The Bluff (Graham Brothers, #2)(16)

I hear the swish of a broom over concrete and head toward the sound. Winnie is sweeping the first and smaller room in the warehouse, the one that will become the main bar. Without electricity, the shadows pool inside the building, and I use them to hide from sight, for the first time all day allowing myself the indulgence of watching her.

Winnie is impossible to ignore, even sweaty from a day of work and dressed in baggy, athletic clothes. It’s the woman herself who holds all the allure, not whatever she’s wearing. My gaze falls from her messy ponytail to her full lips down to her lean but defined shoulders and arms. Winnie may be petite, but she looks like she knows her way around a weight bench. Her pale skin and lithe muscles only emphasize the dark tattoos swirling down her arms. They’re something like vines or ribbons, curving and twisting over her skin with what look like words and other objects woven in. I want to trace them with my fingers, study them, ask her about each one.

Winnie suddenly pauses, looking up to meet my gaze. I jerk mine away from her tattoos. “Am I sweeping to your impossibly high standards, boss?”

That. That right there is why the muscles in my shoulders feel like they’ll never unclench again. It’s the teasing lilt in Winnie’s voice, the slight edge of sarcasm every time she says boss, the glint in her eyes, more visible today without her glasses. That threw me off too—the uninhibited view of her deep blue eyes. Does she wear contacts? Or are the glasses just for show?

You don’t care, James. Winnie’s eyesight is not your business.

“Well?” She leans on the handle of the push broom, grinning at me. Her skin glows with a light sheen of sweat. She looks tired, but the happy kind of tired, the energized kind. My work gloves still cover her hands, and I like seeing them there, touching her skin.

Something about her sets off a series of connected reactions in me, spanning the distance from anger to attraction. Turns out, those two are closer in proximity to one another than I ever thought.

“It’s fine.”

“I think you need to refresh your vocabulary. The word fine is so … overused.”

I grunt at this. No need to use words at all.

“The place looks good,” she says, after a moment.

It does look good. And it wouldn’t be so close to completely cleaned out if she hadn’t been responsible for getting so many people here. We would probably have another day or two of work, easy. I’m working to scrounge up words to thank her when she starts to take off my work gloves with her teeth. All my thoughts die right where they are. I swear my head is about to explode.

First, because those things are filthy. She’s been hauling rusty, old equipment and sweeping broken glass and picking up rotted pieces of wood for hours. My dirty gloves shouldn’t be anywhere near her mouth.

But also … watching Winnie’s teeth close around the finger of my glove has me imagining her mouth biting down on my fingertip. What would a little nip from her feel like?

“James? Are you still with me?”

“Yep.”

The problem is I’m a little too with her. I shake my head to dispel my errant thoughts. There’s nothing I can do, however, to shake loose the inexplicable attraction to a woman I don’t like. And the resulting frustration because Winnie’s draw only seems to be growing, not diminishing.

No, now I’ve devolved to the point of imagining Winnie nipping me with her teeth.

This is not like me. Tank made words like consent and respect a part of our early education, saying he refused to raise a house full of men who behaved like teenage boys in a locker room. I am not a man who imagines women—much less my employee—biting me.

And yep—now I’m picturing it again.

She has broken my brain. Winnie plus the stress of everything I’m trying to do here, the nagging comments from Collin all day, and the dang cats infesting the building—it’s all too much. That is the only explanation for my errant and inappropriate thoughts.

“When is the contractor coming? He’s pretty late.”

“Any minute now, temp.”

Winnie’s eyes light up at my words, and my stomach dips. Why did I have to go give her a nickname pulled straight from The Office? And yet … the nickname totally fits. She is my Ryan—the totally unqualified temp I can’t get rid of.

“Hello?”

The contractor, now a full three hours late, has impeccable timing. I walk to meet him, shaking his hand as he apologizes for getting caught up at another site.

“I’m sorry I got such a late start,” he says, glancing around, his eyebrows climbing his forehead as he takes in the space. “Especially since it looks like you don’t have your electrical set up.”

“The electrician is coming later in the week, but I’m not sure if any of the lights work anyway. We’ll have to use phone flashlights.”

“That should be fine, since this is just a preliminary look. Wow,” he says, glancing around and running a hand through his dark red hair. “This space is massive. That’s a good and bad problem to have.”

That’s exactly one of the issues I’ve been having. With a warehouse that’s essentially one massive open space with a few small storage rooms and closets, I don’t know how to break things up. I’ve been to a lot of breweries in Austin to study how things are set up. No two are alike. And none of them had a building this big and empty. I’ve always been more focused on the brewing side of things, and while I have the measurements and know exactly where the system of tanks will be installed, everything else is a big question mark.