Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 85565 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85565 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Then why I was I still standing here, wearing only pajama bottoms, clutching a ruler at 3:00 a.m.?
The answer was simple. Because Sawyer was here.
“I’m ready to measure… stuff.” We stared at each other as my words bounced around the disaster zone.
8
Sawyer
James Allen was irresistible. As he stood there in his pajama pants with an old wooden ruler in his hand and his hair all messy from sleep, I felt my breathing kick up even higher than it had been during the demolition work I’d done on the wall.
I grinned at him. “Do you need something to…” I glanced at his ruler. “Measure?”
His cheeks bloomed pink as he tossed the ruler over his shoulder. “Never mind. What can I do? Put me to work.”
I handed him a couple of thick contractor bags and directed him to start cleaning up the debris that had begun piling up. As I continued to pull a section of the wall board away, I tried not to sneak too many peeks of James’s bare chest and arms as he worked nearby.
“Why are you joining these two rooms?” he asked after a while. “Won’t one large room mean less potential revenue than two regular-sized rooms?”
I continued to toss pieces into the pile. “It’ll still be two rooms. I’m just changing the configuration to make better use of the space. If I bump half of this wall forward into the other room, I can make the closet for this room. Then I’ll do the same for the other room by bumping into this room on the other side of where the TV stand usually goes. That will free up the existing closet spaces to make the bathroom bigger in both rooms.”
James stopped collecting trash and glanced at the areas I’d gestured to. “But you’ll lose the space where guests put the suitcase stand thing.”
I shook my head. “No. The luggage rack will go where the TV stand was. And we’ll get rid of the TV stand altogether by upgrading to flat-screens.”
“Huh. Yeah. I can see it. Makes sense.”
We went back to working in silence with nothing but my music filling the room from my portable speaker. I hated the awkward silence between us. If there’d been silence between us at the bar last night, it wouldn’t have been awkward at all, but now… with the business deal on the table, there was a giant elephant in the room that was making things painful.
But the last thing I wanted to talk about was his client’s desire to demolish eighty years of my family history, which meant finding a safer topic of conversation.
“What do you do when you’re not lawyering or collecting trash in motels?” I finally asked.
“Nothing at all. My time is mostly filled with lawyering.” A crinkle of stress marred his forehead, illustrating the truth of the matter.
“That’s depressing as hell,” I muttered.
He paused, a chunk of drywall in one hand and the garbage bag in the other. He was crouched in a squat, a position that caused his pajama bottoms to ride low on his hips. I tried, and failed, to keep my eyes from trailing along the curve of his back.
After thinking for a second, he shrugged. “Well… I run. And work out when I can. I live near the park, so I enjoy running there when I can. Other times I have to make do with the gym in my office building.”
Images of him shirtless and sweaty filtered through my mind. “You should go for a run on the beach while you’re here. It’s one of my favorite things to do besides swim.”
Now my mind was conjuring images of him half-naked, sweaty, and smelling of the sea.
His face brightened. The sight of it did something to my insides that was not entirely unpleasant. I gripped the sledgehammer tighter to keep from reaching for him.
“Oh, I did,” he said. “I went tonight after dinner. It was gorgeous. I ran to the point and back.”
I grunted, swinging the sledgehammer into the wall with perhaps a little more force than necessary, needing to channel my sexual frustration into something productive. “Next time go the other direction to the lighthouse. There are less jetties to climb over.”
The silence descended again. As I worked, my senses grew keenly aware of James’s presence. The way the muscles along his back shifted as he stretched to reach for a piece of debris. The way he occupied space, and not just physically. It was like he’d somehow infiltrated every inch of the room so that even the air was filled with him. My mind began imagining dirty porn scenarios involving sweaty construction workers who looked an awful lot like James, and I clenched my teeth against the throbbing in my cock.
Suddenly, the man himself blurted, “I game.”
For a split second, I thought he’d said I’m game, as if he was game to reenact the naughty scenarios in my mind. I glanced at him in surprise and hope before my brain provided an alternate version of what I’d heard.