Colt rolled his eyes. “You’re so expert, how come you nearly fucked it up with Miranda?”
“Because my baby’s complicated,” Dane said proudly. “But Grant here sucks with women.” This time, he ducked when Grant tossed a bottle cap in his direction. “It’s true. You’re rusty and out of practice. You need some advice or she’s going to run over you rough-shod.”
Grant stilled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you let her call the shots, she’s going to call all the shots. You need to take control of the situation.”
“Gee, you mean like letting her drag you to go taste cakes? Or dragging you to pick out wedding colors?” Colt said in a dry voice.
Dane shot him the bird.
Rome smiled into his pizza.
“Fuck you, man,” Dane said, but his grin belied the hard words. “This isn’t about me. I already know she’s got me whipped.”
“True enough.”
“Thing is, Grant here’s a control freak.”
“Hey, now—”
“True enough,” Colt said again, smirking.
“And Brenna’s the same, but she’s just controlling in a different way.”
Now that was an interesting way to look at it. Grant considered Dane. “How so?”
“She’s deliberate in everything she does. Didn’t you notice?” Dane gestured at her desk. “All the crap she has piled on there? It’s other people’s stuff. She borrows and snatches what she can, which makes you think that she’s broke, right? Except she gives away all her own money, too. And her clothes.”
“And her cabin,” Rome murmured. When all three men turned to him, he continued. “When she gave me the tour earlier, she told me I could have her cabin. I thought it was empty. Other than a few pieces of clothing, there were no personal items in there.” He gave them a curious look. “She new here, too?”
“No,” Grant said in a sour voice. What the hell? How did everyone know more about Brenna than he did? Even Rome had been inside her cabin and deduced that Brenna was different. Grant had never been in there. He’d never bothered.
And now it bugged him that he’d never looked beyond Brenna’s flighty surface.
“I’m telling you, man. There’s some sort of freaky-deaky control thing going on in Brenna’s mind. You just gotta figure out what makes her tick, and you’ll understand her.” Beer in hand, Dane extended a finger and pointed at his temple. “It’s about control for her, too. She wants control of the situation with you. You want control of the situation with her. One of you’s going to have to yield.”
“Or compromise,” Colt drawled, his accent thick on the word. “There’s a concept.”
Dane snorted. “You ever tried to compromise with Brenna?”
The man had a point. Grant was thoughtful, pondering Dane’s words as he devoured his slice of pizza. He knew he was a controlling sort. He liked things done his way, and he liked organization and neatness. That was why Brenna usually got under his skin. She was the antithesis of neat and orderly.
But what if that was another kind of control, and Dane had been the only one to see it? Grant vowed that he was going to pay more attention to Brenna from this point forward. Watch what she said, what she did, everything. He needed to find out what made her tick.
Because then he could figure out how to make her want to be with him, instead of pushing him away. On a hunch, he got up and walked over to Brenna’s desk, examining it. He rescued his coffee mug from where it was dangerously close to tipping over the side. He glanced at the stack of folders on her desk—all of them had Dane’s handwriting. He opened a drawer and found two chewed pencils—those were Colt’s, since he tended to chew on both pens and pencils. A pack of Altoids—those were Grant’s, Grant’s business credit card, Grant’s monogrammed letter opener, and his business card wallet. Frowning, he shut the desk.
Taking a swig from his beer, he headed to the back of the main lodge and flipped on the porch light. The spotlight was glaringly bright, and three cabins came into immediate view—Pop’s, Brenna’s old cabin, and his. He headed for Brenna’s and opened the door.
It was empty inside. There was a small coffee table that was so beat up that it had either been picked up at a yard sale or gifted from Miranda’s mother, who ran a junk-slash-antique store in downtown Bluebonnet. There was a narrow twin bed, which was currently stripped of all linens.
And that was it. No television, no phone, no nothing.
Brenna was a hurricane of a mess when it came to the office, but when it came to her own personal space, she lived like a Spartan.
It didn’t make sense.
SEVEN
Inspiration struck at unusual times, but whenever it hit, Brenna always gave in to it.
It had been days since she’d pranked Grant. Absolutely days and days. He probably thought he was in the clear now that they were having sex.
How very wrong he was, she thought with a grin as she headed into the lodge, yawning at the early hour. It was barely six in the morning, and she’d be the first one in. Which was perfect, really. It’d give her enough time for her newest prank, and she couldn’t wait to see Grant’s reaction.
There was nothing better than shocking the hell out of that man. Well, other than having sex with him. Shocking him was a very close second, she amended.
When she went into the lodge kitchen, however, she was surprised to see that Rome was already there, a big bowl of cereal in front of him. He wore a plain black shirt, the collar slightly ragged with wear, the sleeves tight enough to show off his rather impressive tattoos.
He stiffened at the sight of her, the look on his face flashing guilty for a moment, then defensive. “The guys told me I could eat here,” he said. “The food was for the employees.”
“It is,” Brenna said. “Calm down. I’m not here to steal your Cheerios.” She headed past him to the pantry and opened it, searching the shelves. She’d seen that look on Rome’s face one too many times—heck, she’d lived it. It was the look of someone who was scrounging a meal and had been caught. From her drifter days, Brenna knew that when money was lean, you sometimes took food and apologized later. And it told her a lot about Rome.
Mainly, that he was flat-ass broke and desperate.
She found the item she was looking for—a roll of foil—and grabbed it, then headed to the breakfast bar and sat down across from Rome as he ate. As he did, she opened the foil roll and began to tug the long sheet open, studying it.
Rome scarfed another bite of cereal, then asked, “Are you baking?”
“Nope. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m about the opposite of domestic.” She scrutinized the sheet of foil and asked, “Do you think this will cover a telephone?”
Rome stared at her. “A telephone?”
“Yeah, Grant’s phone. I’ve been letting him have it easy for a few days, so it’s time to wake him up again. I figure that a nice, festive desk covered in foil will do the trick, but I’m not sure I have enough.”
“Foil?” The corner of Rome’s hard mouth tugged up in a reluctant smile. “Will you get in trouble?”
“He’ll probably want to kill me for about five minutes,” she told him. “And then he’ll be so turned on that he’ll want to sex me a million times during the day. I figure it’ll even out.”
Rome’s face was carefully neutral and he picked up his cup of coffee. “So, uh. Not sure if there’s a polite way to ask this, but I saw you and Grant kissing the other day. You’re sleeping with your boss?”
“I’m sleeping with our boss,” she corrected.
“That . . . doesn’t make it better.”
“We do things a little differently around here,” Brenna said in a light voice, tearing off the sheet of foil. “Like, for example, we hire the newest instructor and don’t ever bother to check his credentials.”
He froze.
/>
Brenna waved her sheet of foil at him. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell on you. I hired you because you looked like you need the money.”
After a long, long moment of consideration, Rome told her, “I do.”
She nodded. “I thought I recognized it in your face. You have any survival experience at all?”
“I’m a fast learner.”
Yeah, that wasn’t what she asked. But she only said, “I figured. That’s why I hired you. We take care of our people here.”
He said nothing.
Brenna guessed she’d made him uncomfortable. That wasn’t a surprise. He seemed intensely private. Time for a distraction. “I do need to ask you a favor, though.”
His jaw flexed, and his features looked hard and unyielding, his expression guarded. “What’s that?”
“If you’re working with the paintball equipment—which I suspect you will be—I need you to break some of it on a regular basis. For Pop.”
The look on his face told her that hadn’t been what he’d expected her to ask. It also seemed like he thought she was more than slightly crazy. She didn’t care.
“Excuse me?” Rome asked politely, his manners at odds with all those piercings and tats. “I’m not certain I heard you correctly.”
“You did,” Brenna told him. “It just sounds weird. Basically, Pop is Colt’s dad. He needs a job but won’t take charity, so we hired him to be the handyman around here. Except that we’re a small business, so he runs out of stuff to fix pretty fast.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “So I break lots of things around here to keep him busy.”
“I can’t decide if that’s crazy or sweet.”
“Story of my life,” Brenna told him with a grin, sliding off the stool. She tucked the roll of foil under her arm and fluttered the sheet at him. “Now I’m off to go cover a man’s stapler, phone, and desk in foil.”
“Don’t forget his chair,” Rome called back at her.
He was going to fit in just fine, she decided. Brenna set to work and five minutes later returned to the kitchen, shaking the empty roll of aluminum foil at Rome. “I barely covered his phone before I ran out. I need more foil, stat. If I give you the keys, can you run to the grocery store and grab me all the foil they have?”
“You trust me with your car?” He looked surprised.
“Dude, you haven’t seen my car. I’d be shocked if you actually wanted to keep it.” Brenna grinned at him. “But you’re welcome to take the keys any time you need it. I don’t mind.”
He gave her a skeptical look, as if he didn’t quite believe that her motives were pure. “I’ll take my bike to the store. You said you have a corporate card?”
“Did I say that? It’s Grant’s visa. Just wear sunglasses when you use it and no one will suspect anything.”
“You do realize this is a small town and I’m an outsider? That’s a surefire way to get arrested.”
Jeez, it seemed Grant wasn’t the only paranoid one around here. “I have tattoos and no one’s stopped me.”
“Yeah, but you’re a cute girl. I’m a big scary man on a bike.”
“Fine, fine.” Brenna pointed at him. “You drive, I’ll shop. We’ll just consider it team building or something.”
His mouth twitched. “Fine.”
• • •
A half hour later, they returned to the main lodge with twelve rolls of foil. Brenna was pleased to see that no one was up yet, so she bounded to the desk and began to dump her foil out on Grant’s desk. “Thanks for driving me into town.”
“Sure.” Rome sat down across from Grant’s desk and watched her as she began to move stuff off the top of Grant’s desk.
“Your bike’s pretty sweet,” Brenna commented, trying to make him feel at ease. He wasn’t the most chatty sort. “You ever been in a biker gang?”
“Motorcycle club,” he corrected. Then added, “Why would you ask that?”
She shrugged. “You ride a bike.”
“I can’t just own a bike? What kind of car do you drive?”
“A Sunfire.”
“You ever been in a Sunfire club?”
“All right. Good point.” Brenna unrolled a long sheet of foil and began to smooth it over the surface of the desk. “I suppose that was kinda dumb for me to ask, right?”
“Nah.” Rome’s tone was guarded. “I get asked that a lot. And I didn’t say that it wasn’t true, just wanted to know why you’d ask.”
Oh. Okay, now she didn’t know what to think. But clearly Rome was reluctant to talk about it, so she decided to let it die. People were allowed their secrets. She certainly wasn’t going to be the one to press him for details. “So what do you think of our business so far?”
“It’s different.”
That wasn’t a ringing endorsement, and it bothered Brenna. They’d worked hard to make their small niche business a success. Well, more like Grant, Dane, and Colt had worked hard and she’d kept them company. She glanced up at Rome’s face and reached for more foil. “Different like how?”
“Well, far as I can tell, you have an ex-hockey player, an ex-marine, a handyman who you don’t need, and a secretary who’s sleeping with her boss. None of that exactly screams normal.”
“Normal is overrated,” Brenna said between noisy crinkles of foil as she unrolled another sheet.
“It is.” He seemed to relax in his chair a bit. “That’s why I applied here. I figured if anyone around here’d accept me, it’d be you guys.”
She smiled at him. “That’s sweet.”
He rolled his eyes at her.
That was the sort of thing Brenna was used to, though, so she didn’t mind. It was sweet. She went back to covering Grant’s desk with foil.
“So do you harass all the guys with foil?” Rome asked, curious.
“Nope. Just Grant.”
“To show him that you care for him?”
Brenna stopped mid-foil, then frowned in Rome’s direction. “No one said I cared for him. I just said we were sleeping together. We actually really don’t get along all that well.”
“Uh-huh.”
She pulled Grant’s monitor closer and began to cover it. “Now what does that ‘uh-huh’ mean?”
“It means that I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t believe that I don’t get along with Grant?” She snorted. “Did you not see me buy all the foil in Bluebonnet a half hour ago?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think that you’re foiling his desk because you want to annoy him. You say that, but I can’t imagine that you sleep with all the people who bother you.” He leaned back in the chair and went to kick a foot up . . . and then paused, clearly rethinking placing his foot on all that shining foil. “I think you do this stuff because you want his attention.”
She paused again. Looked over at him. Snorted in derision once more. Then she went back to wrapping. Want Grant’s attention? Please. She did this sort of thing because she liked to get under his skin. There was nothing better than seeing that expression on his face go from incredulous to exasperated in the blink of an eye. Then he’d scowl and turn his gaze on her and—
Oh shit. Rome was right. She loved getting Grant’s attention. Well, that was an obnoxious self-discovery, she thought to herself. “Let’s not talk about me anymore. Are you going to sit there and distract me or are you going to help me?”
“I’m not helping,” Rome said. “The last thing I want is to be an accomplice.”
“Chicken,” she told him.
He bent his arms and flapped them like wings.
• • •
By the time Grant arrived into the lodge for the morning, the sun was shining, birds were singing in the crisp morning air, and every inch of Grant’s desk was covered with gleaming silver tinfoil, right down to his stapler and the three pens he kept on his desk
in a Wilderness Survival Expeditions branded coffee cup (also covered).
He stopped as he entered the room and stared at the desk. Really stared at it for a long, long time. It was difficult for Brenna to keep working as if nothing was wrong, knowing that he was standing ten feet away and staring dumbstruck at his desk. But she kept typing. It was quite a work of art, if she admitted it to herself. She’d already taken a few pictures with her phone and posted them to a few social media websites so her friends could appreciate her artistry before Grant woke up and tore it all down.
A moment later, the skin on the back of her neck prickled and she knew he was staring at her. And she couldn’t stop the silly smile that started to curve her mouth, no matter how much she tried to bite it back.
Grant laughed. He laughed hard and loud, and that made Brenna look over in utter fascination.
She’d done prankish things to his stuff before. There was the time she’d put pink glitter all over his keyboard and phone. The time she’d put flour all over his car just before it rained. The time she’d forwarded his calls to an erectile dysfunction support group. There were a half dozen other, smaller pranks she’d played, too. He’d been furious at all of them, no matter how big or how small the annoyance. Completely and utterly furious each and every time, and each prank had ended up with her being yelled at or Grant vowing to get rid of her. Which never happened, of course.
But he’d never laughed before.
And she had to admit, Grant in an open, laughing mood? Was a gorgeous thing to look at. His normally somewhat stern features were drawn into a pleasant, almost rueful grin as he carefully picked up his stapler in one hand and examined it. And the entire time, he kept chuckling to himself, as if the fact that she’d foiled his desk was the cutest thing in the world and it gave him great joy.
When he looked over at her, still laughing as he picked up a foil-wrapped pen, she found herself beaming back at him. Maybe Rome was right and she did do all this crazy stuff just to get his attention. Being the focus of Grant Markham’s full attention? Not the worst place in the world to be, she decided.
The Expert's Guide to Driving a Man Wild (A Bluebonnet Novel) Page 13
