by R. E. Butler
In the shared breakroom, two small round tables and a handful of metal folding chairs sat empty, along with a large refrigerator.
“Can I get you a bottle of water?” Can I buy you a house?
“Sure, thank you.”
She sat down and folded her hands on the table top after accepting the bottle of water from him. He cracked the top on one himself and took a few sips to gather his thoughts. Suddenly, he very much wanted her to take the job.
“So, it’s pretty simple, I guess. We’re looking for someone to run the desk for the evening shift. Dante, he’s my brother, he runs things in the evenings, but it’s not like he can sit out here and check people in. Hours would be three to eleven, with a half hour break and some O.T. on the weekends if you’re up for it, but we’re not open fully on the weekends like we are during the week. Duties are typical, checking people into the computer system, answering the phone, directing clients around and setting up sessions with the trainers. We can offer you twelve an hour to start and there’s full use of the gym, not during work of course, and um, I think that’s it. Do you think you might like to take the job?” Oh please say yes.
She looked surprised. “Well, yes, of course. I need a job and I’m good with customers, so this is right up my alley. Except I’m not really a gym bunny or anything.”
“What’s a gym bunny?”
“You know, the girls who spend all their free time at the gym? I don’t know much about this kind of place.” She took a drink of water with a small, nervous laugh.
“Don’t worry about that, I’ll be happy to teach you. And anyways, you look perfect.”
She blushed, her pretty light skin flushing pink. “Thanks.”
He cleared his throat. “If you’ll just give me a minute, I’m going to talk to Dante. Sit tight.”
“Okay, Mason.”
With a glance back, he drank her in one more time. No way could he let her leave the building without the job. Dante had to approve.
* * * * *
Cairo’s phone wouldn’t stop beeping. Somehow he’d set an alarm or a timer and he couldn’t figure out how to get it to stop. Punching the buttons in frustration, he growled as he walked into the breakroom, looking for Mason to fix it. What he found instead was a beautiful woman sitting at one of the tables.
“Hi.” He tucked the beeping phone into the side pocket of his cut-off sweats, suddenly unhappy he wasn’t wearing anything nicer. She was a complete stunner.
“Hi.” She looked nervous.
“Oh, are you here for the interview?” Damn beeping phone.
“Yes. Are you Dante?”
“Oh, hell no, I’m Cairo, the middle brother.”
She smiled. “I’m Alyssa.”
“Why did Mason leave you here by yourself?” Easing into one of the chairs across from her, he tried not to ogle her, but damn it was hard. Pretty brown hair, warm brown eyes with thick lashes, and a totally kissable mouth. She looked soft and natural, without layers of makeup and overly revealing clothes. She looked...perfect.
“He went to talk to Dante.”
“Ah. So, are you new to town?”
She fidgeted suddenly, and he wondered what her story was. “Is there something wrong with your phone?” she asked instead.
“What? Oh yeah, I was going to ask Mason to take a look at it. I think I set an alarm or something.” He pulled the phone out and she held out her hand.
“I have this one,” she said as she took it from him and began clicking around on the screen. She leaned over the table slightly and showed him how to cancel the alarm.
“I could just have you fix it for me next time,” he said, after thanking her.
“Sure, if I get the job.”
Oh, she was going to get the job, that was for damn sure. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he had a gut feeling that Alyssa belonged there. Maybe it was just because it was October, and in a few months it would be winter and they’d be in their lonely den, or maybe it was because the soft, honeyed scent of her called to him on a cellular level. Whatever it was, there was just something about her. She needed to stick around.
Mason appeared in the doorway, giving him a strange look that might have said ‘hands off’ if they weren’t the sharing sort, and said, “Come on, Alyssa, Dante’s in his office.”
When she stood up, the chair scraping on the linoleum, he got a good look at her body and wasn’t disappointed. She was maybe 5’ 6”, and curved in all the right places. “Nice to meet you, Cairo.” She smiled at him and he immediately pictured her mouth wrapped around his cock, and he liked the image. Very much.
“You, too, Alyssa. Good luck.”
If Dante fucked this up, he was going to rip his throat out. She was special. Maybe even the one.
* * * * *
When Mason promised Dante he would love Alyssa, he wasn’t so sure. He’d been riding Mason pretty hard for the last few weeks about getting someone in for the front desk, and she was the first one to answer the ad they’d put out at the end of September.
Mason ushered a beautiful young woman into his office. Dressed in a skirt and matching top, she looked way too classy for the gym. He could see why Mason wanted her to work for them. Just on looks alone she was heads above anyone else; a sweet, honest beauty.
He shook her hand, which was cold from nerves, and shot a glance to Mason, who took the hint and left.
He hadn’t looked at her resume, but Mason said she was perfect. Dante reminded him that they weren’t looking for a fuck buddy, and that he had declared that no more employees were sleeping with other employees. Mason reminded him that if Cairo hadn’t gone home with the receptionist that one night, they would never have known she was stealing from them. Still…they were the owners, it just didn’t look right. No matter how attractive the girl sitting across from him was.
“So why did you leave your last job?” He glanced over the resume that Mason had given him.
“I was looking for a fresh start.”
Hmm. “And you’re moving here to Dalton?”
“That’s the plan.” He was distracted when she crossed her legs. He had a thing for nice legs, and she had very nice ones. The immediate image in his mind was of grasping her knees and holding them far apart while he pounded into her pussy. His whole body went tight with the thought, and he growled internally and shook the thought free.
“Where did you move from?”
“Havers, Ohio.”
He had never heard of Havers, and he took in a deep breath while he thought of something to say, when he detected a hint of werewolf.
He must have stared for a while because she said, “Is something wrong, Dante?”
Leaning back in his desk chair, he gave her a long look. “Are you a wolf, Alyssa?”
Her face paled, which told him the truth regardless, and she twisted the strap of her purse in her hands before answering. “Yes.”
“We’re hyenas.”
“Oh, I didn’t know. Is it a problem for you, then? That I’m a wolf?”
He pushed the thoughts of the wolf pack south of them away from his mind and concentrated on Alyssa. “No, of course not. I’m just surprised that you’d leave your town. I thought that pack members liked to live close together.”
“They do, but I left the pack.”
“So you’re rogue?” His interest was definitely piqued.
“Yes.” She looked embarrassed. Something must have happened to make her leave the pack, but it was a good thing for them. He had no desire to get mixed up with another wolf pack.
“So you can’t work on the full moon, but otherwise you’re okay with working here for the evening shift?”
“Yes, definitely.” The relief was plain on her face as she smiled.
Standing up, he said, “Why don’t you go wait out at the front desk and let me talk to my brothers for few minutes.”
“Okay. Thank you, Dante.”
As he had suspected, his brothers were very close to the office, t
alking quietly. He made a motion for the two of them to come inside, and the first thing they both said was, “We have to hire her.”
He sighed. “I know she’s pretty, guys,”
Mason cut him off. “Just get over it, Dante, okay? She’s special, and not just because she’s a wolf. Cairo and I both think so. We let you take the lead last time, and where did that get us? All that wasted time!”
“We want her here so we can get to know her. We trusted you before, now you trust us with Alyssa,” Cairo said. Dante didn’t know how he’d been so wrong before, but he had been. And now he didn’t trust himself at all.
The curvy brunette at the front desk made his mind race, his body hard, and his heart hurt. He just didn’t want to see his brothers disappointed again.
“Fine. You can hire her, but hands off during work hours. And don’t fuck this up with her, because I don’t want to have to train another desk person.”
Mason grinned and Cairo smiled smugly. Groaning internally, he went with them to tell her the good news. Alyssa Morgan didn’t know what she was getting herself into.
Chapter 5
“Are you sure you don’t have any rooms? I’d even pay for a suite,” Alyssa said into her cell, frustrated. This was the third hotel that was booked for the night. She sure as hell didn’t want to sleep in her car!
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry. We’ll have rooms available in two nights, if you’d like to make a reservation.”
Was she serious? “No, thanks.”
Ending the call, she was startled out of her funk by Mason’s voice. “Why do you need a hotel room?”
She turned, flushing bright red. She hadn’t wanted them to know that she was not only jobless, but homeless. She hadn’t planned this very well at all. Who does that? Who moves to another town without making a hotel reservation first?
“I…moved out of my apartment in Havers to come here, and I don’t know where my head was when I planned this because I didn’t do anything right.” Oh hell, she was going to have to call one of her so-called friends and beg to use their couch for the night. Tears burned in her eyes at the humiliating thought.
“Fuck that. You’ll come home with us.” Cairo said.
“What?”
Mason nodded, “Yeah, we’ve got a big house about twenty minutes from here. You can have the guest room for however long you need it. We want you to take the job.”
Her mouth went dry. Yes, they were hot. All three of them. Brutally hot. But she’d already promised herself that she wasn’t going to get involved with anyone, and she really needed this job more than she needed to get laid. Granted, they were only offering her a place for the night, but that was way too tempting of an offer. The last thing she wanted to do was get romantically tangled up with any of them. They were her bosses and they were brothers, which meant that someone would get hurt. Probably her.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said weakly. “I’ll find a place. I’m not a charity case.”
Cairo’s features went soft. “Look, we’re offering you the job because you’re qualified. It’s got nothing to do with this at all. But we can’t have you out alone at night with no place to go, it’s not safe. There’s a conference in a town nearby, so no hotel around for miles is going to have vacancies. You can’t sleep in your car. What other choice do you have? Drive to our house, take the guest room. Since you didn’t need help with moving expenses, think of it as our way of welcoming you to the gym.”
As relieved as she was to hear that she had the job, the look on Dante’s face told her he really didn’t want her at their house.
“Thank you for the job, but I’ll be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow at three.” She put her cell in her purse with shaking fingers and a humiliated blush on her cheeks and started to walk for the door.
A hand closed on her elbow and to her surprise, it was Dante. “There’s a room in the back with a couch. You can stay here tonight and we’ll help you find a place tomorrow. There are a few apartment complexes nearby and we know the owners, so we can give you a reference before your first paycheck. How does that sound?”
Like heaven, if only because it was nice to actually be worried over. She couldn’t remember the last time that someone had cared if she had a place to sleep or not.
A part of her wanted to tell him thanks but no thanks, that she’d be fine. But the rest of her knew that she would wind up with her tail tucked between her legs, looking for a place for the night in Havers. She’d rather sleep on broken glass.
She looked up into his dark eyes. “It sounds really nice. Thank you.”
He smiled. “Good. Why don’t you grab your bags or whatever and we’ll get the room ready for you.”
When she returned with her small suitcase, Dante was back in his office and Cairo was working out with another man on a weight bench. Mason smiled at her. “I get to give you the tour. Come on, let’s go put your bag away first.”
Mason, like his brothers, was well over six feet, broad and muscular. His jet-black hair was shiny and soft looking. As she followed him through the break room, she took time to enjoy the view. He had the nice, slim waist of a man who worked out a lot, narrow hips, and, as she could see from his tight jeans, a fantastic ass. Around his right bicep was a tattoo band, a jagged, broken design, like deconstructed barbed wire. Her fingers itched to touch it, to trace the muscles in his arms and tickle her fingers across his chest. Oh hell. She shook the sexy thoughts from her mind as fast as possible. They’d only lead to problems.
One old couch sat against the wall of the small room. There was a TV on a small table but it didn’t look hooked up. The overhead light was harsh and made the room look worse than it actually was. One pillow and two blankets were folded neatly on one end of the couch and she put the small suitcase on the other end.
“Okay, so there’s plenty to eat in the fridge. Help yourself,” he told her as they walked side by side back through the breakroom. “Gym opens at six, closes at eleven. Cairo will be in here first thing, I come in about noon, and then Dante comes in about five. You can use the ladies’ locker room.” He gestured to a door with the outline of a woman on it. He showed her the two levels of the gym: weights, bags, padded mats and a large boxing ring on the first floor; nautilus and treadmills on the second floor, along with an empty studio and a room containing another boxing ring. At one time, Mason said, they’d had fitness classes, but lost their instructor and hadn’t replaced her. Although he didn’t say what had happened, exactly, she got the feeling that it was something personal and they had all been affected. As they walked back downstairs, she wondered if one of them had gotten romantically involved with her and it went south.
They were down in the pool area when Mason interrupted her thoughts. “Oh hell, I need to call that guy back,” he growled. “Come back to the front desk with me, I’ll show you the phones.”
“And you won’t hit your head again, right?”
He laughed, and it was a good laugh. “I’ll try to be more careful.”
She took one of the two desk chairs behind the U-shaped reception desk. Mason sat down in the other and called the electrician again.
She turned in a slow circle, taking in the gym. This was her new start. Her fresh start. She didn’t ever have to go back to the pack and pretend to be okay with being subjugated by Monica or looked down on by the pack members. The Alyssa who partied the weekends away, who drank until she couldn’t remember whose house she woke up in, was no more. She hadn’t been real in the first place.
It was quiet, but she wasn’t sure what their weeknights normally were like. She hadn’t been in a gym before; the whole workout thing never appealed to her. She was a size ten and she’d always been that no matter what she did. In high school, she’d tried in vain to diet, but nothing had ever worked for her, and eventually she stopped and accepted her body, curves and all.
Mason said there were twenty trainers on their payroll, contractors who only came in when they had clients. T
hey made between one hundred and three hundred an hour, and a percentage went to the gym along with the clients’ monthly fees. It sounded like a very good racket. They had two trainers full-time to help people with machines, one for the morning shift and one for the evening shift. In the evening, it was Denny, a man who looked like he was about thirty-five, with closely shaved hair and a bulky body. Whoever the man was that Cairo was working out with, he was well-muscled but not in the incredibly defined way that Cairo was. And that name! Was there a sexier name on the planet? Well, possibly Dante. And Mason.