Take Me All the Way

by Toni Blake

At this, Jeremy let his eyes widen slightly. Then he reached down and picked up an earbud that dangled from his jeans pocket now. “I was listening to music.”

  She blinked and looked a little embarrassed. But then she went right back to sounding snippy. “Well, I’m not a psychic—and I couldn’t see through all that hair that you had anything in your ears.”

  “Well, now that you know, maybe you can cut me a little slack, huh?”

  Uh oh—wrong thing to say. Now that sparkle in her eyes shifted toward being irate.

  And even though at 6’1” he was considerably taller than her, she took a step closer and stared pointedly up into his eyes. “Look, I just expect you to be on time, do what I say, and be respectful. We don’t have to like each other—but we have a job to do, so if you can follow those few simple rules, this will be much easier.”

  He just looked at her. This from the woman who had shown up fifteen minutes late—which was why he’d started shoveling the overflow of dirt and sand in the first place.

  “Are you hearing me?” she asked.

  Wow, she could be brusque for a little slip of a thing. Not that she was tiny actually. He supposed, now that he was really looking at her, her build was . . . average. But in a nice, curvy way. Though that might have been easier to see if she weren’t so irate.

  “Yep, princess, I sure am.”

  This time he could almost feel her bristling before he saw it in her big round eyes and stiffened posture. “And that’s another thing. Don’t call me princess.”

  At this, Jeremy just shrugged. “You got something against princesses? Most women dig that sort of thing.” Then he winked. Because at this point, she was egging him on, kind of asking for it.

  “Well, I’m not most women. And I’m not a princess, by any stretch of the imagination. Understood?” Still asking for it.

  So he delivered. “You got it, babe.”

  She kept on looking put out. “I’m not your babe—I’m your supervisor.”

  “And you might just need to relax a little,” he muttered under his breath. But apparently loud enough to be heard, given the look she flashed him. Oops.

  She crossed her arms beneath ample breasts. “Who do you think you are anyway?”

  “Just a guy trying to do a job,” he said. “Didn’t know I’d get told off before I even started.” Jeremy had thought he was going to like doing this work, but now he suspected his non-babe boss might make that difficult.

  “Listen, I just want to work peacefully here.”

  “I could go for some peace, too, believe me,” he informed her.

  “Good,” she replied with a terse nod, sounding a little too satisfied for his taste. Like she’d conquered him or something.

  And he knew he should shut up, just ask her what she wanted him to do to get started here, yet instead he heard himself beginning to talk. “But for the record, all this started when you snapped at me because you didn’t know I had earbuds in. So a little respect goes both ways, ya know.”

  She pursed her lips and sized him up beneath half lowered lids. “No,” she said, sounding a little more calm, but also a little more calculating. “This started when you rudely told me to get out of the way and nearly dropped a big root ball on my toes.”

  Something about that made Jeremy laugh, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he thought she was taking that a little too seriously. He’d known in retrospect he probably could have been more polite, but he’d just been trying to get the damn bushes in place, and they’d weighed a ton. “They were heavy,” he said.

  “I know. You told me.”

  “So I didn’t have time to be nice.”

  Her tone got a little more indulgent then; she sounded slightly more appeased. “Well, maybe I didn’t take the time to be nice just now. But we’ll get along a lot better if we can both take the time going forward. It’s not that hard.”

  Jeremy turned that over in his head. There had been a time when he was the nicest guy in the world—when that had come naturally. He supposed spending so much time alone had screwed with his people skills. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try.”

  “Thank you,” she answered quietly. “Me, too.”

  And he realized her face had changed. Calming down had taken away the sharp edges, the harsh lines, and left behind a much softer, prettier woman.

  Huh. He hadn’t seen that coming, thinking she was pretty. But she was. Not Barbie doll pretty, not supermodel pretty, not schoolgirl pretty—but pretty in a more . . . solid sort of way with her large green eyes, wide mouth, and the long, auburn hair that hung down behind her in messy spiral waves, pulled back in an elastic band. He wondered vaguely what it looked like loose, falling around her face.

  “Why don’t we get started?” he suggested.

  She gave a short nod. And even though she still regarded him warily, at least she’d quit raking him over the coals.

  She opened the large three-ring binder she held and said, “Why don’t we take a look at the project plans and discuss the best route to move forward. As you can see, the course has already been designed and the concrete forms are in place.” She motioned at the flat lot they stood in, surrounded by slabs of concrete that had been poured in what was otherwise a sea of the same dirt/sand mix he’d been shoveling. “Our job is . . . to do everything else.”

  As she began to unfold a large map of the course, Jeremy said, “Why don’t we take this to my truck—I can open the tailgate to use like a table.”

  The surprised light in her eye told him she hadn’t expected him to be smart, even in such a small way. “Sure,” she agreed, and they walked together toward the old red Ford.

  Once he lowered the tailgate, she showed him the course and began outlining the various aspects of construction. “I’m not an architect or anything,” she said, “so you’ll need to be able to take my drawings and build from them without plans. Can you do that?”

  He looked down at her sketches of the obstacles that would sit on the course—miniature versions of the Happy Crab, the Hungry Fisherman, the pier, the lifeguard stand on the beach, and other Coral Cove landmarks. “Not exactly the Taj Mahal—think I can handle it.”

  When she reached the part about the small building where the cashier would take money and hand out equipment, he said, “Would make sense to get that erected first thing—be a good place to keep tools where they can be locked up at night and under roof when it rains. And a good home base for paperwork and other things. Don’t ya think?”

  Again, she looked slightly surprised he’d come up with an intelligent idea. “Um, yeah.”

  And he let out a small laugh.

  “What?” She was instantly back to looking wary again.

  “You don’t have to act so shocked I have a brain,” he told her. “Just ’cause I don’t bend over backwards to kiss anybody’s ass, that doesn’t make me an idiot.”

  Her face colored slightly with a pretty pink blush. “I didn’t think it did.”

  He flashed an I-know-better expression and tapped his head with one finger as he said, “Don’t underestimate what I got goin’ on up here, pri—” He stopped himself and let out a small chuckle.

  “If you’re so smart,” she pointed out, “I’m sure you can stop yourself from calling me princess.”

  He arched one eyebrow in her direction and said, “I just did.”

  The woman next to him pulled in her breath, but he couldn’t read her thoughts. The only thing he knew for sure was that she didn’t want him to get the best of her—which meant that even if they’d technically made peace, they were still secretly at odds. And which, of course, made him want to get the best of her—just because she still seemed to be asking for it a little.

  After briefly meeting his gaze, she quickly pulled her eyes away, down to the open binder. “Let’s . . . look at the supplies you’ll need to get started.”

  “Sure,” he said easily, dropping his gaze there as well. He found himself watching her hands, turning pages, using her
fingertips to point at particular pieces of information. Her nails were longish but not well manicured. And there was something in that he liked. Natural. It seemed . . . feminine but natural. There was no trying, no affectation—it was just real.

  They went over what he’d need and decided he’d head to the Home Depot out on Route 19 to get it.

  After which she closed her notebook, picking it up to walk away, and Jeremy followed. Only to hear an oomph as she fell, sprawling in the dirt before him, the binder flying out of her grasp to land nearby.

  “Damn. You okay?”

  She sat up, gave her head a quick shake to clear it, and said, “Yeah.” Then, “I tripped over something.”

  Jeremy bent to find a large root jutting from the ground. “This.”

  She drew in her breath. “We paid to have this lot completely cleared and graded before the concrete was poured.”

  “Eh, sometimes something gets missed,” Jeremy said reasonably. If war had done anything positive for him at all, it had made it so he didn’t sweat the small stuff.

  “I didn’t pay for things to be missed,” the woman on the ground informed him. Man, she was tightly wound.

  He reached a hand down to her, helping Tamra to her feet. Then murmured under his breath, “You really could stand to lighten up a little.” After which he glanced up in time to see his new boss flashing him a death glare.

  “What did you just say?”

  She was right—she wasn’t anybody’s princess. “I said . . . why don’t I go get a shovel and see if I can dig this thing out?” Then he dared cast her a small grin, since they both knew that wasn’t even remotely close to what he’d said.

  To her credit, she simply brushed the dirt off her shorts and quietly answered, “Okay.”

  Not to Jeremy’s credit, as he began digging up the wayward root, he found himself watching her ass when she bent over to pick up her binder. Her shorts were loose, but he still thought she might have something nice underneath them. Pretty legs anyway, even if a little paler than he might expect from a woman who lived at the beach. And he considered asking about that, but thought better of it, pretty sure it would only get him snipped at some more.

  As she turned to face him, he darted his gaze away from her shorts and pretended to be engrossed by his work. Turned out the root ran deep. The earth around it was fairly loose, consisting largely of sand, so the digging was easy—but no matter how deep he went, he couldn’t find the base.

  “Maybe if you just pulled on it, it would come out,” she suggested.

  Jeremy doubted it. But he wasn’t inclined to argue with her, so he dropped his shovel, bent down, and used both hands to grab hold of the root.

  As he’d suspected, it remained firmly attached to the ground, but he continued to pull, putting to work all those muscles he’d built on Lucky’s weight bench. “Damn,” he muttered—but then something loosened beneath his grasp and he knew part of the root had broken free. Grabbing onto it a little farther down, he gave it every ounce of strength he had, yanking hard. So hard that the root came loose from the earth’s grip and sent him flailing backwards.

  Instinct made him shift his body forward, midair, not wanting to land on his ass—just as he felt himself connect with the softer female flesh of his boss and he knew he was taking her down with him.

  They hit the soft dirt with a gentle plmmmp, and his fall was made even softer by having her body beneath him. They ended up face to face.

  When Jeremy met her gaze—filled with a little bit of shock and little bit of something else he couldn’t quite read—a small, unplanned grin left him just before he said, “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

  The woman beneath him didn’t smile back. “You can get off me now.”

  Yeah, he knew that. But for some reason, he didn’t really want to. It wasn’t a bad place to be. “Before I do,” he said, “I just realized we were never officially introduced. I’m Jeremy.”

  Mary’s heart began to thump and her hands to shake a little in her delight and excitement.

  Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

  Chapter 4

  “YES, I know,” Tamra said. She couldn’t believe the Neanderthal was lying on top of her. How on earth had she gotten herself in this situation? “Get off me.”

  “And you are?” he asked.

  “Getting angry,” she said through slightly clenched teeth.

  Which made him let out another of those deep laughs of his. Which might have charmed her on some human level if he weren’t a belligerent wiseass and if she didn’t have to deal with him. “You’re Tamra,” he said, since she’d refused to play along.

  “Very good,” she said dryly, rolling her eyes. “Now get up.”

  And when he didn’t immediately make a move to do so, she pressed her palms to his chest. It felt warm, solid. In a way that somehow seemed to echo through her fingertips and up her arms.

  Oh. Ugh. She didn’t know what was happening here, especially as their eyes met. His . . . weren’t bad. They were maybe even kind of nice. Blue. Flecked with gray. And something hard, masculine—not the kind of thing you could really see, but more sense, feel. Yet the rest of him was unkempt and hairy and rude and cocky and a host of other things that held no appeal for her. He was so not her type. So she was back to ugh.

  And why was he still lying on her? And dear God, right in view of Coral Street. “Get up! Now!” She pushed on his chest again, harder this time. And ignored any other feeling besides the intense desire to bring this awkward connection to a quick end.

  Finally, her rude worker pushed upward to his knees, separating their bodies, and she suffered a startling awareness of the way he hovered above her, their legs still mingled.

  When he got to his feet, relief rushed through her veins—along with a more subtle underlying current she couldn’t put her finger on. The heat of the tropical autumn sun beat down on her, making her hotter than usual.

  As he reached to help her up for the second time in just a few minutes, he said, “You’re no fun.”

  And the accusation put her on the defensive. “Not wanting to lie around in the dirt with a stranger on top of me has nothing to do with whether or not I’m fun.”

  The last time he’d pulled her to her feet, she’d become more aware of the touch than she should have. The same thing happened this time, too—only more so now. Just as when she’d touched his chest, a zing of unwanted electricity rippled up her arm, then spread all through her.

  “So are you?” he asked.

  “Am I what?” She tugged at the hem of her shorts, then smoothed the tank top she wore as she scanned the area, looking around to see if anyone had witnessed Jeremy Sheridan, war veteran and jailbird, lying on top of her at the jobsite.

  “Fun,” he said easily.

  Okay, why did that question catch her off guard?

  Because . . . it’s flirtatious. No matter how she sliced it, Mr. Scruffy Beard was flirting with her. And she supposed he’d been doing so for the last few minutes, but the reality was only fully hitting her now. “None of your business.” She had no idea where the reply came from.

  Yes you do. You don’t want to say yes and have him think you’re flirting back. But you don’t want to say no and have him think you’re not fun. Ugh again. Why on earth did she care what he thought of her?

  When he flashed a speculative grin through that messy beard of his, it moved all through her—and made her nervous as hell even as it irritated her.

  “And quit smiling at me like that. I’m not that fun.”

  “I’d be surprised if you were,” he said, stooping to pick up the shovel he’d abandoned.

  And she was on the verge of feeling insulted—when he winked at her. Oh Lord. She wasn’t sure what was worse—that it was officially overt flirtation or that her body responded with a thin burst of desire flowing through her lower regions when she’d least expected it.

  “Was it so horrible to have me on top of you?” he asked. Lord,
he was direct. She wondered if her eyes betrayed her and wished desperately for sunglasses to hide them, but she’d left them all the way over on his tailgate.

  “I didn’t mind it so much,” he added when she didn’t reply.

  “That was clear,” she quipped, not wanting to let him think he was getting the upper hand. “And yes, it was extremely unpleasant.”

  As usual, though, he just laughed. “Why’s that, prin– . . . Tamra?”

  She raised her eyebrows. Was he seriously asking her? She’d met his gaze, but now looked away. “Well, I don’t even know you, and I don’t lie around with men I don’t know.”

  “But if you knew me you would?” Another grin through that beard.

  She prayed he couldn’t see the heat rising to her cheeks, or that he would mistake it for a touch of color from the sun. “No! You’re not . . . not . . .”

  “Not what?”

  Did the man never stop? Well, fine, she’d just be direct, too. He was asking for it anyway. “My type,” she said. “You’re not my type.”

  He appeared completely undaunted as he asked, “What’s your type?”

  So she tried to keep being honest. “Well—not so much of this,” she said, motioning around her head with her hands, meaning he had too much hair for her taste. “Or this.” She motioned to her chin, meaning his beard. “And I like men who are nicer, and more polite—two things you seriously have working against you.” She ended with a brisk nod, just to drive the point home and make sure he knew exactly how much she was not into him.

  And she supposed it shouldn’t have surprised her when he simply laughed in reply, but it still did.

  So she heard herself ask, “What’s so funny?”

  “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” he said, still looking amused.

  And her jaw dropped. “You’re quoting Shakespeare now?”

  He lifted one hand, used his index finger to point at his head, and let his eyes grow big. “Like I said,” he told her, “lot going on up here, sister.”

  Tamra rolled her eyes once more. “That’s another thing I am not. Your sister.”