Messing with Mac. Jill Shalvis

he wasn’t going there, not tonight. He stripped, hunted up a pair of beat-up old shorts and headed back out for his own anger management class.

      A long, punishing run.

      AT THE CRACK OF DAWN the next morning, Mac drove back to Taylor’s building. He had a soft spot for this hour, before the sun had fully risen on the horizon, as no one had yet screwed up his day.

      Today he’d have a crew working on the demolition, tearing out drywall down to the wood studs, then stripping old electrical and plumbing lines. Yesterday had been just for him, a way to burn off some accumulated steam. And he’d had plenty of it. There’d been that call from his mother, who in spite of her own life and full-time, very demanding job, was warm and loving and more than a little certain he was wasting away without her home cooking, and when was he going to come home for a Sunday meal?

      Then had come the call from his old captain, wanting him back on the police force, which he’d left at the same time as his divorce four years ago. Much as Mac had loved being a cop, he loved rebuilding and renovating more, and always had. He’d been building things, working with his hands, ever since he could remember, and his love of doing so hadn’t changed.

      But his purpose had. Life was too damn short, as he’d learned the hard way, and he intended to spend the rest of it doing what he loved. And what he loved was taking old, decrepit, run-down historical buildings and restoring them to their former glory. He’d been doing just that since getting off the force and had never looked back. He’d started out working for a friend of the family, learning the trade. For two years now, he’d been on his own doing mostly single rooms within existing buildings until this last year when he’d taken on whole buildings for the first time.

      He’d found his calling. Taylor was his biggest client to date, his biggest job and his stepping stone to the next level.

      He hoped. Thanks to Ariel, who’d dragged him through the coals financially, morally and every other way possible, he couldn’t afford to renovate his own place, not yet. Fine. He’d do it for someone else and work his way up. He had no problem with that.

      And with that single-mindedness, he parked right in front of Taylor’s building—a miracle given the deplorable parking in South Village—and fervently hoped she’d made herself scarce. He had a crew to think about, and he wanted their minds on work, not on a beautiful woman, no matter how good she’d looked swinging a sledgehammer in all her finery.

      His crew was waiting for him, just standing on the front steps, which made no sense. They knew better than to stand around wasting time.

      But they weren’t just standing, they were smiling and nodding like little puppets to…surprise, surprise…Taylor.

      “It came from Russia,” she was saying, holding up some sort of vase as he strode up the walk, annoyance already starting to simmer.

      Taylor stroked perfectly manicured fingers over the smooth, porcelain surface of the vase as she talked, caressing the thing like she would a lover, and Mac’s blood began to beat thick, and not with just annoyance now. An ache, purely sexual, began to spread through his belly.

      Which proved it, he was insane.

      “It’s worth a small fortune,” Taylor said, seeming lost in the delicate etching on the vase, sighing over the beauty of it as she touched.

      The sound of her soft sigh didn’t help Mac’s inner ache, and he spent a moment brooding over the fact he hadn’t been with a woman in a good long while. He hadn’t wanted to, not since Ariel and her cruel betrayal.

      But not having a sexual urge wasn’t the same as ignoring one. He looked at the vase in Taylor’s hands and concentrated on her words.

      Worth a fortune, she’d said.

      Enough to cover the wasted labor for however long she stood there occupying his men’s every thought?

      But what did she care how much money he lost in wages unearned? Mac wasn’t exactly sure what had happened yesterday, why she’d momentarily drawn him, given who and what she was—that being a woman too close to Ariel’s type to make him comfortable. But whatever it was, whatever little spark or electrical current of attraction he’d felt in spite of himself, he wouldn’t feel again.

      She wore a pair of pale blue capris with a matching short, little cropped jacket, looking like she should be getting ready to walk down the runway instead of standing on the step of her ugly building.

      Her hair was pulled back in a careful twist and she wore more of that peach lip-gloss from yesterday.

      She was a long, cool drink of water, and even knowing it, even having prepared himself to see her again, he was suddenly dying of thirst, and couldn’t seem to tear his eyes off her.

      When she saw him, she stopped talking, rubbing her lips together in a little gesture that signified either nerves or arousal. Either way, awareness shot straight to his groin.

      So much for ignoring her. “Why are you here?” he asked.

      She lifted a brow, assuring him and everyone around that she considered him a Neanderthal for asking such a question. And okay, yes, maybe his tone had been a bit brusque. After all, she did own the place. But there was some inexplicable…thing going on between the two of them, some amazing thing that reminded him of…a shark bite. Painful, and probably lethal.

      But they’d signed a contact, he and she. Every possible little detail had been decided on, down to the last shade of paint on the walls. Her presence here wasn’t required, and in fact, he knew the ratio of work done today would be directly related to how far away she was.

      The further the better. “You agreed to move out for the duration of the restoration,” he reminded her.

      “I agreed to make sure there were no tenants during the duration. Suzanne and Nicole are gone.”

      “But you’re not.”

      “I’m not a tenant.”

      Shaking his head, he took the last step that put him on even ground with her. Mostly he towered over everyone around him, and knowing it, he usually made a conscious effort not to use his size as an intimidation. But right now he wasn’t thinking intimidation so much as self-preservation. He wanted this job. He needed this job. It was the first thing he’d cared about in far too long. And in a way he was just beginning to understand, he needed to lose himself in the pure joy of the work itself, something he couldn’t do with her parading around all damn day.

      “You can’t mean to be here while we work.”

      She lifted that chin, eyes flashing. “I’ll do as I please.”

      Damn. She did, she meant to be here while they worked. Because she didn’t trust him, or because she wanted to drive him crazy every step of the way?

      “Why?”

      “I won’t be in your way,” she said in lieu of a real answer.

      In his experience, clients couldn’t help but be in the way, always wanting to change the logical order of things, waiting until paint was on the walls or tile on the floor before deciding the color was off, or the brand not quite right. And he had the Town Council and historical society to impress on this one. “Look, Princess—”

      “My name,” she said, still smiling that cool smile as she carefully shifted the vase from one hand to the other in a way that suggested she was considering smashing it over his head, “is not ‘Princess.”’

      He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m not trying to be a hard-ass here, it’s just that we’d all be better off if you’d just let us do our jobs.”

      “You are a hard-ass, it’s one of the reasons I hired you,” she said, surprising him. “And I think you could try trusting me a little. I’m not going to bog you down.”

      Mac didn’t do trust, and even if he did, he’d be crazy to give in to a woman quite used to