The shower was really calling my name.
I’d seen it last night when I’d gone to the bathroom to get ready for bed.
After luxuriating in his custom shower, with its bells and whistles that got you at all angles, I got ready to go to work. But first, I made sure to check my bank account to see what kind of damage had been done to it.
What I was left with ten minutes later was the inability to catch a breath.
I had nineteen million dollars.
That was six zeros, tacked onto a nineteen.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
In tight jeans that stretched like nobody’s business, a black t-shirt that I hoped would hide most of the stains that today would bring, and my trusty pair of muck boots that I had to pull from my van, I headed into the clinic.
I had a paper check in my hand made out to Diana, with exactly half of what was owed to her for my part of the clinic. Something I thought I’d be paying off for the rest of my life.
In the other hand, I had a cup of coffee. A splurge for me that never happened because if I could afford coffee, it was the kind that you brewed at home and drank black because you couldn’t afford the cream to go in it.
Needless to say, I was a ray of sunshine that morning.
A good night’s sleep, money in your bank account, and Etienne sleeping next to you all night would do that.
I smiled at a few of the men I passed, but hoped that I was walking too fast for them to try to talk to me.
Most didn’t try.
I wasn’t sure if Etienne or Diana had tipped them off to my lack of social graces, but I’d take whatever I could get where I could get it.
I’d just crested the main lobby, and was walking through a draped-off section of a room where there was music blaring, when I spotted him.
I hadn’t seen his truck…
Oh. My. God.
He was unclothed.
Well, from the top up, anyway.
Guys didn’t know how easy they had it. Just being able to whip their shirts off anywhere and everywhere, not worrying about what they were portraying when they did it.
But, in this instance, I was sort of glad that those social qualms were acceptable in the society we had. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten the show.
My eyes roamed down his body, taking everything in.
I mean, logically, I’d known that Etienne had a great body. It was kind of hard to hide that kind of body with clothes.
Normally, my urges to touch things extended to inanimate objects only.
But that was before I’d walked into the clinic and seen Etienne on a stepladder nailing up crown molding, jamming out to Queen.
I didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing.
Normally, he never got his hands dirty.
Normally, he never stayed at a jobsite for long.
I took a sip of my coffee, and the movement in his peripheral vision had him glancing my way.
The warm smile that lit his face had my heart thundering in my chest.
“What are you doing?” I asked curiously.
And can I do you while you’re doing it?
That question, alas, went unsaid.
“The other crew that I had in here,” he said, his eyes narrowed on the nail he was about to hammer into. “Were caught stealing from me. When I fired them, I didn’t really put much thought into the fact that I wouldn’t be able to replace them right off the bat. And my first crew, the one I trust that has a few guys who followed me here? They’re working on other jobs. And this one needed finished.”
This one needed finished.
Was I reading too much into that statement?
Did it need finished because he didn’t want to be around me any longer than he had to be? Or was it needing finished because he didn’t want to leave us hanging?
Either way…
“Why do you keep looking at my side like that?” he asked.
I jerked my gaze up to find him no longer hammering, but standing at the top of the stepladder with his gaze on me.
I swallowed hard, not wanting to reveal what I was actually thinking.
But, like the blunt person that I was, I just blurted out my thoughts.
At least the ones that made me look like I wasn’t an insecure fool.
“It’s taking everything I have right now not to touch that,” I pointed at his side, where his “Adonis belt” was located.
At least the one I could see from my vantage point, anyway.
“So touch it,” he suggested. “With Conrad, normally if he just touches it, and gets it out of his system, he’s better. So touch it.”
I licked my lips.
That wasn’t how it worked with me.
“That’s not how it works for me,” I admitted, mirroring my thoughts. “How it works for me is… if I like it, I keep touching it. If I don’t like it, I keep touching it until I figure out why I don’t like it.”