t try to blow my socks off. Be safe.”
“Right, right.” She turned into the gas station. “I’ve got to go.”
“One last thing.”
“What?”
“I want you to keep your distance from Pratt.”
“Caleb—”
“No, I’m serious. Sean, I need your help here. Keep the guy away from my sister. I don’t trust him not to take advantage.”
Katie pulled to a stop beside a pump, her blood boiling. There was overprotective, and then there was stifling. She loved Caleb and all, but she wasn’t about to let him smother her to death.
Sean had turned to look at her. He had the most astonishing eyes. Dark, dark blue, with thunderstorms in them.
She lifted her chin. “That isn’t necessary,” she told Caleb.
“I think it is.”
“No, it isn’t. If Judah wants to take advantage of me, I’m all for it.”
Sean blinked.
“Katie,” Caleb said, a note of warning in his voice.
“Stop. You don’t want to have this conversation any more than I do, so just drop it, okay?”
Sean got out of the car. Katie watched him go, uneasy but resolved. It was hard enough to defeat her own internal censor. She didn’t need two men dog-piling on to judge her ability to make decisions about her own freaking sex life.
