“All I want to say is—” Hunter sighs. “Don’t crush on her. Don’t sleep with her, and for your own sake, don’t fall in love with her. She’s the type that won’t stick around a small town like this.”
What he’s really saying is that she isn’t the type to stick around my type.
Sex is one thing and I have my Logan looks, dancing skills, loud music, and distracting light effects in clubs that hide any impediment. When it comes to needy women, I seem to fit the bill perfectly. There isn’t a lot of talking involved when your lips are busy with other things. The bar is set pretty low when it comes to making coherent sentences while you’re having sex. Plus, it helps that my dick brain takes over and the barbed wire loses its hooks when things heat up. Yeah, sex has never been an issue and there’s a lot to be grateful for right there.
But.
Women.
They love words. They love talking. They love sweet nothings and serenades that aren’t delivered in shreds. They love the Hunters of the world—successful, clever, and pristine.
Never mind that women want to know all your secrets. The few women who stuck around long enough for me to get close to, soon realized how complicated life could get with me long-term. Most women want children, and at some point, sooner or later, they decide I’m not cut out to be their sperm donor, because the last thing they want is a mini me. They want little Hunters who’ll end up exactly like him—successful, clever, and pristine.
I finish my beer and reach for another one. I can’t slip back into this bad habit, but Hunter’s pushing all my buttons tonight.
“I haven’t made up my mind whether I’m sticking around Ashleigh Lake yet either.” More than one thing is on probation here. As much as I want to re-establish myself in this town as the Logan who’s finally sorted out his shit, if it’s going to be too tough, I have to let it go. I have a life in Boston. Friends. A stable job. It’s more than I ever could have hoped for. This slice of ambition I have is a threat to everything I’ve achieved over the past few years.
I groan out a sigh. I don’t like hearing it, but Hunter is right. I might as well put him at ease. “As for my intern and this gig, I’m planning to do the right thing here.”
At this, Hunter nods and mumbles “Good” between two bites of pizza.
We finish our dinner in silence, brewing over our argument. He can say what he wants, but one thing we both know: Hunter has been single for so long that the whole Brodie and Logan clan thinks he’s given up on love and life.
When I get back to the boathouse an hour later, the porch light is on, but the rest of the house is quiet and Georgiana’s bedroom door is closed. I slip into the bathroom and notice all the signs of her having had a shower. The soft scent of expensive feminine soap still hangs in the air and her toiletry bag gives color to the otherwise stark white and practical bathroom.
It’s nice. The scents are calming, and I adjust my feet to avoid making the neat row of products on the shower floor go down like dominoes. I breathe in the scent one last time before wiping out these girly fragrances with my harsh cheap products that get a man like me clean after a day of hard labor.
I groan as the cold water hits my heated skin and runs tracks through the fine sweat-glued sawdust on my body. I adjust the temperature to make it as hot as I can handle. Maybe if we live around each other and come up with a shower schedule, a separated social schedule, and a twelve-hour sleeping schedule, where we’re both locked up in our rooms, we’ll not only steer clear of unwanted sexual attraction, but we’ll be successful with this project and take the tiny house win home.
Maybe that rush of physical attraction I felt when Georgiana Wess walked into Hunter’s office would fizzle out and not escalate. Maybe Georgiana Wess has a boyfriend back home and I’m totally not her type. Maybe Georgiana Wess has a cold little heart of stone that can’t be moved by a mere mortal man.
I close my eyes and pray for a cold little heart of my own, because I sense myself going soft on her already.
13
GEORGIANA
When I get to the barn the next morning, there’s no sign of Raiden. He also wasn’t at home and his truck was gone. I’m not sure he even slept at the boathouse. Not that it’s any of my business, but—
I place my purse beside my laptop and walk around the trailer once to see what we finished the day before. After I left for Sharky’s, Raiden fastened the subfloor to the trailer with long metal bolts and cleaned up all the sawdust and wood cut-offs.
For now, without his guidance, there’s nothing I dare do or touch on the tiny house itself, but I can work on the drawings. I sit down and fire up my laptop. I’m only half an hour into deciphering some of the basic dimensions of his tiny house when Raiden strolls in, a cardboard box in his hands.
“Paperwork. For you.”
He plonks the box on my desk and pulls a plastic bag from it with stationery and files.
“What’s all this?” I peek into the box and all I see is a disarray of receipts and other bits of crumpled papers and invoices printed out on letter-size sheets. God help me.
“Expenses. For accounts. Budget, we have to stick to. Records, we should have, for the competition. Per item. No throwing to-to…sums to-together.”
“You haven’t kept track of any of it? Not even on a spreadsheet?” A cold flush of doom spreads over my body. At some point yesterday there was a delivery of side panels and a few boxes of things I haven’t investigated yet.
“Nope. Your job, Miami.”
What’s up with this Miami business? An itch of irritation sprouts on my skin. “Do you know how much you’ve spent so far?” I try to keep my voice even, but really?
He chuckles as he points to his temple, a little gesture that I’m already finding annoyingly Raiden. “Plus-minus. I’m likely off by a do-do-dollar or t-two.”