Coldhearted Boss(47)

I glance down at the machine currently filled with my clothes, tumbling them dry.

“So?”

“So…you lugged everything home only to repack it and bring it all back here to wash?”

I won’t admit defeat so easily.

I arch a sardonic brow. “Are you always this obsessed with other people’s laundry habits?”

His smile stretches. His dimple pops. He seems to be enjoying this far too much. And well, of course he is. He’s caught me. “Did I not make myself perfectly clear when I told you no one is allowed to stay here on the weekends unless you get prior approval?”

“From who?”

“Me.”

My laugh is short and sarcastic. “You’d never give me approval for anything. In fact, I think you go out of your way to make my life difficult.”

His brow arches. “So then we both agree that’s what we’ve been doing.”

Making each other miserable, he means.

I bite down on my bottom lip and shrug. “Let’s just say I never had any interest in learning how to play guitar before last week.”

He grins then and my stomach clenches tight. I can’t help but remember what I did yesterday morning down by the lake—what I imagined him doing to me—and my cheeks burn with heated embarrassment. Fortunately, his next question thrusts me right back into the present moment.

“Why do you want to stay here on the weekends?”

He assumes I want to?

Well, it’s probably good that he does. I’d rather not correct him. It would only open me up to another line of questioning, and I think a common rule of war is that you don’t give your enemy more information than is totally necessary.

“It’s nice, quiet without you here tormenting me,” I say with a bored tone.

“So you’re going to continue to do it even though I’ve asked you not to?”

He doesn’t seem so against it now.

I tip my head to the side, assessing him. “I don’t know. If it were no longer forbidden, maybe I’d suddenly lose interest.”

He chuckles as he shakes his head, finally pushing off the doorway and turning away, leaving me there with my heart and mind racing after him.





Neither of us relents the following week. If anything, we escalate.

Oh, don’t get me wrong—during the day, you’d only ever hear Ethan speaking to me in the same curt, professional tone he uses for everyone. I don’t talk back or utter a single word that could be misinterpreted as insolent. In fact, I’m even better at my job than I was in previous weeks because I’m starting to get the hang of the construction site. In short, I’m flourishing, and Ethan would be crazy to let me go. Even Hudson, Ethan’s loyal sidekick, informs me that it’s much better with me around, though I think that’s just because I keep his and Robert’s desk tidy.

But all that prim-and-properness all day just means we have more energy for antics after quitting time.

Ethan has begun doing leisurely workouts in the center of the cabin. Push-ups, sit-ups, anything and everything that works up a sweat and produces low grunts that remind me of sex every time I hear them.

“You know there’s a whole wide world outside that cabin door,” I say, airing out my shirt while I lie on my bunk. “You can work out wherever you’d like.”

“I’m fine right here,” he says, bringing his t-shirt up to wipe his brow.

Rock-hard abs greet me, and I flush deeper before returning to my book.

It belongs to Ethan. Thankfully, he brought back half a dozen paperbacks with him from Austin. Slightly overkill, but it was probably out of fear that I’d accidentally drown a few of them. He lined them up on the desk Sunday night and I perused them while he showered, proceeding to borrow the one that looked most interesting, a psychological crime thriller. He never officially offered to let me read it and I never asked, and yet when he sees me up here flipping pages, he doesn’t say a word.

Brought on by his antics last week as well as his new fondness for cabin-calisthenics, I’ve decided it’s probably time to start burning him up with desire too. I shouldn’t be the only one having to splash cool water on my face every time he finishes a workout. And so, we slide into an even more vicious cycle.

If before our game was to try to appear unaffected by the other person, now it’s morphed into Who Can Turn the Other On the Most. I “accidentally” leave the shower door open when I rinse off on Tuesday night. The door isn’t cracked so much that he can see me, just enough that the steam wafts out into the cabin and the sound carries easily: hands lathering skin from head to toe, water splashing against the tiled floor. It’s no surprise that when I cut the water and stroll out in a towel a few minutes later, he’s pacing like a lion.

When I arch a brow, he turns and slaps his hand against the front door so it swings open. Heavy footsteps pound on the porch stairs and then he’s gone for the next hour. It’s the best hour of my entire life, alone in that cabin, smiling fondly at having bested him.

The next day, I take scissors to a pair of jeans. It’s the pair that were too long on me anyway. Now, they’re denim cutoffs, and I’m every country boy’s fantasy come to life when I stroll around the cabin later. I wouldn’t dare wear them around the site. Outside these four walls, my goal is to assimilate. Here, though, in this cabin, I want Ethan dying a slow death.