by Emily Bishop
“It is. For example, that adhesive you just chose won’t be effective in the long run.”
Something flashed in his eyes. “I have used this glue for a long time, and all my boats are still perfectly fine. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”
I shrugged, not appreciating his dismissive comment. “If you say so. But can you tell me with absolute certainty that none of them are leaking like sieves when you get them wet?”
“Trust me, sweetheart. I know what I’m doing when it comes to getting them wet.”
I bristled at his words, partly from his dismissive tone and partly because of the dizzying wave of arousal they sent through me. I knew what I was talking about when it came to every piece of equipment that the store stocked, and I had grown up building boats with my dad at the marina.
Who the hell did he think he was, strolling into my store and telling me that I was wrong? And then trying to flirt with me as he did it?
Condescending much? Lucky for me, my father hadn’t raised a girl who would let any man talk down to her.
“See, I don’t think that you know what you’re doing,” I said. “That glue will dissolve in the elements in less than five years, which means that when your hull hits the water any time after that, it’ll leak like a rusty screen door.”
I abandoned the subtext and insinuations that had colored our conversation. I knew boats and I knew equipment, and I wasn’t going to let him brush that knowledge aside because he thought a girl couldn’t know that kind of stuff better than he did.
And he called me sweetheart. The nerve! I was nobody’s sweetheart.
Whoever he was, he had the good sense to look taken aback for a moment. He clenched his jaw and turned to face me directly. “No rusty screen doors to be found at any of my places, I assure you.”
Any of his places? So, he wasn’t from Mystic. I was right. People from my hometown were generally more laid back. This guy was polished and on edge. Even in his jeans and his Henley, he moved with the precision and lethal grace of a fighter pilot. There was nothing laid back about him.
“When was the last time you tested your hypothesis?” I challenged.
If he had been referring to his having a place in Mystic, it was unlikely that he’d been there for a long time, at least, not since I started working at the hardware store. I would’ve remembered him if he’d been in before.
It occurred to me that there were plenty of people in Mystic that I didn’t know. I also knew that Drew, or even the owner, might have assisted him if he had been in previously. But I wasn’t going to let those technicalities get in my way. The hardware store and everything it stocked was my turf. I was right about the glue, whether he was ready to face that fact or not.
“How long it’s been is irrelevant,” he shot back. “I only build things that last. It would take more than crappy glue to poke holes in anything that I’ve had a hand in.”
Wow. Shots fired. It seemed I’d struck a nerve. His beautiful face turned to stone. His eyes, so playful moments before, were now colder than ice. Like frozen pools reflecting the light of the forest surrounding it.
I shuddered unexpectedly at the change, but I wasn’t about to back down. “The elements don’t poke holes. It’s a subtler process of corrosion.”
“Subtlety isn’t my thing.” He fixed me with his intent gaze, rooting me to the spot once more. His stance was stubborn, legs spread wide and his muscled arms crossed over his chest.
Suddenly, the only two words left in my head were control and dominance. It had the strangest effect on my body. Alarm bells blared in my mind. Danger, Will Robinson. Danger!
“I can see that,” I breathed, forcing aside the images that my mind conjured up of what it would be like to have a man like that in my bed.
Not happening.
Some of the ice in his eyes melted at my words, but the tension and challenge was still there in his stance. In the set of his shoulders. In the square line formed by his jaw.
“Smart girl,” he said more quietly. Almost as if in contemplation.
“I am. Smart enough to ask you to leave. I think it might be best if you picked up your supplies elsewhere.” The store was my home turf. I would protect it, and my knowledge of its stock, with everything that I had.
Or maybe that was just a lame excuse. This man had me reeling. He made no secret that he wanted me. His confident swagger and suggestive comments were beyond inappropriate.
Even then, he wasn’t the first customer who’d ever hit on me. He was just the first one who made me want him back. He awoke a raw, instant desire in me, and it shook me to my core.
We locked eyes as the bell above the door jingled again. Drew came sauntering in, stopping when he noticed us locked in silent battle. The stranger gave a slight shake of his head, nodded once, and left.
“Who was that?” Drew asked, watching the guy’s back as he retreated toward the marina and down the bustling street.
“No idea,” I answered, trying to shake off the lingering feeling of his eyes on mine and his delicious scent hanging in the air.
Drew surveyed me carefully, his head tilted in curiosity. “He from around here?”
“Nope, don’t think so,” I replied softly, staring at the spot on the corner where he was waiting to cross the street.
“Yeah, I don’t think so either. Everything okay? You look kind of flustered.” Drew smirked.
He knew me way too well. I flipped him off and ignored his knowing smirk. We walked back to the paint aisle to finish up. But Drew wasn’t the one distracting me now. My thoughts were consumed by the mystery man.
As infuriating as the guy had been, there was something about him. Something that I couldn’t shake or, try as I might, forget.
The rest of the day passed in a blur. I stocked shelves, rang up customers, and talked with Drew but all of it felt like I was sleepwalking. Dirty thoughts kept flashing through my head every time I thought about the sexy stranger.
The daydream kept replaying in my mind until later on that night when I finally gave into the urge and discovered that the batteries of my vibrator had long since died.
Fuck my life.
Chapter Two
Shane
Despite getting kicked out of Mystic Hardware, I managed to gather up the materials to build my boat at another store. Now, I stood in the backyard of my father’s house, looking down at the unassembled pieces. It felt good to have a project to work on. Something not related to the oil rig accident.
The sun beat down on me, and I stripped my shirt off as I got to work. The breeze coming off the marina ruffled my hair and cooled my skin. The sparkling, endless ocean beckoned to me as it had since I was a child.
Living in Mystic had been a favorite part of my childhood, however brief our stay here had been. I loved the way our house sat right by the water. We had our own dock and boat house. Most of my days had been spent in and around the water to some degree. I think that was why I was so eager to work on this boat. It was a connection to a simpler, more carefree time.
I hadn’t been back to this house since we moved to Houston when I was six, but I’d always meant to. It was a shame it took a tragedy of this magnitude to get me back here. I pushed those grim thoughts away and started assembling the boat.
The parts began coming together. There was something soothing about the process. Bringing order to chaos. Taking something in pieces and making it whole. If only the other problems in my life were so easy to fix.
A few hours into the project, I headed into the house to grab a cold drink. My phone was charging in the kitchen. It vibrated angrily on the hard countertop every couple of seconds, alerting me to mentions of Perkins Enterprises in the news and on social media.
I sighed and clicked the phone on. Twitter was blowing up about the recent tragedy. A few people expressed their sympathies for those affected by the accident but the vast majority of the comments were negative.
The tweets featured sensational
ist labels like #bloodforoil, direct outrage with #FuckPerkins, and my favorite, #ShamePerkins. Hah. “Shame” instead of Shane. Cruel… but admittedly clever.
In addition to all that, the world had noticed the fact that I’d taken a step back from the company while the investigation took place. I opened my email on the phone and saw several messages from my P.R. team.
They’d sent me some links to news stories about my departure. I emailed them back and instructed them to push back harder with the truth of the situation. I was stepping away to allow a full, transparent investigation, and I was conducting an investigation of my own in the meantime. I had taken time off from the day-to-day operations to investigate the supplier, the procurement process involved, and the incident itself.
Of course, there was only so much that I could do. My father had a huge office here in the house. He’d been fond of Mystic, and he spent a lot of time here when he could. He’d only stopped coming out here after he’d retired and married a much younger woman who found the place too “boring” for her tastes.
I knew that he had been paranoid about his record keeping for the last years of his reign of the company, and as such, he had had everything sent to Mystic for safekeeping. To somewhere only he had access to and kept locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Thankfully, I now had a key and access to the security system.
If there was any evidence for me to find, it would be here. But I couldn’t bring myself to go in there just yet. Poking through those old files felt too much like digging up the past.
I wanted to figure out what happened, but I had plenty of time to look through everything. The EPA investigation would take two months, so that was how long I’d be staying in Mystic.
Two fucking months. There was only so much I could do remotely. Two months away from the office was going to feel like forever.
But it had been my plan to begin with, so I couldn’t bitch too much about it. Besides, I could use this time to build my boat, get out on the water, and do some fishing. Maybe being out here would do me some good.
I left my phone in the kitchen and went back outside with a cold beer. My barely-started boat sat on the lawn between me and the glimmering water. With some hard work, she’d be seaworthy and out on the water in no time.
I’d learned to build boats while we’d been living in Mystic, and it was a hobby that had stuck, regardless of how often we had moved.
The fact that some offshore girl thought she knew better than me just because she happened to work in a hardware store was laughable. I knew she had just been trying to be helpful, but boats were my thing. My favorite, and only, pastime.
I watched as a sea gull made a lazy circle overhead and settled on the mast of a sailing boat nearby.
I remembered naming the gulls as a child, remembered strolling around main street with my mother on Saturday mornings just like all the other families. I remembered wishing that we would stay there.
We didn’t, of course. It had been nothing but an idle childhood fantasy.
Perhaps if the girl in the hardware store knew who I was, she would have known better than to question me. Especially when it came to boats but about everything else as well, really. She definitely would have known better than to kick me out of her damn store if she knew that I was once Mystic royalty.
No one, and I mean no one, told me what to do. Or what not to do, for that matter. I couldn’t believe that that little scrap of a girl thought that she could. The cans of paint she’d been hauling around when I’d first arrived in the store looked like they weighed more than her.
I resented the fact that she questioned my judgment and had the nerve to kick me out, but I was also intrigued by her. I could tell she wasn’t used to a man being so direct with her but she hadn’t backed down right away.
Those gorgeous blue eyes watched me with intense interest as I flirted with her. Her full, ripe lips had trembled at some of my more suggestive comments, begging me to still them with a kiss. Just picturing her luscious curves had my pants tightening.
I glanced down at my watch. The cleaning service should almost be done by now. They’d finished up the downstairs a few hours ago, and they were getting everything squared away upstairs now.
Sure enough, one of the cleaning staff called to me from the back door, telling me I was all set. I went back inside and handed each of the workers a hefty tip before they left. They’d earned it. The house looked brand new.
All alone now, I walked past my father’s office but I wasn’t ready to open that can of worms just yet. It didn’t help that I couldn’t get the girl from the hardware store out of my head.
She had bantered with me and argued with me in a way that no woman ever had. She didn’t fall all over herself to fuck me, even if her eyes and body language betrayed the fact that the thought crossed her mind. She’d held her own in her argument. About boats, no less.
I couldn’t deny that the whole exchange had turned me on. All the way on. I’d been thinking about caging her to a shelf with my arms and kissing her until she was breathless, wanting me enough to concede that she was wrong. So much so that she begged me to stay instead of ordering me to leave when that guy had interrupted us.
Fuck. Just like that, I was hard. That’s how much the banter had turned me on. Well, the banter, and the fact that it came from a girl who was sexy as sin.
The apron she’d been wearing did nothing to hide the swell of her gorgeous breasts. Her dark hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, showing off the smooth lines of her neck. I thought about gripping that ponytail in my fist, guiding her head down, and watching her wrap her pink lips around my cock.
That did it.
I needed to get her out of my system, and more than that, I needed a release. The last couple of days had been stressful as all hell, and those bright blue eyes checking me out from her pretty face had ramped up the tension in my body, channeling it all to my throbbing cock.
I thought about surfing the web for porn when I reached my bed, but the heat from her gaze when I’d stepped into the store was front and center in my mind. As was the way that her dark chocolate hair brushed the tips of her breasts in the front and hung all the way to her pert little ass in the back.
I shrugged out of my jeans and laid down on my bed, rubbing my erection that was still covered by my briefs. I felt like teenager, given that I had a raging hard dick and was half naked on my bed before the sun had even completely set. But my body was insistent, and I wasn’t getting anything done because of it anyway.
In my mind’s eye, I went back to the store in the cool early evening. She was there. Alone. She would be surprised to see me there, but her eyes would be burning hot, her nipples peaked under her shirt.
I ran my hand down my abdomen and freed my cock from my briefs, groaning with relief when it was no longer straining against the material. I stroked up and down, slowly at first, imagining how I would walk right up to her and kiss her the way that I had wanted to earlier.
Her body would mold with mine. She would be reluctant, but then she’d open for me, moaning as she rocked her hips against me.
I pumped my fist harder, faster, my free hand wrapping around my balls. My neck arched and the air surrounding me no longer felt cool. I could practically hear the little sounds that she would make when I slid my hand under her skirt and cupped her over her soaked panties.
I groaned, rubbing my thumb over the wet tip of my dick, easily visualizing the slick bead of pre-cum to be from her wetness as I fucked myself.
My hips thrusted to meet the strokes of my hand, my mind running wild. I gripped her ass and lifted her against me, walking her over to the counter. It was just the right height for my throbbing cock to line up perfectly with her slick pussy.
I imagined sinking into her with one hard thrust and her crying out as I hit home. How she would writhe beneath me. I would clutch her hips to keep her in place and fuck her quick and hard. Then long and slow.
Her bright blue eyes, almost the exa
ct color of the ocean, would be dark and heavy-lidded. Her breathing would be as ragged as mine. She would be chasing her release as hard as I was chasing mine.
My dick pulsed. I was so close. I tightened my grip and stroked myself with abandon, needing to come so badly it was almost painful. I moaned loudly. The familiar tingling started in my balls and traveled to the base of my spine, my stomach dipping on a harsh breath. My muscles tensed.
A low groan was ripped from my chest when my orgasm finally hit. Pleasure shot through me as warm, thick cum shot in jets from my tip, covering my stomach and forearms.
By the time I caught my breath, the sun had set and the house was dark. I reached for my bedside lamp and flicked it on, bathing the room in soft light. My heart was still hammering in my chest as I came down from my high.
I was in for a long night, but I didn’t mind one little bit. It had been way too long since I’d paid that kind of attention to myself.
Chapter Three
Fiona
I struggled to haul a box of roofing insulation up on the shelf. The box was just heavy enough and bulky enough to make it a real pain in the ass.
Usually Drew took care of the stock that had to go on the higher shelves, but I had sent him out for ice cream. There were perks to him thinking that I was PMSing, and I figured I deserved to exploit them. But I couldn’t very well leave the boxes lying around on the floor while he was gone.
The box slipped from my hands and tumbled to the floor. I cursed quietly and tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. Wrestling with this one box had already turned me into a mess. My face was red and sweaty, wisps of hair floated around my head where they’d escaped from my ponytail, and the front of me was covered in a grimy layer of dust.
Still, I wasn’t going to let it beat me. I hunkered down in a bow-legged squat to grab the ends of the unwieldy box. I was just glad there was no one else in the store to see my undignified pose.
The bell over the front door rang, and I glanced over my shoulder awkwardly to see who it was. Of course, it was him. The cocky, know-it-all stranger who I’d thrown out of the store a week ago.
