Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
“I don’t know why exactly you felt the need to give us all a fuckton more work to do right before the hotel opens.”
Walker glared at his brother, who was standing in the doorway of the main venue barn, arms crossed, expression sharp.
“It’s a trial run,” Walker said. “Testing out all this cracker-jack staff we hired, making sure we can get an event put together as quickly as we need to.”
“Well, you sure made us do it quickly.”
Though when Walker put it that way, he had a hard time being irritated at him. A hard time, not an impossible time.
Of course, maybe the real issue was that he was actually the person he was irritated at.
He had forced himself to keep entirely clear of Marlowe for the last three and a half weeks. Which was no mean feat.
But then, considering there were a million and a half things to do ahead of the resort opening, he had been able to come up with reasons that he was too busy to do any kind of interfacing with her.
He had made sure that Walker and Lila did the communicating with her, and that wasn’t even weird. It was reasonable. It would be weirder if he were constantly involved. It would feel like he was trying to get proximity to her because they’d slept together.
Lila was the one overseeing more of the hotel specifics than he was, and Walker was the events person.
Anyway, even without seeing Marlowe, he felt like he did. He saw her every night in his dreams, and he woke up breathing ragged and hard as iron. Reliving that afternoon in the cabin. What it had been like to be inside her…
“I think booking weddings is aging you,” he said, looking at his brother’s profile.
“I got asked for white peacocks. How stupid is that? And why the fuck do they think that I should be the one providing the peacock?”
“Are you going to do it?”
“Yes. Because I named a ridiculous fee for finding them, and the couple is willing to pay it? They’re ridiculously rich. From California.”
“Where are you getting white peacocks?”
“There’s a farm. And I have to pay for the handler’s time, because we have to make sure that the peacocks are treated appropriately. It’s like hiring a child star. They can only work for so long, and then we’re going to have to bring out a different pair.”
“To do what?”
“I guess they’re just… Supposed to kind of be there? But they’ll be sort of posed in the flowers for some pictures? I don’t know. You would think they would just put them in in post.”
“I don’t know. I’m just glad that none of this is my problem.”
“Yeah. Because you made it my problem.” At least that was an amusing distraction from…
He should be focused on the resort. Only the resort. Keeping himself away from Marlowe was supposed to ensure that.
But all he could do was think about her. He’d had to take a cold shower more than once, and he refused to jack off thinking about her… until he couldn’t refuse it anymore, and then did, because he was only human.
He hated it. He wasn’t some kid wanting all these things he couldn’t have anymore. He didn’t like longing. Didn’t like a big empty ache in his chest. It reminded him of too many of those times.
It reminded him too much of being inadequate. Unworthy.
He resented the hell out of the fact that she was the one who made him have that feeling again. Resented the hell out of the fact that it made him wonder if this was a fraction of what his mother had felt when thinking about his father…
He didn’t think that had been love. It had been something dark and twisted, something obsessed.
He didn’t like the discovery that something similar lived inside of him.
He didn’t like it at all.
She would be at the barbecue tonight, most likely. Unless she decided she was too busy, and stayed in the hotel.
They were working with a local, large-scale barbecue catering company for the event tonight, but Laney was providing dessert — a gourmet s’mores bar— even though he’d told her she didn’t need to do that, because he knew she had a lot else going on.
She had insisted that she and Marlowe had the hotel so dialed in that she had extra time.
So, Marlowe probably would be there.
Especially because she would probably want to show support, and be a good leader and all of that.
Neither of them could avoid their jobs just because they had slept together. That would mean that their sleeping together had actually compromised something.
Worse, it would mean that it had meant something.
It didn’t.
It had just been hot enough to get under his skin.
Connections like that… They were best left unromanticized.
Sex was sex. Nothing more.
“Wow!” Lila walked into the barn, her voice echoing off the rafters. “This place looks great.”
They had their tables and chairs set up, with rustic linen over the top.
They had five linen options for their wedding guests, and for this event, they had chosen cream-colored tablecloths with plaid accents underneath.
There were rustic lanterns on the tables, something that Walker said was the pioneer package.
That was something he should probably know more about, and Walker had ranted at him about it extensively, but he always zoned out when things got too granular into the aesthetics of it all.
He cared about that. But, not really on that level.
The design of the hotel was one thing. Linens were another.
“You can thank Walker for that,” Cody said.
“I won’t,” Lila said cheerfully.
“Feral,” Nolan muttered, stepping into the barn.
“Talking about yourself?” Lila asked.
“Sure, sprout,” he said.
“Sprout up your –”
“Everybody has to be on their best behavior tonight.” Zane chose that moment to walk into the barn. “Including you, ZB. You might want to practice smiling.”
Zane grunted and crossed his arms over his chest. “No thanks. Place looks good, though.”
“I’m surprised you showed up,” Walker said.
“I’m part of this,” Zane said.
A man of few words, as always, he didn’t expand on that.
But, forty-five minutes later, when guests started to filter in, he was almost sure that he saw Zane checking the door repeatedly.
He wondered who he was looking for. When Cody wasn’t checking the door for Marlowe, he wondered, anyway.
He knew that he couldn’t be doing that. He had to make his way around the room, talk to everybody. Make sure that he introduced himself. The bigger Painted Ridge got, the less personal it all felt, and he wanted it to feel personal.
This was his… It was his functional revenge plan, really. Make himself rich enough off the place his dead, deadbeat dad had left him.
As revenge plots went, it wasn’t exactly the most spiteful, he supposed. But what he wasn’t going to do was cut his nose off in an effort to hurt a dead man. Or something like that.
He just wanted to prove that he was better. That he was the best.
He had done that in the rodeo. He would do it here. Nothing else mattered. Not even how good it felt to kiss Marlowe. How soft her skin had felt underneath his hands.
That was a distraction. Nothing more.
The barn was mostly full, staff and their loved ones eating and drinking and laughing.
“Does the food pass muster?” He asked Walker quietly.
“It’s great,” Walker said. “So I feel really confident moving forward with this caterer for the weddings.”
“Good.”
“This is weird,” Walker said.
“What is?”
“More people now work for us than ever spoke to us willingly while we were growing up in town. Plus all the people who are here from town to try and make business deals with us because now we matter.”
A surge of adrenaline shot through his veins. It was true. And it made him feel… triumphant. Made him feel like he had won something.
Then he turned and saw her walk through the door. It was like being hit with an anvil in the center of his chest. It was like the world, the room, the moment, all just stopped.
Marlowe.
This was why he’d been avoiding her. Goddamn.
Every shred of good intention went right out the window the moment she set foot in that barn. Boss, employee, that didn’t matter.
Man. Woman. That was as advanced as his brain was right now.
No, if that were true, it wouldn’t need to be her. If that were true he could go hook up with any woman, like he’d always done, and it wouldn’t need to be her.
It hit him then that she was one of the few forbidden things he’d ever come across.
The only things that had ever been forbidden to him had to do with his own moral compass, not about anything else.
And while his own moral compass certainly wished like hell his dick wasn’t pointed toward the true north of Marlowe, it was.
The bigger issue was all the external things it could break.
Back when he’d been younger, he’d been trying to break things.
Now he’d actually built something. And keeping it intact mattered.
But she was pretty like a blade. Sharp, shiny, and able to cut him deep without even trying. This lure into forbidden temptation was new. And it was intense.
Her red hair was cascading over her shoulders, parted to the side, with a wave that framed her face. She was wearing a tight burgundy dress that came only midway down her thighs.
He was well familiar with those thighs. He had them wrapped around his waist while he drove deep inside of her.
A lot of the women in town had enjoyed secretly sneaking off and giving him blowjobs back in the day. Because what was hotter than a little bit of danger?
The thing was, he’d always been the danger. Now, Marlowe was the danger, and it lit him on fire.
He could feel Walker looking at him, and he wasn’t sure he cared.
Or rather, he wasn’t sure he could do anything to mitigate the reaction he was having, to make himself give a fuck about hiding it from his brother.
“Wow. Damn. She’s hot, just like you said,” Walker whispered low.
“Thanks,” Cody responded. “Your opinion has been noted now multiple times.”
“As is yours,” Walker said.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” he said.