9
| SUMMER |
TUESDAY
(Time: 3:01 a.m.)
I’m exhausted.
Bone-deep, soul half-asleep tired.
And it’s all Jason freaking Steele’s fault.
The man went from avoiding me for most of last week to showing up seemingly everywhere I turned after our little kiss fiasco.
It started early Saturday evening when he came knocking on my apartment door. Routine landlord inspection, he’d called it. Which—he’d added when I’d tried to slip out and leave him to it—the tenant needed to be present for while he was in the unit.
He had a clipboard and everything.
So, I stayed. And for the next hour, he made me stay by his side while he checked the vents, the locks on the windows, the paint on the ceilings, even the frickin’ caulking on the baseboards. A whole hour I stood by as he treated me with kid gloves, shooting concerned glances my way whenever he thought I wasn’t looking, talking all gentle-like instead of in his usual voice.
It drove me up the wall.
If there’s one thing I hate more than being treated like a woman, it’s being treated like a weak, vulnerable woman.
So, to show him…and maybe also myself a little bit…that I was just fine, that I wasn’t all falling apart at the seams or wilting like a sad flower over what happened—or didn’t happen, rather—between us, I texted some of my guys to see if anyone wanted to go out drinking.
It’s funny, though I’m awkward and just plain awful at dating those nice guys who ask me out, I’m actually pretty normal in social settings with construction dudes. Years of practice, I guess. And, since I usually make the effort to hang out with my men every so often to keep the camaraderie up, I figured two birds, one stone.
I even dressed up a little for the occasion. Meaning I did something with my hair other than coil it up into a bun for a change, and I threw on a pretty, girly tank top on over my jeans instead of the plain t-shirts I usually wore out. Still, it was enough to earn me a few whistles from my guys, which went a long way in making me feel better.
Really, it was the perfect, fun little distraction…until, surprise, surprise, Jason showed up. He waltzed into the bar with two of his buddies, Cade and Logan, both of whom I’ve met before in passing on the site a couple of times. Since both guys apparently knew a lot of my guys pretty well, of course the trio was invited to join us.
And so began three long hours of Jason watching over me like a mother hen. Or a protective rooster. Whatever the appropriate overbearing bird metaphor, he was the very dictionary definition of it. Much to his two ever so unhelpful buddies’ visible amusement.
With every bottle of beer I drank, his expression grew more brooding. Every time one of the guys touched me in any friendly, totally innocent way, whether it was a simple pat on my knee or even a brief shoulder nudge to get my attention, he glared at them like they were committing an unholy sin.
Then he got downright hostile with the nice accountant-looking man who’d sidled up to me at the bar and offered to buy me a drink.
Ten whole minutes he spent afterward chewing me out and lecturing me on being more careful about men buying me drinks.
Finally, with my night officially ruined, I told the guys I was taking off and I went outside to get an uber. Tried to at least. Before I could even finish pulling up the app, I had a totally sober, six-foot-three, disgruntled billionaire swiping my phone from my hands and dragging me over to his truck to drive me home himself.
I feigned sleep the entire ride back to our building.
Sunday, I spent most of the day surveying the marsh lands, just like I had the two Sundays prior. Unlike those other two Sundays, however, I had a shadow the whole time. As soon as I saw the big black work truck parked right next to mine outside the trailer, I tried waiting Jason out. But when it starting raining a bit, I finally gave in and trudged on back to the jobsite, fully prepared to get my ass handed to me for being out there alone. Seeing as how I’m a woman and all.
But he didn’t yell at me. Or scold me. He just gave me a silent onceover as if checking to make sure I didn’t have any visible scratches or bumps and bruises. Then he climbed into his truck and left without a word.
Yesterday, however, the man upped his game considerably. All day long, every time I tried to talk to any of my guys in private about something, he’d pull some barely plausible reason to step in—literally—and send them off to take care of something clear on the other side of the jobsite. Just so he could get me alone to lock those intense green eyes on me and tell me we needed to talk. About “us.”
It was tricky, but I managed to escape each time. I used the fake phone call trick a few times, the classic ‘look over there’ and running in the opposite direction tactic once (which I honestly didn’t think was going to work), before finally resorting to hopping in my truck and continuously parking it in new locations around the site while doing mundane paperwork with my windows rolled up until the end of the work day. Cowardly? Yes. But also highly effective. I know Jason. He’d never make a scene in front of the guys.
Maybe today I should go see how those sewer pipes are coming?
Sleepy but sound plan in place, my brain finally gives me the go-ahead to close my eyes and try to get at least a few minutes of shuteye before the sun comes up. The last three nights, I barely got a wink of sleep. Because as it turns out, having Jason follow me around during the day, inevitably results in him following me right into my dreams at night.
Who knew my imagination was so, well, imaginative?
Not to mention vivid.
Even now, I’m fully conscious that I’m dreaming. I know that Jason isn’t really stalking into my room, grouchy as hell, and reprimanding me for running from him all day yesterday in that deep, sexy voice. Still, I feel every inch of my body flood with heat, and my panties getting drenched the instant he pounces on top of me on the bed and rips open my shirt. I feel my legs actually parting under my sheets as dream-Jason presses his big, hard body against me, pinning me down with that huge, thick cock of his to prevent me from escaping again.
I know it’s only a dream, but I let myself revel in it anyway. Because in the dream, I’m not the weird tomboy who’s never had sex, but has worked more power tools than most men ever will in their lifetime. No, I’m the strong, sexy woman that’s capable of making a man like Jason Steele lose control. The woman bold enough to go after what she wants the second he starts to.
That last truly fantastical thought has my hands fisting against the bed covers in frustration.
What I want, I’ll never have.
This is all just a dream. A fantasy that’s never coming true. I need to accept that and banish these futile delusions about Jason and me to the farthest corners of my mind.
I can’t screw this up. This is literally the biggest job I’ve taken on to date, and the first big commercial project I’ve run point on in a while, to be honest.
Before, when Granddad was still alive, folks used to hire me out of respect for him after I took over his company. He had personally taught me everything he knew, and arranged for me to work my butt off for the best of the best in the Pacific Northwest right out of high school.
Maybe that’s why I feel a sort of kinship with Jason. It’s a well-known fact that Jason’s father was a self-made billionaire who raised Jason the way he’d grown up, working from dawn to dusk. Back before Steele Developments International went global, they created their fortune working low-glamour, high-stakes projects like dams and bridges, after years building everything from highways to military barracks and even prisons.
When Jason joined the family business, he brought his savvy smarts and started landing them top-dollar projects like sports stadiums and premiere golf course resorts, along with lavish luxury communities for the outlandishly rich, skyrocketing their net worth to what it is now. And he did it all, not from some glass office, but out with his men on the jobsites getting covered in grime, swearing up a storm, and eating out of food trucks right alongside them.
I respect him for that.
Like Jason, I practically grew up with a hardhat, spending most of my youth surrounded by brusque, hard-working, I-am-who-I-am-take-it-or-leave-it construction guys. It was awesome. Though I’d had a mom, it was my grandfather who raised me. And he raised me right. Granddad made sure I could build a house from top to bottom with the bare minimum supplies, while ensuring I could also use every tool and work every piece of machinery.
No one pushed me harder than he did, and because of that, working my way up through the trades to becoming one of the youngest and most qualified general contractors in the state a couple years ago had been a breeze. And though I’ve never run point on anything as grand as the stuff Jason normally takes on, I’ve had my fair share of commercial success.
I’ve handled swanky high-rises and specialty gyms, as well as schools and even a small strip mall once, but again, regardless how good my work was, I wasn’t just a woman in a strongly male-dominated profession, but also one with a reputation for downright odd people skills that used to be muttered about enough to make the big projects—and long-term topnotch crewmen—harder to come by after Granddad finally passed.
It didn’t bother me too much though. I just kept my head down and gave all I had to the projects I did get.
Work is work. That’s what Granddad always used to say.
I miss hearing his words of wisdom. Miss him, period. Every day.
When he died, I lost the only person in the world who ever got me, or ever truly liked me. Sure, my mom loved me in her own basic, biologically-encoded way, but she definitely never liked me. Still doesn’t, in fact. We essentially butt heads over everything.
Case in point, after my mom found out what I had planned for the money Granddad had left me, she made what should’ve been good deeds feel like root canal surgeries.
She rolled her eyes over every check I wrote to fund scholarships for disadvantaged youths wanting to enter the trades, whined about the donations I made to various construction charities in areas recently hit by natural disasters, and then downright bitched over the contribution I made to the new wing at the hospice center I’d ended up moving him to when I discovered the deplorable conditions of the care home she and her husband at the time had initially stuck him in.
That’s why, when I got the approval to build Granddad’s memorial gazebo in his favorite park, I didn’t touch what was left of his life insurance money. I didn’t even tell her what I was doing at all. The last thing I’d wanted was any of her negativity to touch that memorial. She would’ve ruined it by complaining about my paying more for the see-through glass top for sure, and no doubt disparaged my decision to splurge on the wheelchair swing. What’s worse, she wouldn’t have understood why I did either.
Granddad used to love sitting on his porch swing and looking up at the stars at night—two things she would’ve known if she’d cared enough to spend any time at all with him.
Her loss.
She missed out on getting to know the greatest man I’ve ever known. A man I still partly believe is watching over me and my career. Because let’s face it, if not for the swing and the gazebo, I never would’ve gotten onto Jason’s radar in the first place. The memorial had caught Jason’s attention sometime last year after his dad’s passing, though he didn’t find my information and make contact until just a few months ago when he first started having problems with the construction manager he ended up firing.
And now here we are, with me heading a project I’m absolutely in love with. For a man I’m starting to have decidedly unprofessional feelings for.
Talk about a rock and a hard place.
Now emotionally as well as physically exhausted, but no closer to sleep, I give up trying to fight my insomnia, and decide to get some work done.
Sewage pipes today, definitely.
Maybe that’ll give me a brief reprieve from thinking about the man.