Tavish had been grinding in his workshop for hours and the restless energy hadn’t left him. Two weeks of body-intensive labor, really putting his back into production and sparring, plus a newfound interest in jogging, and he still hadn’t gotten the sudden, simmering need that had coincided with Portia’s arrival out of his system.
He turned on the power grinder and began the first passes of the sgian-dubh blade over the whirring, textured surface, smoothing away the imperfections in the metal. Someone had placed a somewhat substantial order for the small traditional daggers, and he was trying to get them out as quickly as possible, before the customer could change their mind. With his recent business luck, he couldn’t risk delay or sending out anything but perfect products.
He tried to clear his mind of everything else but the work before him. He braced himself against the shock that ran up the tang, gripped tightly in his hand, and reverberated through his body. Beveling the edge of the blade to make it sharp required slightly less concentration than other parts of the process. It required focus, like everything he did, but years of experience meant that stray thoughts of his business woes, or of his apprentice, wouldn’t result in the loss of hours of work.
Portia. Something about her clung to him like the fine steel mist thrown off by the grinder that was a pain in the arse to wash away. He was interested in her, and that talk of treating her like a delicate flower hadn’t helped. He wasn’t one to keep floral arrangements about the house, but he knew that you nourished flowers and in return you got to inhale their fragrance and run your fingertips over their soft petals. He didn’t need to think about either of those things when it came to his apprentice.
He growled, twisting his wrist to turn the blade back and forth. He didn’t mind getting dull with age, but was he really all hot and bothered about a snooty American? Pish. It was infatuation, like when he saw a well-made sword with an ornate hilt and brilliant artwork etched into the blade. Beautiful, but not essential.
Essential or not, he had to train her. That’s what she was here for. For the last two weeks he’d had her working on updating databases and shipping and anything that would keep her behind a desk and out of his sight. He’d admitted to being a bad boss, but the only thing he’d done to change it was growling slightly less when in her presence. Even that had him worried. Growls served as a warning to keep potentially dangerous creatures at bay. If he stopped, she might figure out that he was bloody terrified.
He turned off the grinder and examined the blade, running his thumb along the bevel. Still a little rough, but he needed to take a break. He placed the knife onto a soft towel on his worktable and was in the process of removing his protective ear coverings when a sudden, animal awareness went through him.
He turned, still holding the ear coverings over his head, and there she was.
Dammit.
She leaned against the doorway of his workshop, quite comfortably, as if she’d been there for some time. She held a folder or something to her chest, but Tav fixated on the way her lips were parted and her eyes were fixed on him.
Her gaze skittered to the ground, but in the second during which they’d locked eyes, Tav had felt it like a solid thing knocking into him. Desire. He wasn’t a fucking mind reader, but he was old enough to know when someone was giving him the eye. Portia had been thinking something decidedly naughty. About him.
Fuck’s sake.
“Need something?” he asked, sounding more aggrieved than he’d meant to.
She stepped forward, expression polite and professional. Good. Between their age difference and the fact that she was working for him, Tav had no interest in knowing what exactly had been going through her mind a moment ago. He wasn’t trying to become some kind of midlife crisis cliché.
“I was talking to Jamie about the website and he said that my initial plans look good, but nothing could be changed without your approval.”
Website?
“The site is fine as it is,” he said, glad she’d landed on the topic most like being dunked in ice-cold water for him.
“Actually, it’s not. It’s really not.”
“It lists our name, phone number, and address, and it has pictures of the products and their prices. What else does it need?”
She opened her folder and pulled out a slim, sleek tablet.
“I should have known you’d have that hingmie with you,” he muttered as she approached. She always seemed to have her nose stuck in her phone or tablet, and her tapping away at a keyboard was generally what alerted him to her presence around the building, allowing him to avoid her.
She leaned back against the table next to him, leaving a bit of space between them. That didn’t stop the scent of whatever perfume she was wearing from drifting over to him. Delicate. Floral.
Tav sighed.
“So. Here is your site,” she said, pulling it up.
He glanced over to placate her, but what he saw drew a grunt of perplexed disgust from him.
“Why do the pictures look stretched like?” he asked, taking the proffered tablet from her. It looked like someone had copied the photos on Silly Putty then pulled.
“Because you’re not optimized for mobile. You also have a weird pop-up that blocks the site and is really hard to close out unless you’re on a desktop or have a large screen.” She took her tablet back, as if she didn’t quite trust him not to drop the thing. “The majority of hits to the site these days are coming from mobile devices, in case you were wondering.”
“The pop-up is for people to sign up to be notified about sales,” he explained. That’s what the designer had told him when Jamie had forced him to commission a site upgrade. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually had a sale or even looked at the email addresses that had been compiled. “Can’t people just look at it on their laptop?”
“I guess they could. But when I navigate to a site that I can’t access because of a pop-up like that, I keep it moving and find a store that cares enough not to annoy me. Customers are fickle. You shouldn’t make them work to see what you’re selling.”
Tav couldn’t argue with that. “Okay, so you want me to . . . optimize for mobile, then? Because of the hits?”
“Well, no. I want to make a completely new site.” She swiped her fingertip over the screen and now he was looking at a different site. It had his business’s name on it but bore no relation to the monstrosity she’d just clicked away from. It looked clean and modern, but with a background like a faded medieval tapestry to give it an aged look. Simple but engaging. He didn’t know tech, but he knew what good, solid design looked like.
“This is just a mock-up,” she explained as she scrolled. “But there’ll be a separate page for the armory, with detailed lists of products—I’ll talk more about that later. One page for the European martial arts lessons. Another for Jamie’s workout classes. A history page, with information about the armory building itself, and the history of Scottish swordmaking. And there’ll also be a gallery with photos and videos, like of Jamie giving a quick workout lesson that people can do at home, and you in action with that thing.”
She inclined her head toward the grinder.
Tav abruptly pushed off of the table to face her. “Why do I need to be recorded?”
Her brows raised again. He had the oddest compulsion to smooth his fingertip over one dark arch as it scrunched in annoyance.
“You don’t have to do anything but what you were doing just now, except I’ll be recording a couple of minutes of it.”
“And throwing it up on the internet for everyone to gawk at. I don’t see the point of it,” he said, shaking his head. “Jamie’s lessons I understand, I suppose—people can get a taste of the boot camp and see how fun it is. But I’m certainly not inviting strangers here to grind with me.”
Portia licked her lips, then pressed them together.
“Actually, I was invited here to grind with you, as you put it,” she said. More brow scrunching—he was fairly certain she was capable of carrying a conversation with just her eyebrows. “But since you’re too worried that I’m going to cut you, in the meantime I’m trying to set you up with a website that will attract potential buyers. And if what I just watched is any indication, video of a large, attractive man using a power tool to hone a sharp object is going to induce a significant portion of the population to at the very least click, and some portion of those who click to buy.”
Tav’s throat went dry. She was giving him that look again and, worse, he didn’t think it was on purpose. Her gaze passed over his body and her chest rose and fell as she took a deep breath.
“How long were you watching me before?” he asked. His voice came out low—much too close to a groan for his liking.
“A few minutes.” Her voice had gone quiet, too. “At first, I didn’t want to bother you, but then I was peeping because you still haven’t let me do any work in here and I wanted to see what I was missing out on. I thought there’d be more banging.” Her eyes went wide and she glanced away. “With hammers. On a forge.”
Tav blinked against the image of Portia bent over his forge, that look of determination he’d glimpsed at the boot camp on her face. He had to hope that she’d be so bad at swordmaking that he’d get to kick her out of the workshop.
She grinned suddenly—this time she knew what she was doing, he could tell. The heat in her eyes was replaced by a friendly glimmer. A challenge. “Come on. People will watch the video. They’ll tell their friends to watch the videos. And then they’ll buy the fruits of your labor.”
Tav took a step closer to her, and that step was so natural that he realized he’d been holding himself away from her the entire time. He leaned in a bit, caught a hint of that scent that seemed so out of place in his workshop. “Are you saying you want me to use my sexy body to hawk my wares, Freckles?”
She held his gaze for a moment, then her head moved an inch closer to his . . . as she burst into laughter. Her forehead grazed his shoulder, and when she lifted it away, there were tears of mirth in her eyes and a smudge of metallic filings on her forehead. “Can you say that again? Please?”
Tavish crossed his arms over his chest, mostly to resist the urge to wipe the smudge away.
“Muh sexay buhdy,” she said, squaring her shoulders up in what he supposed was an imitation of him, then broke character as laughter took her again. “I’m sorry, that’s really adorable.”
He would have kicked her out if he wasn’t enjoying her uninhibited joy so much. And she had called him adorable. Not a descriptor he’d had tossed his way in recent years.
“My sexy body,” he repeated, laying the burr on thick, and was rewarded with Portia’s renewed laughter. He turned and started cleaning his workspace so she wouldn’t see the broad smile on his face.
“I’m sorry. You can make fun of my accent too if you want,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t need your permission, dude,” he replied, knowing he sounded more Valley Girl than New Yorker. “Did you need anything else?”
She shifted from one foot to the other. “You’re cool with me relaunching the site, then?”
“Do what you want, Freckles. I don’t know much about tech shite, but what you’ve made looks good, professional, and like it took a lot of work. Thank you.”
She stared at him and he shifted uncomfortably. He could be an arse, but was praise from him that off-putting?
“Thank you?” she said.
“Aye.”
“Oh! Your ludditeness reminds me. I stopped by Mary’s shop again and she had a book for you.” She pulled a small velvet sack from her shoulder bag and handed it to him.
“Mary’s catering to the hipster crowd now, is she?” he asked, running his hand over the bag.
“Oh, the bag’s mine,” Portia said. “I mean, she is trying to bring in some new business, actually. That’s what I was talking to her about. But she said it was a rare book that you’d been searching for a while, so I thought maybe it should be handled with care.”
Tavish rubbed his thumb over the book, feeling the velvety fabric covering it bristle beneath his fingertips. He could make Portia out to be a pain in the arse all he wanted, but she was a pain who had tried to do right by him so far. The least he could do was try to be cordial and act like a grown man in control of his libido.
He grabbed a tissue, reached out, and roughly swiped away the smudge from her forehead. Not exactly treating her like a delicate flower, but he didn’t want to know what her skin felt like beneath his fingertips. If he knew that, he’d have to find out more. He’d always found it hard to let go of anything his curiosity snagged on, and he was certain Portia wouldn’t be the exception to that rule.
“What—”
He turned the tissue, showing her the metal filings, and she drew the heel of her hand over where he’d swiped, looking at him with those wide eyes again.
“Thanks. For the book. And the website, and all,” he said gruffly.
She gave him a quick nod, turned on her heels, and then stopped, looking back over her shoulder. “Thanks for trusting me to do this.”
Then she was gone.