by Lee Kilraine
I knew when they’d do it too. When some kid was telling a story about camping with his dad, or a kid was bragging about the latest toy their grandmother bought them, or when half the kids were talking about the sports team they were on. The one you can’t join because you’ve got no one to pick you up from practice. And you’re not even sure if you’ll finish out the year in the same school when you keep getting moved from foster home to foster home.
If a little bragging about knowing Asher the Crasher was going to get the kids at school to look at them differently even for just a few minutes—that was more than fine in my book.
Gray hooked his arm along the seat in front of me, turning my way. “You know what funny thing I remember about Ryker and his candy test?”
“What?”
“He still always ended up picking the exact same candy. Without fail.”
“Those damn orange circus peanuts,” I said with a pained laugh. “God, I hate those things. But I buy them anyway.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Chapter 8
Beckett
“All right. Let’s clear the air and deal with the thing we’re avoiding talking about.” Sam huffed out a breath and lifted her eyes to mine across the large island in Lila’s kitchen for the first time that morning.
The fact that she was the most stubborn woman on the planet? We’d been going back and forth with no forward progress all morning, and it was safe to say the frustration levels were high on both sides. But I’d love to hear her take on how we were going to clear the air. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for her to start. I’d bet money she wanted one of us to compromise and that person’s name started with “B” and ended in “eckett.”
“We had sex. Maybe if we discuss this frankly, we’ll find a way to work together easier,” Sam said, sounding very matter of fact, almost like giving a presentation. “But it was two years ago. Heck, it’s ancient history. I hardly even remember it.”
“Then why are you blushing?” I wasn’t so sure that our hookup two years ago was the problem. I’d chalked the problem up to Sam’s unwillingness to budge even a millimeter on her ideas. Although the sexual tension that still buzzed between us like arcing electricity was distracting. I could do without that.
I could do without her soft honeysuckle scent hijacking my mind from the job at hand. I could do without noticing her lips, pink and soft. Or noticing her curves, generous in all the right places. It helped to diminish the distraction by focusing on the way she looked at me when we knocked heads like I was some lamp in the corner of her design space. One that she wanted to hide in the closet.
“Blushing? No. If I’m flushed, it’s not on account of you. You’ve noticed this heat wave, right?” Sam shrugged with stiff shoulders. Hmmm. There sure was a dollop of defensiveness to that denial. “All I’m saying is the little blip in our personal lives is in the past, and I’m ready to move forward with a clean slate.”
“So a totally clean slate and we’re forgetting the past?” I didn’t want any confusion here and end up having to work with an angry, resentful woman.
“Absolutely. Just two professionals doing a job.”
“Just the job. Got it.” Not saying it would be easy, but I could focus on the job.
“Look, I don’t know about Six Brothers Construction, but this is the most important job Devine Designs has ever contracted. I need us to rock it.” She sighed loud enough for me to hear her.
“Believe me, I get it.” I was right there with her. SBC needed me to deliver my best work.
“What if we change up how we’re thinking about it?” She tapped one finger against her chin as she thought it through. “How would we treat each other if we worked for the same company? Even if we had differences, we’d have to figure out how to get along.”
Sam had a point. Now that we were working together, how we got along needed to change. Because the memory of how we’d gotten along two years ago was still floating around in my brain—against the hotel room door, rolling across the king bed, and pressed slick and wet against the tiles of the shower. I needed to separate Sam, the sexy woman in my past, apart from Sam, the business woman in my present. I’d never been in this situation before. I should be able to do this… But could I? Damn.
“I can see you’re doubting me. Let me ask you this… Are you telling me you’ve never once disagreed with one of your brothers on a job?”
“Hell no. We disagree every day.” Okay. I saw where she was going with this.
“So from here on out, consider me one of your brothers.”
Not where I thought she was going. “You want me to pretend you’re my brother?”
“If that’s what it will take for us to start finding some middle ground.” She arched an eyebrow at me like she wasn’t crazy. As if she’d just offered up a common sense plan.
“Pretend you’re one of my brothers. Right. I’ll get right on that.” We needed to find middle ground based in reality. Not some convoluted, twisty pretend-I’m-your-brother territory.
“We can do this, Beck.”
“Sure we can.” If she could, I sure as hell could. We’d be spending a lot of time together, and clearing the sexual tension off the table was the right way to go. Lock it down and focus. From here on out I’d only think about fully-clothed professional Sam.
“Okay, good.” She gave me an approving nod. “Obviously we’re in a time crunch, so I propose we sit down and bring our best ideas to the table and lay them out for each other.”
“Fine. I’ll make us an excel spreadsheet with Lila’s list of must-haves and the list of feng shui considerations we’ve got to manage.”
“Great idea. That way we can go through those lists and figure out which room will best accommodate those items or changes. See? We can do this. We can work together just fine.” She sighed as if she’d been holding her breath, unsure herself how this would go down. “Speaking of Lila’s must-haves, any idea on where we’re putting number four?”
“Fuck no. Are you sure she isn’t pulling our leg with that one? Testing us? Because…”
Sam frowned across at me. “I think she’s totally serious. But I vote we set that off to the side and let our subconscious minds deal with it while we move on.”
“Okay, moving on…”
Two reasonable, creative people working toward one goal. Our jobs were all about working with people and finding ways to compromise to get the best results for the clients. This would work.
* * * *
“This isn’t going to work,” I grumbled, tossing my pencil onto the table and running my hands over my head. “Sam, you’ve got to give an inch here. I get that your designs are art, but no more than mine.”
She sat next to me on the couch at Lila’s house with her lips pressed into a straight line, her head tilted back, and her eyes seemingly beseeching someone up high for help. Puffing out a breath, she finally turned to me.
“I agree, but you can’t just move walls and change the space I’m working with and think that’s okay, Beck.”
I could tell she was ticked at me because her green eyes had gone bright and her cheeks pink, and she’d donned an in-your-face attitude that I would have admired if it hadn’t been aimed at me.
“Why not let me make the changes on the computer? Then we’ll both look at it and decide what does or doesn’t work.”
She started to shake her head before I’d even finished my sentence. “Because I can already tell you what won’t work, Beck. It doesn’t work to take a foot from the dining room to gain space for the study.”
“But you aren’t even considering it.”
“You’re right; I’m not. It’s off the table, or I won’t fit in the perfect dining set I’ve already found for that room. I knew it the first time I walked through the house. The dining room came to me like a vision.”
“Y
ou sound like Lila.”
“Well, that probably means she’d agree with me. So it’s settled then.”
Not even close, lady.
“Were you a difficult child, Beck? Stubborn? Did you have trouble sharing with others? I’m sensing you’re having trouble letting go of some of the control here.”
“Not a difficult child, no. Got straight ‘A’s when it came to sharing too. Stubborn? I wasn’t born stubborn. I grew into it.” I had to learn to be real adaptable growing up the way I did. She nailed it on the control though. I maneuvered around that one. “Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. Why don’t we divide up the rooms? You design half of them and I’ll do the others.”
Again with the head shake before I’d finished the suggestion, like she was a dang mind reader. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I feel like that’s going against what Lila asked us to do. Besides, we haven’t even been at this very long. Isn’t it too early to be giving up?”
“I don’t see it as giving up. I see it like we’d be moving forward instead of stuck spinning our wheels.”
“I’m too stubborn to give up. What if we’re not spinning our wheels here? What if this is all part of the process of getting to know each other? Getting a feel for how each of us works. Getting a sense of who the other person is so that our creative spirits can find a place to meet.”
“Creative spirits?” No wonder we weren’t connecting if she believed all that same woo-woo stuff Lila did.
“Stand up. I have an idea,” she said, standing up from the couch herself.
I stood, crossing my arms over my chest to wait. Yes, I was that frustrated over knocking heads with Samantha for the last few hours that I’d—
“Trust fall!”
Oh, shit! Sam fell straight forward in front of me, and I jerked my arms out with barely enough time to keep her face from smacking the tile floor. I lifted her, plopping her none too gently back on her feet.
“What the fuck was that? Do you know how close you were to face planting?” My heart felt like it had been shot out of a high-powered rifle.
“It’s one of those team building exercises. You know, to build trust.”
Well no wonder it didn’t work. My circle of trust was small. Pretty much my brothers. And with some things even that was hard.
“You know what else is great for team building?”
“If you say agreeing with you, I’ll throw something. Probably at your thick skull.” She threw her hands on her hips with a huff. “Why should I be the one to give in? I don’t see you moving from your stuck-in-cement ways.”
“I was going to say not giving me a heart attack. But now I’m thinking one hour in the batting cage. Hitting something hard always relieves stress and helps me think. Let’s go.”
She looked unconvinced. “I don’t see how hitting a baseball is going to help.”
“It can’t hurt. Think about it. We’ve spent more time together naked and in bed than we have talking with our clothes on. Maybe we just need to develop an easy camaraderie to get a flow going between us. Help open up communication and get a spirit of cooperation.” I had no idea what I was saying, but after clashing with Sam for this long, hell yes I had the urge to hit something.
Chapter 9
Samantha
“You like my truck.” Beck threw me a cocky grin from the driver’s seat.
“Pfft. No. Why would I like your gas-guzzling, road-hogging, too-big truck?” I really liked his truck. It was silly because trucks in the south weren’t like some rare thing, especially in construction, but his big, black truck seriously had my pulse flying. Something about sitting on the bench seat, just one butt slide away from being pressed up against him had my mind going places it shouldn’t.
It wasn’t a new model by any means, but it looked well maintained, which was a thing with me. No idea why. I guess something about a guy who had enough care and attention to detail with his truck might take the same care with a woman.
His truck was also clean. I mean, no trash thrown in the back extended cab seat. No papers, no fast food wrappers, or loose mail sliding around with every turn. There wasn’t even dirt on the floor mats. It was a thing of beauty. That clean factor had my mind imagining having hot wild sex across his front bench seat, or me straddling his lap with my back pressed up against the steering wheel. If that was too tight of a fit, the bed of his truck was pristine too. No left over bags of cement or tools rolling around. Not even a mess of pine needles to make me itchy if we stretched out under the stars back there.
“Some women have a thing for pick-ups.” He turned his truck off the road, pulling behind the Six Brothers Construction office and into an extra lot with a freestanding garage. “And you were sort of caressing the leather on my bench seat.”
“Not this woman, so check that ego. It’s barely fitting in this humongous truck of yours.” That was not a lie. I didn’t have a thing for pick-ups. Just his for some reason. You can believe I jumped out of the truck as soon as Beck set the parking brake. The truck was a bad influence on my ovaries. I met him by the front bumper. “I thought we were heading to a batting cage.”
Beck motioned with his hand over off to the far side of the garage.
“You’ve got a batting cage at your office?”
“Yep. Had it installed when we moved into this space.” Beck ducked into the building, returning with a canvas bag of balls in one hand and two bats in his other.
“I know your brother, Asher, plays hockey. Does one of your brothers play baseball?” It wasn’t everyday a company had a batting cage on the premises. The long tunnel of thick nylon sat in the shade of the garage-turned-workshop and ran the length of the building and then some.
“No. We just need to hit stuff on a regular basis.”
“Anger issues?”
“Not anymore. Turns out smacking the leather off a ball is very therapeutic.” After entering the cage, Beck dumped the bag of balls into the pitching machine before offering me a bat. “Ladies first.”
“Thanks, but go ahead. You’re the one who said he had to hit something.” To the left of the cage, in the shade of the building, sat a bench. But they also had a small section of spit rail fence, and I chose to stand and lean my forearms on it to see the pitches better. It was purely accidental that it also gave me a better view of Beck’s ass.
I wasn’t unfamiliar with batting. The thing was, when a girl tried like all get-out to be the son her dad always wanted—that meant she had to play sports. Which I did. Swim team in the summer. Softball in the spring. Cross-country in the fall. Not that my father made it to any of my games or meets. But I sure tried to make him proud.
Beck took his stance in the batter’s box, clicked the remote to start it, and waited for the machine to fire the ball at him. I watched his body tense. He loaded his hands and took his stride. His bat and hip exploded forward, and he threw his hands at the ball, making contact with a sharp pop. The ball sailed forward, over the pitching machine, and smacked against the netting at the back of the cage.
Beck was resettling his stance for the next pitch when I felt someone stand next to me. I spared a glance to see it was his brother, Gray, who’d I’d met at Eddie’s the other day. The dim lighting in the bar had hidden half his gorgeousness. And he’d been a ten in the dim lighting.
“Samantha.” He gave me a nod, but his eyes were on Beck. “Job not going well already?”
“Why would you think that?” We’d only been working together one day. What did they expect? That I’d agree to everything Beck and his brothers suggested? I think not.
“Because Beck’s already in the cage. That doesn’t usually happen until weeks into a project.”
Two more men joined us. One looked enough like Beck and Gray to be a brother. Dark blond hair and blue eyes. Except where Beck’s eyes were a light, luminous blue, and Gray’s were a silvery blue
, this other brother’s eyes were dark cobalt blue. The last man didn’t fit the mold. He stood as tall and big as Asher Thorne who I’d seen on TV, only this guy’s hair was pale blond with a bushy beard to match and light green eyes.
“What’s going on?” The bearded man gave me a stare so penetrating I’d surely want to confess if I had something I was hiding.
I jerked my gaze from his beard, to Beck, and back to the beard again. “Um…batting practice…I think.”
The Beard arched a blond eyebrow at me. “Beck’s never brought a woman to the cage before.”
Beck smacked another ball, this one a line drive that thwacked against the side netting.
“Samantha,” Gray said, jerking his head to the other men standing in line with me. “Wyatt and Eli, the youngest of us Thornes. Beck! You’re pulling your elbow too low.”
“No. He’s sinking back on his right hip,” Eli said. “Swing like you mean it!”
“He’s taking his eyes off the ball too soon,” Wyatt said with such matter-of-fact sureness that I was ready to believe it. “Swing, batter!”
His brothers heckled and needled him with good humor. The banter going back and forth during the next few hits had me laughing at their antics. They seemed to truly like each other. I’d been around friends’ families where siblings got along, but Beck and his brothers seemed bonded even tighter than that. It was so far outside my own experience, and I loved every second of their interaction.
“Keep swinging, Beck! I like the cool breeze!”
“Oklahoma, bro! You need to hit sooner!”
Throwing a glance at all his brothers, Beck only shook his head and flashed a quick grin before readying for the next pitch. His next swing sent the ball into the netting overhead.
