Page 25 of Fall Into Me

“You’re so fucked, Fane,” I mumbled to myself before starting to clean up the mess I’d made. I’d arrived here with a half-formed plan, and none of it had involved fisting my dick while pretending the praise the woman who hated me was giving to her dog was for me.

My plan was so shit I wasn’t sure I could even consider it a plan.

Images of her mouth at my ear, asking me if I was going to come, asking if I was a good boy, were all I thought of when I made a beeline for her front door, my hair still dripping wet. I didn’t want to face her because, for some reason, I was sure she’d know what I’d just done. I also didn’t fully trust myself to hear her voice or, fuck, even see her scowl at me. Those red heart-shaped lips of hers turning into a pout, and not be able to imagine them wrapped around my cock.

I drove to work with a semi-hard-on, recalling, again and again, the feeling of her pressed against me and put my behavior down to the last two years of celibacy.

It hadn’t even been hard to endure. Nothing and no one had made mewant. The very thought of touching anyone but Cali had made me physically sick.

“C’mon,boss!” Declan called out from the back of the room while he balanced on the back two legs of a plastic chair,effectively snapping me out of my thoughts of Calista and deflating the hard-on I was sure I’d be sporting all day.

At least he was finally good for something.

The chair looked like it had been plucked out of the trash, and I waited with bated breath for the thing to collapse beneath him.

“What’s going on?” Ashton decided that was a good time to walk in.

I met Ash when I was eighteen and hadn’t been able to shake the asshole since. When I told him I was going to work for my dad, he hadn’t so much as breathed differently. All he’d done was be dressed the next morning, waiting by our front door, ready to come with me.

“Can’t let you face off with the devil on your own, can I?” Nothing more, nothing less. Two years later, we were still in it together. He was the only real family I had left.

“Boss isn’t staying at the accommodation with us.” Declan wagged his eyebrows, and I immediately wanted to punch him.

“Anyone ever mentioned you’re not welcome here at all, Dec?” Ash said around a mouth full of the massive bite of apple he’d just taken.

“Sure, why?” Dec had already moved back to his phone, completely unfazed.

I was pretty sure Declan was a psychopath. I’d caught him once at a job site outside Banks City trying to drown a bird in a birdbath. His hand shot out so fast, grabbing the bird, and before I could react, he’d shoved it under the water.

It took me a heartbeat to move, ask him what the fuck he was doing. When he let it go, he turned to look at me with this expression that I’d taken something vital from him. It was there and gone in a second, but I knew then that there was something broken about him, and not something that could be fixed.

“I was just trying to save it.” He shrugged before picking back up his tools and getting on with what he was doing before, flashing me a megawatt smile.

I dragged my hand down my face to shake the memory, nodding my head in greeting as little by little the rest of the crew started to show up for work.

“So?” Ash sat down on the corner of my desk. “Care to share?”

“No,” I bit out.

Ash knew why we were in Darling. He was fully aware of who Cali was. He’d been there the night we met.

I chose to plead the Fifth and keep my mouth shut. It wasn’t going to keep him from finding out, but I wasn’t going to help him.

“Oh!” His face was almost split in two at the sheer giddiness he was trying to keep contained. “Goody!” He rubbed his hands together. “Is—”

“All right.” I stood up, effectively cutting him off but doing nothing to dampen the challenge he’d set for himself to figure out where I’d been. The moment he found out, I’d never hear the end of it.

“Everyone’s been broken up into groups. The goal this week is to understand what it is we’re working with throughout the four central zones we’ve outlined on the map of the town. Zones five through twelve are of no real consequence to us at this stage while we evaluate the viability of the town center.”

Cali had been wrong when she said that I believed what I was saying about what Mackenzie Co.was doing to small towns. I hated every word coming out of my mouth, but I was here for a reason, and so right now, the end justified the means. It was what I repeated to myself day in and day out.

“I emailed everyone their lists this morning,” I said, letting my gaze sweep over the room. “If you finish ahead of schedule,come find me. Otherwise, I don’t want to hear from you until your tasks are done. Clear?”

Chairs scraped as the crew half-rose from their seats, but before anyone could make it to the door, Declan’s voice cut through the room like a cold draft.

“What about what people are saying?”

Groans rippled through the group as everyone sank back into their chairs, clearly resigned to whatever bullshit was about to spill out of his mouth.

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