Chapter Two

Shane

Despite getting kicked out of Mystic Hardware, I managed to gather up the materials to build my boat at another store. Now, I stood in the backyard of my father’s house, looking down at the unassembled pieces. It felt good to have a project to work on. Something not related to the oil rig accident.

The sun beat down on me, and I stripped my shirt off as I got to work. The breeze coming off the marina ruffled my hair and cooled my skin. The sparkling, endless ocean beckoned to me as it had since I was a child.

Living in Mystic had been a favorite part of my childhood, however brief our stay here had been. I loved the way our house sat right by the water. We had our own dock and boat house. Most of my days had been spent in and around the water to some degree. I think that was why I was so eager to work on this boat. It was a connection to a simpler, more carefree time.

I hadn’t been back to this house since we moved to Houston when I was six, but I’d always meant to. It was a shame it took a tragedy of this magnitude to get me back here. I pushed those grim thoughts away and started assembling the boat.

The parts began coming together. There was something soothing about the process. Bringing order to chaos. Taking something in pieces and making it whole. If only the other problems in my life were so easy to fix.

A few hours into the project, I headed into the house to grab a cold drink. My phone was charging in the kitchen. It vibrated angrily on the hard countertop every couple of seconds, alerting me to mentions of Perkins Enterprises in the news and on social media.

I sighed and clicked the phone on. Twitter was blowing up about the recent tragedy. A few people expressed their sympathies for those affected by the accident but the vast majority of the comments were negative.

The tweets featured sensationalist labels like #bloodforoil, direct outrage with #FuckPerkins, and my favorite, #ShamePerkins. Hah. “Shame” instead of Shane. Cruel… but admittedly clever.

In addition to all that, the world had noticed the fact that I’d taken a step back from the company while the investigation took place. I opened my email on the phone and saw several messages from my P.R. team.

They’d sent me some links to news stories about my departure. I emailed them back and instructed them to push back harder with the truth of the situation. I was stepping away to allow a full, transparent investigation, and I was conducting an investigation of my own in the meantime. I had taken time off from the day-to-day operations to investigate the supplier, the procurement process involved, and the incident itself.

Of course, there was only so much that I could do. My father had a huge office here in the house. He’d been fond of Mystic, and he spent a lot of time here when he could. He’d only stopped coming out here after he’d retired and married a much younger woman who found the place too “boring” for her tastes.

I knew that he had been paranoid about his record keeping for the last years of his reign of the company, and as such, he had had everything sent to Mystic for safekeeping. To somewhere only he had access to and kept locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Thankfully, I now had a key and access to the security system.

If there was any evidence for me to find, it would be here. But I couldn’t bring myself to go in there just yet. Poking through those old files felt too much like digging up the past.

I wanted to figure out what happened, but I had plenty of time to look through everything. The EPA investigation would take two months, so that was how long I’d be staying in Mystic.

Two fucking months. There was only so much I could do remotely. Two months away from the office was going to feel like forever.

But it had been my plan to begin with, so I couldn’t bitch too much about it. Besides, I could use this time to build my boat, get out on the water, and do some fishing. Maybe being out here would do me some good.

I left my phone in the kitchen and went back outside with a cold beer. My barely-started boat sat on the lawn between me and the glimmering water. With some hard work, she’d be seaworthy and out on the water in no time.

I’d learned to build boats while we’d been living in Mystic, and it was a hobby that had stuck, regardless of how often we had moved.

The fact that some offshore girl thought she knew better than me just because she happened to work in a hardware store was laughable. I knew she had just been trying to be helpful, but boats were my thing. My favorite, and only, pastime.

I watched as a sea gull made a lazy circle overhead and settled on the mast of a sailing boat nearby.

I remembered naming the gulls as a child, remembered strolling around main street with my mother on Saturday mornings just like all the other families. I remembered wishing that we would stay there.

We didn’t, of course. It had been nothing but an idle childhood fantasy.

Perhaps if the girl in the hardware store knew who I was, she would have known better than to question me. Especially when it came to boats but about everything else as well, really. She definitely would have known better than to kick me out of her damn store if she knew that I was once Mystic royalty.

No one, and I mean no one, told me what to do. Or what not to do, for that matter. I couldn’t believe that that little scrap of a girl thought that she could. The cans of paint she’d been hauling around when I’d first arrived in the store looked like they weighed more than her.

I resented the fact that she questioned my judgment and had the nerve to kick me out, but I was also intrigued by her. I could tell she wasn’t used to a man being so direct with her but she hadn’t backed down right away.

Those gorgeous blue eyes watched me with intense interest as I flirted with her. Her full, ripe lips had trembled at some of my more suggestive comments, begging me to still them with a kiss. Just picturing her luscious curves had my pants tightening.

I glanced down at my watch. The cleaning service should almost be done by now. They’d finished up the downstairs a few hours ago, and they were getting everything squared away upstairs now.

Sure enough, one of the cleaning staff called to me from the back door, telling me I was all set. I went back inside and handed each of the workers a hefty tip before they left. They’d earned it. The house looked brand new.

All alone now, I walked past my father’s office but I wasn’t ready to open that can of worms just yet. It didn’t help that I couldn’t get the girl from the hardware store out of my head.

She had bantered with me and argued with me in a way that no woman ever had. She didn’t fall all over herself to fuck me, even if her eyes and body language betrayed the fact that the thought crossed her mind. She’d held her own in her argument. About boats, no less.

I couldn’t deny that the whole exchange had turned me on. All the way on. I’d been thinking about caging her to a shelf with my arms and kissing her until she was breathless, wanting me enough to concede that she was wrong. So much so that she begged me to stay instead of ordering me to leave when that guy had interrupted us.

Fuck. Just like that, I was hard. That’s how much the banter had turned me on. Well, the banter, and the fact that it came from a girl who was sexy as sin.

The apron she’d been wearing did nothing to hide the swell of her gorgeous breasts. Her dark hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, showing off the smooth lines of her neck. I thought about gripping that ponytail in my fist, guiding her head down, and watching her wrap her pink lips around my cock.

That did it.

I needed to get her out of my system, and more than that, I needed a release. The last couple of days had been stressful as all hell, and those bright blue eyes checking me out from her pretty face had ramped up the tension in my body, channeling it all to my throbbing cock.

I thought about surfing the web for porn when I reached my bed, but the heat from her gaze when I’d stepped into the store was front and center in my mind. As was the way that her dark chocolate hair brushed the tips of her breasts in the front and hung all the way to her pert little ass in the back.

I shrugged out of my jeans and laid down on my bed, rubbing my erection that was still covered by my briefs. I felt like teenager, given that I had a raging hard dick and was half naked on my bed before the sun had even completely set. But my body was insistent, and I wasn’t getting anything done because of it anyway.

In my mind’s eye, I went back to the store in the cool early evening. She was there. Alone. She would be surprised to see me there, but her eyes would be burning hot, her nipples peaked under her shirt.

I ran my hand down my abdomen and freed my cock from my briefs, groaning with relief when it was no longer straining against the material. I stroked up and down, slowly at first, imagining how I would walk right up to her and kiss her the way that I had wanted to earlier.

Her body would mold with mine. She would be reluctant, but then she’d open for me, moaning as she rocked her hips against me.

I pumped my fist harder, faster, my free hand wrapping around my balls. My neck arched and the air surrounding me no longer felt cool. I could practically hear the little sounds that she would make when I slid my hand under her skirt and cupped her over her soaked panties.

I groaned, rubbing my thumb over the wet tip of my dick, easily visualizing the slick bead of pre-cum to be from her wetness as I fucked myself.

My hips thrusted to meet the strokes of my hand, my mind running wild. I gripped her ass and lifted her against me, walking her over to the counter. It was just the right height for my throbbing cock to line up perfectly with her slick pussy.

I imagined sinking into her with one hard thrust and her crying out as I hit home. How she would writhe beneath me. I would clutch her hips to keep her in place and fuck her quick and hard. Then long and slow.

Her bright blue eyes, almost the exact color of the ocean, would be dark and heavy-lidded. Her breathing would be as ragged as mine. She would be chasing her release as hard as I was chasing mine.

My dick pulsed. I was so close. I tightened my grip and stroked myself with abandon, needing to come so badly it was almost painful. I moaned loudly. The familiar tingling started in my balls and traveled to the base of my spine, my stomach dipping on a harsh breath. My muscles tensed.

A low groan was ripped from my chest when my orgasm finally hit. Pleasure shot through me as warm, thick cum shot in jets from my tip, covering my stomach and forearms.

By the time I caught my breath, the sun had set and the house was dark. I reached for my bedside lamp and flicked it on, bathing the room in soft light. My heart was still hammering in my chest as I came down from my high.

I was in for a long night, but I didn’t mind one little bit. It had been way too long since I’d paid that kind of attention to myself.