by Zara Chase
She glowered at him. “What do you take me for?”
“Sorry. What’s this image thing then?”
“Pictures,” she said, grinning. “Pictures of the two of you working on the renovations, dealing with paperwork, interviewing staff for the hotel, dressed up for the evening, relaxing—”
“Relaxing?” Josh quirked a brow. “We don’t do relaxing.”
“You do for my photo shoot.”
“Oh no, not a photographer spying on us day in and day out as well.” Josh threw his head back and glowered at the ceiling. “How the hell are we supposed to get anything done when we’re in the spotlight all the time?”
“You’ll probably get things done more easily. If suppliers and the workforce know they’re being publicly judged, they’ll get with the program.” She paused. “And as for the photographs, this is your lucky day, because photography just happens to be a hobby of mine.”
Rex guffawed. “A lady of many talents.”
“I like to think so.” She stood up and gave them the once-over. They were both dressed in ancient jeans and work boots. “It looks as though you intended to do a spot of work yourselves this morning.”
“The bar,” Josh said. “The old timber we needed to make it authentic turned up late. If I don’t help out, they’ll fall behind.”
“Which means I get to help, too,” Rex said amiably. “Lucky me.”
“I’ll go get my camera,” she said, heading for the door. “See you in there in five minutes.”
Ellie ran up to her room, not giving them the opportunity to object, full of excitement about the project. She just knew it would work. What woman in her right mind wouldn’t want a piece of either of these two? Josh was moody and operated on a short fuse, which could be a problem. If he intended to run a successful public enterprise, she’d just have to make sure he kept that side of his personality under wraps when dealing with paying customers. She had no worries about Rex. He was good-looking, amiable, and obliging. Perhaps a little too obliging, she thought, remembering his habit of undressing her with his eyes. He was an inveterate flirt as well, which was a useful attribute in the present circumstances.
She struggled to get all her camera equipment downstairs in one go. When she entered the bar, she found it jam-packed with workers, Josh and Rex right in the middle of things. No one paid her much attention as she got herself set up. As she did so, Ellie took sidelong glances at Josh. He was handling an old piece of timber, presumably to be used as a strut above the bar.
Ellie knew nothing at all about wood, but even she could see that it was special. The smell of it filled her senses, and she could understand why someone would feel inspired to create beautiful things from such a precious resource. Josh ran his hands along the length of the wood, his gaze totally focused, the gesture almost sexual. Just for a moment she imagined his capable hands touching her body in a similar manner but quickly shook her head to dispel the image.
Josh dumped Annabel. He’s dangerous.
Ellie used the guys’ preoccupation to fire off a few quick shots of them at work—Josh as he lovingly planed his timber, Rex using his strength to hold up a heavy-looking beam whilst two men maneuvered it into place. She set up her tripod but quickly abandoned it, moving round the men in a half-crouched position, always looking for the best light, the best angle, the unposed, natural shots.
She didn’t notice a toolbox in her path and fell over it, crying out as she landed heavily on her butt.
“Ouch, that hurt!”
Josh dropped his timber and made a dive to save her. Too late. Everyone else stopped working as Ellie carefully assessed the damage. At least she’d had the presence of mind to keep a firm grip on her camera. Better a few bruises than the loss of expensive equipment.
“You okay?” Josh asked.
“I think so.” She gingerly lifted one buttock and gently rubbed it.
“Want some help with that?” Rex asked, grinning.
Josh extended a hand to help her up. She regretted taking it when his strong fingers closed round hers and he pulled her to her feet like she weighed nothing at all. An electric charge whipped through her bloodstream and went straight to her pussy. Damn it, she absolutely didn’t need to react to him like this!
“Thanks.” Ellie snatched her hand from his. “Look, it’s a bit hard for me to work with all this clutter about the place. Do you think we could get rid of some of it, and the men, just for half an hour whilst I get some more shots?”
“You said you wouldn’t intrude.”
“It won’t take long.”
“I guess they’re due for a break anyway.” Josh sighed. “Take thirty, guys,” he said.
“We were enjoying it here,” one of them said, winking at Ellie. She couldn’t help smiling right back at him.
“At last, we’ve discovered how to keep them focused,” Rex said as they left.
Josh scowled. “Yeah, only problem is, they weren’t focused on their work.”
“Carry on with what you were doing,” Ellie said, trying to sound authoritative, ignoring the churning in her gut when she realized she had these two alpha males at her mercy. “Don’t mind me.”
Josh shot her a look and returned his attention to his piece of wood. He picked up the sander, and the soft sound of the tool smoothing its surface was the only noise in the cavernous room, apart from Ellie’s shutter as she continued to fire off shots. Rex had opened a can of varnish and was applying a brush to the baseboard, apparently absorbed in the task. She captured him stretched full length on the floor in much the way that many of the women at the auction would most likely want to see him, except it would be them, not the baseboard, getting the treatment. Ellie completely got that part.
She paused to flick through the shots she’d taken so far. They were okay but not good enough. The camera loved them both—big surprise!—but something wasn’t right. What was it that was missing?
“Problem?”
She hadn’t realized that Josh had stopped planing his wood and was looking at her, a scowl marring his handsome features.
“Yes, this isn’t going to work.” She canted her head, looking at the two guys, trying to figure out what was wrong. It came to her in a flash. “I think I know what it is. Do you both mind, er…taking your tops off?”
“What!” Josh’s face grew forbidding. “You can’t be serious.”
“Never more so. Look.”
Both guys walked over to her, and she showed them the shots she’d taken so far. “They look okay to me,” Rex said. “That’s what we look like.”
“Yes, but you can look a hell of a lot better than that. We need sex appeal.” She dredged up a winsome smile. “Something tells me that bare chests will help a lot. You two appear as though you look after yourselves.”
“Do you know what the temperature is outside?” Josh asked.
“It’s warm enough in here.” She certainly thought so anyway.
Rex grinned, pulled his shirt over his head, and stood before her, giving her an up-close-and-personal view of his impressive torso.
“Okay?” he asked, winking at her.
“Er yes, great.” She gulped and then got back to work, taking a few experimental shots of him as he moved about the room in his worn, sculpted-on jeans. “Yes, that’s good. Just what we need.” She turned to Josh. “Not shy are you, big boy?”
With a frustrated growl he also pulled his top off but didn’t stop to pose for her. Just as well, really, because the bulging, flexing pecs, the washboard abs, and the tapered back now on display weren’t something a girl saw every day, and Ellie had a hard time hiding her appreciation. She might not like what he’d done to her girlfriend, but she could still appreciate a decent male body without it meaning anything, couldn’t she?
The dusting of blond, curly chest hair, those hard, taut muscles, the pure…well, sex appeal of this decadent Adonis took her breath away, and she couldn’t stop looking at him. She moistened her lips, trying hard not to st
are at the bulge in the front of his jeans, which, if she was any judge, was at least as impressive as his torso. Jesus, what the hell had she been thinking of when she asked them to strip off?
Josh cocked an ironic brow, like he could read her mind, and returned to his work without another word.
Ellie was now impossibly hot, in more ways than one. Her body was bathed in perspiration, her pussy leaked like there was no today—hell, that should be no tomorrow—and her nipples were so taut they were painful. She pulled her sweatshirt over her head and, wearing just the thin vest she had on beneath it, continued to snap away. It wasn’t until she caught Josh staring at her with sardonic amusement that it dawned on her the material of her vest was very thin. Her rock-hard nipples must be clearly visible to him, and, arrogant sod, he probably thought he was responsible for the state of them. He was, but that was hardly the point.
“Oh shit!” she muttered beneath her breath.
Wondering what to do next, her situation worsened when the foreman put his head round the door.
“Sorry to interrupt, but you’re needed on the phone, Rex.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there.”
He wandered from the room, still bare-chested and, unlike Ellie, totally un-self-conscious. Ellie grinned. The female employees already working at the Lodge were in for a treat.
“Got what you need?” Josh asked, breaking the brittle silence when the door closed behind Rex and Ellie continued to snap away.
“I think so. I’ll print them up and see how they look.”
“You don’t sound too sure.”
“I’m a perfectionist. My photography’s good, but perhaps we need a professional to bring out the best in you both.”
“I doubt that. We’re comfortable around you.”
Unlike me! “Professionals make their subjects comfortable.”
“I’m not stripping off for anyone else. If you want pictures of me half-dressed, then you’ll have to take them yourself.”
Ellie didn’t push him. “Talk me through your connections with Spirit,” she said, seating herself on a stool and putting her camera aside. She flapped a hand when he made to object. “I know you don’t want your origins shouted about, but I need to know for background purposes. How did you get to be so tight with Rex?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you, but this is not for public consumption unless I say otherwise.”
“Got it.”
“I guess you’ve already heard rumors, so I might as well tell you they’re true,” he said with a heavy sigh. “My dad was the town drunk.”
“That must have been hard to live with.”
“Lady, you have no idea. Whenever he’d had one too many, which was most of the time, he took his belt to me for no reason whatsoever.”
Ellie felt the first stirrings of sympathy for this complex, not entirely civilized, compelling, coercive male. The same male who’d done the dirty on her best friend, she reminded herself. Annabel’s warnings about how charming he could be when it suited him rang loud in her ears, and she was determined not to be taken in by him.
“What did your mom do to protect you?”
“What could she do?” Josh shrugged a little too casually. “Like all bullies, he’d allied himself to a woman who was too cowed to stand up for herself. Besides, I realized as I got older that if he couldn’t take his anger out on me, then she was the one in the firing line.”
“So you were protecting your mom when you were still a kid and it ought to have been the other way round?”
“You cold?” he asked, dropping his voice to a seductive purr and nodding toward her nipples.
Ellie was furious when she felt color invade her cheeks. “This isn’t about me.”
“We need to get to know each other if we’re gonna work together. You just said that yourself.”
He smiled then, a blistering, full-wattage smile that definitely reached his eyes and her pussy simultaneously. Damn it, he was hot! And so was she. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Ellie straightened her spine, inadvertently pushing her tits further forward. She was a consummate professional and would act as such, no matter what he did to provoke her.
“No, Josh, we don’t,” she said, dredging up a firm tone and ignoring the strange sensations spiraling through her body as he looked at her through lazy, come-to-bed eyes. “I need to know about you and Rex, get a feel for why you’re so driven to take on the Lodge and the risks that come with such a massive investment, so I can do the job you pay me for. That doesn’t give you the right to delve into my personal life.”
“Have it your way,” he said, with an annoyingly superior smile that made her want to clout him, or fall into his arm, or…Hell, don’t go there! “Long story short. I didn’t enjoy being the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, the butt of everyone’s jokes.”
“You were bullied?”
“Nah, that wouldn’t have been so bad. Some kids tried to use their fists on me on my first day at high school, but when you grow up defending yourself from a drunken adult, you learn how to protect yourself pretty damned quick. I beat the ringleader senseless, and after that the others left me alone.” He paused. “And I mean left me alone. They excluded me from everything and pretended I didn’t exist.”
“I’m sorry,” Ellie said, forgetting for a moment that she must never let her guard down in front of him.
He stared off into the distance. “It hurt, but I survived. And not everyone was mean. Rex was a couple of years behind me. He came from a good family, but, for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom, he befriended me. I hung out a lot at his place, so I got to see how a proper family interacted. There were a few others like that—Jake and Cal Martin to name two—but they’re in the minority.” He shrugged. “You know how kids can be.”
“How did you get to be so successful so young?”
“I graduated high school and went right out to work.”
“Just like that.” She shook her head, not believing it could be that easy. “Where was your father by then?”
“Dead.”
He said the one word emphatically, making it apparent that he wasn’t prepared to elucidate.
“And your mother?” she asked.
“Same.”
“Okay.” Ellie drew in a long, slow breath. “Tell me about your first job.”
“I started working when I was still at school. Running errands, delivering papers, anything that would pay. I’d seen how my parents lived from hand to mouth. Anything my father did manage to earn was spent in the local bar before he even got home. I decided I wanted better than that, so I worked for it. My teachers said I had a good brain and wanted me to go on to college, but I didn’t have time for that. I worked long hours, hid the money away where my father wouldn’t find it, and plotted my way out of my miserable situation.”
Ellie was impressed by the fierce determination glistening in his intelligent eyes. “You worked with wood?”
“Yes, there’s a guy on the other side of town that runs a small construction company. He took me on because I was prepared to work cheap and trained me up. One of the first jobs I was let loose on was in a chalet owned by a multimillionaire over in Vail. He was a stockbroker, played the markets, and I asked him questions about what he did. He actually took the time to explain it all to me and advised me on a few safe investment opportunities. I used some of my secret stash, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“And so now you still play the markets but are into construction in your own right?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“And Rex?”
“He went off to college and we lost touch for a while. When he graduated he went to work on Wall Street but hated it. He tracked me down five years ago and put a construction proposition to me. I borrowed my share, and we made a success of it. I repaid my loan, had profit left to reinvest, and we’ve been buddied up ever since.”
“How much money have you put into the Lodge?” she asked.
> “Just about everything I have that’s not tied up elsewhere.” Ellie said nothing, waiting for him to be more precise. “Three million bucks,” he said shortly.
Ellie nodded. She’d guessed as much. “And Rex has done the same.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Who can say? He knows I have this burning need to put my childhood behind me and prove some sort of obscure point to myself. It seems petty when put into words, but it’s just something I felt I had to do. I was gonna borrow what I needed to make the purchase, but Rex insisted upon becoming involved.” Josh grinned. “Unlike me, he can afford to take the loss if it tanks.”
Ellie was so caught up in Josh’s blatantly honest revelations that she didn’t realize he’d stood up and was looming over her. He was bare-chested, his eyes glistening with fiery resolve. She felt the first stirrings of alarm. He had something on his mind that was nothing to do with his past, and she didn’t trust herself to remain immune to his charm when he looked at her with such single-minded determination.
“What is it?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“You.”
He pulled her into his arms so fast that she had no time to react. Liquid heat coursed through her as her body collided with the hard planes of his chest. His arms closed about her waist, squashing her breasts against him almost painfully, whilst an impressive erection ground against her stomach.
“Don’t, you can’t—”
But, arrogant beast that he was, it appeared that he could, and he did. He lowered his head, his eyes swirling with murky passion as he claimed her lips in a sensuous kiss. His lips roved over hers, more tempting than they had any right to be, and Ellie simply couldn’t hold out. She hadn’t been with a man for months, and her feminine needs, the intoxicating realization that she’d attracted this glamorous man pushed everything else out of her mind. Her arms slipped round his neck and she capitulated with a soft sigh, parting her lips beneath his and offering his tongue ingress to her mouth. He didn’t hesitate to take advantage, plundering her mouth with heart-stopping precision. Did he realize just how turned on she was, simply from a kiss?