“Watch it, lady!” he yelled.
A city girl through and through, Becca held her ground. “You watch it,” she yelled back.
The kid narrowly missed her and kept going.
“Hey, which building is two-oh-three?”
He called out over his shoulder, “Ask Sam! Sam knows everything!”
Okay, perfect. She cupped her hands around her mouth so he’d hear her. “Where’s Sam?”
The kid didn’t answer, but he did give a jerk of his chin toward the building off to her right.
It was a warehouse like the others—industrial, old, the siding battered by the elements and the salty air. It was built like an A-frame barn, and both the huge front and back sliding doors were open to the elements. The sign posted did give her a moment’s pause.
PRIVATE DOCK
TRESPASSERS WILL BE USED AS BAIT.
She bit her lower lip and decided her need to find her place outweighed the threat. Hopefully…
The last of the sunlight slanted through, highlighting everything in gilded gold, both the skeleton of a wooden hull in the center of the space and the guy using some sort of planer along the wood. The air itself was throbbing with the beat of the loud indie rock blaring out from some unseen speakers.
From the outside, the warehouse hadn’t looked like much, but as she stepped into the vast doorway, she realized the inside was a wide-open space with floor-to-rafters windows nearly three stories high. Lined with ladders and racks of stacked wood planks and tools, it was neat as a store. The boat hull, centered in the space, looked like a piece of art.
Just like the guy working on it. His shirt was damp and clinging to his every muscle as it bunched and flexed with his movements. It was all so beautiful and intriguing—the boat, the music, the man himself, right down to the corded veins on his forearms—that it was like being at the movies during the montage of scenes that always played to a soundtrack.
Then she realized she recognized the board shorts hanging dangerously low on the guy’s hips.
Sexy Surfer.
Though he couldn’t have possibly heard her over the hum of his power tool and the loud music, he turned to face her, straightening. And as she already knew, the view of him from the front was just as heart-stopping as it was from the back.
“Me again,” she said with a little wave. “You Sam, by any chance?”
He didn’t move a single muscle other than a flick of his thumb, which turned off the planer. His other hand went into his pocket and extracted a remote. With another flick, the music stopped.
“No one’s allowed in here,” he said.
And just like that, the pretty montage soundtrack playing in her head came to a screeching halt. “Sorry,” she said, and started to say more but he turned back to his work, and with another flick of his thumb, his tool came back to life. And then the music.
Hmm. A real people person, then.
From somewhere within the warehouse, a phone rang, accompanied by a flashing red light, clearly designed in case the phone couldn’t be heard over the tools. One ring, then two. Three. The guy didn’t make a move toward it, though you’d have to be blind to miss the light.
On the fourth ring, the call went to a machine, where a preprogrammed male voice loudly intoned, “Lucky Harbor Charters. We’re in high gear for the summer season. Coastal tours, deep-sea fishing, scuba, name your pleasure. Leave a message at the tone, or find us at the harbor, northside.”
A click indicated that the caller had disconnected, but the phone immediately rang again.
Sexy Surfer still made no move toward it.
Becca glanced around for someone else, anyone else, but there was no one in sight.
Of course there was no one in sight, because God forbid anything should ever come easy. Her first instinct was to run out of there with her tail between her legs. But the hell with that. She was tired of running with her tail between her legs. So she lifted her chin, stepped farther inside, and raised her voice to carry over the sound of the planer, the music, and the phone, which was now ringing for a third time. “Um, hi,” she called out. She might’ve decided to live life instead of letting it live her, but she could still be polite while doing it. “Excuse me?”
Nothing.
Looking around, she followed the cord of the planer to an electric outlet in the floor. She walked over to it and pulled the plug.
The planer stopped.
So did her heart when Sexy Surfer turned his head her way. He took her in—the fact that she was still there and that she was holding the cord to his planer—and a single brow arched in displeasure, and also a good amount of disbelief as well. Probably, with that bad ’tude, not many messed with him. But she was exhausted, hungry, and out of her element. Which made her just enough of a loose cannon to forget to be afraid.
“Sam,” she repeated in what she hoped was a firm but polite tone, moving closer to him so he could hear her over his music. “Do you know him?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Me.” She tried a smile. Having come from a family of entertainers, most of them innate charmers to boot, she knew how to make the most of what she’d been given. “I’m Becca Thorne. I’m new to town. And I’m not looking to be bait, I’m just looking for directions…” She smiled again.
He didn’t.
She cleared her throat. “I’m lost. I can’t find 203 Harbor Street. I think I’m on Harbor Street, but the buildings don’t have numbers on them. Some kid on a bike told me to ask Sam, because apparently Sam knows everything. So, are you Sam or not?”
Sexy Grumpy Surfer didn’t confirm or deny. “You’re looking for the building directly to the north,” he said.
She nodded, and then shook her head with a laugh. “And north would be which way, exactly?”
Holding her gaze for another beat, he let the planer dangling in his big hand slowly slide to the floor by its cord before letting go and heading toward her.
He was beautiful, as rugged and tough as the boat he was working on—though only the man exuded testosterone—a bunch of it.
Becca didn’t have a lot of great experience with an overabundance of testosterone, so she found herself taking several steps back, to the doorway.
He didn’t stop; not until he was crowded in that doorway right along with her, taking up an awful lot of space.
Actually, all of the space.
He was six-foot-plus of lean, hard muscle, with a lot of sawdust clinging to him, and for some reason instead of being a threat, it was the opposite. It made her warm, it made her heart pound. It made her…ache.
Eyes locked on hers, he lifted an arm and pointed to the right. “You have to go around the corner to get to the front door of that building,” he said, his voice a little softer now, like maybe he was feeling some of the same heat. God, she hoped so. It’d be embarrassing to be hanging out here in lust-ville on her own.
“Around the corner,” she repeated, inhaling his scent, which was fresh wood, something citrusy, and a lot of heated male skin. The combination was pretty damn heady. Too bad he didn’t have much of a personality to go with it. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m the new tenant there. Or one of them, anyway.”
He looked at her, and she wasn’t sure but she thought maybe he disapproved.
“I think there are three apartments in total,” she said inanely, not sure what he disapproved of exactly—the idea of her living so close, or that she was rambling. The rambling, she couldn’t help. It was another nervous tic, like the humming.