Enemies With Benefits: Loveless Brothers, Book 1

by Noir, Roxie

  I tackle it, obviously. It’s just a coffee maker, and I have a college degree. I graduated summa cum laude. I got this.

  I fill it with water. I balance the basket-thing on top of the metal-tube-thing, because I’m pretty that’s how that goes. I locate the top and set it aside, then grab a new five-pound bag of coffee, and pull at the top.

  And pull. And pull, because apparently these days they’re closing bags of ground coffee with gorilla glue. I grunt. I grit my teeth and use all my might.

  Suddenly, the bag flies open. It tears down one side and launches ground coffee into my face, all over me, and onto the floor.

  “Dammit,” I say through clenched teeth.

  “There’s scissors in the drawer,” Eli’s voice says behind me.

  I whirl around, the coffee grounds beneath my feet making the floor more slippery than usual. He’s standing there, framed by the doorway, that irritating (and hot) half-smile on his face.

  My heart thumps stupidly. Something flutters in my stomach-region, and before I know it I’m checking him out for about the thousandth time: dark hair just a little wild, green eyes just a little bit teasing, and a shirt that fits him very well.

  Why do all his shirts have to fit him that well?

  It’s unprofessional. Can I report him for being too hot at work?

  “Thanks,” I say, as sarcastically as I can.

  “Rough day?” he asks, shoving his hands into his pockets, eyeing the coffee-grounds-covered floor as he does, leaning against the door frame.

  “I’m fine,” I answer reflexively.

  “You’re trying to make a giant pot of coffee at nine p.m.”

  “That’s just how I party,” I say.

  “What happened?”

  I sigh. I blow a strand of hair out of my face, then toss the busted coffee package into the sink.

  “I screwed up an order with the monks and now I have to fold four hundred and eighty-five origami cranes by tomorrow morning,” I admit.

  Eli whistles low, still looking at me.

  “Yeah,” I say, brushing coffee off myself.

  “All right,” he says, straightening. “Where are you folding?”

  “Cumberland conference room.”

  He nods once.

  “Perfect,” he says, and then walks away.

  “It’s not!” I shout after him, confused.

  Is he just being a dick? For a minute there I thought he was being nice…

  His head pops back around the door frame.

  “Don’t make that coffee,” he says, and disappears again.

  I frown at the door, then at myself.

  “I’ll make coffee if I want to make coffee,” I grumble to myself as I find the dustpan. “I’ll make as much coffee as I want.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Eli

  The coffee cups clink softly as I walk down the dark hallway, carrying the tray. It’s got two full French presses, two coffee mugs with saucers, and a little pitcher of cream for Violet, since I know how she takes her coffee.

  Call me Martha Stewart, I guess.

  When I enter the conference room, she looks up from a half-finished crane, both hands anchoring opposite corners of it on the table.

  “How’s your craft project going?” I ask, setting it on the table.

  She looks around. The table is half-covered with cranes, though it’s clear that there aren’t nearly enough.

  “I’m in hell,” Violet admits. “I’m not even good at this kind of thing. I’m all thumbs. Adeline tried to teach me to knit once, and I almost accidentally strangled myself on my own yarn.”

  I pick up one French press and plunge it, careful to keep the coffee from rushing through the spout.

  “Adeline knits?”

  “Of course Adeline knits,” sighs Violet. “She also bakes, sews, and can probably even make a Christmas tree look good with that weird fake snow stuff.”

  I pour coffee into one mug, then the other, wondering what the story is with Violet and fake snow.

  “Though she’s also the one who set me up on that terrible date, so she also has her faults,” Violet goes on, frowning at the paper in front of her, then flipping it over.

  “That was Adeline?”

  “He was her cousin’s cousin,” Violet says, hands still busy.

  “Poor thing,” I say, pouring cream into her mug. I put it back on the saucer, then slide the saucer over to her.

  “Me, or her?”

  “Her.”

  I raise my own mug to my lips and take a long, slow sip. It’s espresso, and it’s slightly stronger than I meant for it to be, but at least it’ll keep us both awake until we finish these birds.

  “I’m the one who wound up doing dishes in heels and it’s poor Adeline?” Violet says, and she’s trying to sound stern, but I can tell she’s laughing.

  “You can handle being run out on and doing the dishes in heels,” I tease back, sitting opposite her in one of the big leather office chairs. “But I bet Adeline feels really bad.”

  Adeline’s always been nice to me. She’s a nurse, for crying out loud. She even had pity on me in high school and invited me to a party.

  Violet is, well, Violet. She finishes the crane and grabs her coffee mug.

  “I thought our agreement was only for the mornings,” she says.

  “This is honoring our other agreement,” I say, grabbing a piece of origami paper and holding it up. I wonder if I still remember how to make paper cranes.

  Violet looks up at me, briefly, and I can’t help but remember our kiss again: her lips on mine, needy, urgent. Her arm around my waist. My fingers in her hair.

  “The one where we don’t let Martin win,” I say.

  “Right,” she says, and takes a sip of the coffee.

  Then she nearly spits it out, her eyes going wide.

  “It’s espresso,” I tell her, already folding my origami paper in half diagonally.

  “You sure it’s not paint thinner?” she gasps. “You should find out if someone’s got a heart condition before you give them that.”

  “Got a heart condition?”

  “I think I do now,” she says, but after a moment, she takes another sip, and this one stays down just fine. “Look, Eli, you don’t have to — holy shit, Martin.”

  I turn to look at the door, but there’s no one there. I look back at Violet.

  “No, this was him,” she says, pointing at the cranes. “He did this. We were supposed to get a thousand cranes folded by monks, but someone changed the order form to five hundred, and it sure wasn’t me.”

  “Does he have access to those?” I ask, taking another sip.

  “Yeah, of course,” she breathes. “He’s the other coordinator, he can do everything I can do.”

  There’s a brief pause.

  “This sounds insane,” Violet says, half to herself. “I’m sure I just had a temporary lapse of sanity and I did it myself.”

  “The man hid oysters,” I say. “It’s not insane. Insane is offering your employees one twenty-thousand dollar reward for being the best instead of, say, ten two-thousand-dollar rewards for good teamwork. I’m surprised no one’s been hit by a car yet.”

  Violet snorts. It turns out that I still remember how to fold cranes, and we fold in silence for a while. Companionable silence, like maybe we’re finally starting to get used to each other. We don’t even race to see who can make the most cranes, we just work together.

  “Let me guess,” Violet says after a long time. “You learned crane folding in the harem.”

  I finish the head of a crane and launch it into the air, dropping it on a pile of its paper brethren.

  “You’re really stuck on this harem thing,” I say. “Is it so unbelievable that some princess would want to put me up in the lap of luxury just so I was available to her every so often?”

  Violet turns red, but she tosses her hair back over her shoulder and glances at me before folding more.

  “It’s the most salac
ious rumor,” she teases. “And you haven’t denied it yet.”

  Obviously it’s not true. I don’t think harems exist any more, and if they do, no one’s inviting a scruffy, difficult southern boy into one.

  Besides, there’s no way in hell I could share a woman I like. I’d lose my damn mind.

  “I think the cult’s pretty interesting,” I say, still teasing her. “What did we supposedly worship? A spaceship or something?”

  “People join cults all the time,” Violet says, like cults are so passé. “There’s a monastery up in the hills, for Pete’s sake. They’re the ones who didn’t make me enough cranes.”

  “I don’t think the monastery would appreciate being called a cult,” I point out.

  “They wear robes,” she says.

  “So do judges,” I say. “So do I, after a shower.”

  “Is it fluffy?”

  “I’ll never tell.”

  There’s another span of silence. I sneak a glance over at Violet, bent over the cranes, her dark honey hair spilling over one shoulder, unruly at the end of a long day.

  She’s barely spoken to me since we kissed. I’ve barely thought about anything else since then. I’ve laid awake many nights, imagining her lips underneath mine, the way she grabbed me, the way she pushed her body against mine. I’ve done a lot of very quiet jerking off in my attic room.

  I’m starting to think I imagined all that. All the same, I want her again. Here. Now.

  I want to pull her onto the table, her skin against mine, her nails raking down my back. I want her so bad it’s a physical sensation like a weight on my chest.

  “Why were the monks making cranes?” I ask, just to get my mind off of what I want to do to her.

  “Because we gave them money in exchange for services,” Violet deadpans.

  “Doesn’t the bride usually fold them herself?”

  Violet shrugs.

  “Some do,” she says, finishing a crane and grabbing another piece of aquamarine paper. “Some outsource it.”

  “That does run counter to the point,” I say. “Isn’t the whole idea to demonstrate the patience and commitment you need for marriage?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” Violet says. “I don’t know the reasons, I just put in the orders.”

  “It’s supposed to be a labor of love, not something you pay someone else to do.”

  I don’t know why this is the thing that’s getting to me, but it is. Sometimes things are about the experience, about putting in the work. Paying someone else to do it just doesn’t get the job done.

  “Why do you know so much about origami cranes?” Violet asks.

  “I married into the Yakuza while I was in Japan,” I tell her.

  I’ve never been to Japan. Violet looks up for a moment, then starts laughing.

  “How gullible do you think I am?”

  “Wasn’t that a rumor?” I ask. “That’s at least as believable as I was in the Sicilian Mafia,” I go on.

  “I didn’t hear that one,” she says. “But I didn’t particularly pay attention to rumors about you, so it could have been.”

  “You sure know a lot of them for someone who didn’t pay attention,” I say. “And it’s unfair, given that I don’t know any of the rumors about you.”

  “Well, there’s the rumor that I go to bed at 9:30 sometimes,” she says. “And Adeline says that she once heard from an unnamed source that they overheard me on the phone, talking about how much I like using my turn signals.”

  Of course Violet is a stickler for turn signals.

  “Do you?”

  “They make me feel prepared.”

  I believe that. What I don’t believe is that there’s nothing salacious about her, or that she’s always the boring good girl she wants me to think she is.

  Violet’s a lot of things, and boring sure isn’t one of them.

  “So everyone in Sprucevale thinks they know that I was in prison in North Dakota, and you won’t even tell me one wild rumor about yourself,” I tease. “You may have everyone else fooled but not me, Violet.”

  There’s a long, long pause, like she’s focusing on the origami.

  “I’ve never really left town,” she finally says, her voice quiet. “I mean, I’ve gone on trips, but I just stayed here and took care of my mom while you were off traveling the world, and then after she died I stayed in the same trailer, in the same place, with the same friends, doing all the same things…”

  She trails off and meets my eyes. Her gaze pins me down, holds me still, robs me of my words.

  She’s arresting. She’s intense, serious, teasing, playful. Violet’s a diamond in a room full of coal: beautiful, interesting, always the most fascinating thing around.

  Even though that’s not always good. Even though I spent half my life wishing I never had to see her again and when I got my wish, the world was that much duller.

  I didn’t know it then. I didn’t come back for her, but she makes me glad I came.

  “We wound up in the same place,” I point out.

  “At least you know what you’re missing,” Violet says.

  “Who says I’m missing anything?”

  She gives me that look again, the look that says I see straight through you, the look that makes me feel stripped down to my skeleton. No one else has ever looked at me this way, and I hope they never do.

  “Did you have sex with the maid of honor?” Violet blurts out.

  I blink, because that’s not what I was expecting. I’ve probably had sex with someone’s maid of honor, but nothing is leaping to mind.

  “What maid of honor?” I ask.

  Violet swallows. She’s paler than usual, and I search her face, looking for handholds into the conversation, because right now I’m just falling.

  “The one the elevator,” she says. “The wedding with the arancini. You took her upstairs.”

  “Susan?” I say, surprised. “The drunk one?”

  I almost laugh, but Violet looks so serious that I force myself not to.

  “Yeah, she had a few,” she says.

  “She could barely walk,” I say, remembering how I’d practically had to carry the poor girl to her room. “I put her to bed so she didn’t pass out in the hallway.”

  “But did you also —”

  “No,” I say. “I’m not in the habit of sleeping with women who’re too drunk to know what’s going on. I did leave her a trash can, though, because I didn’t want her to puke on the nice carpet.”

  “Oh,” Violet says. She’s bright pink and looks back down at the crane she’s folding.

  “Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?” I ask her.

  She doesn’t answer right away.

  “You thought we made out on Saturday, I had sex with someone Friday, and then kissed you Tuesday?”

  “I didn’t think that.”

  “And you think I’d fuck a girl who was falling down drunk.”

  “I don’t know!” she says, finally looking at me, shoving away a half-finished crane. “I don’t know you, Eli, I don’t know how drunk she was, I just know that you took her upstairs and she was wrapped around you like a — a giant squid on a sperm whale.”

  “And you didn’t like it,” I say.

  “It’s unprofessional to —”

  “That’s not why you didn’t like it,” I cut her off. I’m smiling, despite myself, taunting her even when I know better. I can’t help myself. I never could. “You didn’t like seeing me with her because you were jealous.”

  Her jaw clenches. I’ve succeeded in pissing her off, twin spots of anger pink in her cheeks, beautiful and fiery and breathtaking.

  “I was avoiding you because this —” she points to herself and then me, “is obviously a terrible idea.”

  I lean back in my chair, folding my arms, waiting.

  “We don’t even like each other,” she says. “We can’t even talk without fighting. We’re coworkers, and fraternizing is definitely against company policy. We�
�ll just make each other miserable until we inevitably crash and burn, so I say we avoid all that and just don’t make each other anything.”

  She’s right, but I still want her worse than anything. I watch her for a long moment, both of us silent and still though we should be furiously making birds if we want to be done by tomorrow.

  “Right?” she finally says, like she wants me to agree.

  So I do. I give her that. She’s right about the details even if I think she’s wrong about the big picture. I give her this, even though what I want more than anything at this moment and every moment is just to kiss her again.

  “Right,” I say, lean over, and grab her iPad. “Want to watch a movie?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Violet

  “Ninety-two,” Eli says. “Ninety-four, ninety-six, ninety-eight…”

  There’s a long, long pause. I tear my gaze from the dots in the drop ceiling and raise my head off the floor to look at him.

  “I can’t make two more,” I say. “I’ll die of… paper.”

  Eli holds up two more cranes.

  “One thousand,” he says, and tosses them into the box.

  I flop my head back onto the floor. It’s seven a.m, and I know I should be doing something — someone still has to string all the cranes together, we have to get them out to the wedding barn, get them hung, not to mention that there are ten thousand other things to do for this crazy six hundred person wedding — but I’m lying on the floor, letting Eli count.

  I’m pretty sure I look like a wreck. I know Eli does, though even with circles under his eyes and wild hair, he’s hot as sin. The messy, disheveled look is good on him, but I’m not thinking about that right now.

  It’s been a hell of a night. We folded five hundred cranes and, between the two of us, drank thirty-two ounces of espresso. I feel like I might simultaneously fall into a dead sleep and run a marathon.

  Eli walks over and stands by my feet.

  “You getting up or are these my job now?” he asks.