Because I Can (Montgomery Manor)

by Tamara Morgan

  In the end, Georgia had been forced to play Danny an epically long game of Monopoly for the keys. The game lasted two weeks and ended in bloodshed, and she still had the scar along her upper right eyelid to showcase her victory. Those green houses were sharp little suckers.

  “How many times do I have to tell you to knock first, dumbass? This is my apartment. My home. What if I was getting ready to entertain a male caller?”

  Danny didn’t bother to look up from where he dug through her toolbox. “Ha. That’s a good one.”

  “I’m serious. You have to stop coming in whenever you feel like it.”

  “Then lock your door for a change.” He pulled a wrench out with a flourish. “Here it is! And clean up your tools, for chrissakes. How you can find anything in this pit is beyond me.”

  “I have a system. It’s not my fault your pea-brain can’t comprehend it.”

  Danny finally looked up and saw her standing there in her ratty robe, his expression moving from triumph to suspicion in less time than it took her to blink. He had the same mop of curly brown hair the entire Lennox clan favored, and his features were similarly arranged—a bit too large, a bit too weathered, a bit too forceful. But while the combination made Georgia feel as if she needed four-and-twenty blackbirds to come peck off the most prominent parts, he looked comfortably masculine and at home in his skin. All her brothers did.

  The bastards.

  “Hey.” He frowned. “You don’t really have a gentleman caller coming over, do you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” She tossed her head, heedless of the wet whip of her hair as it swung across her back. She needed to get a haircut, but she was trying to grow it out enough to donate to one of those wig-making charities. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I do sometimes like to live beyond the scope of cleaning out gutters and playing Halo with you in Mom’s basement.”

  “Who is he?” The sharp note in Danny’s voice was impossible to ignore.

  “None of your business.”

  “Is it that dickhead Carl again? Because we told him that if he ever tries to come near you again...”

  “Oh, don’t worry. You guys did a good job putting the fear of Lennox in him. He wouldn’t want me back even if I plated my vagina in solid gold.”

  “Ew, Georgia. Don’t say vagina.”

  “You’re the one with no boundaries. Carl wasn’t that bad.”

  She’d actually liked Carl. The softball coach for a rival league team, he’d been impressed by her pitching drive-through, and said as much after a tournament a few months ago. That kind of compliment was exactly what a lady liked to hear during the wooing stages, and she hadn’t been immune to his prematurely balding charm.

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t returned the compliment—and all of his admiration for her pitching disappeared when her brothers descended on him during their second date.

  Never mind, he’d said after spending five minutes in the company of the Testosterone Trio. He hadn’t even offered to pay for his own beer before he got up and stalked away. You’re not worth this kind of hassle.

  Okay. Maybe Carl had been kind of a dickhead.

  “Don’t worry so much,” she said. Monty wasn’t like Carl. There was no pretense of dating or attraction or even much in the way of small talk. This was the simple tale of a peasant girl and her quest for an orgasm with a peer of the realm. “It’s no one important.”

  “If he’s not important, then why did you shave your legs?”

  Georgia tucked one of her legs behind the other, as if that might erase her obvious overture at seduction. Of course the brother who lived at home would have to be the one who noticed things like her grooming habits. Adam and Charlie probably didn’t even realize she had legs.

  “Oh, go take my wrench and hit yourself with it,” she said. Then, because repairs at the main house were supposed to be her domain, she asked, “What do you want it for, anyway?”

  “There’s a leak in the laundry room. I can hear it drip-dripping all night long, and it’s driving me crazy. I feel like I’m in an Edgar Allen Poe story.”

  “Is it that pipe leading through the back wall drain?”

  “I think so. I haven’t taken too close a look yet.”

  “This is the wrong-sized wrench.” She sighed when Danny sent her a confused glance. Danny was excellent at unfolding the mysteries of his computer—she was ninety-nine percent sure he was part of that Anonymous vigilante group—but his ability to handle anything in a real world capacity was laughable. “Wrenches come in different sizes, because you can only open the jaw as far as the nut... You know what? Forget it. It’s like trying to explain brain surgery to, well, you. I’ll do it myself.”

  “I could probably handle brain surgery.”

  “Only if the goal is death.” She shoved her feet into the pair of bright orange knee-high rain boots she kept by the door and cinched her robe tighter. “This was your plan all along, wasn’t it, to force me into helping with your ineptitude?”

  “I can do it,” he grumbled, but not very convincingly. Danny wasn’t a subtle creature. None of the Lennoxes were. They sort of barreled in and did their thing, consequences be damned. Sometimes their actions were met with approval. As was more often the case, they scared people away and made enemies of perfectly respectable human beings.

  “Make yourself useful and tidy up the kitchen, won’t you?” she asked. “I’ll be back in five minutes, tops.” Five minutes would leave her plenty of time to get dressed and make herself—if not pretty, then at least slightly closer to it. She could also swipe a box of wine from her mom’s fridge to help ease the awkwardness of the upcoming evening.

  A nice cardboardeaux always did the trick.

  * * *

  As expected, the back door was unlocked at the main house—the open-door policy Georgia favored was a family habit, and probably not a very good one when you thought about it. Fortunately, theirs was a small town, and none of her family members took kindly to intruders. She almost pitied the burglar who might someday wander inside to make off with the paper plates and sports memorabilia. It’d be like falling into a honey badger’s lair.

  The laundry room was set off from the main basement area, so she bypassed the pit where Danny nested to get right to work. It wasn’t that big of a job—a few twists of the wrench and some tightening of the joints—and she was done before too many of the spiders building a web-based colony underneath crawled into her hair.

  As time was running short, she tucked the wrench into her robe’s belt tie and ran up the stairs, calling out as she did, “Mom—I’m stealing your good boxed wine. You just have to stab those to open them, right? You don’t need a corkscrew?”

  “I’m in the living room, honey.”

  Of course she was. Her mom was always in the living room at this time of night. An ER nurse by day, she took her downtime very seriously. She was also highly addicted to television cop dramas—she said she liked the procedural stuff, but it was really the bloodshed that drew her in.

  “I know where you are,” Georgia said. “I was trying to pretend you weren’t home so I wouldn’t have to come talk to you. Oh. Hello.”

  She stopped in the doorway, her hands tangled in her hair as she continued picking the worst of the cobwebs out. For reasons it was difficult to determine at that exact moment, Monty was sitting in the living room next to her mom, perched uncomfortably on the edge of a vintage floral chair in what had to be a thousand-dollar suit.

  Although there were plenty of questions she could have asked in that moment—What are you doing here? Has my mom shown you the naked baby pictures yet? Do you think my fancy orange boots go well with this robe?—the first words to cross her lips weren’t the most ideal ones.

  “That’s what you’re most comfortable in?” From the way he sat on that chair, as
if contact with the ancient upholstery might cause the yellow flowers to transfer to his slacks, comfortable was the last word she’d used to describe him. Gorgeous, yes. Flashy, sure. The embodiment of all her longings in primal male form, obviously. But she couldn’t serve him boxed wine dressed like that. That was a full-cork outfit. Twist-top, at the very least.

  “Georgia!” her mom said, a rebuke in her tone. She hadn’t raised a house full of rambunctious children to semi-successful adulthood without the ability to fell them with a sharp word. “That’s no way to speak to your company.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I hope you’re more respectful than that when you’re at work.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Her mom turned to Monty with a sweet smile. “I’m sorry, John. I don’t know what’s come over her.”

  John? She was calling him John already? In all the years Georgia had been working at the Manor, the only person who’d ever dared invoke Monty’s legal first name was his father. Of course, in terms of scary parental figures, her mom could probably beat Mr. Montgomery with her hands and feet trussed up like a stuck pig, so it kind of made sense. You didn’t mess with that scarily efficient five-foot-two scrap of woman. She made Georgia’s brothers look like bunny rabbits.

  Monty cleared his throat. “It’s fine. She requested casual wear. I guess I didn’t realize how literally she took that phrase.”

  Then, and only then, did Georgia realize what kind of a picture she presented. It wasn’t a pretty one, what with her semi-open robe and clunky boots and hair crawling with spiders, but if she’d learned one thing growing up with three older brothers, it was that showing weakness was the worst possible approach in situations of extreme mortification. If you accidentally overslept one day and your brothers drew penises all over your face in permanent marker, you sat across from them at breakfast and chewed your Cheerios as if you didn’t have a care in the world. If your brothers photobombed your graduation pictures wearing Village People costumes, you blew the picture up to ten times its size and hung it on the living room wall.

  Okay. So she had a wrench tucked into her belt and was wearing no underwear. She could make this work.

  “I do find this outfit comfortable for lounging around the house, thank you,” she said, only a few extra degrees of heat rushing to her cheeks as she spoke. “People think rubber boots make it hard for your feet to breathe, but I find this brand to be exceptionally well-ventilated. There’s virtually no toe sweat.”

  “I’m happy to hear it,” he said, but it wasn’t her feet he was looking at. He’d fixated on the wide open vee of her robe instead. She wanted to add that there was no sweat on the rest of her either, but her mouth was no longer capable of forming coherent sounds. Toe sweat was her limit.

  “I was just telling John you don’t technically live in the house. I was going to walk him over to the apartment, but now that you’re here...” Her mother trailed off, her gaze pointed. Her mom didn’t know everything about Georgia’s little problem downstairs, but she knew enough to make this moment even more uncomfortable than it already was. “I assume you two have some kind of work project to sort through?”

  Not for the first time, Georgia wished she were a more ambitious woman, that her life goals extended beyond finally paying off her work truck and keeping enough volunteers to meet Homeward Bound’s housing goals. Ambitious women went to college and got desk jobs. They moved away from home and escaped the extreme mortification of sharing a driveway with one’s mother.

  “Yes. A project.” Georgia uncleaved her tongue long enough to create an escape plan. “And we both have an early morning, so we should get going.”

  “Didn’t you say something about wine, dear?” Her mother’s voice dripped with false innocence. “Don’t forget to take some glasses with you. I doubt you have any clean ones.”

  “Oh, I don’t drink,” Monty said politely.

  Well, shit. There went that plan. The awkwardness would have nowhere to go but between them, where it could breed with the toe sweat.

  “But please don’t let me stop you from enjoying a glass. I don’t mind when other people drink. Especially since you, ah, look like maybe you’ve had a difficult evening.” Monty got to his feet and plucked a giant spiderweb from her hair. Even though his hand barely brushed the still-damp strands, she felt the intimacy of the gesture reverberate through her. She wanted to do all kinds of indecent things with that hand. To that hand.

  She mumbled something about not being thirsty.

  “Are the spiders and the wrench connected, by any chance?” he asked.

  It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about, since his proximity was constricting her lungs. “Pipes,” she managed. “Water. Arachnids.”

  He nodded as if her string of words made perfect sense. One benefit she hadn’t realized to a man famous for his stiff reserve—she could say pretty much anything and his reaction would always be the same. Shakespeare or inane syllables, all she’d ever get out of him was that disconcerting stare.

  He tilted his head toward the door. “Shall we?”

  Dazed, aroused and aware that her mother was watching, Georgia led the way out. “I should have mentioned it’s an above-garage apartment,” she apologized as they descended the front steps. “Does being twenty-nine and living at home make me a total loser?”

  “I don’t know. I live at home, and I’m thirty-five. Would you consider me a total loser?”

  Something about the night air—darkly enveloping and cold against her exposed legs—added weight to his question, but her opinions of this man’s living arrangements meant nothing. Less than nothing. Nothing times infinity.

  “Of course not,” she said. “It’s not the same situation at all. You’re...” Wealthy? Living in a palatial manor? Exempt from the rules that bound her fellow bottom-feeders?

  He grunted, misconstruing her silence as an assent. “That’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

  * * *

  Monty wasn’t sure what he expected when he walked into Georgia’s apartment, but a young man cursing at an ancient desktop computer hadn’t figured into his imagination.

  Of course, his imagination hadn’t accounted for how profoundly the sight of her bare legs would affect him either. There was no way he could have known that underneath those coveralls, Georgia was hiding what had to be the shapeliest pair of thighs he’d ever seen in his life, strong and firm in ways that defied every law of nature he’d ever encountered. He’d known she was a muscular woman—if the fact that she could hoist and carry logs like they were twigs hadn’t tipped him off, then her general swagger would have eventually done the job—but this was more than protein and tissue. Even though she wasn’t in motion right now, he could see the delineation of her musculature, overlaid with delicately tanned skin that seemed to go on forever.

  She could crush things between those thighs. Basketballs. Hearts. Men.

  “Oh, hell, Danny.” She returned to motion and used one of those legs to kick at the desk chair. “I forgot you were here. Get out, would you?”

  The man didn’t look up from where he was clicking. “Hang on a sec. I’m fixing your computer. You’ve got like three trojans on this thing. Have you been downloading porn again? I told you to double-check your firewall before you visit those sites.”

  Georgia’s eyes widened, and she shot Monty an alarmed look. He wanted to tell her he had no objections to the occasional enjoyment of internet pornography, but gorgeous legs aside, they weren’t close enough to make that a comfortable conversation. He stared at the wall above her head instead.

  “Stop it,” she hissed, and kicked the chair again. “You know I only did that as a joke. You have to leave now. My company’s here.”

  “Oh, really? Do introduce us.” The man turned in the desk chair, steepling his fingers under his chin. Hi
s movements were purposefully slow, as if he were reenacting a cartoon villain moment. “Well, well, well. And so we meet again.”

  “Ignore him. He’s leaving.”

  There was no doubt in Monty’s mind that he was facing a brother of Georgia’s. As Danny rose smoothly to his feet, it was possible to not only see the similarities between the siblings, but feel them. In addition to the same general features, there was a kind of overly aggressive confidence about the whole family that made him feel like a bear being led to the ring, blindfolded and baited. He had no idea what they were talking about half the time, but he was pretty sure he was serving as the butt of a joke only they were in on.

  “You’re awfully overdressed to be one of Georgia’s admirers. Are you sure you’re not an insurance salesman?”

  “I mean it, Danny. I’ll take my wire clippers to your entire cyber complex when you’re sleeping.”

  “Or a mortician. Have you come to sell Georgia a casket? I should probably warn you—she’s already made her own. It’s that bookshelf over there.”

  Although determined not to give any of his sensation of groundlessness away, Monty glanced where Danny pointed. Sure enough, a wooden bookshelf rested against one wall, two side panels holding up a series of shelves, a strangely casket-like shape to it overall. It held, among a multitude of odd items, an impressive array of trophies with baseballs on them.

  “It’s a very nice bookshelf,” he said honestly. Simple and practical, its design fusing function and strength to create its own kind of appeal. It reminded him a lot of Georgia, actually.

  Especially those legs.

  “I told you—it’s not a bookshelf. It’s a casket. It’s attached by notches, so you can take it apart and refit it for burial. Here. I’ll show you.”

  “Oh, my God. You are not showing him my casket shelf. We have things to do.”

  “But it’s cool. You think it’s cool, don’t you? You totally like my sister’s box.”