The concern in his voice nearly did her in. Where was this guy earlier today?
Brooklyn swallowed and nodded. “I will. Thank you,” she said again.
Neither spoke as they continued along the sidewalk. An inkling of fall teased the air, the humidity of the summer barely noticeable in the crisp evening breeze. Leaves littered the ground, short piles collecting against the curb. The urge to make excuses for tonight remained, but she would see it through, if only to prove to Reid that she really would be okay without his playing bodyguard.
They were still several yards from her car when she unlocked her door with her key fob. As usual, Reid walked ahead of her, opened her car door and waited for her to get in.
“Thank you,” Brooklyn muttered. It was the phrase of the hour.
Instead of closing the door, he draped his arm over the rim and dipped his head. “Do you know how to get to the bar?”
Brooklyn held up her phone. “I looked it up before I left the trailer.”
He nodded. “See you there.”
With that, he closed the door and crossed the street to where he’d parked his truck. There’d been a service of some kind at the church in the next block, so most of the parking spots along the street had been occupied this morning.
Brooklyn clutched her steering wheel and lowered her head against it. She was so friggin’ confused when it came to that man. One minute it seemed as if he would give up both thumbs to have anyone but her as Holmes Construction’s new site coordinator, and in the next he’s offering to play her knight in shining armor against drunken, ass-grabbing construction workers. He needed to pick a damn role. Either he was her enemy or he was her friend.
By the time she arrived at Pal’s Lounge there were at least a dozen of Holmes Construction’s crew taking up several of the small, round tables.
“Hey, Brooklyn. Over here!” She looked left and found Anthony straddling a chair at a table occupied by three others who worked in General Labor.
“It’s Wonder Woman.” This from one of the guys whose name Brooklyn had yet to learn.
She rolled her eyes at the nickname they’d started to call her. She’d worn T-shirts featuring five different comic book heroes this week: Green Lantern, Iron Man, Captain America, Wonder Woman and The Flash. Of course, it was Wonder Woman that stuck out to them. Gender stereotyping was a son of a bitch.
“Let me be the first to buy you a beer,” Anthony said, motioning for her to take the chair he’d just vacated as he dragged another from a nearby table. “It’s the least I can do after you saved my ass this week.”
“And how exactly did I save your ass?” Brooklyn asked, helping herself to a French fry from the basket in the middle of the table. “Wait, don’t tell me. The safety goggles,” she said.
He nodded. “And the tax forms.”
“That’s right! I forgot about that.”
While familiarizing herself with the personnel system, she’d noticed several important tax documents missing from Anthony’s file. He would have paid a ton in penalties and interest if Brooklyn hadn’t caught it. “I think you owe me two beers,” she told him.
Anthony threw his head back and laughed. He clearly didn’t realize she was serious.
Someone at the table brought up the big rivalry game between the Saints and Falcons in the Superdome this weekend, and Brooklyn was quickly reminded of why she usually had no interest in hanging out with construction workers outside of work. She couldn’t give a flying hockey puck about sports of any kind.
While the guys went on about quarterback passer ratings, Brooklyn scanned the room, mulling over just how long she would put herself through this before she feigned fatigue and went home. There was a brand new set of Copic watercolors with her name on it—literally, she’d had them personalized—and she was eager to break them in. She continued her perusal of the bar until her gaze connected with a set of intense brown eyes.
Reid sat two tables away, one arm draped over the back of his chair, the other resting on the scarred table. His palm wrapped around a bottle of beer. His expression unreadable. Brooklyn did her best to ignore the heady sense of awareness coasting across her skin with each second his intense gaze remained on her.
Reading people had never ranked high on her list of skills, but when it came to this particular person, she royally sucked at it.
Which Reid had walked into Pal’s Lounge tonight? Was it the one who’d listened with rapt attention the other day as she shared the procedures she’d implemented over the years in her dad’s business to help increase productivity? Was it the one who’d just walked her to her car less than a half hour ago, who claimed that looking out for her was actually a bullet point on his priority list? Or was it the guy who basically ignored her existence once they stepped foot outside that trailer?
And if he was the guy who ignored her whenever they were around their coworkers, why wasn’t he doing so now? Why were those deep brown eyes locked on her?
As if he’d heard the words echoing through her mind, his eyes widened, as if shocked to find himself staring, and he quickly brought his attention back to the guy next to him—Donte, she thought his name was—and assumed the role of the Reid who ignored her.
Well, at least she had her answer.
She could deal with the Reid who ignored her. In fact, she preferred the Reid who ignored her. At least with that Reid she knew what to expect.
Nothing at all.
* * *
Reid tightened his grip on the condensation-slicked longneck he’d been nursing for the past half hour—the only alcohol he planned to partake of tonight. He vowed to never put himself in the position he’d found himself in last weekend, being so inebriated he wasn’t even sure who he’d taken into his bed. The fact that a chill ran down his spine every time the door to Pal’s opened revealed just how much that episode with Vivian’s granddaughter had shaken him. He kept expecting her to walk through the door with her friends and start whaling on him.
A potential run-in with a past one-night stand wasn’t the only thing causing this weird, edgy feeling to claw at his skin tonight. Every time he heard that melodious laugh coming from the other table, an unnerving sensation that felt too much like jealousy washed over him.
Jealous? Me?
It had been so long since he’d even come close to being jealous over a woman that it had taken Reid a while to recognize the emotion for what it was. But damn if that wasn’t jealousy causing his palm to tighten on the beer bottle every time one of the other guys from the crew made Brooklyn laugh. He’d worked with these guys for years. Their jokes weren’t even that funny.
At the moment Brooklyn was the one causing the raucous laughs to erupt at the table as she told a story about a mishap she’d caused while trying to carry on her grandmother’s tradition of holding a fish fry for the work crew at LeBlanc & Sons during the Lenten season.
“You have to keep in mind that I was only sixteen,” she said. “And my cooking skills at the time consisted of heating up frozen chicken nuggets in the microwave. I dumped about four pounds of catfish in the fryer and half the cooking oil spilled over the sides and onto the propane burner.” She shook her head, her self-deprecating humor charming the pants off just about everyone in the bar. “I nearly burned poor Smitty’s eyelashes off.”
The guys damn near fell off their chairs with their laughs. Reid couldn’t help the grin that edged up the corners of his own lips. Having spent several hours with her in that trailer over the course of her first week on the job, he’d had ample opportunities to witness her sense of humor. The fact that it bothered him so much that others were now experiencing it would bug him for the rest of the night.
As he nursed his beer, Reid settled back in his chair and studied her. Brooklyn LeBlanc did not fit in with this group. She just didn’t. If he were basing it on looks alone, he’d have pegged her as a quirky preschool teacher, the kind all the kids talked about incessantly because she always came up with fun games and didn’
t pressure them to take naps. If he had encountered her on the street, never in a million years would Reid have once thought she’d spent over a decade working for a construction company.
Yet, to say she kicked ass at her job was the biggest understatement of the millennium. The improvements she’d made after just a week on the job were mind-boggling. Reid had made fun of all her charts when he first saw them on Tuesday. By this morning he found himself using her timeline to figure out how best to adjust his plumbers’ work schedules to fit around the work being done with the sinkhole.
And he wasn’t the only one. The head of each unit had praised the new charting system instituted at HCC. What would have taken hours of going around in circles to figure out who should go first, and which crew would need the most time to complete their work, had been done in about twenty minutes. Having everything laid out and color coordinated had made all the difference.
So, yeah, not only was she funny, easy to get along with, and the owner of an apparently endless supply of super hero T-shirts that pulled perfectly across her dream-worthy breasts, she was also on track to being the best site coordinator to ever work at Holmes Construction. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the resentment he’d felt over her taking Donte’s job had been superseded by an attraction Reid was still trying to come to grips with, and one he knew damn well he couldn’t act upon.
His fist tightened so hard around the bottle Reid was surprised it didn’t shatter in his hand.
His reluctance to even consider examining the magnetic pull he’d felt with each encounter he’d had with Brooklyn this week had nothing to do with loyalty to his friend. Once he’d acknowledged she was the better person for the job, Reid hadn’t given Donte a second thought. It was the promise he’d made to Alex that had him so damn conflicted. He’d promised to watch over her. Reid doubted the watching he’d found himself doing this week was what his cousin had in mind.
His directive from Alex also played into this unnerving, unfamiliar urge to pummel so many of the men he usually called his friends. For the better part of an hour, every time one of them even hinted at something that even seemed like flirting, his blood started to boil. An old D’Angelo song from the late ’90s came on and Jarvis Collins tried to coax Brooklyn into dancing. It took every ounce of restraint Reid possessed not to launch himself across the table and choke the living daylights out of the little shit.
And that’s when he realized he had a problem.
His orders from Alex did not extend beyond the worksite. He had no say in who Brooklyn danced or flirted with on her own time. The rational part of his brain knew this. It was this other part—the part that selfishly believed Brooklyn’s teasing smile and dry sense of humor was reserved for those times when they found themselves in the trailer back at the job site—that had Reid ready to climb the walls.
He had to get a handle on this, which would require ignoring the irrational part of his brain. It was the only way he would make it through the next hour.
Another five minutes passed with Jarvis making yet another corny ass attempt at flirting, and Reid decided removing himself from the situation was the best game plan. He didn’t want to have to explain to Alex that he was down one laborer because Reid couldn’t stop himself from knocking the guy’s teeth down his throat.
He pushed away from the table and walked past the occupied high-backed barstools on his way to the bathroom. Notorious for the vintage photos from Playboy Magazines from the ’60s and ’70s that plastered the walls, the men’s room at Pal’s could usually take his mind off just about anything. Not tonight. Reid’s brain hardly registered the naked starlets on the walls.
He braced his palms against the porcelain sink and stared at the face reflecting back at him in the mirror. It was the same face he’d been staring at for years, so why did he all of a sudden feel like a stranger residing in his own skin? Why in the hell was he so conflicted about every damn thing these days?
“Shit,” Reid released on a frustrated breath.
Between leaving Holmes Construction to join Anthony with this new business, questioning whether he was capable of coming up with a theme for the kickoff party for his mom’s foundation, and navigating these feelings for a woman who, just a week ago, he wouldn’t have even considered his type, Reid couldn’t decide which had him more discombobulated. What happened to those days when his most pressing worry was whether or not to have Chinese food or pizza delivered for dinner? Why couldn’t he go back to that lifestyle?
“Because you can’t,” Reid said to his reflection.
He’d made a promise to Anthony a long time ago that they would eventually go into business together. He’d made a promise to his siblings that he would take this business with his mom’s foundation seriously. And he’d made a promise to himself that he was done being the guy who woke up to strange women in his bed.
Did that mean he should be making room in his bed for Brooklyn? Hell no. Never mind the fact Alex would probably kick his ass if he tried to start up anything with her, but who’s to say she wanted to be in his bed? She didn’t even want him walking her to her car in the evenings.
But Reid could no longer ignore the obvious. If the enigmatic pull he felt whenever he was around her wasn’t enough of a clue that he was venturing into new territory when it came to Brooklyn LeBlanc, his reaction to seeing her chumming it up with the other guys from the crew sure as hell was. She had awakened something within him that left him both confounded and intrigued. Which begged the question…
“What are you gonna do about it?”
Releasing a heavy breath, Reid took another minute to collect himself and readjust his mood before joining the crew again. He had to remind himself that connecting his fist with Jarvis’s stomach was not the way he wanted to end his night.
When he exited the restroom a solid thump to his chest met him at the door.
“What the—”
“Just what in the hell is your problem?” Brooklyn asked.
He took a step back, his eyes widening at the vehemence in her voice. How long had she been out here waiting for him?
“What’s my problem with what?” Reid asked.
“With me,” she said. “What is your problem with me, Reid? Everyone else on the crew freaking loves me. They think I’m the best thing since wireless headphones. Except for you.”
Was she serious right now? He liked her too damn much. That was the problem.
“Brooklyn, I don’t know—”
She pointed toward the tables where the rest of the HCC crew sat. “We’ve been having a blast over there, sharing stories and stupid jokes, while you’ve spent the entire night glowering at me. Are you really that pissed that I tagged along for your little Friday night get-together? Is it really that bad having me around outside of work?”
“That’s not why—”
She thumped his chest again. “You treat me like dog shit stuck to the bottom of your shoe, and I want to know why.”
What the hell?
“I do not treat you like dog shit!” Reid said.
“Yes, you do. Actually, dog shit gets treated better. At least dog shit gets acknowledged. You don’t even acknowledge me when there are other people around.” Her voice hiccupped on the last word and Reid’s chest nearly caved in on itself.
She backed away and lifted her chin in the air, fearless and breathtaking and phenomenal in her refusal to show weakness. She might be small in stature, but she was big in attitude. Yet another thing for him to admire.
“Look, Reid, I don’t know what your problem is, and to be honest I no longer care. You don’t have to like me. But if you don’t like me in public, that means you don’t like me in private either. Don’t come in the trailer pretending to be interested in the podcast I listen to or my T-shirt collection or anything else that doesn’t relate to work. We’re co-workers. There’s nothing that says we have to be friends.”
But he wanted to be her friend. He wanted to be more than just her friend. For
the first time in longer than he could remember, he’d found a woman who actually sparked his curiosity. He was aching to get to know her better. And she thought he didn’t like her? Damn. Could he have possibly fucked this up any more than he already had?
Yes. He was pretty good at fucking things up.
But unlike his previous mess ups, he was not about to let this one stand. He had to make this right, because the thought of the light banter they shared when he stepped in that trailer at work coming to an end was enough to make Reid’s stomach turn. She’d only been around for a week, yet she’d become one of the brightest spots in his day.
But if he told her that right now she’d probably call bullshit.
Because she was right, he had been treating her differently in public than he did in private. It started out as loyalty to Donte. He hadn’t wanted to be seen as a traitor. But that excuse sounded weak even to his own ears.
He had to make this right.
“I’m sorry,” he started. “I don’t dislike you.” Reid huffed out a laugh. “God, if you only knew how far off base you are.”
She folded her arms across her chest and hit him with that look Indina used when she thought he was lying.
Reid pitched his head back and rubbed the spot between his eyes. This would not be easy. Not that he deserved easy.
She, however, deserved the truth.
“I wanted your job to go to someone else,” he finally admitted. Her head jerked back and Reid could tell that wasn’t the explanation she’d been expecting to hear.
“I’d recommended Donte for your job. I’d practically guaranteed it to him. And when Alex up and hired you without even telling me that he was passing on Donte, it…well…it kinda pissed me off.” He shrugged. “I was determined not to like you from the minute you started working for Holmes Construction. Not because there was anything wrong with you, but out of loyalty to Donte. I didn’t want it to seem like I was cozying up to the person Alex had hired for the job I’d promised to him.”
She nodded slowly. “I get it. Because of something I had absolutely no control over, you decided to treat me like shit.”
Awaken Me Page 8