“Fine,” she said, blowing out a breath. “Show me your trick.”

“The thing is,” he said, leaning in, “when we installed it, the housing ended up getting bent, and we folded part of it over and put an extra screw through...

“Want a hand with the screwdriver?” he asked. He was so close now, his scent filling her nose, his big body right next to hers. She could feel...something like a vibration in the scant air between them and it made her skin feel itchy. “I can show you.”

“Why don’t you tell me?” she said, refusing to hand the screwdriver to him.

“If you insist.” He wrapped his hand, rough and calloused, around hers and guided it back behind the motor.

Her body jerked forward, and her heart lurched right along with it.

He let go of her, but she was still trying to catch her breath even as the screwdriver butted up against what felt like the head of the screw.

She swallowed hard. “Thanks,” she said.

“No problem.”

She started to unscrew it quickly, trying her very best to ignore the extreme sensations his touch had created in her body. It was ridiculous. And stupid.

Except, she couldn’t remember when the last time was she’d been touched like that by a man who wasn’t family.

Never. Pretty much never.

But this wasn’t about him touching her hand. It was about him being a butthead, who had given her this task knowing that she wouldn’t be able to finish it without this little bit of intel. She arched her shoulders back, bumping into his, not on accident, and then finished undoing the screw. After that the motor came out easily.

She scowled at him, then turned around and looked on the ground for the replacement part.

“Do you need help with that?”

“That depends,” she said. “Is there a trick to that, too? Something that you booby-trapped?”

“I promise you I didn’t set out to sabotage you. But I did assume that if you needed help you would ask.”

Oh, he’d totally planned this and she would never believe otherwise. She gritted her teeth. “Well, I haven’t seen you around all day. Where exactly have you been?”

“I slept in for a minute,” he said. “And had to take care of a little bit of admin work.”

“Slept in?”

“I went out last night,” he said, a lopsided smile on his face.

Those words, combined with the roguish expression, made her stomach curl. No. He wasn’t different or unusual or unpredictable.

He was everything she’d always thought he was.

He’d hooked up with some poor, unsuspecting woman last night who probably hadn’t realized all his sweet whispers were damn dirty lies. And now he was wandering around like everything was just fine and dandy.

And in his world, it was.

“That doesn’t seem responsible,” she said, her tone stiff. “You know, seeing as you’re the boss and all.”

“I am the boss,” he said. “Which is just one of the reasons that I get to do it if I feel like it.”