6
Animals
Jack’s crew had been pulling overtime shifts for two days, trying to catch up after the tower-put-together-backward disaster. Which of course meant Mari was pulling overtime, too, walking endless laps around the construction pad to make sure animals wouldn’t get in the way of their work.
Today, they were doing crane work, which was terrifying to watch, even though they’d done it a million times and it was probably no more scary to them than changing lanes. They would put together a section of tower, all the metal lattice pieces bolted together, then the crane would lift that piece and set it atop the existing tower they’d already built.
The catch was that four living, breathing men had to perch atop the tower to guide the corners into place.
If Ricky, the crane operator, slipped or even moved too fast, the new section started to swing. That could impale a man, or knock him off the beam. They had safety straps to tie them in, but she could see that those would catch them at just the right height for them to swing face-first into the metal struts below them.
Four men climbed the four corners of the structure at the same time: Jack, Toby, Kipp, and Gideon. Joey the apprentice had begged to be allowed to help, and Jack had turned him down so loudly she was pretty sure the next crew a mile down the road had heard. For all the truly filthy names he called that apprentice, Jack watched out for him very carefully. But then, that seemed to be his way—he always scowled the darkest when he was being kind, like he was afraid someone would catch him at it.
Hand over foot, the four of them swarmed up the tower so fast it looked like they were on an escalator. All they had to climb were fat metal bolts sticking out on both sides of the supports, and when they got higher than twenty feet, Mari had to close her eyes to keep her stomach from churning. They couldn’t clip their safeties in until they stopped climbing, and she didn’t want to see any of them slip.
When Jack’s gruff shout rang out, she opened her eyes again. She should do a sweep for tortoises, but instead her gaze glued itself to the sky, where Jack straddled a thin metal strut as comfortably as if it were a La-Z-Boy recliner. The crane swung the metal lattice of the new section over the top of them and started to lower it toward the waiting men. It was swaying so much in the breeze that the operator, Ricky, had to reel it in and try again on the approach.
“Damn it, Jack,” she muttered under her breath. The guys had argued about whether there was too much wind today to use the crane. It was two miles per hour below the safety cutoff . . . until it gusted. And it was the desert, so it gusted whenever it pleased.
But Jack thought they needed to push it to finish at this site today, so here they were, four tiny men on top of a tower, trying to catch the swinging metal thing that outweighed them by several thousand pounds. On the third try, Jack got impatient and stood up, balancing on a piece of metal narrower than an Olympic balance beam. And then he leaned out to grab the swinging piece.
Mari sucked in a breath, her hands flying to her mouth, but Jack caught the metal beam and locked on. His body stretched taut as he muscled the tower piece into place, the other men catching their corners now that he’d steadied the whole. It seemed impossible that they could fit something so huge into such an exact spot that the bolt holes would line up, but a moment later, it was done. The compressor blared as they slammed bolts home, and Mari shoved her gaze back to the ground, trying to remember how to breathe.
When they climbed back down, tossing taunts and insults jovially back and forth, she stepped forward to meet them.
Jack stopped, the slant of his eyebrows puzzled. “We fuck something up?” He glanced around. “Dunno what we could have hurt from up there.”
“No, no. That was incredible!”
His brow furrowed, like he thought she might be making a joke at his expense, so she cleared her throat and reeled in her tone a touch.
“Good work, I mean.”
She’d been determined to try to speak to the crew a little more, not just hide out with the lizards and the creosote, and yet Jack seemed more thrown off by her attempt than she was.
“Uh, right.” He glanced away toward his men, uncertain. She supposed compliments from the bio weren’t exactly part of their normal routine. “Ricky’s one of the best crane operators around. Asshole, but good at his job.” He paused. “Guess I’ll, um, get back to it then.”
“That’s not all,” she hastened to add, scraping up her courage. “I just wondered . . . you guys want to see something?”
Mari seemed excited, and his guys really had kicked ass today, so Jack went along with it, letting her lead his whole crew like the Pied Piper away from the construction pad. Leaving their tools behind and crunching over rocks, dodging cactus. Her loose swirl of a bun peeked out from under the back of her hard hat, exposing her long, slender neck. His gaze kept being drawn to it like it was a gap between her buttons, something he wasn’t supposed to see. And he kept reminding himself it was just a neck. Nothing sexual about that.
He cleared his throat and refocused his eyes on the sandy gravel under his boots. She stopped next to a hole in the ground and dropped to her knees, and he blinked with renewed interest. Was this one of those holes the turtles lived in? He bumped Toby out of the way, trying to see better. Was one in there right now? He wondered what had happened to the little cheeseburger-sized one he’d moved.
Mari bent forward, her head low to the ground and her bottom in the air as she flicked on a flashlight and peered down the burrow. Her jeans stretched taut across her hips and he was hit with a bolt of hard, fierce lust. It was basically a sex position, so he couldn’t help but imagine her bent forward like that for him, his hands clenching the pretty curve of her waist . . .
He choked and looked away, shifting his weight around before he remembered the burrow and looked to see what her flashlight revealed. There was an animal inside, and it was . . . fuzzy?
“You see them?” She looked back with a smile so bright he got distracted all over again. “Kit foxes. They’re about the size of a house cat, but with great big ears so they hear everything. You won’t often spot them out during the day, so it’s really cool to find them in a den like this. Can you see?”
She shielded the beam of her flashlight with her fingers so it wouldn’t blind them, but Jack could still make out the eye shine of three creatures, their sharp, furry faces poked inquisitively out toward the entrance. They did look like big-eared cats. Little buggers were kinda cute, actually.
“Why don’t you look deeper, sweetheart?” Ricky said. “Think I see something way back there.”
“What?” Mari unshielded the flashlight, craning her cheek closer to the ground. He could see the moment she got what Ricky was really saying, because her shoulders went stiff and she sat back on her heels, suddenly awkward.
Jack slapped a hand against Ricky’s chest, cuffing him toward the worksite. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up and go back to work?”
Ricky smacked his hand away. “What? We were just looking. Weren’t we, boys? At the fox.”
Itchy heat flushed up Jack’s neck. Those fox kitten things were cute, but they didn’t hold a candle to the allure of Mari all bent over like that. And he hated like hell that he’d been gawking at her just like this idiot.
Jack glowered, but when Ricky didn’t retreat, he gritted his teeth. Stupid cocky crane operators. But hell, if he wanted to play it like that, Jack was game. He stepped up into his face, the other man two inches taller but Jack moving with the absolute confidence that he could punch harder.
“Think you can wave your big paycheck around and stop taking orders? You’re working on my crew, and if you wanna be here, that’s what you do. Work.”
Jack saw the retreat in the crane operator’s face a second before he stepped away. But Ricky tossed out a parting shot, his eyes flashing with the humiliation of being forced to back down in front of an audience. “Better watch your mouth, Wyatt. Might be one day my hand slips.”
Jack scoffed but the other men on the crew looked pissed. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said on a job site. Fucking ever. But he’d deal with that later.
He didn’t look at Mari as he herded his guys back to work. He didn’t want to see how she’d shrunk into herself at his stupid crew mouthing off like he couldn’t control them. He didn’t want to see the disgust written in every line of her body because that was her real, undisguised reaction to guys like them wanting a woman like her.
He might have been the one smacking Ricky for opening his mouth, but he was no better than him, and he knew it. He just wished Mari didn’t know it, too.