His lips lifted in a smile, another one of those human manifestations of joy she wasn’t sure what to do with. Since when was Monty—her Monty, a silently stoic man whose stare could crack stone—such a happy, well-adjusted human being? Her brothers were supposed to bring out the worst in people, not the best. It was the rule.
“Is that what you call them? The Testosterone Trio?”
“It fits, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. It seems kind of exclusionary to me. I like Quarrelsome Quartet better.”
Georgia felt a spreading warmth move through her, almost as if sunshine had been lodged inside her rib cage. There was no way Monty could know how highly she regarded any comparison that placed her on equal footing with her brothers.
“Hey, what are you doing after this?” she asked, his compliment propelling her toward folly.
A long, penetrating look was his only reply.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to make you stay after and clean gutters or anything.” She squirmed as the sunshine ebbed away, leaving only that look. “It’s just that it’s tradition for the whole crew to go out for drinks after a good day, and today was definitely a good day. You should come.”
“Really?”
“Why not? You can spend some more time being attacked by my brothers. They’d love that.”
“You’re sure I won’t be in the way?” He pulled off his hard hat and ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of self-consciousness. She thought that gesture was for her benefit, that he was trying to find a polite way to decline, but his expression turned inward at the last second. “I already know your brothers hate me, but I don’t want to put a damper on everyone else’s fun while I’m at it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You won’t damper anyone’s fun.”
“It’s not ridiculous. It’s a fact. Social gatherings improve more when I go out the door—not when I come in it.”
“That’s not true...” she began, but bit down on her lip when Monty’s frown didn’t lift, no glimmer of self-deprecation to lighten the mood.
How many times had she thought that exact same thing? Monty was nice to look at but unpleasant to talk to. Monty was a ten cut down to a five for his personality. Only yesterday, Holly had been teasing her about how industrious her crew would be now that she’d have Monty there to stare everyone into action.
She felt like the biggest asshole in the world. Okay, so Monty wasn’t exactly teeming with laughs, and you had to get used to long periods of intense scrutiny if you intended to spend any time with him, but he’d managed to make Adam wear a sandwich board about nuts. That wasn’t the work of a man with no personality.
That was the work of a man with a death wish—which just so happened to be a trait she admired the hell out of.
“Listen up, everybody!” She put a finger in either side of her mouth and released a piercing whistle, causing Monty to wince. Her talent at putting men off with loud noises and barbaric gestures knew no bounds. “Excellent work today. If we get this packed up and put to bed in the next thirty minutes, the first round of drinks at the Lager Loghouse is on me.”
A rallying cry went up around the site, and Georgia turned to Monty with a triumphant grin. “They aren’t a tough crowd to please. If you pick up the second round, I guarantee you’ll have half a dozen new best friends.”
“Does that figure include your brothers?”
“Well, let’s not go crazy here. From the way Adam is glaring at you, I’m pretty sure he’s already taken a hit out.” When Monty’s eyes flared, she laughed and patted him on the arm. It was a good arm, strong and taut where the fabric cut across his biceps. She could have spent hours running her hands over that bulge—her second-favorite kind on a man—but she caught him staring and dropped her hand before she did something awful like mentioning orgasms again.
“What kind of hit are we talking?” Monty asked carefully.
“The traditional kind—but don’t worry. He’s notoriously tight-fisted. No assassin he hires is going to be very good. He’ll probably miss the first time.”
“And the second time?”
Georgia just laughed. “I hope you have good reflexes.”
Chapter Seven
“Nancy is going to kill me if I don’t go home soon.” Adam glanced at the clock above the bartender’s head with a grimace. The more time that passed, the more pronounced the grimace grew, and the more often it got pushed Monty’s direction. “The kids have to be approaching meltdown mode by now.”
“Oh, don’t let us stop you,” Georgia said. “We don’t mean to make any more demands on your time.”
Her eyes met Monty’s over the top of her beer, sparkling with contagious humor. Although his own inclination had been to clear out before the other man’s head had a chance to explode, she was enjoying this power play with a perversity he couldn’t help but admire.
“I bet your poor wife is going crazy,” Georgia continued with a wink in Monty’s direction. “She’s going to be really upset you spent all night carousing with the crew. Remember that time she got so mad at you for buying her a dishwasher for her birthday she made you sleep in the garage for two weeks? God, that was funny. You had such a hard time getting rid of the fleas.”
Adam released a snort from nostrils so pinched they defied the laws of human anatomy. “There isn’t any crew here to carouse with. They all went home.”
“I know.” Georgia clucked sadly. “Lightweights, every last one of them. I thought for sure Danny would outlast you.”
The result of this interchange was a clear stalemate. In any other human pairing, one of the siblings would have given up hours ago. Although Monty didn’t drink—most of his workdays started at five in the morning, and a clear head was a must at that hour—he’d purchased Georgia’s suggested round and won an alarming amount of camaraderie in the process. There had been laughing and back slapping and all those other manifestations of healthy human interactions. He’d had no idea friendship came so cheap.
But even cheap friends had to go home eventually, which left only the three of them at a sticky table surrounded by empty beer bottles, each one fixated on being the last man standing.
Well, Georgia and Adam wanted to be the last ones standing. Monty was merely enjoying the show, hanging on out of a combination of perversity and curiosity.
And maybe a small desire to win. He couldn’t help it—the Lennox combativeness was contagious, their determination some kind of game. These were not people who believed in the existence of a middle ground. If Monty’s life was a testament to careful decisions and not rocking the boat, Georgia and her brothers preferred kickboxing on the prow.
Of course, Georgia’s leg pressed up against his might have had something to do with his resolve. Sometime in the past thirty minutes, she’d scooted close enough that the entire length of her thigh, warm and unyielding, touched his. He was too much a man—and too much aware of what that leg looked like in the flesh—not to feel each movement she made as an ache deep in his groin.
“How long have you been married?” he asked Adam. It was a poor attempt at diverting his attention from his contemplation of Georgia’s thighs, but at least he got the conversation going again.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but ten years.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Adam said thinly. From the contortion on his face, you’d think he never displayed gratitude before.
“He and Nancy were high school sweethearts,” Georgia put in. “We love her. She’s fantastic.”
“She is, isn’t she?”
“Much too fantastic for you.” Georgia turned to Monty with a wide smile, dazzling him with how assured it was. “It was lucky for all of us that Adam got to her before she realized how much better she could have done for herself. We consider
their marriage one of the most successful portrayals of Stockholm Syndrome in existence.”
“Ha-ha. Very funny. I’ll have you know the women at the firm consider me quite a catch.”
“Only if you count the chub they chop up and use as bait.”
“Look who’s talking. At least I found a woman willing to marry me. You’re the one who can’t interest a man for more than twenty-four hours before he decides he’d rather upgrade to his hand.”
A stunned silence fell over the table. Monty would have been hard-pressed to say who was horrified the most by Adam’s comment, but he suspected it was himself. He was the one who saw the flash of pain cross Georgia’s face before she quickly snuffed it out. He was the one who felt how rigid her leg grew against his, every muscle in her body contracting at once. And he was the one who felt an almost overpowering urge to reach across the table and throttle the bastard she called brother.
“Oh, fuck. Georgia—I’m sorry. That came out wrong. I didn’t mean it.”
“I know,” she said brightly. Too brightly, her speech almost brittle as she struggled to keep it from shattering. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. It was a shitty thing to say.”
“Shitty, but true.” Georgia wished she could unlock her arms enough to reach across the table and take the hand Adam held out to her in a gesture of apology, but every bit of her concentration was taken up in not falling apart in front of Monty.
For a few minutes there, she’d felt an almost giddy rush at how well the evening was going. She was witty, Monty was charming, and he hadn’t run away at the first opportunity to afford itself. He’d even touched her, playing his foot against hers in what she could have sworn was a deliberate motion while her brother scowled at them from across the table.
But of course reality intruded—it always did, and she refused to be anything but grateful for it. Georgia wasn’t built for romance and affection. She wasn’t the sort of woman who married the love of her life and floated into a blissful happily ever after.
The sooner she accepted that truth, the better it would be for everyone at this table.
She lifted a shaking hand, hoping she could make it to Adam’s without breaking down.
“I once got dumped by a girlfriend who announced she’d rather spend the holiday weekend among department store mannequins than with me.”
Georgia swiveled her head to stare at the man next to her. So did Adam, the pair of them gaping in openmouthed wonder as Monty tore at the damp label on his untouched bottle of beer.
“Another woman I took on a few dates admitted she only went out with me as a way to get to my brother.”
“I don’t think that’s—”
Monty met Adam’s eyes across the table, locking him in place. “That actually happened more than once, though I didn’t find out about the other times until a few months after the fact. Usually because a tabloid reported seeing them together.”
“I don’t see how—”
“I know you don’t,” Monty said with that somber firmness of his. “But I doubt anyone who’s been with his wife since high school realizes how difficult it is to find someone, whether it’s for twenty-four hours or twenty-four years. You’ll have to forgive me for thinking your opinion on the matter is one hundred percent irrelevant.”
Georgia couldn’t tell if she felt a stronger compulsion to laugh or to cry. Adam’s natural response to being verbally smacked down—and by a man like John Montgomery—was to puff up like a gorilla and start thumping his chest, and she could tell that was exactly what he wanted to do.
But he couldn’t. Not without shoving his foot any further inside his mouth than it already was.
She could have kissed Monty. She almost did. But before she could do much more than wonder what could have compelled him to make a romantic confession like that in public, Adam was rising to his feet, his movements jerky.
“I should be getting home to my family,” he said, his face red.
Personal experience told her that the bluster in his voice was due primarily to shame—there was no doubt in her mind he was sorry for what he’d said—but it probably looked more like anger to a man like Monty.
Monty didn’t let it derail him. In a single, well-practiced move, he also stood, his hand outstretched. “It was nice to meet you, Adam,” he said, his words formal and polite. “As strange as it sounds, I enjoyed your company on the roof today—and I can promise you I won’t forget what we talked about.”
“Good. Because despite what happened just now, it still stands. It will never not stand.”
And like that, it was over. No more standoff. No more belligerence. Adam was actually dropping a twenty dollar bill on the table to cover his share of the tab.
“Wait—you’re paying for your own drinks?” Georgia could handle the rest—the insult, the humiliation, the vaguely offensive way she wasn’t being included in their manly goodbyes—but the day Adam willingly parted with cash was the day she started scanning the skies for four shiny white horses. “What just happened here? What’d I miss?”
“Ha-ha, Georgia.” Adam leaned in and dropped a brotherly kiss on her forehead. It was the same way she’d seen him tuck her nieces Abby and Emma in at night, and she felt a surge of affection for him despite the situation. He tried so hard to take care of them all, even if he didn’t always succeed at it. “Have a good night. I’ll see you at family dinner on Wednesday.”
“I know you didn’t mean it,” she said, since it seemed like her turn for a peace offering. “Thanks for helping out today.”
“Anytime,” he said gruffly, but he didn’t meet her eye as he headed for the door.
* * *
There were a thousand things Georgia wanted to ask Monty after Adam finally left—about his dating past, about his relationship with his brother, about why he was being so persistently nice to her—but once they were alone together she settled for “How the hell did you do that?”
“How did I do what?” he asked, not the least put off by her swearing. She appreciated how even though he was so patently a gentleman, he didn’t seem to care that she was no lady. Ladylike behavior was as much an enigma to her as a pushup bra.
“How did you get rid of him so easily? No one can handle Adam when he’s in a mood like that—not even Nancy. He actually spends quite a bit of time sleeping in the garage, if you want the truth.”
Monty chuckled, but didn’t make a move to divulge any of his secrets.
“I’m serious. When Adam gets into his overprotective mode, he could scare away the pope. I’ve never known anyone to get him to walk away like that when he’s itching for a fight. Here—arm wrestle me.”
“What?” He dropped his hands under the table before she could get a grip on him. “I’m not arm wrestling you. What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to do with everything.” She reached under the table and grabbed his hand, but she couldn’t move it to the top of the table. There was a power to him—a tenacity—she was coming to appreciate.
That wasn’t all she was appreciating. The texture of his skin was that perfect combination of rough and soft, and even though she was trying her serious best to out-muscle him, her only result was the hot press of his palm against hers. He was that strong.
“Come on. I want to see if you can beat me.”
His hand moved to the tabletop, taking hers with it, but instead of propping their elbows so they could enjoy a quick competition, he held her fingers firmly entwined in his own. Oh, dear God. He was holding her hand. By force.
“What are you doing?” she asked, staring at where their hands met.
“If I confess something, will you promise not to hit me over the head with your beer bottle?”
“It’s actually a lot harder to break a bottle that way than y
ou think,” she said, her voice thick. He was still force-holding her hand. How could she think straight if he was still force-holding her hand? “The bottles are manufactured more compactly than they used to be. It’s so companies can make you think you’re getting more beer than you actually are.”
Monty’s lips lifted in a half smile. “Alcohol distributors are part of the mass conspiracy?”
“Who better to gain people’s trust? Polls show that people put more trust in their local breweries than they do their politicians. If I had plans to take over the world, I know where I’d start.”
“If you had plans to take over the world, I have no doubt you’d have accomplished it by now.” His smile lingered. “It’s better for all of us that your ambitions run to more altruistic channels.”
Monty’s compliments—if that was what they were—had a way of yanking the ground out from under her feet. If he’d have called her beautiful or darling or, God forbid, feisty, she’d have known in a second he was lying. But like comparing her to her brothers, altruistic was a sneaky one to slip in there, and the idea that she could take over the world pandered to her vanity in ways he couldn’t possibly understand.
“I won’t hit you over the head no matter how strong the provocation,” she promised. “I think I might owe you one for getting rid of Adam anyway.”
“I’m afraid the provocation might be stronger than you think.” He didn’t look up when he spoke, busy instead running his fingertip over the jagged edges of her nails. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to slice himself open. “This isn’t easy for me to say, but I want you to know I’ve been giving your problem some thought.”
She swallowed. “My problem?”
“Yes. Your problem.”
The doors were wide open for interpretation. There were so many problems in her life that he could have been talking about anything. Her ungainly appearance and pathetic income level. Being almost thirty and still living at home. The fact that every week, she fell a little bit more behind in her building schedule.
Because I Can (Montgomery Manor) Page 10