Big Bad Wolf (3 page)

It didn’t help he stood there like some cadet under inspection.
He was, she realized, mocking her.
It was there in those wolf eyes, with their strange, intense light gleaming at her.

“Are the shoes right?” he inquired politely.

She hadn’t missed the new shoes.
“Show me the bottom,” she
said.

“The bottom of my shoes?” he asked, as if to make sure.

Jaymee glanced up at him sharply and saw the gleam in his eyes was now full-fledged laughter.
Her chin jutted up.
“Yes,” she told him in her firmest tone, and hastily stepped back when he moved unexpectedly in her direction, bumping into the tailgate of her truck.
To her dismay, he put a hand right next to her, braced his weight on it, and obediently lifted up a foot for her inspection.

If she moved
six inches forward,
she would be up against his chest.
Her senses were on overload, amped-up and uncomfortable.
She didn’t like her reaction at all, not one bit.
She didn’t like how he had managed to make her feel
small and helpless.
Didn’t like that she noticed
the way the muscles rippled in his forearm that was bearing his w
eight.
Didn’t like the delicious scent of male and cologne
that crowded her mind like an instant logic-erasing spell.
Hated, hated, those blue-gray eyes giving her their own lazy perusal.

“Does it look good to you?” he asked, still polite.

She was sure they weren’t talking about the
same thing, but Jaymee
hadn’t stayed unattached at the advanced age of thirty without good reason.
She knew men and all their rotten little games, and had been given an excellent lesson in the particular area of wolves in sheep clothing.
She considered that the one main important point under the topic of Past Experience in her resume toward singular living.

Breathing out easily, she replied, “Looking good won’t help you, Langley, when you’re slip-sliding off a roof.”
She gave a brisk nod.
He smelled too damn good for a roofer.
Time to make him sweat.
“You can put your foot back down.
Your shoes look fine.
You can start by taking the toolboxes and air hoses up onto the roof.”

It wasn’t easy to sound businesslike when she was talking to an expanse of male chest, but
she didn’t think leaning back and looking up would give her any advantage.
Moving sideways, she eased out of the warmth of his male body and made her escape with a pretended air of looking busy.

Nick followed the sway of those enticing hips for one moment longer before turning to look into the back of the truck.
If he weren’t careful, he was going to get himself fired before he’d even started on his new job.
He didn’t know why he took such perverse delight in trying to rile up Jay Barrows, but the deliberate cool and distant attitude of hers was like an itch just out of reach.

Hoi
sting three coiled
air hoses onto one shoulder, he picked up a box of nails under his free arm, his mind still
on his new boss.
She might not know it, but Jay Barrows affected him too
.
He’d watched her a long time yesterday.
She was cool as the ocean breeze in the summer heat, working with silent determination while others wiped away their sweat, and seemed to be all business, rarely
smiling.
However, Nick
had been trained to look for the weak links in his opponent’s armor; it was his job to break in, examine, and leave his mark.

Erase, replace, destroy.
That was his core job in his unit.
There were nine of them, and each was programmed in one specialty, although essentially, they had been trained for one thing.

Nick put that subject out of his mind for now.
He would worry about getting his hands on a computer later.
Right now, he had to concentrate on his newly-chosen line of work.
After reading the instructions on the shingle wrapper he’d picked up the day before, he now had a basic understanding of how to install shingles on a roof, but suspected on-the-job training was very different from mere words written by some technical writer.
He, the Programmer,
should know that.

And he was proven right.

A few hours later, perspiration pouring down his face, stinging his eyes, his tank
top drenched into a useless rag, he marveled at the inhuman coolness of his boss.
The other roofers,
Dicker and Lucky, were taking a cigarette break, sitting on top of several bundles of shingles, but
Jay Barrows was methodically laying her shingles one after another, moving in a crab-like manner across the roof.

His current duty was to tear open a bundle of shingles and put several within her reach all the way up the roof, so that she didn’t have to stop to get the shingles herself.
She had given him a utility knife with a hooked blade, showing him how to cut “starters” out of the fiberglass shingles for each row.

She was a good teacher.
Instead of explaining and instructing in the sweltering heat, she went straight to work, leaving it up to h
im to watch her, pointing out ways to do things quicker in short sentences.
Too much explanation usually distract
ed
from physical work and roofing, he quickly found out, was all about working efficiently and constantly.

The starter shingles went on first, over the drip edge, then the first course, six inches or so of
f the left side.
Each time, her
nail gun flew over the shingles with a precision and speed that belied the difficulty of being in such a cramped and awkward position while wielding the tool attached to the air hose. All in humidity-drenched hundred-degree heat.

“We break for lunch in half an hour,” Jaymee said, as she continued laying shingles without looking up.
“You can stay on the site or go to a diner.
Up to you.”

“What do you do?”

She gave him a brief glance, then resumed nailing.
“I go to a diner.
It’s good to get out of the heat.”

The heat had turned her ponytail into a mass of unruly curls, and Nick felt the urge to run his fingers through them, to feel what those little corkscrews were like.

“Can I come along?
I’m still quite lost around town.”
It was a small lie, but he wanted to see that delectable mouth chewing on food.

Jaymee hesitated.
It would be ungracious to refuse.
“Sure,” she told him, and changed the subject.
“Get me a lead boot
for the plumbing pipe from the
box, will you?”

He was a good worker, she thought.
He hadn’t complained about the heat yet, and followed
every order without question, an essential requirement while roofing and dying of thirst
.
The latter was somehow surprising to her, as he didn’t strike her as someone who took orders
easily.
It was there behind that lazy grace—a man who did things his way—
and she had the feeling
he was merely biding his time.

For what, she hadn’t the faintest idea,
but one thing was certain.
Nicholas
Langley definitely had never been a construction worker.
Why was he working as a laborer?
There were only a few reasons people picked her kind of work.
They were uneducated, or addicted to drugs and thus couldn’t find a steady job, or they started really young
and had made this their livelihood
, or they were running from the law.
The first three reasons didn’t fit.
Nick Langley appeared educated and his body certainly didn’t look abused.
He didn’t look like some roofing apprentice, since he was probably a few years older than she was, which left one last alternative theory.

Somehow, he didn’t fit the description of a hardened criminal either, but Jaymee had seen them come and go enough these past years to know not
to be surprised.
Perhaps
Langley
was a criminal.
That would make perfect sense, since she, Jaymee Barrows, was attracted to the criminally inclined, and would do well to remember her debts from that one mistake.

Nick lifted a brow when she finally waved him to stop, stood up and stretched.
“Lunch?” he asked hopefully.
He was getting hungry.

“Lunch,” she agreed, then disengaged the nail gun from the hose.
She
pulled out the foam plugs protecting
her hearing.

“I need to get some of those,” Nick remarked.

Jaymee smiled.
More proof that he wasn’t in construction.
Roofers rarely bothered about hearing protection in
Florida
.
Most of them were partially deaf by the time they turned forty.

“I have some extra ones.
I’ll give them to you after lunch.”
She walked to the ladder leaning against the roof and turned to the other two roofers.
“Coming to lunch, Dicker?”

“Nah, I’m going to stay here.
Brought my own today.”

“We’ll be here when you get back,” the other man said.

“OK.
I have to go pick up some more roofing cement, so I’ll probably take longer today,”
Jaymee told them.
“Make sure you cut the valleys before the sun heats them too long.
The last time we left them till the end, the whole side of the white roof had tar stains, and the builder
complained."

“OK, boss.”

Nick watched with interest when Jay pulled off her tee
-
shirt after she got down from the roof, displaying a colorful bikini.
She went to the tap on the side of the house and sluiced her body with water to cool off, wiping herse
lf with the shirt.
Now that was a great idea.
He
proceeded to take off his tank
top
and did the same, putting his head under the
gush of
water as well.
That felt wonderful, cleaning off the dust and the sticky sweat.

Jaymee swallowed hard.
She shouldn’t be looking, but
God, the man was nothing but sleek muscles.
His body was lean and hard, the same dusting of fine dark hair arrowing down to an “outie” belly button, just above the top of his jeans.

“Maybe it would be better if I wore shorts tomorrow,” Nick interrupted her wayward imagination.

Jaymee blinked.
Shorts.
Meaning naked thighs and calves.
Sha
king her head, she said, “You’
ll regret
it.
The fiberglass shingles’
ll cut up your knees
in no time,
and it’ll also burn you every time you kneel down.
Remember, the shingles are baking in the sun.”

Nick nodded.
He should know that by now.
Every time he held on to one too long, the heat had burned his fingertips.
No wo
nder she wore gloves.
She, he
noted, was golden all over, at least where he could see.
There wasn’t an ounce of fat on her, and that scrap of cloth she had on right now barely covered unexpectedly full breasts.
She wasn’t shy about w
alking on the job site either
, obliviously passing the other men who were looking at her like they would like her for lunch.

As far as he could tell, she was unmarried and unattached.
Perhaps she was looking for a man.
His eyes narrowed a fraction
.
No.
She hadn’t sent any such signals to any of the men she’d talked to all morning.
She had been serious and totally businesslike.
Jay Barrows was obviously unaware of any male attention, except for his.
He hadn’t missed the heat that showed up in her lively eyes now and then when she looked
at him, which was often, heat
that would disappear as quickly as it flared up.
She was fighting it, and for some reason, it m
ade him want to add fuel to the
fire.

Donning a fresh tee
-
shirt, Jaymee beckoned to him to climb into her truck.
“Don’t you have another shirt to wear?”

“It’ll dry in the sun,” Nick said, shrugging.
Jaymee sighed, then pulled another shirt out from behind her seat.
She threw it onto his lap.
“I doubt your shirt would fit,” he wryly commented, indicating her smaller size.