Killian (West Bend Saints 4)

I grit my teeth as Connie C. rings the juice boxes up slower than I think anyone’s ever done anything ever. This is just another reason I’ve been avoiding getting any supplies here if I can help it.

Then I realize I forgot my purse. Could this day get any worse?

Behind me, Brick Wall clears his throat. “Bourbon."

“Excuse me?”

“In the coffee."

“Bourbon in the middle of the day?"

"I was visiting a friend."

I snort. "At the bar?"

"As a matter of fact."

"7.33," Connie C. interrupts.

I exhale heavily. I know she's not going to do this, but I ask anyway. "I forgot my wallet. Can you put it on a tab?"

Connie C. raises her eyebrows and I roll my eyes hard. Of course not.

Brick Wall sets a ten dollar bill on the counter. "My treat."

"No, no, no," I protest. "I'll go grab my wallet."

Brick Wall sucks coffee loudly through a straw. "It's seven bucks. You need to learn to accept help."

"Excuse me?" My voice goes up an octave as I whirl around to face him. "You don't even know me."

"I know you obviously have a problem accepting help from people."

"I do not have a problem accepting –" I pause, distracted by the fact that he's drinking this disgusting concoction that bears little resemblance to actual coffee. "You really shouldn't just pour hot coffee over ice. It's all watered down. What kind of guy drinks iced coffee, anyhow?"

He leans close, speaking to me low in his throat. “One who’s real secure in his manhood."

My breath hitches in my throat and heat surges through my body, settling in my face. Good Lord, if I were wearing a dress, I’d have to check to make sure my panties didn’t just fall right off.

"Here's your change," Connie C. interrupts.

“You’re not buying anything for me," I protest, even as Connie hands me the bags.

“Don’t worry. You can buy me another coffee sometime to make up for the one you spilled.”

I groan. "I did not spill – you know what? Sure. I'm late and I have to go. Thanks for the juice boxes. And the wet t-shirt."

"The wet t-shirt was my pleasure," he calls.

I stop short with my bags in my hands, but I don't turn around. It takes all of the self-control I have to ignore the crude comment.

Outside, I put the bags on the floor of the passenger side of the car, ticking off my checklist in my head. I can dash back to the bakery and grab a new shirt, then run over to the school, and then race back to the bakery for another hour until Chloe gets out of school and –

I turn around… right into Brick Wall again.

God, he’s solid.

When he catches my forearm, heat floods my body. Clearly, the fact that I’m having this kind of a reaction to a total brute makes me think it's the universe’s way of telling me I need to get out and date. Or, hell, just get laid. How long has it been again? I stopped keeping track of my celibacy in terms of months a long time ago. I’m obviously way too hard up if a guy like this is having such an effect on my body. I must be totally desperate.

“Are you following me? Is this like a Ted Bundy thing or something? You spill coffee on a girl and follow her out to her car so you can bring her to your remote mountain cabin and chop her into pieces with an axe?”

“You got me. Now my dastardly plan is ruined. How did you know I have a remote mountain cabin?”

"The lack of basic social skills gives it away," I huff, pushing around him to get to the other side of the car. “You clearly don’t get much interaction with other members of the human race.”

"Seems like you could learn some social skills yourself, lady."

I pause with the driver's side door open. "Stop calling me shit like that. Lady is even worse than woman."

"So you're saying you're not a lady either, then." The corners of his mouth turn up underneath his beard, and so help me, the only thing I can think of in this moment is how absolutely infuriating I find this guy I've know for all of two seconds… and how that rough beard would feel between my legs.

Oh, God. There's something terribly wrong with me.

I can feel my face flush hot.

I have to get out of here.

"Look." I steady my voice. Don't look at his lips. Or think about what he could do with those rough hands. "You ruined my shirt. Now I have to go back to my shop for a new one, making me later than I already am. So as enjoyable as this experience has been, I have to go."

Opening the driver’s side door, I slide into the seat and start the car.

“Well if you just needed a new shirt, all you had to do was ask."

A shirt lands on my lap before I can close the car door.

A shirt that smells like guy, like leather and the outdoors and some kind of aftershave and I don’t know what else, but my breath hitches in my throat.

When I look up, Brick Wall is turning to leave, completely bare-chested.

He’s definitely a brick wall of muscles rippling, beautiful muscles.

He might be smiling but I can’t tell. For some reason, I think that annoys me even more.

I ball up the shirt and throw it back at him. “I’ll take a pass on the sweaty t-shirt, caveman,” I yell.

“Suit yourself, woman."

I think I hear him chuckling as I close my car door and pull away. When I glance in my rearview mirror, he’s walking down the sidewalk bare-chested as if that’s totally normal behavior.

Somehow, I get the impression he doesn’t give a shit about normal behavior.

4

Killian

If there’s one thing I can count on in life, it’s that a little manual labor will clear my head. That's what I've spent my days up here doing over the past few months – making this cabin livable and clearing my head. An hour of splitting logs outside of the house today should have taken the edge off, but it hasn’t. An afternoon of digging fence posts in the sun didn’t do much to help that either.

The way that girl at the general store looked at me yesterday the judgment in her eyes when she smelled the bourbon in my coffee has grated on me all damn day. It's the kind of look people used to give my father, and it's the reason I stay in control of myself. The bourbon in the coffee was all Bud's doing. I went to the bar earlier to see the old man who owns it and before I knew it, he was ruining my iced coffee.

I've never much given a shit about what anyone thinks (growing up in a family of pariahs in a small town will take that right out of you) but the way this girl looked at me back there got to me. I don't even know her name, and she's taking up residence in my brain like she owns the place.

So I tried to shake it off by splitting logs and digging fence posts. Women don't get under my skin, and I don't care what some uppity PTA mom thinks about me, especially a huffy, sanctimonious PTA mom even if that huffy, sanctimonious PTA mom had the nicest rack I’ve ever seen. She stood in front of me, nostrils flaring, looking up at me with wide eyes like she was daring me to kiss her. Her lips were slightly parted, and all I could think about was bringing my mouth down on hers.

Fuck that.

With all those juice boxes she was buying, she probably has seven kids. And I don't like kids. I'm not like my brother Luke, who finds some chick and suddenly decides he’s a family man, complete with a damn baby to take care of. Granted, his girl Autumn is pretty decent – after all, she did shoot that crooked son-of-a-bitch Jed Easton, and she owns a cider distillery. Even so, family life is Luke’s thing. I might be closer to Luke than to my other brothers, but I’m not like Luke and I never will be.

Damn it. Closed.

The general store’s hours seem to be whenever the hell Connie feels like working. My coffeemaker broke this morning and I need a new one. I haven’t had near enough coffee today to function, and apparently expecting the general store to be open during normal business hours is just too much.

Behind me, a woman clucks her t

ongue. “Looks like Connie up and left,” she complains. “I needed milk.”

“I needed coffee,” I grumble. I decide to take my miserable ass over to Luke and Autumn’s place and scrounge up some coffee and food.

“That new coffee shop is pretty good,” the woman says. “I heard it is, anyway. Haven’t been in there myself. I heard the woman who owns it was married to ”

I put up my hand, grumbling, "Thanks," before walking away. People in this town and their gossip annoy the hell out of me. I don’t need to hear the damn life story of the coffee shop owner.

The store is on the main street that runs through town, nestled between a shop selling country-style house décor and a shoe store. When I look up at the sign, a white wooden antique thing with pink scrolled letters that spell out Cupcakes and Cappuccino, I groan. This is definitely not my kind of place. I almost turn around, except coffee is coffee, right? And I’m desperate.

The inside of the store is thankfully not as girly as the sign outside would have suggested. I half-expected the place to be done in pink and polka-dots and ruffles. Instead, it looks more like a beach cottage than anything else with grey plank flooring and white tables and light streaming through the large windows.

And her. The girl I spilled coffee on at the general store a few days ago.

She's standing at a table wearing an apron over a t-shirt and jeans, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail high on her head, the same as it was when I saw her at the general store. She doesn't look like she's wearing a lick of makeup except for some kind of gloss on her lips that makes them pouty as hell.

She's waiting on two guys at a table. One says something and leers at her while the other guy laughs. A flush creeps up her neck to her face, and then her face colors red. When she turns around, the guy who talked reaches up and grabs hold of the apron string that dangles over her perfect ass, and the apron unties, falling from her waist.

She whirls around with fire in her eyes.

I don’t know why I do what I do next. I don’t even think before I do it. I walk across the room, sliding my arm around her back and pulling her against me before she can react.

Then I kiss her, square on the mouth. And for a second, the world stops spinning. For a second, she kisses me back. She melts against me, her body pressed against mine, and her tongue finds mine for the briefest of moments. I think I hear her whimper, the sound dampened by my mouth, and I want to keep kissing her. I don't want to stop.

Then, just as suddenly as it happened, she puts her hand against my chest and pushes me back. “What the –“

“Hey, honey. Sorry I’m late. Are these two assholes bothering you?”

One of them snickers, and that just pushes me over the edge.

"That's my girl," I lie, picking him up by the collar of his shirt.

"Your girl?" Coffee Girl squeals. She looks at me wide-eyed, and I can't tell if she's shocked or impressed by my quick thinking, but I don't have time to figure it out, because I'm walking the asshole out the front door.

Outside, I press his stupid head against the wall. His friend follows us, protesting, but he's too cowardly to even try to hit me.

“We were just joking, man,” the guy's friend says, his voice trembling. The guy with his head against the wall says nothing in his own defense. “We didn’t know she had a boyfriend.”

“You need to learn some manners.” I spit the words, my heart racing as adrenaline surges through me.

I’m nearly about to beat this guy’s ass when the bakery door opens and Coffee Girl is standing there, her eyes wide.

“Put him down,” she orders.

I press the guy’s head harder against the wall. Like hell I’m going to put him down. “Apologize to the lady.”

“I wasn’t doing anything ”

“Apologize to the lady now.”

“Drop him,” she insists, her voice firm.

“I’m sorry,” the guy sniffs.

“Sorry for what? That’s not an apology.”

“Sorry for – harassing you,” he whines.

“Ma’am,” I add.

“Sorry for harassing you, ma’am.”

“And you’re not going to come back to this store again.”

“We won’t come back, man,” he snivels. "Ma'am."

When I drop him, he and his friend scatter.

“You,” the girl from the bakery snaps, her eyes wide. “In here. Right now.”

Wordlessly, she walks through the front of the shop. An older woman at the counter gives us a disapproving look, so I give her my best wink.

Maybe Coffee Girl is so grateful for my assistance out there that she’s taking me in the back for a quickie. As pleasant as that sounds - especially since I can't remember the last time I had a quickie - the last thing I need is to bed some clingy PTA mom.

Instead, she doesn't let me get a word out before she slaps me, clean across the face.

“What the hell was that for?" I ask, my hand on my cheek. My skin still stings from the blow. Damn, she hits hard for a girl. "I'm not the one you should be mad at. Your boss shouldn’t let shit like that happen!"

We’re standing in the kitchen surrounded by stainless steel appliances and a counter covered in flour. I’m still pissed as hell about those two morons hitting on her, yet I can’t stop thinking about sliding my hands under her thighs, lifting her up and fucking her right there on that flour-covered countertop.

“My boss?” Her face upturned and her jaw set, she looks at me with blue-grey eyes flashing. She's angry instead of grateful, but I can hardly imagine why, given the fact that I saved her ass from those two jerkoffs.

"Yeah, the woman out there. She shouldn't tolerate that kind of stuff in her store."

"So you think the boss is some kind of pushover," she says, her voice tight.

"I'm just saying that you shouldn't have to work in that kind of environment. Now, slapping me isn't a real great way of showing your gratitude."

"My gratitude?" Her voice rises an octave. "You walked into my store, kissed me, declared me your property, and then shoved a customer's face against the wall outside and told them never to return."

"Yeah, and slapping me is a great way of thanking me." Is she actually angry that I helped her out? That's some shit.

Her cheeks are flushed and a piece of hair falls down over her forehead. She wipes it away and sighs loudly. Hell, I didn't think she could get any hotter than she looked yesterday, but she's proved me wrong. I think she's sexier when she's angry.

"I'm the boss, you ass!" She yells it, her hands on her hips.

“You’re the boss. Well, hell. How about that.”

She purses her lips. “Yeah, how about that. And, despite what you assumed, I had it handled. Because this is my store. And I don’t need some caveman barging in here with some misguided notion that he’s rescuing me because I can’t deal with a couple of assholes."

“I didn’t say –“

She holds up her hand. “I can take care of myself, thank you very much. And I can run my own damn business.”

Shit, she’s standing there a few inches away from me, her face upturned toward mine, lush lips parted slightly, and she's absolutely stinking mad. And I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted to kiss a woman more in my life.