“I no longer run Relinquish Control,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter. From what I found out, you ran it for several years, and your…clients paid a lot of money for the whores you trained. I would think you’d want to give me a little bit of your take as a thank-you.”
“Are you kidding me?” she gasped. He might as well sprout two heads right now, because she considered nothing as unbelievable as what he’d just said.
He shrank back the tiniest bit at her show of outrage, but then he stood back up and glared at her. She had to be careful. A desperate man equaled a crazy one. Her fingers gripped the pepper spray a little tighter, her finger on the trigger.
“There’s no way you’ll ever get a single dime from me. Do you understand?” Rage was the only thing keeping her on her two feet right then.
“You do owe me, McKenzie, and you will pay it — one way or another.”
His eyes drifted up and down her body, making her stomach turn. Never, ever would this man touch her again, not while she was still breathing.
Nathan now made a big mistake — he took a step toward her. McKenzie didn’t budge an inch. She stretched out her arm and blasted him with the pepper spray. The man who had been responsible for the most nightmarish night of her life let forth an ear-piercing scream, and he stumbled back down her front steps and collapsed on the ground, grinding his hands into his eyes.
“You bitch!” he screamed over and over again as he writhed in agony. McKenzie wasn’t going to take another second of this. Reaching for her phone, she dialed the police and sat at the top of the steps, her eyes not moving from his twisting body.
After about fifteen minutes, he lay there in the fetal position, crying. She still didn’t trust the idea of taking her eyes off him. When the police showed up ten minutes later, she took her first deep breath.
The next forty-five minutes were some of the longest minutes of her life. She watched Nathan being cuffed and placed in the back of the squad car, and then she answered the officers’ questions before they finally drove away.
She didn’t know whether she’d seen the last of that…slimeball, but she would be a fool to underestimate him. He looked to be out of choices, and that made him dangerous. She wouldn’t stroll down any dark alleys anytime soon.
Once inside her house, she engaged the locks, and then she moved determinedly through the place, checking every window. When she had assured herself that everything was locked up tight, or seemed to be, she went to her bedroom and collapsed across the bed.
The tears finally fell, and she curled up into a ball on top of her blankets and cried out her frustration. She should have known it would never be over with a man like that. How had she ever been such a fool as to trust him?
Now there were two men in her life who wanted the impossible from her.
Chapter Eight
A bead of sweat dripped down Byron’s neck as he took a break and leaned against the wall of the building he’d been pounding with a hammer. No, he didn’t have time to be out on the job site. And no, he wasn’t running away from the office, where he’d brought in a woman who was making his life a living hell.
Okay, maybe he was running from that woman. He was a fool – a certifiable fool. He could admit this in his own head. He’d had her working for him for a week. At any time, he could hire one of her employees and see her maybe once or twice a year if she happened to be at his brother’s house when he was. End of problem. But the thought of doing just that turned his gut inside out.
Absurd, simply absurd.
“We’re heading to lunch, boss. Do you want to join us?”
Byron turned to see his foreman waiting by the work truck and the rest of the men piling into varying vehicles as they got ready to go in search of food. “No. I’m going to finish up what I’ve been working on and head back to the offices. I’ve already wasted too much of my day,” Byron told him.
“It’s never a waste to work up a sweat,” Wyatt said before jumping in the truck and taking off.
Byron moved to his own truck and pulled out a bottle of water from the cooler, then sat down under a tree not too far from the building. The place was going up fast and it was a beauty. A new mall was being built on the outskirts of Seattle, far enough away to not feel like the city, but close enough to get to, and the owners wanted it to have a historic feel to it with several architectural features that he didn’t often get to do anymore. All three of them had been working on and off on this site, since it was such a pleasure to work on.
Closing his eyes, he leaned back feeling a small measure of peace. He did love his business, loved working with his brothers, and loved being independent from someone being able to boss him around. If he could only quit obsessing about a certain woman, his life would be damn near perfect.
Opening his eyes after a few minutes, Byron noticed horses out in the field. What the hell? Where had they come from? They were looking at the opening to the building, and Byron turned, then froze at what he saw.
“McKenzie?” he called, but she only smiled and gave the smallest shake of her head before holding up a finger against her lips.
Byron stood, to move over toward her, but again she shook her head, and then those delicate fingers of hers lifted, resting on the top button of her blouse, and Byron’s body instantly froze.
Looking him in the eyes, she moved her other hand up, and then her head tilted back and her fingers traveled down the front of her blouse as she moaned aloud. Byron was instantly rock solid. He took a step toward her, but her head came back up and she shook it a third time.
Fine. If she wanted to play, he would let her play. He stepped back and leaned against the tree, his body pulsing, his eyes glued to McKenzie as those fingers rose again and she slowly began undoing her blouse, one small button at a time. Finally, he would see what her clothes kept hidden from him. As her full breasts were revealed to him, it was everything he had imagined and more, with her dark pink nipples jutting out.
She didn’t wear a bra to work? Now that was going to make him even harder when he was at the Knight Construction offices. His eyes shifted to her waist as she reached behind her and undid the zipper at her back and then the skirt was dropping to the ground.
No panties, either? Whoa! Byron feasted his eyes on her uncovered womanhood as she kicked the skirt away, then spread her legs and leaned against the doorway of the building, her chest pushed out, her ass dipping low as she opened and closed her legs.
Enough was enough.