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I’d have to come up with a new fantasy to keep me warm at night. Jake, the motorcycle man, was no longer it.
Chapter Seven
Jake
Four out of five days a week, I spent working in an office. Instead of coveralls or jeans and a T-shirt, I wore suits. This had been the case the past three years, and I still felt like I was suffocating inside my clothes.
I didn’t need a psychiatrist to analyze what that meant. If I didn’t have my one day working in the shop, I’d lose my goddamn mind. Desks and meetings weren’t my thing, but I wasn’t the complaining kind. Besides, working alongside my brother wasn’t bad.
Now, he belonged in a suit. He wore them like a second skin and carried the mantle of CEO like it weighed nothing. Jeremy had been made for this. Technically, it was in his blood.
Mine too, but nurture had beaten out nature in my case. Jer and I had grown up in different houses, me on a ranch in Wyoming, him in the heart of Denver. The beginning of our lives had been nothing alike, yet we’d both ended up in the same place, courtesy of Grandpa Hayes.
I slapped my hand on the frame of his office door. “Time.”
He jumped in his seat, his eyes darting from his computer screen to me before dropping to his cell.
“Shit.” He shoved his fingers into his hair. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I leaned against the frame. “This is me telling you. We need to head out in five.”
“I need more than five minutes to prepare. I was working on—”
“Jeremy,” I barked, snapping him out of the death spiral he was sending himself on. I didn’t interrupt, he would sink into his neurosis, and this meeting would not happen.
“Yeah?”
“You’re prepared. Overly so. Get your ass up, run a comb through your hair, splash some water on your face, and let’s go.” I held up my hand, spreading my fingers. “Five minutes.”
“Five minutes,” he repeated.
Jeremy was eight months older than me. We worked for the company our grandfather had started and left to us. Jer was the CEO, and I was his VP. Despite living apart, we’d been raised as brothers. Holidays, vacations, and summers had been spent together. By rights, we should have been a lot alike, but we couldn’t have been more different. He was happiest when he was with his wife of two years, Anne, or commanding a boardroom. I’d never been married, and getting my hands dirty in a garage or outside filled me up.
Our differences had a lot to do with sharing half the same DNA. His mother, our dad’s wife, was a nervous little woman, always fluttering and wringing her hands. Jer was her one and only kid, and, man, did she hover. My mother had been a free spirit from day one. She’d taken our dad to bed while he’d been passing through her town and ended up pregnant with me. I had three younger sisters from the man she’d married a few years later—a rancher who let her fly free.
Jeremy had inherited his mother’s frail nerves and our father’s business acumen. I was a lot lighter on the acumen, and my nerves were made of steel. This was why we worked well as a team. When he spiraled, I righted him. If the business had been left to me alone, I would have run it into the ground—more than likely on purpose to rid myself of a responsibility I did not want. Jeremy never faltered as the head. When he needed to pull his shit together, he did.
This was why I wasn’t worried about today.
He strolled up to where I was waiting for him in the lobby of the Hayes building, loose and casual, proving me right. From the outside looking in, no one would ever guess the internal warfare he had going on. Jeremy Hayes put on a damn good show when it was time.
“All right?” I asked, clapping him on the shoulder.
“All set.” He squared his jaw, scanning the wall of windows to the sidewalk beyond. “Car’s here?”
“Car’s here,” I confirmed.
The ride to Rossi Motors wasn’t long, but the silence stretched it out. Once Jeremy was in this mode, he did not like to be pulled out of it, no casual shooting the breeze for my brother. Not that he was much for it on a normal basis.
That left me with my thoughts, which inevitably turned to Clara—the same way they had since I’d had her pressed against her SUV last week. I didn’t like to think about what had come after, where I’d been a jackhole and she’d rightly called me on it.
The feel of her downy skin under my lips and press of her tits against my chest was preferable to the way she’d dressed me down before driving off.
In hindsight, she hadn’t been looking down on who she saw as a lowly mechanic. My past experiences had had me jumping to the wrong conclusion about a woman protecting herself.
I’d been thinking with my disappointed dick—and look where that had gotten me, with nothing and nowhere.
As a man who had most of my personal life locked down from outsiders, I got where Clara had been coming from. If what she’d said about not bringing men around her daughter was true, spending the evening with me had probably frazzled her. Hell, it'd affected me too. I didn’t date, but even when I had in the past, women with kids had never been on my radar.
