Page 6 of Harbor Me

Should’ve named him Benedict.

At the bench I pick up the wrench and put it down twice, because the picture won’t clear. Her mouth shaping the word finally. Slow, deliberate, like she’d been saving it up just for me. Half hard in the middle of the day over a woman I fully intend to run off. I don’t need this kind of bullshit complicating my life.

I want her gone. I want her under me. Both of those are true at the same time, neither one’s moving an inch, and it’s going to be the longest two weeks of my life.

Unless I manage to run her off sooner.

Chapter 2

Aiden

Six forty in the morning and her truck’s already in the lot.

Parked dead straight again. Along the fence, exactly where Marcus pointed yesterday. The office lights are on and the screen door’s propped open with a cinder block I recognize, because that cinder block lives behind the workshop and has for a decade.

She stole my cinder block.

Diesel’s on the office porch. Obviously. He gives me a look on my way past that I choose not to interpret.

Through the doorway, the office is a crime scene. Just about every drawer of the filing cabinet hanging open. Four trash bags lined up against the wall, fat and knotted. The desk, my desk, is cleared down to actual wood, which is something I haven’t personally witnessed since my father died.

The paper that used to live on it is now laid out across the floor in rows. Grids. She’s built grids out of my paperwork.

Vanessa Daniels is sitting cross-legged in the middle of it in jeans and a sweater, hair up, pen behind her ear, sorting envelopes into piles like she’s dealing cards.

The glossy hair piled on her head is the detail that gets me. There’s a strip of bare skin at the back of her neck, soft and pale above the sweater’s collar, and I stare at it for exactly as long as it takes to hate myself. Longer, honestly. Not even seven in the morning and I’m already hard over four inches of the back of her neck.

“You’re in my office,” I say.

“Technically it’s my office now.” She doesn’t look up. “You gave it to me yesterday. In front of witnesses.”

“I gave you a trial. I didn’t give you demolition rights.”

“Nothing’s demolished. It’s been put on life-support.” She flips an envelope over, frowns at it, sets it on the pile nearest the window. “That’s the dead pile, by the way. Anything older than eighteen months and already resolved. That one’s pending. That one’s money you owe. That one,” she taps the smallest stack, dead center, close to her knee like she’s guarding it, “Is money people owe you. Which, fun fact, is the biggest number in the room.”

“Nobody owes me-”

“Hendricks owes you a winter storage deposit from October. Grayson’s got an open invoice from May for a job you never billed the second half on. And somebody named R. Prescott has three unpaid service tickets and a note in your handwriting that says ‘will pay after Labor Day,’ which Labor Day, it doesn’t specify and based on the paper aging I’d guess it wasn’t last year’s.”

The Prescott jobs were two summers ago. I know that without checking, I hate that I remember when the job was and not the fact that they didn’t pay, and I hate even more that she’s watching my face as I realize this.

“Some of those are handshake deals,” I say gruffly.

“Sure. And your handshake’s worth about eleven thousand dollars right now, sitting in a drawer.” She finally looks up at me. She’s far too awake for a woman who’s been down on that floor since before six. “You want coffee? I made a pot. Your machine was disgusting, that’s why the coffee tasted like mud before. I cleaned it, you’re welcome.”

Getting rid of her is going to be a pleasure. Just as soon as I figure out where she put everything.

The coffee’s better than I usually make it. A fact that can’t be water-boarded out of me by a professional torturer. I drink it standing in the doorway like a man guarding an exit, because sitting down in here feels like giving in.

Also, from the doorway I can watch her without her noticing just how much watching I’m doing.

The way her lips move when she reads, shaping numbers she doesn’t say out loud. Wanting to fuck your new office manager into the threadbare carpet first thing in the morning is a hell of a way to run a business.

But there’s no denying I want her. It sits under everything else all morning, low and constant, and telling it to stop does nothing at all.

She works while she talks. Paying no mind to my terse responses. She doesn’t even wince when I use my most cutting tone on her. Every placement the agency’s sent up here spent day one asking questions and day two crying in the parking lot.

She hasn’t asked me one question yet. She just keeps pulling answers out of my own paper and handing them to me like she found my keys.