Screw Driver (Blue Collar Alphas Book 2)

by Piper King

  I blink once. “Yes.”

  “That’s complete bullshit, and you know it,” Luke says. “Besides, I wouldn’t do that for anyone. Not on company time or dime. Your time isn’t free, and neither is the wood you used for her new floorboards.”

  “Fine, I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket then,” I say.

  “Just forget it. It’s done now.” Luke grabs his power drill and some wood from the corner. “The only thing I’m going to ask is this. Could you please not fuck the clients from now on? It made an awkward as hell meeting yesterday morning, and I feel like it could have been even worse if it was someone else, someone who doesn’t know us.”

  “It was awkward?” With one eye on Luke, I start sanding the wood before me, getting it nice and smooth for Roman’s handmade wine rack he wants to add to his bar. A part of me doesn’t want to know what Harper said to Luke. Whatever it was will only hurt. But another part of me can’t help myself. I’m dying for some hint, some suggestion that she wasn’t completely livid when she woke up with the scent of me on her skin.

  “Of course it was awkward.” Luke glances up at me with a slight frown. Sometimes when he looks at me this way, I feel as if he’s viewing me through a different lens, one that makes me look like an alien from another planet. Luke and I are nothing alike even though we are completely the same in so many ways. Luke would never have a one-night stand. And he would certainly never run from an uncomfortable confrontation with said one-night stand. He’d meet it all head on.

  But he’s not so different when it comes to the core of us. He closes himself off and refuses to get close to anyone, even me and Jack. He never says more than he needs to, and when he speaks, it’s never about himself. Everything about Luke is inward, though I’ve caught him writing poems in a leather-bound book. It’s the strangest thing, Luke’s penchant for words when he hardly ever speaks more than a few sentences at once.

  Which is to say, he’s just as afraid as getting close and revealing himself to someone as I am. He just hides himself from the world way differently than I do. I turn to booze and games. He turns to books and music.

  “What did she say?” I ask. “Was she mad?”

  “This is all very tiring.” Luke frowns and waves his power drill in the air. “I have work to do, and so do you. Can we put aside the high school gossip and just build some shit?”

  “My brother, the poet,” I say with a slight grin. “Look, this is going to tear me up all day unless you give me something. Just tell me if she was angry. That’s all I want to know. Tell me that, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  Luke meets my eyes and gives me a sad smile. “Sorry, brother. She was fucking furious.”

  17

  Harper

  Twenty-four hours before my grand opening, and I still don’t have electricity. The power company hasn’t been particularly helpful, to say the least. Apparently, there were a lot of outages because of the snowstorm, and they’re swamped in their attempts to get everyone back up and running.

  On the plus side, the attic is fixed, and the roads are clear. All the rooms have been cleaned fifty times, and I’ve straightened the tablecloths in the dining room every time I’ve paced through the front hallway with my eyes peeled for the electrician’s van.

  As long as they can get me up and running today, the bed and breakfast can go forward as planned. No snowstorms, no broken floorboards, no irritatingly hunky men can get in the way of a brand new—and much more successful—chapter of my life.

  Everything is going to be just fine.

  Unfortunately, that thought goes right out the window when the electrician finally does arrive and explain to me what’s happened to my power.

  “Some animals have chewed through your wires,” he says, tipping back his hat and giving me a smile. Why the hell would this make him smile? Is my plight amusing to him?

  I mean, it probably is. If I weren’t me, I’d probably find the situation pretty entertaining. Depending on what kind of animals we’re talking about here.

  “Animals?” I find myself clutching at an invisible set of pearls. Because what else can you do when confronted by animals scurrying through your building and gnawing on your cables? “What kind of animals?”

  He shrugs. “Hard to say unless you’ve seen something run past. Could be rats or mice.”

  “Rats?” I try not to scream the word. “I can’t have rats in a bed and breakfast. People will be sleeping here. They need to get out of here. Now. Can you get rid of them?”

  “I’m an electrician,” the man says. “Not animal control.”

  His words bring back flashes of Noah, and it hurts more than I care to admit. His jokes, his smile, even the way he likes to tease me until I’m on the brink of fury. Because I know now it’s been just teasing all this time, the way a boy pokes a girl on the playground in elementary school because he doesn’t know how else to show his affection.

  I’d give anything for him to tease me now.

  But he’s gone radio silent. It’s like that night together doesn’t exist in this version of reality.

  I’ve thought about calling a few times. But I don’t want to be that girl. The one who doesn’t see what’s right in front of her face. He’s just not that into you. Isn’t that what they say? If a guy is interested, he makes it known. He doesn’t skip off in the middle of the night without a word and then disappear off the face of the planet.

  In high school, I had friends who went through this exact situation. And I always said I’d never let it happen to me. But here I am, pining after some guy who wants nothing to do with me.

  The electrician is droning on about rats, and I force myself to focus on the here and now. Not on Noah’s rippling body as he held it over mine. Not on the heat in his eyes. Not on the way he caressed my cheek, the way he touched me as if I was some sort of prize he couldn’t believe he won.

  He was drunk, I think bitterly. I had been, too, but I meant every moment of that night.

  “So, I can get these wires fixed up, but you’re going to have to get someone in about the rats or else they’ll just do it all over again.”

  Rats. In my bed and breakfast. Maybe I should just give up now and call it quits. Too many things are going sideways.

  “Thanks,” I hear myself say, even if I don’t remember thinking the words. My mind is pulled in too many different directions. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  With a sigh, I leave the electrician in the basement and head back up the stairs. I’m in such a daze that I don’t realize I’ve continued upward and upward until I hit the attic. A scurrying sound catches my ears, and I hold my breath in my throat. On the floorboards—the brand new floorboards Luke and Noah have painstakingly fitted to the current floor—sits a squirrel nibbling on bits of sandwich meat that must be left from the day I lost my sense of gravity.

  Something moves in the corner of my eye, and I whirl to see another squirrel. And another. And another. Heart hammering, I quickly count them. There’s at least half a dozen scattered around the attic. Some are nibbling on the sandwich bits I missed when I cleaned up, and some…some are gnawing on the floorboards.

  A whirl of conflicting emotions rushes through me. Relief, frustration, hilarity. On the one hand, squirrels have taken over my attic, which means they’re probably hiding in all corners of the bed and breakfast. Which, frankly, is creeping me the hell out.

  On the other hand, at least they aren’t rats?

  18

  Noah

  The wine rack starts to take shape. It feels good to work with my hands. The rough wood under my hands is firm, solid, steady. It’s something I know how to do, something I can be certain of. It grounds me when the past few days have cut the anchor from my legs.

  “Alright, I’m off,” Luke says when he swaggers into the room sans his usual ensemble. He looks like a stranger in a suit and tie. I think about cracking a joke, but the look on his face stops me short.

  “Good luck with the meeting. Knock her dead
,” I say instead. In Jack’s absence, Luke it taking on the client-facing portion of our job where he’ll need to wine and dine a developer several towns over. Someone who is looking for a dependable and reputable contractor. We haven’t done much work outside of Redwater, not yet, so this could be a great contract for us to land.

  Every contract is another step forward.

  But rumor has it, this particular developer is hard to impress.

  He nods once before giving me a steely gaze. “I’m trusting you to hold down the fort, Noah. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “What you mean to say is, don’t fuck the customers,” I say. Because that’s exactly what he means. I wish he wouldn’t think of Harper like that. Even though she was technically a customer when I started on her attic, she wasn’t really. Harper was and will always be much more than that, and Luke knows it as well as I do.

  “Don’t fuck the customers and keep to the schedule. You have some appointments today you can’t miss.”

  As irritating as my brother can be, he’s always right. There’s a long list of tasks I need to complete today, starting with Roman’s wine rack. Then, I need to swing by Mrs. Anderson’s house to give her a quote on some new kitchen cabinets. After that, more of the same. Meetings, quotes, earnest smiles. I look forward to getting back to the shop so I can do what I’m good at: building.

  “You’ll be gone one night, Luke. Just trust me.”

  He raises his eyebrows and heads toward the door, throwing words over his shoulder. “Don’t burn the place down.”

  An hour later, I step back to admire my handiwork. Roman’s going to love this. It fits perfectly with the dark elegant oak ambience we’ve helped him create over the years. The edges are sleek and smooth, and once I add the layer of stain, it’s going to practically glisten in its perfection.

  Yeah, I take pride in my work. Nothing wrong with that. There’s not much I’m good at in this life, so I recognize when I can do something well.

  It makes me feel less like a shit when I inevitably screw something up.

  The door jingles, and I brace myself. The whole client-facing thing sucks ass and not just because I’m terrible at it. It’s mostly because I don’t like playing nice, wearing a false smile, jovially talking about the weather like it’s something I’m interested in.

  Another thing Luke and I have in common. We both hate small talk. I don’t envy him this trip to Hartford.

  “Oh. Hi.” The soft voice surprises me, and I jerk my head up to see Harper Harrison standing inside our shop like some kind of angel from another world. She’s wearing a thick coat and snow boots, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking how good she looks and how much I want to touch her skin. Even with her body completely hidden, all I can think about is fucking her all day and night.

  “Harper,” I say quietly, squeezing and unsqueezing my fists. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  Has she come to tell me I’m an asshole? I probably deserve it, but the thought makes my feet want to run.

  “Is…Luke around?” She looks nervous. Her fingers are fidgeting and pulling on the ends of her coat. I remember when she did that the other night when we walked out of Roman’s bar. At the time, it was a signal to me that she wanted exactly what I did. But now, I don’t know what it means. Especially when she’s asked for my brother, not me.

  “You missed him,” I say. “He left about an hour ago to head to Hartford for the night. Should I take a message for him? He should be back sometime tomorrow evening.”

  So formal, so stiff. Even at our worst, we never spoke to each other this way, like we’re strangers passing on the street. At least before we fucked, we had passion and fire and words we exchanged like we meant them. Not this hollow meaningless chatter.

  “Tomorrow night? Fuck.” Harper tips back her head as if she’s looking to the heavens and slouches against the wall. Despite myself, I take two steps closer.

  “You okay?” I ask. “Did something happen with the floor again?”

  She starts to laugh, but the sound mixes with a cry. A few tears spill from her cheeks. And I am one-hundred percent toast. I’ll do whatever it fucking takes to stop her crying.

  “Harper.” I cross the floor and take her face between my palms, brushing aside the dampness on her cheeks. “Listen, I know things are fucking weird with us right now, but tell me what’s wrong. I can fix it. Okay?”

  “I don’t think you can.” She shrugs and lets out an exasperated sigh. “I don’t think Luke can either. Really, I have no idea why I came here. I just felt lost and wound up pushing open the door and hoping for someone to hear my frustrated call of S.O.S. The animal control is shut due to the power outage earlier this week, and I have nowhere else to go.”

  “Animal control?” I frown. “Why the hell do you need animal control?”

  She laughs some more, though it sounds less like amusement and more like hysteria. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Why don’t you try me out?”

  “There are squirrels,” she says, shaking her head in exhausted incredulity. “Squirrels in my attic. The grand opening is tomorrow, and I don’t know how to get them out.”

  19

  Harper

  Somehow, I’ve ended up in the Hall Brothers’ shop, rambling to Noah about the squirrels in my attic. I must look like a loon to him, laughter and tears mixing together as I try to calm my frazzled nerves. I should have gone anywhere other than here. He still hasn’t called, after all.

  His face relaxes, as if he’d braced himself for far worse than squirrels. But what could be worse than that? Rats, maybe. “Okay, that explains a lot.”

  “You mean, the floorboards and the chewed wires?”

  “I meant the floorboards. Didn’t know about the wires. You got an electrician to come ‘round?” he asks with raised eyebrows. What, did he expect me to sit there in the dark waiting for some white knight to ride in to save the day? Because there are no white knights. Noah’s made that clear enough.

  “Of course I did,” I snap.

  “And he couldn’t help you with the squirrel problem?” he asks.

  I give him a look. “He said he’s an electrician, not animal control. Sound familiar?”

  “Well, I’m not animal control either, sweetheart.” His lips quirk, and suddenly, I want to throw a squirrel into his face.

  I should have known not to come here. He’s making a joke out of my plight, just like he does everything else.

  “You know what? Nevermind.” I whirl on my heels and stalk toward the door, gathering up what’s left of my dignity. I can find someone else to help me with my squirrel problem. It doesn’t have to be a Hall, and it definitely doesn’t have to be Noah.

  “Harper, wait.” He grabs my arm and roots me to the spot. His fingers are warm, rough, big. They scorch into my skin, reminding me of how he caressed my body as if I were some kind of treasure he couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to keep. But that must have all been for show. “I was just kidding around. Let me help you.”

  “Let go of my arm, Noah,” I say in a voice that’s almost a growl. “Or I’ll scream bloody murder.”

  “You’re being irrational.” He doesn’t let go of my arm. “I’m sorry I joked around, but you have to admit, it’s kind of funny. Squirrels in your attic. Just think about it.”

  “It’s not funny.” I jerk my arm away, and my skin breaks through his grasp. Suddenly, I’m free, though I still feel rooted to the spot. “Besides, why would I ever want you to help me again? You’ll just run off. It’s what you do. You did it that day when you were supposed to be fixing the floor, and you did it again the night…well, that night. You know the one. Or was it so meaningless to you that you forgot it already? It wouldn’t surprise me. It’s not like you’ve acknowledged my existence since it happened.”

  All the words in my brain come tumbling out of my mouth. I didn’t mean to say so much. It just happened, the way the night we had sex just happened. T
here was no stopping it, no matter how hard I tried. Then and now. They were both inevitable.

  “I have my reasons for running, but you wouldn’t understand.” His eyes narrow. “You’ve never had to run from anything in your life.”

  I flinch, taken aback by his anger and his words. “You’re not the only person on the planet that’s been hurt, Noah. It’s pretty self-centered of you to assume that yours is the worst of it, that I could never possibly understand what it means to feel pain.”

  He stares at me, hard and unblinking, and I feel the need to go on.

  “Besides,” I say, lifting my chin. “At least pain is better than nothing. If I never ride a bike too fast, I’ll never fall and scrape my knee. But I won’t feel the wind in my hair either.”

  Tension rockets between us. Noah’s eyes go hot.

  And now his mouth is on me, hard and fast and hungry. Desperate. Or at least that’s how I feel. The need inside me rises up, crashing against him. My arms wrap around his neck, and his hands grasp at my thighs until I’m suddenly off the ground and climbing up him. Thighs spread and hooked around his waist. Lips crushed impossibly hard against his. My crotch rubbing against the hard mound in his jeans.

  I want him. I need him. I don’t care why he ran anymore. All logic and reason have left my brain, and the only thing that’s left is this unquenchable thirst for Noah Hall.

  He rocks us forward and slams my back against the wall, grinding against me. Everything inside me aches for him. My nipples, my pussy, even my heart. I thought I’d never get to feel his body again, and now that I can, I want to spend hours upon hours with his hot skin on mine.

  And the scent of him. Oh god, the scent of him. It only heightens my arousal. There’s something intoxicating about the mint, sweat, and pine that follows him around like a sensual, manly cloud.