Aidan. The only man she didn’t want to see, wearing sexy jeans faded in all the stress spots that she absolutely wasn’t noticing and a T-shirt that said KEEP CALM AND SKI ON.
“Mm-mmm,” Jonathan murmured for her ears only. “I tell you what. Channing Tatum and his gorgeous wife both own my heart, but Aidan’s a close third. The girls are going to be bummed. We love it when Gray sends Aidan to fix stuff.”
“Not this girl,” Lily said. She blamed the kiss. “And this place is falling apart,” she said, trying to redirect. “You should be as irritated with him as I am.”
“No can do.” Jonathan was not only an equal opportunist when it came to sex, but he was also eternally optimistic. “I’m a lot of things, but irritated isn’t one of them.”
“But he—”
“Shh.”
Oh, for God’s sake.
“Hey,” Aidan said in greeting to Jonathan before his gaze then slid to Lily.
She stood her ground instead of running in the other direction as her feet wanted.
“Lily,” he said with a nod and absolutely no indication that he’d played tonsil hockey with her just yesterday. “One of you called?”
Lily glanced over at Jonathan, who was very busy looking at Aidan like he was the sun and the moon and maybe also a lemon meringue pie. She gave him a nudge that was really a shove and then spoke for both of them since apparently she was the only one of them immune to Aidan’s dubious charms. “We need some renovations,” she said.
Aidan raised a brow. “We.”
“Jonathan,” she corrected and then shook her head. You know what? She worked here too now, and so far she liked it, dammit. It’d been weeks since she’d liked where she was. More than weeks. Way too much more. “And okay, me too,” she said, claiming the place in spite of herself.
Jonathan grinned and blew her a smooch.
“There’s a problem with the electrical,” she told Aidan. “We can’t run two blow-dryers at the same time. A pretty big problem for a salon.”
“Absolutely,” he said easily. “What else?”
“Nothing,” Jonathan said, pulling three sodas out of the mini fridge they kept stocked for clients. “We’re good.”
Lily glared at him. “The private patient room needs some plumbing help. The sink drips.”
“Drips,” Aidan said, taking one of the sodas and popping it open.
“Yes. It’s annoying.”
He smiled. “Annoying.”
“To the client, yes,” she said. “It’s annoying. They’re here to relax and be pampered. A dripping faucet isn’t relaxing.”
“Understood,” he said. “Anything else?”
Huh. She didn’t remember him being this agreeable. “And the lighting. It’s not bright enough in the client room, and too bright and harsh out here.”
Jonathan choked on his soda.
But Aidan just looked at the overhead lighting and nodded. “You also need a new paint job.”
“Yes,” she said, surprised. Huh. Maybe this was going to go a lot easier than she’d imagined. “Thank you,” she said genuinely.
Jonathan was smiling at Aidan like he’d just brought Christmas. “She’s something else, right?” he asked Aidan.
Aidan looked at Lily. “Definitely something else.”
She gave him a long look that made him grin.
Jonathan too. “I’m thinking of putting her in charge just so I don’t have to be.”
Aidan nodded. “I’m sure you’ll be in good hands.”
Well dammit, it was hard to hold on to a good mad with a compliment like that, but she gave it the ol’ college try.
“Get me a list of the work you need done,” Aidan said. “I’ll talk it over with Gray and see what we can do.”
“Maybe we could just deal with Gray directly,” Lily said.
He gave a slow shake of his head. “Why?”
She tried not to notice how his T-shirt had stretched itself nearly beyond its limits to cover his broad shoulders. Or how the shirt was only partially tucked in at his abs. Or that he smelled fantastic. “It’d make things easier,” she said.
“For who?”
She stared at him. Was the air suddenly too thick to breathe or was that just her? “Me,” she admitted.
He cocked his head. “Maybe I’m not interested in making things easier for you,” he said so casually that it took a moment for the words to process. By the time it sank in, he’d changed out the blown fuse and was gone.
Jonathan was still grinning.
“Why are you smiling like that?” she asked, irritated.
“Because this is going to be fun.”
Lily was pretty sure this, whatever this was, was going to be the exact opposite of fun.
Thanks to some idiot throwing a lit cigarette out his window on Highway 74, Aidan and the entire fire department spent the next three days fighting a blaze fifteen miles away on Mt. Rose.
Finally a violent rainstorm rode in like a tumbleweed and saved the day, helping them beat the fire into submission.
When he finally got home, he felt disgusting. He stripped on the way to the bathroom and then stood beneath the showerhead for a full thirty minutes—the best thirty minutes he’d had in days.