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“You said I could use your bathtub.”

“Not drunk.”

Hugging my clothes to my chest while keeping a firm grip on the towel, I frowned. “Well, if you’re done teaching me ridiculous lessons, then I’m going to bed.” Pivoting, I shuffled my feet to the bathroom door.

“I’m not done teaching.”

I stopped, but I didn’t look back at him.

“What now?”

“You need to bring your own towel. That one’s mine. Leave it right where you’re standing.”

“You’re a perv. How do you think Rory will react when she finds out you were being so perverted with her daughter?”

“I don’t know, but make sure you start the story with the part where you stole beer from my fridge.”

Fucker!

It felt so good to scream it in my head; I just wished my body would have cooperated and screamed it to his face. He knew I’d never tell Rory about the night’s events. So he took every opportunity to embarrass me.

“I’m filing a sexual harassment complaint against my boss on Monday.”

“You do that.” He was a steel beam, an immovable boulder. Always one step ahead of me.

Chapter Eleven

I spent Saturday in shameful regret, not venturing out once.

Sunday morning I bolted to the Outback to go to church and pray … lots of prayers. And when I returned, God had answered at least one of my prayers: Fisher wasn’t outside.

Monday morning, around five-thirty, my luck ran out.

Fisher: You’re with me today. We’ll leave in twenty minutes.

Someone might as well have said, “You’ve been found guilty. We’re executing you in twenty minutes.”

I wore my hair down to hide my face as much as possible. With not a second to spare, I dragged my feet up to the driveway and climbed into the truck, keeping my backpack between my legs on the floor instead of tossing it in the back where I might have accidentally made eye contact with Satan’s son.

“Morning.” I could feel his gloating expression. His amusement.

“Morning,” I mumbled, keeping my head down.

“Listen, there’s no need to drag your weekend to work with you on Monday. What happened, happened. No big deal. We move on.”

My head snapped up, jaw open. “No big deal? You molested me with your eyes! I wouldn’t call that no big deal.”

Fisher’s molesting eyes flared, a new kind of shock I hadn’t seen on him before. I may have spent the whole weekend letting my emotions build into something a little … explosive.

“You know what your problem is?”

My chin tipped up as my eyes narrowed. Yeah, I knew what my problem was … him.

“You need to get laid. And so help me, if you even think of telling Rory I said that, I will tell her everything.”

“I …” My jaw flapped a few times. I couldn’t believe he said it. If I would have had a hundred guesses as to what I imagined he thought my problem was, lack of sex would not have been on that list. “That … you …” My head wouldn’t stop shaking side to side. “I do not need to get laid. You need to stop being so crude. Some people take sex seriously, not like a game to play with anyone willing to have it with them. It’s supposed to be something beautiful between two people who love each other.”

“You’ve clearly never had an orgasm.”

“I have too.” Once, by accident. And it irked me that he had a way of keeping me on the defensive. I wasn’t proud of my accidental orgasm, but I felt the need to own it with him accusing me of needing one.

“Liar.” He smirked.

“You can’t call me a liar about this when you’ve known me for a few weeks. You don’t know anything about me and my past.”

“Did you give it to yourself or did someone else give it to you?”

“This … this is a stupid topic and really inappropriate. You’re my boss, driving me to work.”

“I’ll be your boss when we get there.”

“Then let’s go.” I faced forward and folded my arms over my chest.

At the first job, he inspected the previous day’s work and talked to a few of the workers. The second stop was a meeting with potential clients at an empty lot. I waited in the truck. We grabbed a fast-food lunch (unfortunately not Mickey D’s) and headed to the final stop of the afternoon. It was a staircase he’d been working on for a client, but they weren’t home.

“Did you buy these?” I asked, running my finger over the intricate details of a spindle.

“Nope. I made them.” He slipped on his tool belt.

Although I kinda hated him from our morning conversation, I couldn’t not appreciate how sexy he looked in a tool belt.

The scruff on his face a little longer.

His shirt nice and snug in the chest but loose over his tight abs.

“Are you serious?”

He glanced up, gathering the spindles in his arms to haul them inside the house from the garage. “Why are you constantly doubting my skills?”


Tags: Jewel E. Ann Fisherman Romance