by Emily Bishop
He eyed my huddled position around the box, making me painfully aware of how ridiculous I must look. He didn’t say anything but the upward curve of his lips spoke volumes.
My face burned bright red with embarrassment, and I turned my head away from him, hoping he hadn’t seen it. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me blush.
I expected him to approach me, but the sound of his footsteps on the creaky floor told me he’d gone down another aisle. I let out a deep, relieved breath. But that relief was quickly followed by irritation.
Can’t he take a hint? It wasn’t even really a hint. I’d asked him point blank to get out of the store, yet here he was again.
The infuriatingly hot stranger was back for a second round, apparently. I was still bristling from our last encounter and frustrated because I still hadn’t remembered to buy batteries.
And, of course, he had to walk in at the worst time. I looked like I hadn’t showered in days, and I was crouched in the most inelegant position possible. Not that I even cared what the cocky stranger thought of me. But if I had to face him again, it would have been nice to do so with a modicum of grace.
It didn’t help that Drew had been ribbing me about the guy all week and blaming my moodiness on a combination of being horny and PMSing. I wasn’t even PMSing. I had been rolling my eyes and telling him off about it but it only encouraged him.
Men. Even the ones of the friend variety were impossible sometimes.
I ignored the guy and focused instead on somehow getting the box onto the shelf with looking even clumsier.
Hopefully, Drew would be back before the guy finished picking up whatever it was that he needed, and I wouldn’t have to do the checkout.
The guy didn’t approach me, so I gave him a chance to do his shopping. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t still on edge. As much as I was trying to concentrate on tipping the box onto the shelf that was just beyond reach, I was supremely aware of the guy’s presence on the other end of the aisle.
I leaned onto my tippy toes, guiding the corner of the box onto the shelf and breathing a premature sigh of relief when I thought that I had gotten it secure enough to slide forward. But the box came crashing to the floor when I shifted forward and lost my balance.
The box landed with a thud and sent a puff of dust into the air inches away from where I landed flat on my ass. A burst of pain shot up my spine at the impact, but I stretched gingerly and concluded that, at worst, I would have a bruise on my ass.
My ego, on the other hand, suffered an irreparable blow.
Forest green eyes appeared in my line of sight. A small line marred the skin between his brows as he reached a hand out to me, concern clear in his eyes.
“Are you okay?” he asked, dropping to his haunches beside me.
“I’m fine. I just miscalculated.” I brushed away the hand he had extended to me and huffed to my feet, wincing at the pain in my butt.
Both the literal and figurative pains in my butt. Hah.
I reached for the offending box, determined to make it, and the stupid high shelves, my bitches.
Having turned my back on him almost immediately, I didn’t notice him move to take the box from me. One second, I was straining toward the shelf, and the next, I was holding nothing but air, and he was effortlessly sliding the box into place.
“I’ve got this,” I said, with less force than I’d hoped.
I was suddenly breathless. The cocky stranger was right behind me. So close I could feel the heat of him radiating against mine. Every nerve ending in my body lit up like Christmas lights, feeling ultrasensitive.
His warm breath tickled my neck, sending a shiver through me. I shut my eyes tightly and tried to ignore the feelings igniting inside me. I turned around to snap at him but when I did, our eyes locked. An electric charge crackled between us, and my heart beat violently in my chest.
I took a deep, shaky breath. “I’m not some damsel in distress.”
And I build boats, too, I wanted to tell him. Probably better than he did. And I’d probably been doing it for longer than he had but I bit my tongue. That fun little tidbit probably wouldn’t earn me any respect from him at that point, and I refused to seek it from him anyway.
“I never said that you were a damsel in distress.” He blinked, confused by my outburst. “I was just trying to help.”
“Don’t,” I told him. “This my job. I do this every week.”
He stepped back, gesturing to the pile of boxes still littering the floor. His message was crystal clear: Have at it, then.
He watched me wrestle with the next box, struggling to get a good grip on the thing. Amusement lit up his eyes. He crossed his arms and leaned against the shelving but he seemed braced to uncoil and catch the box at the slightest hint of trouble.
“You enjoying this?” I grunted, lifting the box to the lowest shelf to help get a better grip on it.
“Enjoying watching you struggle when I could’ve had all the boxes stocked already?” His tone was teasing but his eyes were watching the box cautiously. “Nah, not my thing.”
Then what is your thing? I nearly asked, then caught myself.
No, Fiona, don’t even go there. Unfortunately, my momentary lapse of concentration was enough for the box to slip from fingers. It would’ve gone crashing, too, if the man hadn’t suddenly appeared at my side and caught it.
He held it as if it weighed nothing and didn’t break eye contact with me as he lifted it and slid it into place next to the first one.
I moaned in frustration. “What are you even doing back here?”
He took a step back, and I turned to look at him. The corners of his mouth curled upward into a smug smile. A very sexy but very smug smile.
“Keeping you from being crushed by insulation, apparently,” he said. “The original plan, however, was to pick up some extra boards for my Nymph.”
“Yeah, well. Get to it then.” I gestured him to the place he had been hovering when he’d first come in that morning.
“Thanks, I think I will.” Instead of moving away from me, he bent and picked up the next box, placing it on the shelf before I could object.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I gritted out.
“Freeing up your time to come tell me that the equipment that I’m choosing is wrong,” he said, with an air of finality to his tone. Then he turned his back to deal with the remainder of the boxes.
Fine. I would let him hurt his back then. Although, I had to admit that it was a mighty fine back. I hadn’t let myself openly ogle him, apart from those first few seconds after he’d stepped into the store and caught me staring. But with his back turned, I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity to do just that. It would be a downright sin not to take it.
His shirt stretched over his broad shoulders, and a tiny strip of skin exposed itself each time that he reached up to the shelf. It was tanned and golden and smooth, just like his arms. He had gotten some color since he’d first come to town, and it suited him.
I had been too irritated with him to let my mind fully appreciate him properly before, even if he had been in my dreams. The overall effect of him, now that I allowed myself to take it in, was mind-boggling.
My traitorous body reacted to his, even though my mind was screaming in dismay. He thought he could do my job better than I could? It was confusing as all hell. My mind and my body were in such conflict about him.
The roped muscles of his arms bunched and rippled when he lifted the boxes without seeming to take any strain whatsoever. He made quick work of the four remaining boxes and looked at me over his shoulder with satisfaction.
I sighed, shaking my head at him. “I’m not going to thank you, you know. I could’ve done it myself.”
“I know, but there are a lot of things you can do for yourself that you don’t have to, if you have a man around.” Mischief glinted in his eyes while I rolled mine.
“You’re incorrigible.”
A deep laugh rum
bled from his stomach, and he stared at me incredulously, shaking his head.
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before,” he said.
“No? Probably because the women you hang around with don’t know the meaning of the word,” I said, my voice deadpan.
He laughed again and clutched a hand mockingly to his chest. “Ouch, shots fired. You wound me.”
“I doubt anything could wound you.”
“Not true. You just did.” He smirked and followed me down the aisle to where he had been gathering his equipment earlier.
I eyed the items he had placed in his cart, not bothering to tell him that he had chosen wrong. Again. It wasn’t like he was going to listen to me.
“What do you think?” he asked, holding out two different kinds of bolts.
I pointed to one and his eyes crinkled as he dropped the other in his cart.
“Why do you even ask for my opinion if you’re just going to intentionally choose the opposite?” I asked, running my hand through my loose hair in agitation.
He was a customer, so I shouldn’t be outright rude to him, even if I had chased him out of the store. But he seemed hellbent on rubbing me the wrong way.
His eyes darkened for a fraction of a second as they fell to my chest. I’d inadvertently exposed my bare shoulder when I’d lifted my arm to run my hand through my hair. I tugged my sleeve back up and dropped my arm to my side. He focused his attention on the shelf beside us.
“I’m not intentionally choosing the opposite,” he said after a beat. “You and I just seem to have opposite ideas of what the right equipment is.”
“No kidding,” I said under my breath when he made yet another wrong choice and placed it carefully in his cart. “What else do you need?”
“I still need the boards, though I doubt you’re going to agree with the kind that I had in mind.” There was a silent challenge in his eyes but he left it there and followed me to where the boards were.
“Undoubtedly,” I agreed.
“Well, at least we agree on that. Shocking, right?”
I cracked a smile despite myself. “Yeah, at least we’ll always agree that I don’t agree with your choices.”
“It’s not Paris, but hey, it’s something.” His pop culture reference surprised me.
“You’ve seen Casablanca?” I asked, wondering if I’d misheard him. He did not seem like the type who watched classic romantic movies, but then again, I wasn’t either.
“Yeah, but ‘We’ll always have Paris’ was also the name of an episode of Star Trek,” he answered easily.
“Well, what do you know?” He also didn’t strike me as a Trekkie. “Are you a fan?”
“Of Casablanca or Star Trek?” he asked.
“Either. Both.”
A grin tickled at his lips. “Yeah. Both. You?” He reached for a board and flipped it between his palms, examining the grain of the wood before returning it to the shelf.
“Casablanca is all right.” Casablanca had been Mom’s favorite movie, but he didn’t need to know that. “And I’ve seen a few episodes of Star Trek.”
“Well, what do you know?” He repeated my earlier words back to me. “Now we’ve got that in common, too.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes and noticed that he was loading up on boards that I would never even have considered. They were the wrong size, but I didn’t point that out to him.
“You all set?” I asked once he turned back to me.
He smirked, noticing my inspection of the contents of his cart. “Yeah, all set.”
I rang up his purchases and couldn’t help but watch him leave, wrong-sized boards and all.
Chapter Four
Shane
I loaded up my truck and got distracted by the smell of coffee wafting from the diner next to the hardware store. I thought that I deserved a scotch after having gone another round with the girl next door, but coffee would do, too.
Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out the chick from the hardware store. Apparently, being a gentleman and trying to help her out was a mortal sin in her eyes.
It figured that the one time I tried to be a gentleman, the girl would take offense and decide that it was because I thought she couldn’t do it herself.
Truth be told, I wasn’t sure that she could. But I hadn’t said anything. Those boxes were heavy, and the shelf was way beyond her reach.
My phone buzzed just as I placed my order. Bart’s name blinked on my display. I paid quickly and slid into a booth that offered some privacy.
“Bart, give me good news, man,” I answered.
“An update okay instead?” he asked, sounding flustered.
“Sure thing. Shoot.” My stomach was tied in knots about the explosion, and it killed me that the best thing I could do under the circumstances was to take a step back.
“The EPA is running a full investigation, Shane. The preliminary wasn’t conclusive.” He didn’t offer a reason about why the preliminary had been inconclusive.
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “They need more information to wrap it up, I guess.”
“Okay,” I agreed. I had to trust my right-hand man. He would tell me if there was anything else that I needed to know, even if my gut was telling me something different. “What’s happening on your side right now?”
“They’re interviewing employees at the moment,” Bart told me. “The board will be next, so watch your phone.”
“And then?”
“They’ll interview maintenance people and suppliers, I would imagine.” He sighed.
“What have they found so far?” Bile was rising in my throat as I asked. My lawyers were not painting a happy picture in the event that Perkins Enterprises was found to be at fault.
Burrows was quiet again. “Not much from what I can discern.”
“From what you can discern?” I asked incredulously. “This is our fucking future, Bart.”
I whispered the last part but no one was paying attention to me anyway.
“I get that,” he snapped. “I can’t tell you more than what I know.”
“And this is really all you know?” I knew that I had to trust him, but there was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I trusted Bart with everything that I had in me, yet it felt like something was off.
Even so, I had to distance myself. At least for the course of the investigation. It had been my decision to do it, and I followed through on my decisions. If there was something that he wasn’t telling me, it was for a good reason.
I trusted less than a handful of people who had ever been born. One of them was my mother, who had passed away a long time ago. Bart was another. He had been with the company for so long that I couldn’t imagine not trusting him. I had been skeptical of him at first, but he had never steered me wrong.
Swallowing my misgivings, despite my better judgment, I tried to listen objectively to his answer. “Yes, Shane. It’s really all I know.”
Trust him, I chided myself. “What are we looking at, if worse comes to worst?”
“Worse isn’t going to come to worst,” he assured me.
“Don’t try to handle me, Burrows. Your hands aren’t big enough.” His tone didn’t sit right with me. “I’m not your boss’ fucking son anymore. I am your goddamn boss.”
Most of my employees respected the hell out me, but some of the old- timers had to be reminded from time to time.
“I know that,” Bart seethed quietly.
I inhaled a deep breath, trying to control the sudden urge to fly home to Houston and take control of the situation myself. My voice changed when I spoke again, the command of a man in control and who had been raised to be ringing clearly. “Then level with me.”
“If worse comes to worst, there could be penalties,” he said.
“Penalties? How much? Is there a statutory cap?”
“Millions,” he breathed, as if it pained him to say.
I made quick calculations i
n my head. “We can withstand that.”
“Not the kind of millions we’re possibly looking at.” Getting straight answers from him today was like pulling teeth from a goddamn chicken.
“So, not only millions then?” I queried.
“It depends, Shane.”
I controlled the ball of rage in my stomach. “I told you to level with me, Burrows. You’re my fucking employee, even if you are the president. I’m keeping out of this. I haven’t spoken to the lawyers since I left because I thought it was the best for the company. But if you won’t fucking level with me, guess who my next call’s going to be?”
“Shane.”
“I’m not kidding, Bart,” I growled into my phone.
“Not millions, no. Billions possibly,” he finally admitted.
“What do the auditors say?”
“No projections we can share yet,” he answered.
I breathed hard. I wasn’t quite sure why he couldn’t share them with the fucking CEO of the company, but I reminded myself once again that distance was what was best. “So, massive motherfucking penalties, is that it? Are we facing anything else?”
He paused. “Possible criminal sanctions.”
“Criminal sanctions? You’re only telling me this now?” The vein in my head threatened to explode.
Bart’s simple answer nearly gave me an aneurysm. “You only asked now.”
“I only...” I inhaled, the edges of my vision red. “I only asked now? Is that honestly the best you’ve got?”
I cut Bart off as soon as he started talking. “Fuck distance, I’m coming home. I’m calling Eric in five. Have the board assembled by tomorrow morning.”
“No! No, Shane,” Bart jumped in. “That would be a mistake at this point. All the board members have already given public statements about how proud they are of you for fully immersing yourself in an internal investigation, and they will repeat that in their interviews with the EPA. You’re better off staying where you are.”
Something tugged at my gut. “Should I be concerned about this investigation?”
“No. Absolutely not, Shane.” Bart’s usual confidence and bolster was back in his tone. “I’ve got everything under control on this end. You keep sending over whatever you can find and relax.”