by Low, Gennita
“You’ve another job?” Nick kept his voice light, but anger reared at the thought she had to work so hard. For what? He wanted to know the whole story. Was she really in such debt?
She must have read his mind, because she answered him so softly he had to dip his head close to her face. “For my future,” she said, and fell into a deep slumber, her body satiated for the first time in eight years.
*
A smart Red Riding Hood would take a different route to avoid the Big Bad Wolf, and a smarter little pig would barricade herself inside her house of stone and not come out till the wolf was gone. However, both Red and the pig didn’t have a contract to keep, a job to do, and most of all, they didn’t dream of being naked with the Big Bad Wolf.
He had seen her naked.
Jaymee looked at the reflection of her body in the mirror. It wasn’t like she covered herself from head to foot under the Florida sun, she told herself defensively. He had seen what she looked like when she stripped down to a bikini top at lunchtime. Except that he had kissed there. And, there. A slow flush crept down her face, all the way to her toes.
She touched her breasts with renewed curiosity. She didn’t look any different from yesterday, but she felt like a new person, someone who had tingling breasts and sensitive skin. Someone who also, she added with sudden humor, seemed to have pet butterflies in her tummy.
Could he really want this body? It was hardly the kind to interest any man. She looked at the strong arms and legs, a fit and trim body toned by her line of work. There was nothing beguiling about muscles and strength. She didn’t have Mindy’s generous curves and she’d lost the easy comfortable softness of youth. She wished she could be feminine again, the way men wanted their women, smelling good and with time to take care of her body; she wanted to look good for.... With a brisk shake of her head, she turned away from the mirror. Jay Barrows didn’t want to be feminine for anybody. She had roofs to do, debts to pay, and bigger goals to reach.
It was going to be difficult to face him this morning, and more difficult to say no to him. It would be easy to sleep with a man like Nick, but why should she? Why should she, just because he was the most magnificent male to cross her path in eight years, and the only one who had managed to stir her cold, lonely heart since Danny? A brief affair would be disaster. He’d break her heart, even after giving her fair warning. He’d destroy her carefully constructed armor and...and discover the little girl inside. Silly, guileless Jaymee, who loved with such an ambitious, romantic heart. Already, she could feel the stupid, vulnerable side of her stirring, responding. That Jaymee, she smiled tightly, wouldn’t know how not to love Nick Langley. She would tumble straight into love, and then, what would she do when he left?
Torn apart with anxiety and a need to see him, she drove to work, wondering if she could bear to say no at all, when her body betrayed her at every chance.
*
Nick was used to not sleeping. The Programmer had been trained to withstand any number of punishments the enemy might use against him. Lack of sleep, synthetic drugs, hypnosis, pain—every operative in his particular unit had a defensive mechanism and the ability to turn their emotions on and off. Some of them had gone so far they were always off, to make sure nothing interfered with their work.
For the first time in his operative experience, the Programmer, known for his abilities for covert counter-programming of both the electronic and human mind, couldn’t control his own emotions. Nick pondered this problem as he drove to work. It was a problem because it—she, he corrected—was becoming more important to him every day. He sighed. He had a new on/off switch and her name was Jaymee, and she’d been eating at him like one of his own subversive programs. And succeeding.
When he reached the job site, Dicker and Lucky were sitting in their truck, smoking. He got out and approached the vehicle.
“What’s up?” he asked. They weren’t unloading the tools, or getting ready to get on the roof.
“Trouble, man,” Dicker said, thumbing at two parked cars on the other side of the road.
Nick looked and saw two men talking by the permit board. “Who are they?”
“That’s the builder and the other is one of the city code-inspectors.” Dicker flicked cigarette ash out of the window. “The builder won’t let us start work, saying he wanted to talk to Jay.”
“And that means trouble?”
“It smells like it,” the roofer said.
Just then, Jaymee’s blue truck pulled up. Nick watched her frown up at the roof, not seeing any work being done, then looked around searching for them. Her frown deepened when she looked in their direction and caught sight of all the vehicles.
“The boss is going to have a wasted day,” prophesied Dicker.
“Shoot, I should have stayed home,” Lucky muttered, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray. “It’s too damned hot to sit in the truck while they go back and forth about God knows what.”
Jaymee’s eyes were still on the two other men when she reached them. “What happened?” she quietly asked.
“The builder wants to talk to you, Jay, that’s all he told us,” Dicker informed her. “Here they come.”
“’Morning, Mr. Anderson,” Jaymee greeted a burly man. Nick assumed he was the builder, since the other man was in uniform.
“Hello, Jay.” He towered over Jaymee as he stood in front of her. In his fifties, he had the sunburned complexion of an outdoor man, slightly balding with a shaggy mustache peppered with gray. He looked irritated, and Nick stepped closer, standing behind Jaymee. “We have a problem.”
Jay could feel Nick’s presence, but kept her eyes on the builder. She didn’t like this at all. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“John wants to have a random inspection of some of your roofs.” Mr. Anderson nodded at the inspector beside him.
“What’s wrong?” Jaymee calmly repeated, this time directing her question at the other man.
John wiped the sweat off his forehead with a crisp, white handkerchief. He stood like a military man, a clipboard clutched to his chest, his thin lips a straight line across his narrow face. “We’ve received a complaint about your roofs,” he told her in a clipped, accusing voice, slightly high pitch. “A code violation.” He cast her an equally accusing glare.
Jaymee sighed with the impatience of someone waiting for a punch line. “And?” She made a “continue, please,” gesture with one hand.
“Beg your pardon?”
“What is the complaint?” Jaymee asked, trying not to be rude. “What code have I violated?”
“Well, someone called in and said you’ve been undernailing the shingles. Instead of six nailing, you’ve been telling your men to four-nail, even two-nail. You’ve also not been properly applying tar in the valleys.”
Nick saw the slight stiffening in Jaymee’s shoulders, but her voice sounded mildly surprised. “Really?” She folded her arms. “Who filed these complaints?”
“You know we can’t reveal that information.” The inspector wiped his forehead again, then adjusted a piece of paper on his clipboard. He clicked on his ballpoint pen with an important flourish. “I can’t let you or your men start work until I’m sure everything you’ve done is up to county code. This is a serious complaint, Miss Barrows, and I’m very thorough with my inspections.”
“I’m sure you are,” Jaymee said, with a polite smile. “Can you give me a few minutes to rework my men’s day before I follow you to whichever roof you want to check?”
“Of course.” John noted something down onto his clipboard. “Are you coming with us, Anderson?”
“What for? Either the roofs are done right, or they aren’t. My being there won’t make any difference. I’ve other things to do. Call me on the cell phone when you’re through, will you, John?” When the inspector walked back to his truck, Mr. Anderson turned to Jaymee. “This is serious, Jay. If you really did that, I want you off my property effective immediately. I can’t have the word getting around that
Excel Construction cuts corners and violates code ordinances, or some of these zealous inspectors will just give me headaches looking for more violations.”
“There aren’t any problems with my roofs,” Jaymee assured the big man.
“You know how it is, Jay. The more codes they add, the higher our cost. Right now, I don’t make much per house as it is. You understand, as a businessman, I’m always listening to bids and deals from other subcontractors.”
Nick didn’t like the man’s implication. He wanted to step between them, to protect her, but of course he couldn’t. For the first time, he wished he had the right to do that.
Jaymee heard Mr. Anderson’s warning like far-off thunder. “It’s your right to compare prices, of course,” she murmured politely.
“We’ll just have a talk after you get through with John.”
“Sure.”
Jaymee gave a cold smile, then turned her back to the contractor, effectively dismissing him. “Dicker, go pick up the order at the warehouse and leave the material at my house. Then you and Lucky can meet me there after lunch.”
“OK, boss.”
Jaymee ignored Mr. Anderson as she headed back to her truck. “Bring your tool belt, Nick.”
The burly contractor stared at her retreating back, then looked at Nick. Nick stifled a grin, obeying orders. General Jay, as he usually called her when she acted that particular way, wasn’t in the mood to be intimidated, even by the big man who signed her check every week.
When he joined her in the truck, Jaymee finally smiled at him. Starting the vehicle, she turned on the air-conditioning to a full blast before turning the truck around to follow the inspector’s. She blew hair out of her eyes.
“The day is shot,” she said, with a sigh, “and I haven’t even climbed on a roof yet.”
He took hold of one of her hands and gave it a quick squeeze. “I assume this is Rich’s and Chuck’s doing?”
Her smile became a grimace as she nodded. “Petty creatures. I want to punch the lights out of them.”
“What if the inspector finds something?”
“He won’t.” Her voice was confident as she kept her eyes on the inspector’s truck, following him through the subdivision. “I went back on every roof those two have done, and made sure there wasn’t any undernailing after I caught them. I think they just started doing this stupid stuff recently, when I let them work alone without me.”
Nick could imagine her checking everything. Others might have shrugged and hoped not to get caught, but Jaymee was a perfectionist, a detail-meister. “So what would the inspector want you to do?”
She shrugged. “Probably climb onto a roof with him and lift up a couple of shingles here and there to show him the nailing. John has a reputation of being a pain in the butt, if he doesn’t like you. And he doesn’t like me, so don’t be surprised if he wants all kinds of things done.” They slowed down in front of a stucco house. “Bingo. One of Rich’s and Chuck’s houses.”
She parked the truck. Nick ran a hand down her back and felt her shiver.
“Want to have some fun with Mr. John Inspector?” he asked, a slight grin forming.
Jaymee would much rather have fun with the man beside her. He had that glint in his eyes again, she noticed, the one that made him look roguish. She watched the inspector step smartly out of his vehicle, brushing his pants with the perfect starched creases. Her eyes narrowed.
“I’m losing money, anyway. Might as well have some fun.”
They discreetly slapped a high-five.
The next two hours, as the sun went higher and higher in the sky, Jaymee dallied as long as possible on each roof, calling out to Nick to retrieve tools that somehow managed to slide off the roof. Like he’d warned, the inspector was very thorough on the first roof, but as he became hotter, he cut down on his requests to check the smaller stuff.
“The shingles are stuck down good, aren’t they?” Jaymee cheerfully commented as she took her time detaching the one at which the inspector was pointing. Using a flat bar, she finally loosened it enough to flip it up for him to see that there were indeed six nails in that shingle. “Any other area?”
“Over there, by the valley,” the inspector said, puffing up the incline.
Nick took the flat bar and imitated Jaymee, but being a novice, he soon poked a big hole through the shingle.
“Ooops.” He looked adoringly apologetic at Jaymee, and it was all she could do not to smirk at the schoolboy expression on his face. “Sorry, boss.”
Jaymee shook her head. “Go down and get some cement. We’ll have to patch it up.” She turned to the inspector and said, “He’s rather new at this, but he’s quite good for a beginner.”
“Uh-huh,” muttered John, wiping sweat off his flushed face.
“As you know, it’s all cemented down at the valley,” explained Jaymee, “so it’ll take a little longer to peel it back.”
“Never mind,” the inspector said. “If it’s cemented, that’s all I need to know. Just patch that up and let’s go on to the next roof.”
“Oh, sure. Nick, where are you?” Jaymee yelled, standing at the edge of the roof.
“I’m looking for the cement,” he called back.
Jaymee rolled her eyes. “It’s the blue can in the back of the truck!”
“Oh!”
“He’s a little slow,” she sweetly told John. “Gosh, it’s hot today, isn’t it? Must be a hundred degrees up here.”
By the third roof, the inspector’s crisp, white shirt was plastered against his skinny frame. The pants lost the starched-up look. The man was sweating so profusely, Jaymee gave him a towel to wipe off.
“We should take a break, John,” she told him. “Let’s do that, and then continue with the other houses. How many more did you want to see? We’d better get on them before the noon sun bakes them up.”
John shuddered as if he couldn’t bear the thought of staying out in the heat all day. “This is it,” he firmly declared, marking down on his clipboard. “Everything looks fine to me, Miss Barrows. The complainant was obviously wrong.”
She pulled off her tee-shirt and wiped the perspiration from her body with it. She gave the inspector a brilliant smile and tilted her head back. “Can I get a copy of your inspections? If any other contractors have doubts, I can just show them your forms. That’d really help me out, John.” She walked to the flushed-face man and handed him her water bottle from the cooler. “Something to help cool you off.”
A few minutes later, she waved jauntily at the departing inspector, then turned to find Nick leaning with folded arms against the tailgate of her truck, his head cocked to one side.
“What?” she asked.
“Come here,” he ordered, softly. The schoolboy look was gone. Jaymee slowly approached him, wondering what had brought out that glint in those blue-gray eyes. When she stood in front of him, a long finger slid under her chin to tilt her face up. She stared, squinting against the bright sunlight. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Tease a man like that. The poor son of a bitch almost had a heat stroke when you took off that tee-shirt.”
A slow, sultry smile spread on her face, making Nick catch his breath. Without her usual guarded expression, she was like sunshine, her face warm and inviting.
“Serves him right,” Jaymee said. “I wasn’t teasing him, anyhow. I was hot, too, what with your great acting talent in making us suffer through all your mistakes.”
They both started chuckling, and the humor grew into full-scale laughter as they remembered the poor inspector toasting in the heat when Nick dropped the hammer off house number one, forgot the inspector’s nail-puller on house number two (that had caused them to drive back to retrieve it), and lastly, disappeared for almost fifteen minutes to look for a portable bathroom. All minor, but added to the minutes on each baking roof.
Jaymee found herself in his arms, still laughing helplessly. It felt good to be hugged by a man again
, to share funny moments like this. His hands traveled up and down her back, and she laid her cheek on his chest, inhaling the scent of sweat and man.
She was so small, he could drape her over his chest like a pet, Nick observed, as he circled her waist with his hands. So tiny, and yet, so strong. He wanted her so much.
Jaymee could feel him growing hard against her and she rolled her head back. His gaze was hot and untamed, and she could see the tic of his jaw muscle just under his left ear. For the first time in eight years, she didn’t feel the usual fear, the need to back away from such blatant invitation. Her spirit was strangely light, as if some burden had been taken off. Boldly, she placed her small hands on his muscular shoulders and braced her weight on them, then she climbed onto the bumper, planting a leg on each side of the tall, lanky man, trapping him between the vee of her legs. His gaze blazed a few degrees higher.
“Do you know, Nick Langley, you have the longest and sexiest eyelashes on a man I’ve ever seen?”
Her face so close to his he could see the changing green flecks in her eyes. “Is that right?” he drawled, easily balancing her weight against his body. Draped on him like a pet, he repeated silently.
“Mmmhmm. It’s terribly unfair what those eyes do to a woman.” There was a growing excitement inside Jaymee that made her feel sexy, invincible. Tentatively, she licked his crooked smile with a pink tongue, tasting him. “Delicious,” she murmured, and did it again, this time, a lot more boldly. “You’re incredibly edible.”
He was so hard he could feel his pants’ zipper. “I...” He slid his hand behind her neck. “...just found out something that’s been puzzling me.”
“What’s that?” Jaymee nibbled on his lower lip. She felt his thudding heartbeat under her palm.
Nick growled, trying to catch those teasing lips. He applied pressure on her neck. “I couldn’t see how you and Mindy could be such good friends, but now I know why,” he muttered, pressing her closer.
“Oh?” She resisted a little longer.
