Cal held up his hands. “She never listens to me when I tell her to take time off.”
Gideon shook his head. “Figured as much. She’s a Maverick, after all.” Gideon was a big, strapping guy who looked like he’d only just come out of the military, rather than having left ten years ago.
Jorge, Rosie’s son, was running laps with Noah around the pool, his arms out as he pretended to be an airplane. Gideon had fallen head over heels for Jorge as well as his mom. Jorge was the same age as Noah, Matt’s son, and the two boys were best friends.
“Careful,” Matt called as his son skidded close to the pool’s edge. “You’re getting close to falling in.”
“I know how to swim, Daddy. So does Jorge.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t watch out for you.” Matt tickled both boys in the ribs, and they giggled like two very happy six-year-olds.
Cal felt an ache around his heart. Once upon a time, he’d dreamed of this—having a family, a loving wife, the white picket fence, laughter. But when he was seventeen, everything in his family had gone sideways, and after that, it had been easier to focus on school, then jobs, then building his business. So much easier than facing his past, or delving into his emotions and the darkness he’d shoved way down deep inside. He’d never met a woman who made him want to dig deep enough to make things last, because he couldn’t live without her, because he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Not until Lyssa.
She was the only woman he’d never been able to get out of his head.
Lyssa, the Mavericks’ younger sister.
Lyssa, the woman he’d taken again and again on a transatlantic flight.
Lyssa, the woman he couldn’t stop fantasizing about. Even when he was surrounded by her brothers, all of whom would tear him apart with their bare hands if they knew what he’d done. The way he’d made her gasp and cry out with pleasure. The way she’d—
“Hey, you guys, get your asses down here,” Sebastian yelled, breaking through his wicked thoughts. Thoughts that should have damned him to hell already.
“Did you hear?” Gideon asked as they walked over to the others. “They want to finish the deck today. The whole thing, start to finish.”
Cal nodded. “Normally, I’d say it’s an impossible task. But with seven of us—and the Maverick energy flowing strong—I’m thinking it won’t be a problem.” If he didn’t explode from guilt, leaving them with only six.
“We put in the concrete piers last week, along with the posts,” Sebastian said as they approached. Tallest of the guys, he had dirt on his hands and holes in his jeans, as if he wasn’t worth several fortunes.
“Today we’ll set down the support beams and lay out the decking,” Evan added.
The Mavericks were like one being. They finished each other’s sentences. They knew one another backward and forward, all the family secrets.
Except Cal’s big, humongous, they-would-kill-him-a-hundred-times-over-if-they-knew secret.
God, it was going to be a long day.
Cal pulled out his hammer. “Tell me where to start.”
“Over here,” Daniel said.
Faced with Lyssa’s big brother, Cal felt yet another wave of guilt. Would it never stop?
It wasn’t as if the Mavericks didn’t have their demons. Each of them had a shadowy past they rarely talked about. Fortunately, they’d all found amazing women who’d helped them move forward and forgive, even if they couldn’t forget.
Lyssa was an amazing woman too. More amazing than any woman Cal had ever met.
Out of the blue, the thought occurred to him that if he’d dealt with his own demons the way each of the Mavericks had, rather than forever shoving them deeper into the shadows, then maybe he and Lyssa could—
Damn it! He was doing it again. Getting lost in fantasies. Even if they could somehow circumvent her brothers, the truth was that she could do so much better than her boss, who was twenty years her senior.
She had her whole life ahead of her. Cal couldn’t stand the thought of holding her back in any way. And given his track record with relationships, it wasn’t lost on him that the women he dated usually had the same complaint, that he held something back, or worse, retreated altogether if things started to get even the slightest bit serious. Lyssa could do a hell of a lot better. Dane Harrington kind of better, in fact.
Furious with himself for continuing to want her even when he knew he could never have anything beyond their one-night stand, he hefted a beam with Evan and worked for the next hour without so much as a water break. His muscles heated, and sweat poured from him, but he was intensely glad for the hard physical work. Anything that would keep his thoughts from straying to Lyssa.
It didn’t help that the guys kept talking about her. “Tell us more about this gala Lyssa and Dane Harrington are planning,” Daniel said.
“I don’t know much,” he had to admit. “They’ve been running with it while I’ve been out of town.”
Thinking about how much time Lyssa was spending with Dane made him unnaturally clumsy. He lost his grip on the beam, scraping his finger and drawing a little blood.
“What’s got you so jumpy?” Matt tossed him a pair of work gloves.
He wasn’t jumpy. Except when he thought about how he’d slept with their sister.
“Too much caffeine,” he lied.
Too much dreaming about Lyssa Spencer.
“Wait a second,” Daniel said. “Is there something you’re not telling us?”
Oh shit. How could they possibly know? “Like what?”
“Is Dane hitting on my sister?” Daniel asked, his chest puffing out like he was ready to avenge her right that second.
“He’d better not be,” Cal said before he could stop jealousy from surging through him again.
“You’re right about that,” Will said. “Because we would tear him limb from limb if he so much as touched a hair on her head.”
Sebastian nodded. “I don’t care how much money the guy has, or how much he’s helping with Gideon’s foundation, she’s got no business being with a guy that old, or that experienced.”
Gideon and all the rest of them nodded. While Cal stood there and tried to act like he hadn’t done a damn thing with Lyssa beyond hiring her and complimenting her accounting skills.
“Speaking of experience,” Matt said, “how are things going with you and the ladies lately?”
Cal hammered a beam in place as another wave of guilt hammered his gut. He was almost getting used to the queasiness. Almost.
Until he stood among the Mavericks.
They would smash him into pulp if they knew what he’d done. And he would deserve every last bit of punishment meted out to him.
“Sorry, guys, I got nothing.” He tried to distance himself from the conversation by focusing on repositioning a beam that was slightly out of line with the others. “I’ve been really busy with work.”
Now that the Mavericks had each found their soul mate, they couldn’t resist ribbing him since they could no longer rib each other. Which was why Daniel elbowed Sebastian and said, “That means he’s got a hot one on the hook.”
Sebastian laughed. “If he doesn’t want to talk about her, she’s got to be pretty special.”