Page 5 of Nailing Studs

Oh, yeah, I’d get some sleep now.

I lay there, hand still in my panties, listening to my ragged breath. It took a long time for my breathing to return to normal and even then my head still rang with images of the three of us in this bed.

As I drifted to sleep, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to get those images out of my mind. In fact, why would I ever want to? I was done with real men for the time being. New start and all that. When I got lonely—when I got horny—I could escape into fantasy again. Even though I’d never meet them in person, I’d have Dark and Broody, and Mister Trustworthy at my beck and call.

Maybe next time, I’d even add Mr. Fix-It-Guy Taylor’s voice to the mix, imagining him whispering all kinds of dirty things to me.

And if that made me the freak in bed Grant had accused me of being?

I was going to embrace it.

3

Taylor

The day had been uneventful until that last phone call, a couple of hours ago. The famous niece of Tabitha Vanderzee finally arrives. And damn, did she have a sexy voice. Of course, voices didn’t mean much when it came to people, but it wasn’t just her voice, it was the way she’d handled herself. Clearly Kaylaloved her aunt and still grieved her loss, but she’d also managed to show me a friendly, flirty side. Tabitha had told me her niece was beautiful, and she'd even shown me a few fuzzy photos of Kayla as a kid. I’d put some serious money down that Kayla Pratchett had grown up to be smoking hot gorgeous.

“Who was that I heard you on the phone with earlier?” Dominic stuck his head into my office. We’d been friends since high school, and we were also roommates—had been ever since college. We shared a lot of history, including a former girlfriend who’d tested our friendship at one point. Thankfully our friendship survived. In addition to our history, we apparently also shared flimsy office walls. Clearly he’d overheard my conversation with Tabitha’s niece earlier.

“I was talking to the Queen of England.”

Dom snorted. “No, really. You had a hard-on for her. Who was she?”

“Like I said, the Queen. It’s all those colorful hats and frocks.”

“Idiot. You mentioned Tabitha Vanderzee. Who’s talking about Tabitha?”

“Her niece. Kayla. Just arrivedfrom New York City. She inherited Tabitha's house andneeds us to come by tomorrow morning. Burst pipe in the kitchen.”

“Does that mean we’re finally getting our shot at fixing the place up?”

I shrugged. “She wants an estimate, but looks like she might sell it.”

Dom’s expression hardened. “Right. Why take even a few days deciding whether you might want to move into the badass house your deceased aunt left you when you have your fancy life in New York to get back to?”

I sighed. Of the two of us, Dom had always been moodier and more mistrusting. After our breakup with Laura in college, he’d gotten worse, but after Ada left him a few months ago? Dom had turned into one cynical motherfucker.

“Maybe she has a life, kids, a husband to get back to in New York,” I said, although I couldn’t recall Tabitha mentioning her niece was married. I gathered my wallet and papers to take home. It was already past dinnertime, which meant Dominic and I would end up ordering pizza. Sometimes I wished I could trade him in for a roommate who actually cooked, but in all honesty, Dom was a good guy even with his dark side. “What’s wrong with her selling, Dom?”

“Anybody who can sell a family estate like that to a stranger has no heart,” he said bitterly.

I laughed. “What kind of logic is that?”

Though I knew where he was coming from.

Tabitha Vanderzee had left her niece a fucking amazing house. Dom and I had both driven by it a thousand times on our way out of town and we’d always talked about fixing up the place. As an original Victorian, it was a renovator’s dream come true, but it needed a shit ton of work. Dom was right—keeping an estate like that in the family would be the right thing to do. Tabitha had said Kayla loved spending summers there as a kid, baking with Tabitha, running around the quiet streets of Fosterman, swimming in the creek. The place had been in the family for a few generations, since back in the late eighteen hundreds, when it was first built. Selling would be a shame.

Still, the house was Kayla’s to dowith whatever she wanted. As I’d told her, I was pretty impressed she’d come out from New York to deal with the house at all instead of passing off the job to someone else. Hell, maybe the house was too big for her. Maybe she couldn’t afford to keep it. So many factors were involved when it came to keeping or selling a falling-apart home.

“You can laugh,” Dominic said, “but it’s true. Heartless. Not to mention the fact she didn’t even fly in for the funeral. Did you ask her about that?”

I sighed. “Unlike you, I don’t assume the worst. She probably wanted to come but couldn’t. Dude, you don’t know anything about her.”

“Like you do?”

“More than you. I know she sounded gorgeous.”

“Uh-huh. Remember what happened last time you said a caller sounded gorgeous?”

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