by Maisey Yates
She let out a long, slow breath as she rounded the final curve on the mountain driveway, the vacant lot coming into view. But it wasn’t the lot, or the scenery surrounding it, that stood out in her vision first and foremost. No, it was the man standing there, his hands shoved into the pockets of his battered jeans, worn cowboy boots on his feet. He had on a black T-shirt, in spite of the morning chill, and a black cowboy hat was pressed firmly onto his head.
Both of his arms were completely filled with ink, the dark lines of the tattoos painting pictures on his skin she couldn’t quite see from where she was.
But in a strange way, they reminded her of architecture. The tattoos seemed to enhance the muscle there, to draw focus to the skin beneath the lines, even while they covered it.
She parked the car and sat for a moment, completely struck dumb by the sight of him.
She had researched him, obviously. She knew what he looked like, but she supposed she hadn’t had a sense of...the scale of him.
Strange, because she was usually pretty good at picking up on those kinds of things in photographs. She had a mathematical eye, one that blended with her artistic sensibility in a way that felt natural to her.
And yet, she had not been able to accurately form a picture of the man in her mind. And when she got out of the car, she was struck by the way he seemed to fill this vast empty space.
That also didn’t make any sense.
He was big. Over six feet and with broad shoulders, but he didn’t fill this space. Not literally.
But she could feel his presence like a touch as soon as the cold air wrapped itself around her body upon exiting the car.
And when his ice-blue eyes connected with hers, she drew in a breath. She was certain he filled her lungs, too.
Because that air no longer felt cold. It felt hot. Impossibly so.
Because those blue eyes burned with something.
Rage. Anger.
Not at her—in fact, his expression seemed almost friendly.
But there was something simmering beneath the surface, and it had touched her already.
Wouldn’t let go of her.
“Ms. Grayson,” he said, his voice rolling over her with that same kind of heat. “Good to meet you.”
He stuck out his hand and she hurriedly closed the distance between them, flinching before their skin touched, because she knew it was going to burn.
It did.
“Mr. Tucker,” she responded, careful to keep her voice neutral, careful when she released her hold on him, not to flex her fingers or wipe her palm against the side of her skirt like she wanted to.
“This is the site,” he said. “I hope you think it’s workable.”
“I do,” she said, blinking. She needed to look around them. At the view. At the way the house would be situated. This lot was more than usable. It was inspirational. “What do you have in mind? I find it best to begin with customer expectations,” she said, quick to turn the topic where it needed to go. Because what she didn’t want to do was ponder the man any longer.
The man didn’t matter.
The house mattered.
“I want it to be everything prison isn’t,” he said, his tone hard and decisive.
She couldn’t imagine this man, as vast and wild as the deep green trees and ridged blue mountains around them, contained in a cell. Isolated. Cut off.
In darkness.
And suddenly she felt compelled to be the answer to that darkness. To make sure that the walls she built for him didn’t feel like walls at all.
“Windows,” she said. That was the easiest and most obvious thing. A sense of openness and freedom. She began to plot the ways in which she could construct a house so that it didn’t have doors. So that things were concealed by angles and curves. “No doors?”
“I live alone,” he said simply. “There’s no reason for doors.”
“And you don’t plan on living with someone anytime soon?”
“Never,” he responded. “It may surprise you to learn that I have cooled on the idea of marriage.”
“Windows. Lighting.” She turned to the east. “The sun should be up here early, and we can try to capture the light there in the morning when you wake up, and then...” She turned the opposite way. “Make sure that we’re set up for you to see the light as it goes down here. Kitchen. Living room. Office?”
Her fingers twitched and she pulled her sketch pad out of her large leather bag, jotting notes and rough lines as quickly as possible. She felt the skin prickle on her face and she paused, looking up.
He was watching her.
She cleared her throat. “Can I ask you...what was it that inspired you to get in touch with me? Which building of mine?”
“All of them,” he said. “I had nothing but time while I was in jail, and while I did what I could to manage some of my assets from behind bars, there was a lot of time to read. An article about your achievements came to my attention and I was fascinated by your work. I won’t lie to you—even more than that, I am looking forward to owning a piece of you.”
Something about those words hit her square in the solar plexus and radiated outward. She was sweating now. She was not wearing her coat. She should not be sweating.
“Of me?”
“Your brand,” he said. “Having a place designed by you is an exceedingly coveted prize, I believe.”
She felt her cheeks warm, and she couldn’t quite figure out why. She didn’t suffer from false modesty. The last few years of her life had been nothing short of extraordinary. She embraced her success and she didn’t apologize for it. Didn’t duck her head, like she was doing now, or tuck her hair behind her ear and look up bashfully. Which she had just done.
“I suppose so.”
“You know it’s true,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, clearing her throat and rallying. “I do.”
“Whatever the media might say, whatever law enforcement believes now, my wife tried to destroy my life. And I will not allow her to claim that victory. I’m not a phoenix rising from the ashes. I’m just a very angry man ready to set some shit on fire, and stand there watching it burn. I’m going to show her, and the world, that I can’t be destroyed. I’m not slinking into the shadows. I’m going to rebuild it all. Until everything that I have done matters more than what she did to me. I will not allow her name, what she did, to be the thing I am remembered for. I’m sure you can understand that.”
She could. Oddly, she really could.
She wasn’t angry at anyone, nor did she have any right to be, but she knew what it was like to want to break out and have your own achievements. Wasn’t that what she had just been thinking of while coming here?
Of course, he already had so many achievements. She imagined having all her work blotted out the way that he had. It was unacceptable.
“Look,” she said, stashing her notebook, “I meant what I said, about my brothers being unhappy with me for taking this job.”
“What do your brothers have to do with you taking a job?”
“If you read anything about me then you know that I work with them. You know that we’ve merged with the construction company that handles a great deal of our building.”
“Yes, I know. Though, doesn’t the construction arm mostly produce reproductions of your designs, rather than handling your custom projects?”
“It depends,” she responded. “I just mean... My brothers run a significant portion of our business.”
“But you could go off and run it without them. They can’t run it without you.”
He had said the words she had thought more than once while listening to Joshua and Isaiah make proclamations about various things. Joshua was charming, and often managed to make his proclamations seem not quite so prescriptive. Isaiah never bothered. About the only person he was soft with at al
l was his wife, Poppy, who owned his heart—a heart that a great many of them had doubted he had.
“Well, I just meant... We need to keep this project a secret. Until we’re at least most of the way through. Jonathan Bear will be the one to handle the building. He’s the best. And since you’re right here in Copper Ridge, it would make sense to have him do it.”
“I know Jonathan Bear,” Levi said.
That surprised her. “Do you?”
“I’m a couple years older than him, but we both grew up on the same side of the tracks here in town. You know, the wrong side.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t realize.”
Dimly, she had been aware, on some level, that Levi was from here, but he had left so long ago, and he was so far outside of her own peer group that she would never have known him.
If he was older than Jonathan Bear, then he was possibly a good thirteen years her senior.
That made her feel small and silly for that instant response she’d had to him earlier.
She was basically a child to him.
But then, she was basically a child to most of the men in her life, so why should this be any different?
And she didn’t even know why it was bothering her.
She often designed buildings for old men. And in the beginning, it had been difficult getting them to take her seriously, but the more pieces that had been written about her, the more those men had marveled at the talent she had for her age, and the more she was able to walk into a room with all of those accolades clearly visible behind her as she went.
She was still a little bit bothered that her age was such a big deal, but if it helped...then she would take it. Because she couldn’t do anything about the fact that she looked like she might still be in college.
She tried—tried—to affect a sophisticated appearance, but half the time she felt like she was playing dress-up in a much fancier woman’s clothes.
“Clandestine architecture project?” he asked, the corner of his lips working up into a smile. And until that moment, she realized she had not been fully convinced his mouth could do that.
“Something like that.”
“Let me ask you this,” he said. “Why do you want to take the job?”
“Well, it’s like you said. I—I feel like I’m an important piece of the business. And believe me, I wouldn’t be where I am without Isaiah and Joshua. They’re brilliant. But I want to be able to make my own choices. Maybe I want to take on this project. Especially now that you’ve said...everything about needing it to be the opposite of a prison cell. I’m inspired to do it. I love this location. I want to build this house without Isaiah hovering over me.”
Levi chuckled, low and gravelly. “So he wouldn’t approve of me?”
“Not at all.”
“I am innocent,” he said. His mouth worked upward again. “Or I should say, I’m not guilty. Whether or not I’m an entirely innocent person is another story. But I didn’t do anything to my wife.”
“Your ex-wife?”
“Nearly. Everything should be finalized in the next couple of days. She’s not contesting anything. Mostly because she doesn’t want to end up in prison. I have impressed upon her how unpleasant that experience was. She has no desire to see for herself.”
“Oh, of course you’re still married to her. Because everybody thought—”
“That she was dead. You don’t have to divorce a dead person.”
“Let me ask you something,” she said, doing her best to meet his gaze, ignoring the quivering sensation she felt in her belly. “Do I have reason to be afraid of you?”
The grin that spread over his face was slow, calculated. “Well, I would say that depends.”
Two
He shouldn’t toy with her. It wasn’t nice. But then, he wasn’t nice. He hadn’t been, not even before his stint in prison. But the time there had taken anything soft inside of him and hardened it. Until his insides were a minefield of sharpened obsidian. Black, stone-cold, honed into a razor.
The man he’d been before might not have done anything to provoke the pretty little woman in front of him. But he could barely remember that man. That man had been an idiot. That man had married Alicia, had convinced himself he could have a happy life, when he had never seen any kind of happiness come from marriage, not all through his childhood. So why had he thought he could have more? Could have something else?
“Depends on what?” she asked, looking up at him, those wide brown eyes striking him square in the chest...and lower, when they made contact with his.
She was so very pretty.
So very young, too.
Her pale, heart-shaped face, those soft-looking pink lips and her riot of brown curls—it all appealed to him in an instant, visceral way.
No real mystery, he supposed. He hadn’t touched a woman in more than five years.
This one was contraband. She had a use, but it wouldn’t be that one.
Hell, no.
He was a hard bastard, no mistake. But he wasn’t a criminal.
He didn’t belong with the rapists and murderers he’d been locked away with for all those years, and sometimes the only thing that had kept him going in those subhuman conditions—where he’d been called every name in the book, subjected to threats that would make most men weep with fear in their beds—was the knowledge that he didn’t belong there.
That he wasn’t one of them.
Hell, that was about the only thing that had kept him from hunting down Alicia when he’d been released.
He wasn’t a murderer. He wasn’t a monster.
He wouldn’t let Alicia make him one.
“Depends on what scares you,” he said.
She firmed those full lips into a thin, ungenerous line, and perhaps that reaction should have turned his thoughts in a different direction.
Instead he thought about what it might take to coax those lips back to softness. To fullness. And just how much riper they might become if he was to kiss them. To take the lower one between his teeth and bite.
He really wasn’t fit for company. At least not delicate, female company.
Sadly, it was delicate female company that seemed appealing.
He needed to go to a bar and find a woman more like him. Harder. Closer to his age.
Someone who could stand five years of pent-up sexual energy pounded into her body.
The sweet little architect he had hired was not that woman.
If her brothers had any idea she was meeting with him they would get out their pitchforks. If they had any idea what he was thinking now, they would get out their shotguns.
And he couldn’t blame them.
“Spiders. Do you have spiders up your sleeves?”
“No spiders,” he said.
“The dark?”
“Well, honey, I can tell you for a fact that I have a little bit of that I carry around with me.”
“I guess as long as we stay in the light it should be okay.”
He was tempted to toy with her. He didn’t know if she was being intentionally flirtatious. But there was something so open, so innocent, about her expression that he doubted it.
“I’m going to go sketch,” she said. “Now that I’ve seen the place, and you’ve sent over all the meaningful information, I should be able to come up with an initial draft. And then I can send it over to you.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “Then what?”
“Then we’ll arrange another meeting.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said, extending his hand.
He shouldn’t touch her again. When her soft fingers had closed around his he had felt that around his cock.
But he wanted to touch her again.
Pink colored her cheeks. A blush.
Dammit all, the woman had blushed.
That he had a sense of that at all was a reminder. A reminder that he wasn’t an animal. Wasn’t a monster.
Or at least that he still had enough man in him to control himself.
“I’ll see you then.”
Three
Faith was not hugely conversant in the whole girls’-night-out thing. Mia, her best friend from school, was not big on going out, and never had been, and usually, that had suited Faith just fine.
Faith had been a scholarship student at a boarding school that would have been entirely out of her family’s reach if the school hadn’t been interested in her artistic talents. And she’d been so invested in making the most of those talents, and then making the most of her scholarships in college, that she’d never really made time to go out.
And Mia had always been much the same, so there had been no one to encourage the other one to go out.
After school it had been work. Work and more work, and riding the massive wave Faith had somehow managed to catch that had buoyed her career to nearly absurd levels as soon as she’d graduated.
But since coming to Copper Ridge, things had somehow managed to pick up and slow down at the same time. There was something about living in a small town, with its slower pace, clean streets and wide-open spaces all around, that seemed to create more time.
Not having to commute through Seattle traffic helped, and it might actually be the sum total of where she had found all that extra time, if she was honest.
She had also begun to make friends with Hayley Bear, formerly Thompson, now wife of Jonathan. When Faith and her brothers had moved their headquarters to Copper Ridge, closer to their parents, Joshua had decided it would be a good idea to find a local builder to partner with, and that was how they’d met Jonathan and merged their businesses.
And tonight, Faith and Hayley were out for drinks.
Of course, Hayley didn’t really drink, and Faith was a lightweight at best, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have fun.
