Jacked Up Read Free Page B

didn’t do weird moments.
    He nodded. “Now you have my number, too.”
    For what? She felt like asking, but she didn’t. “Great. Let’s contact the media with that important piece of news.”
    She expected him to roll his eyes or zing her with a comeback.
    He just said, “That’s your department, not mine. Talk to you later, sweetness.”
    Then with one last glance at her chest, he went back to work.
    Eve went back to being unnerved.
    And as she left the garage, she found herself watching that video of his tight butt yet one more time.
    * * *
    “YOU got any skin left after a verbal lashing from the battle-ax?” Jim asked Nolan as he went back to Evan’s car, up on blocks.
    “I feel pretty intact.” In fact, he felt great. Intrigued. Aroused. Excited about seeing Eve the next night. “Don’t see why you call her a battle-ax. She’s harmless.”
    It was fairly obvious to him that Eve’s whole problem was poor stress management. She had a tough job and she bottled up all that tension instead of releasing it. But she was all bark and no bite.
    “As harmless as a shark is to a minnow.”
    Nolan studied the calluses on his hands, thick and yellow from hundreds of hours spent training in the gym and at the track. He wasn’t about to let Jim dissuade him based on a whole lot of nothing. He suspected no one on this team really knew Eve particularly well. “Actually, I don’t think a minnow would be in any danger from a shark. They’re too small for a shark to bother with them. And they’re in freshwater, not the ocean.”
    “Okay, Professor Smart-Ass. Still don’t change the fact that the woman is a nag. No wonder she doesn’t date. No man can get a word in edgewise.”
    Nolan shrugged. “She apparently does in fact date. I just asked her out and she said yes.”
    Jim and three of his other coworkers stopped their work on Evan’s car entirely and just gawked at him. Nolan grinned. “What? You all have known me to ask women out before. Don’t look so shocked.”
    “You date women who bake cookies and shit,” Jim told him. “Not hard-asses like Eve.”
    Except that Nolan had a feeling she was anything but. There was no telling if she baked cookies or not. Which was why he had asked her out. “I’m just curious about her, that’s all.”
    Rhett, who was Evan’s gas man, and just happened to be Nolan’s kid brother, whistled low. “Make sure you wear a protective cup, bro, that’s all I’m saying. She’s a ball buster.”
    “And your bosses’ sister. And in a way a coworker. Think that one through long and hard. They always say, don’t shit where you eat,” Jim said, shaking his head as he cracked his hairy knuckles.
    That expression was one of Nolan’s personal pet peeves. “I hate that saying. Shitting and dating are not the same thing. It’s associating relationships with something negative and I don’t dig that.”
    Jim was a big guy with a cute wife, a pack of kids, and the unwavering conviction that he was always right. “It’s going to be like falling into a barrel of titties and coming up sucking your own thumb. Bad luck, trust me.”
    The image of Eve’s breasts bursting out of her blouse popped into Nolan’s head, a delicious carrot dangling in front of him. “Oh, I’m willing to chance it.”
    Sometimes you just had to play out the fantasy and see where it went.
    Playing chicken with a rattlesnake. Yep. That was him.

CHAPTER
    TWO
    “WHY do you keep fussing with your blouse?”
    Eve dropped her hand in frustration and looked at her sister-in-law Tamara, who was giving her a curious look. “Damn. I’m doing it without thinking because earlier today my button popped.”
    She hadn’t had time to go home and change before meeting Tamara and Evan’s wife, Kendall, at a Mexican restaurant that served margaritas the size of a toilet bowl. When she had walked in, Eve had been surprised to see Suzanne Jefferson, Imogen Wilson, and Tuesday Jones there as well. It had