My eyes roll. “I know I’m making things worse. I’m doing it on purpose. The thing was barely leaking. How are you going to learn a lesson from a tiny little drip?” I shake my head. “You’re not, that’s how. You need a bigger problem to teach you to stop letting drunks rile you up.”
Thick brows furrow over sky-blue eyes as his mouth pulls down in a scowl.
“It’s almost ready for you,” I inform him with a grin, turning back to my work. Just one more turn of this wrench and we’ll have a proper lesson-teaching mess.
Large, strong hands wrap around my waist and lift, dragging me backward.
“Fox!” I yelp, flailing my arms and dropping the wrench while he hoists me up, up, up, before depositing me on the ground several feet away from the now marvelously leaky sink.
“Go do inventory,” he orders, nudging me toward the stockroom door. “And try not to screw it up too bad. I only have three hours this weekend to clean up your messes. Amia’s got a birthday party.”
I sniff. “I’m not a manager. I shouldn’t be doing inventory. My job description begins and ends at serving drinks and food to the patrons. Which we don’t have anymore, because you decided to go all Rocky Balboa on the clientele.”
“Just find something to do,” he grunts, dropping to his knees by the sink. “And don’t break anything.”
“I could just go home,” I suggest, glancing around the empty bar. “It’s not exactly booming in here.” It turns out that when the bar’s owner attacks a patron, people don’t like that too much. Shocking.
“Your shift ends in fifty-two minutes,” he grumbles. “You can go home then.”
I pout at his broad shoulders as they scrunch, squeezing in under the sink. The sleeve of his black long-sleeve T-shirt snags on the edge of the cabinet, then lifts as he reaches in, revealing the tip of a tattooed feather. The feather, I know, belongs to a whole set of them, some finished, some not, that work together to create a gorgeous set of wings. They flow from the center of his back, wrapping around his shoulders and down his arms to stop on his forearms, not quite reaching his wrists. His twin brother, our local tattoo artist, has been working on them on andoff for the past year. The last time I saw them, the outline was done, and they’d moved on to shading in the feathers one by one.
I’m dismayed to see that the shading has taken an already attractive tattoo and made it a thousand times more attractive. Pity me, please, for this information is devastating.
It’s some sort of cosmic joke that despite his…sparklingpersonality, Fox manages to be supremely hot. A hotjerk. With a hot tattoo.
Very inconvenient, that tattoo.
And more inconvenient the number of times I’ve borne witness to it—enough to have the soft, feathered lines practically branded into my brain. Sadly for me, it’s just not something you can scrub from your mind once you’ve seen it—the tattooorFox shirtless, showing it off.
You’d think a thirty-four-year-old bar owner would be a little more skeezy. A little more beer belly-y. A little less… bicepy. Apparently, you’d be wrong.
Fox spends his free time playing in a recreation softball league, running around playgrounds with his niece, and hiking. All he does is move his body, and it shows. I once asked him how he even has the energy for all of that exercise. He told me, “The exercise gives the energy.” Whatever that means. I’ll not be testing it out.
My exercise comes more in the form of curling a chip from the bag to my mouth while I watchTeen Wolffor the five-hundredth time. Needless to say, I am more squish than muscle. And thank all for that. It probably feels like cuddling with a rock when he manages to con some poor sucker into a snuggle. Cuddling with me is like laying with your favorite, cutest stuffed animal—soft, comfortable, and warm. I think we all know what the superior option is.
And it is not, ever, Fox.
All the more reason to relieve myself of his presence, methinks.
“Fifty-two minutes of you paying me to stand around seems pretty dumb to me,” I point out the very obvious for my poor, lacking-in-brains boss, “when I could go home and work on Amia’s cake.”
“Are you using my niece to manipulate me into letting you out of work?” he grumbles from the floor, peeking his head out far enough to locate the wrench I dropped when he was dragging me around.
“Yes,” I answer, rocking back on my heels. “Is it working?”
He disappears under the sink again. “Not really. I like the idea of you losing sleep to finish the cake on time. The bags under your eyes tomorrow will add to my enjoyment of the party at least tenfold.”
I stick my tongue out at him. “This is dumb. You know that, right?Reallydumb.”
“If you’re not going to do inventory, fine. But whatever you do, godoit,” he grunts, “and stop hovering over me. It’s givingobsessed.”
“It’s givingI don’t have anything to do and my boss is being a tyrant,” I counter, crossing my arms over my artfully tatteredBlackwood Brew[1] T-shirt.
“You’re not going home, kit,” he snaps. “Get over it.”
I just barely resist the urge to stomp my foot. I am not a child. I will not act like one.
“You have a bald spot, by the way,” I tell him.
