Messing With Mac Read Online Free PDF Page A

sensitive, tender or gentle about a man like that, nothing.
    He wasn’t someone to fool around with. He’d swallow her whole and spit her right back out, and in her world, she was the one who did the spitting, thank you very much.
    What she needed, if she needed at all, was a far more beta man to have fun with, to walk all over, if that’s what she was looking for.
    And maybe she would. Later. Right now she had bigger problems, such as figuring out how to keep her contractor from learning she wasn’t just going to be casually around, she was still living here.
    Not because she didn’t trust him, as he figured, but because she didn’t have the money to move out and get another place. Every cent she had was sunk into this building and the renovations. Until she could get more tenants—something else she was dependent on her contractor for—she was pretty much stuck.
    Suzanne and Nicole had each offered her a place to stay. But Nicole lived in Ty’s house now, and Suzanne with Ryan. Both were deliciously, deliriously drunk on true love. She knew the feeling, oh yes, she knew, but she couldn’t watch it or witness it too closely. She just couldn’t.
    She figured she’d just stay here, quietly, out of the way.
    Undetected.
    But that would be tricky, because now she knew the truth, that very little, and quite possibly nothing, got past one Thomas Mackenzie.
    â€œYou want to move, Princess, or you’ll feel the effects of this dust in two seconds flat.”
    Having come out of nowhere, the tall, moody, opinionated man in question stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at her. She leaned against the railing on the second-floor landing just outside her apartment, the one he didn’t realize she still slept in.
    He wore a hard hat, protective goggles and a facemask, which he’d shoved off his mouth, and was now hanging around his neck. He also wore a fine layer of dust that clung to his damp body. So did his dark T-shirt, which she was quite certain shouldn’t make her pulse quicken. He seemed so huge, so powerful and virile standing there with his sledge hammer in hand as he stared up at her from those whiskey eyes. And ridiculous as it was, she quivered like a mare in heat. It was shockingly, amazingly juvenile, and if she’d known how it was going to be, she’d have found another man for the job.
    No, scratch that, difficult as he was, she wouldn’t want to work with anyone else. He was abrupt, in sensitive and far too hardheaded, but he was a damn good contractor and he was honest to a fault.
    Honest or otherwise, he slowly climbed the stairs, holding her gaze in his, until he stood right before her, all but surrounding her with his size and strength in what she considered was a deliberate at tempt to establish his dominance.
    Well, she was dominant, too, and she lifted her chin and stared him down.
    â€œYou’re not moving out of the dust,” he said.
    She wouldn’t back up, not even one little step, though he was close enough now that she could feel the heat of his body, could see the look in his lightbrown eyes, and it was a very confident, cocksure look.
    Even her heartbeat responded to his nearness, quickening, causing a glowing, growing heat within her body. Combined with the almost frantic awareness humming through her every nerve ending, she felt like a bomb waiting to go off.
    No. She couldn’t be attracted to him, he wasn’t what she wanted in a man. He wasn’t quiet, easygoing. He wasn’t laid-back. And he certainly wouldn’t let her walk all over him.
    Damn, but it had been a long time since a man had gotten to her like this, really gotten to her. And to be fair, Jeff Hathaway had been more boy than man.
    They’d met in second grade. Jeff had slugged Tony Villa for calling her a Jolly Green Giant when she’d worn a green dress and green tights with matching green patent leather shoes, and even back