LITMIR.BIZ

       Three

      Marybell gasped low and long, making his spine stiffen. “Ohhh, Fredrico! The things you do to me!” She cooed the words, following up with a customary moan Tag had become familiar with since he’d started eavesdropping at her office door like a stray dog hungry for scraps.

      These constant thoughts about Marybell, this mystique he wanted to unveil, with no sense to it at all, were damn inconvenient. Unwarranted, and totally unwelcome.

      Yet here he was, a week after meeting Marybell for the first time, exercising his right to curiosity.

      From the moment he’d left her apartment, he couldn’t shake the crazy need to see what she really looked like without the big ridiculous hat and that green mess she’d put on her face.

      What drove her to go to such lengths to keep him from seeing what she looked like, anyway? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen her before, whether she knew it or not. Not up close and personal, but he’d seen her around. They’d even met briefly once a few months ago in Em’s office, Marybell on her way out, him on his way in.

      He’d concocted an answer for that while he thought about her nonstop since they’d met.

      The answer was easy. He’d discovered a thing or two about the women here in Plum Orchard. They didn’t like to be caught without their pretties, as Em called them. Marybell had been really sick, so it stood to reason that catching her at such a bad time would make her run for cover if she was anything at all like Em. She was Em’s friend. They were bound to be on the same wavelength. Though Marybell’s makeup and hairstyle were a little more over-the-top than Em’s, they were clearly what made her feel pretty. He’d taken care of lumping their motivations together in his mind quite nicely.

      That handled, he still had no answers.

      This strange fixation on Marybell wasn’t like him. Not since Alison, anyway... No one had interested him even a little since Alison.

      He couldn’t pinpoint his curiosity, couldn’t reason with it. So he’d chalked it up to Marybell’s voice, sugary-sweet and light as air even nasally with congestion, and those enormous eyes, looking up at him in the midst of the crusty stuff surrounding them. She’d sparked his curiosity, and since he’d fixed her heat, he hadn’t stopped wondering what Marybell Lyman really looked like.

      When Em mentioned they needed some work done around the guesthouse at Call Girls, he’d done everything but jump up and down with his hand in the air, yelling, “Pick me!”

      Now, as he hovered around her office door, pretending to fix an outlet that didn’t need fixing, he found himself glued to her every word through the door separating them. And whoever the hell Fredrico was, he already didn’t like the bastard.

      Which was irrational at best. Why his back was up over a phone call with a stranger, one of the twenty or so he’d heard her take since he’d started his “behave like an ass” campaign, was a question Tag wasn’t ready to find the answer for.

      You couldn’t be jealous about a guy you didn’t even know for having an intimate conversation with a woman you didn’t know, either. Could you?

      Shit.

      If she’d just show her face, he’d probably find out she wasn’t his type and then this hunt for Marybell Lyman would be done. End of irrational.

      But it was as if she was hiding from him. Every time he thought he had her cornered, and she was going to walk out of her office door at any second, she didn’t.

      Then Em, being the kind of GM she was, a stickler for details, would hunt his ass down and drag him off to another project to complete before he had the chance to pin Marybell down.

      “Tag?”

      Em’s voice cut into his thoughts, making him drop the screwdriver in guilt. It clattered to the floor, smacking into his toolbox. Damn. Caught again.

      Tag dragged his eyes upward, meeting Em’s inquisitive gaze. “Yes, ma’am?” he drawled, hoping he’d managed to keep his voice level.

      “How do you keep ending up here?”

      Here as in parked in front of Marybell Lyman’s office? Or here as in here way past the time most contractors call it quitting time, here? Play dumb, Hawthorne. “Here?” Tag lifted his knit cap and scratched his head.

      Em pursed her lips, her eyes not amused. He knew that look. It was the “there’ll be no plum pie for you” look—the one she gave to her sons and his niece, Maizy, when they misbehaved. “Yes. Here.” She pointed to the hallway, swishing her finger around. “Whenever I wonder where you are, I don’t have to wonder long. Somehow we always end up here. What is your fixation with this hallway?”

      It was Marybell Lyman’s hallway? Probably not the answer she’d want to hear. Though why should he feel guilty for his interest in a woman? He was a single, mostly healthy, thirty-four-year-old man. He was allowed to be interested.

      Except whenever he came to do any work at all at Call Girls, there was always the residual Neanderthal concept he felt ridiculously compelled to silently defend.

      Women talked dirty in these here parts. Men liked to hear women talk dirty. There was always the natural assumption he was voyeuristically living out a caveman’s dream under the guise of “fixing” things.

      If he were completely honest, hearing Marybell say some of the things she said did make him hot. They damn well did. But the heat was always tempered with the reminder that this was her job, and she likely filed her nails and caught up on her reading while she did it. Not quite as hot.

      Yet this quest to meet Marybell wasn’t about her words. Not at all. This was about finding out if she was still just as cute without the floppy hat and flakey goop. If her hair was buttery blond all over, or just at the tips, leading to the question: Why don’t you just ring her doorbell and meet her right and proper, Hawthorne?

      Answer? He wasn’t sure if he was ready for that yet. Calling on her was an unspoken commitment he wasn’t prepared to offer. A gesture he wasn’t sure he’d properly be able to follow up with anything more than his curiosity. He’d only just begun to get his life back on track—complications, especially with a woman, were the last thing he needed.

      So instead, he skulked around the fringes of her doorway on the off chance he could take the easy way out and catch a glimpse of her—in the effort to rule out any possible attraction, of course.

      Em poked his shoulder, bringing her once more into focus. “Tag?”

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