Honestly, if I was being one hundred percent truthful, I didn’t think that men like him existed.
I mean, he had it all.
The height.
The sexy beard that was just a tad too bushy, but still he worked it.
His dark brown hair was a bit overly long for my usual tastes, but for that man, I could definitely get used to it.
Then there were his eyes.
Not green.
Not blue.
A combination of both that started darker green in the middle nearest the iris and flowered out to sea glass around the edges.
And he had chest hair.
A lot of it if what I could see poking out of the top of his sweatshirt was anything to go by.
Again, usually I didn’t go for chest hair. But I had a feeling that anything that had to do with this tall, dark and obviously dangerous guy would do it for me.
As long as he had a somewhat semi-decent sized dick, I had a feeling I could live happily ever after with him.
He was just that hot.
“What’s that look for?” I heard said.
I jolted as I turned and looked at Murphy.
“What look?” I lied.
He grinned and rolled his eyes. “You know what I’m talking about, girl.”
I did.
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Still…
“Can you deal with this while I go dump the oil out?” I asked, gesturing toward the now-dirty grill.
He looked at the grill, and when he didn’t immediately open his mouth to say ‘yes’ I knew that today was one of the days that he couldn’t clean the grill.
My grandfather had lived a hard life.
He’d had four back surgeries, multiple shoulder surgeries, a couple of hand surgeries, and just as many knee replacements. The man was falling apart at an accelerated rate of speed, and there were days that he physically just couldn’t handle doing what he was once able to do.
I patted his shoulder. “You just go sit back down, Murph. I’ll handle it. I’m refreshed.”
He snorted.
We both knew that was a big ass lie.
I wasn’t refreshed.
I was tired as fuck and I needed a damn vacation so bad that I could taste it.
I wanted to go to Disney World, and I wanted it so badly that I’d been planning it for years.
The only problem was, Murphy couldn’t man the store by himself, my brother would have to be off to handle it, which meant his own vacation from his job and I wasn’t doing that to him.
And my sister would flat out say no way in hell. At least the one that was old enough to deal with my store.
My stepsister manning this place on her own? I’d come back to the place trashed.
Which meant I was on my own.
Like always.
Unless I finally hired someone to be a manager… which wasn’t likely to happen seeing as everyone considered the hours that I was asking for to be a little bit too much.
“We’ll look again at the applicants tomorrow,” he suggested.
I wished.
The applicants that we had were scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Those that didn’t care about the hours were desperate and the majority of the time, the reason they were looking for a job in the first place was due to the fact that they’d been fired from their last one.
“I’ll place another ad.” I shrugged.
The ads normally did well on all social media until my stepmother saw the ad—and I was convinced that she went out of her way to look for them—and sabotaged them in some way.
Last time it was to comment, every half hour on the hour, about how awful the store was. That the damn place had been held up at gunpoint no less than three times, and that it was a robber’s paradise due to the dark and questionable area.
“I think you should look into blocking your stepmother. Maybe that’ll keep her from seeing the ad,” he suggested.
He may be right.
Instead of talking any more on the subject, because honestly the number of hours that I worked were killing me and making me slightly depressed, I cleaned the grill.
Only when I was done did I gesture toward my grandfather that I was going to take the oil out.
Lugging the rather large bottle of oil outside to the designated spot, I’d just turned to head back inside when I saw a large shadowy figure holed up in the alley.
And he wasn’t the sexy one that I’d been admiring for the last half an hour.
Heart beating a hundred miles an hour, I wondered what I should do.
Normally, I would’ve gone back in the alley door, but in my haste to get outside, I’d forgotten the keys that would get me inside the back door.
Leaving me with no other choice but to go the front way.
Or beat on the back door and hope that my grandfather could make it in time.
I decided to go with the beating of the door.