Chapter 2

Chapter Two

I pledged to spare myself the humiliation and avoid the landscapers, but the next morning, I’m simmering with frustration and ready to pick a fight. I may not be able to say what I really feel to Mr. Bosley, because he controls my paycheck, but I don’t owe those shirtless fuckers anything. I deserve to run wherever I want without fearing harassment. And if they howl at me again, I’ll call them out. Maybe, if I confront them, they’ll back off and shut up. Most men have big mouths but turn into weak little puppies when someone actually stands up to them.

Taking my usual route, I reach the house with the torn-up front yard and find the landscaping truck parked outside again. All four men are digging in the dirt. Once more, the tallest one is shirtless, his tanned body shining in the early morning light with sweat. In addition to the hair on his chest, today I notice he has thick, dark stubble on his chin, too.

Fuck me, he’s hot. It’s not fair that he’s also an asshole.

I focus my gaze straight ahead as I approach, maintaining my normal jogging speed. From the corner of my eye, though, I notice all four of them look up when I pass, and their mouths drop open.

Shit. Here it comes.

“ Awoo! ” one calls out. When I glance over, they’re all staring at me intently. Each of them howls again. “Awoo! Awoo! ”

I halt as angry heat spreads from my chest into my head. How dare they? Don’t I get to exist in the world, to go for a simple jog, and not be afraid of some strangers making fun of me?

I turn around, letting that ferocity fill me up, and stalk over to them. The tallest of the landscapers smiles as I approach and drops his shovel.

“Hey!” I snap. “What the fuck is your problem?”

The grin falls from his face.

“Problem?” he asks, glancing over at the other three men with confusion. “We don’t have a problem.”

One of the other guys—shorter, with a wide, beefier chest—tips his baseball cap at me. “Well, we have one minor problem,” he chimes in with a sultry voice. “There’s a beautiful woman distracting us while we’re on a deadline.”

His gaze travels from my collar down to my waist, then my shoes and back up again. He looks almost... hungry.

I cover myself reflexively, realizing just how much of my big boobs my sports bra shows. Suddenly I feel incredibly exposed, which makes me angrier.

“You’re disgusting,” I tell him, and he flinches with surprise. “I’m out here just minding my own business, and you think it’s okay to harass me?”

The short one’s brow furrows. “I’m sorry,” he says to me, holding up his hands. “We didn’t mean to?—”

“Then why the hell are you howling ?” I interrupt. At the perplexed look on his face, though, my anger flags. He really doesn’t understand why I’m upset.

“Because we can smell you,” another guy says. He has a puka shell necklace hanging from his neck. “And, um... you smell incredible.”

At this, all of them nod at once, as if this is obvious.

For a moment, I don’t know what to say. They can smell me from that distance? Isn’t that worse? I sniff my armpits, and sure, I’m sweaty, but my deodorant is doing its job.

The tall one chuckles. “Not like that,” he says in a placating tone, but now all I can think about is how much I must reek.

I always take a shower after I run, but what if I smell like that in the office, too? Did I eat something I shouldn’t have? Now Mr. Bosley is going to have yet something else to jump on me about.

My breathing speeds up as I look around at their four faces. It’s horrifying that they could pick up my scent that far away. Surely they think I’m disgusting.

“I’m sorry,” says the one who’s remained silent until now. He’s skinnier than the others but just as hot, with low-hanging jeans that show off the sleek muscle winding down from his hip to his groin. “We didn’t mean to offend you, but you really do smell great.”

All of them nod in agreement. This conversation isn’t going how I expected. Here I am, surrounded by four incredibly hot guys who all seem to agree they like the way I smell .

The tall one, who has shockingly blue eyes, takes another tentative step forward. This time, though, I hold my ground. I’m not going to let these assholes intimidate me. But now, faced with someone so big, I’m breathing too fast—much too fast. The world is swimming.

“Are you all right?” he asks, leaning down to look in my face. I can barely bring air into my lungs, and my heart is racing so fast I think it might escape my chest.

“She clearly isn’t,” snaps the skinny guy. He appears at the front of the group and puts a gentle hand on my elbow. “You should sit down.” I shouldn’t be letting this strange man lead me anywhere, but all my focus is on trying to breathe. He guides me to the back of the truck, where the gate to the bed is down. “Here.”

I stumble back until I’m sitting on it, and he doesn’t let go of my hand—which I didn’t even realize he was holding. The other three guys all crowd around me, but the skinny guy waves them off.

“Give her some space,” he growls, and maybe it’s just the haze, but it sounds like a dog’s growl. “She’s having some kind of attack.”

“Asthma?” asks the younger man with the puka shell necklace.

“Heat stroke,” says the short guy in the baseball cap.

“Shut up!” The skinny one rubs the back of my hand with his thumb. “Try to take deep breaths rather than short ones, okay?”

I focus on the words. Deep rather than short . I try to bring the air all the way in, even though my throat is fighting it, and then let it back out again.

“I’m Eli,” the man says as I close my eyes, trying to focus. “And I’m right here, okay?”

Slowly my diaphragm relaxes, and I can almost breathe properly. When I look up, there are four huge, chiseled dudes hovering over me, all of them looking quite worried.

“I’m fine,” I squeak out, pulling my hand away out of the skinny guy’s grip and sliding off the truck bed. First they howled at me, and now I’m having one of those attacks in front of them. Great start to the day so far!

But they’re being so kind to me. No one has made fun of me, or told me to just get it together. Eli’s concerned face makes my heart beat faster again, but for a totally different reason.

I should probably go before anything else happens and I make an idiot of myself. When I get to my feet, the tallest guy lets out a heavy, charged breath.

“Damn,” he murmurs, almost like he’s drugged. “You really do smell good.”

“Leon,” snaps the shorter guy in the baseball cap. “You’re not helping our case.” He looks up at me. “I’m sorry about him. This doof really doesn’t know how to talk to women at all.”

“As if you do,” Leon shoots back.

“Ignore them,” Eli says. “We should have introduced ourselves properly before. We already met.”

He holds out his hand to me a second time in a more formal handshake. Against my better judgment, I reach out and accept it. Eli squeezes my fingers, and his grip is firmer than I expected. His eyes are brown, but heated and intense. Damn. He has a carved face, with broad cheekbones, a square jaw and a significant chin.

Finally, he releases me and gestures at the other two. They both have earnest, eager looks on their faces.

“That one’s Jace.” The short guy with the cap nods politely. “That’s Quinn.” The last one, with the puka necklace, gives me a wide grin. “And you met my idiot big brother, Leon.”

The tall guy with the blue eyes clasps his hands in front of him.

“It’s wonderful to meet you,” he says, without a trace of sarcasm. “I’m sorry for acting like an idiot. What’s your name?”

My mouth bobs open and closed. I think there’s a chance I misjudged these guys.

“Um,” I manage. “I’m Tiffany. Tiff for short. I hate being called Tiffany, actually.” My lack of oxygen has gone straight to my brain.

“Tiff,” Leon says, letting the word slide off his tongue. God, even the way he says my name is hot. “I’d like to apologize if we made you feel self-conscious. We just...”

“Are you seeing anyone?” The younger-looking one named Quinn interjects, stepping out in front of Leon. “Would you be interested in going on a date with me?”

I gape at him. What on earth? That came out of nowhere.

Then a creeping anger comes over me. Is that what this all boils down to after all? They just want a piece of ass?

I take a step back and put my hands up. “No. Absolutely not.” I give all four of them a dark look. They were never worried about me. They just see me as meat. “I have to get to work.”

Leon elbows Quinn hard in the side. “Asshole. You’re scaring her off.”

“You shouldn’t move so soon after—” Eli begins, trying to stop me from leaving.

I shove him away, furious. I don’t wait around for anything else to happen before I turn on my heel and take off at a jog back toward home, running much faster than my usual speed.

“Tiff!” one of the men calls to me. As gorgeous as they are, now I know that they’re also total creeps.

They don’t come after me as I head home, sweating profusely from how hard I’m pushing myself. I promise not to go down that street again tomorrow.

I’m still trembling in the shower, frantically cleaning off whatever those guys smelled on me.

I’ve had those kinds of attacks before, usually after work, thinking about things Mr. Bosley did that day or how I might disappoint him the next day. I hate the way my throat closes up so tight I can’t breathe and it feels like my heart is about to explode out of my chest.

Today might have been the first time, though, that someone has ever talked me through it. Usually I sit in the bathroom alone, desperately fighting for air as sobs wrack my body. But Eli’s hand had been so warm and comforting in mine, his voice so steady and reassuring, that I’d recovered much faster than I usually do.

I groan as I try to get my makeup right with my shaking hands. Finally, I head to the office, making sure I have enough time to stop off at the coffee shop on my way.

Mr. Bosley has nothing to say to me as I deposit it at his desk. Every once in a while, I think how nice it would be to hear a “thank you,” but there’s no chance I’d ever get that from him.

We’re placing new orders today, so I try to put all my attention on adding up wholesale costs. But I keep thinking about this morning instead.

It was so bizarre, I still feel like it was a dream. Why had all four of them looked like they were hypnotized? Am I emitting some kind of pheromone that only landscapers respond to?

Mr. Bosley can’t stand it when I’m idling for even a moment, so while he’s in the office, I try to look busy. But today he has a lunch meeting, so I finally get a moment to relax.

For the next hour, I think about asking the girls from accounting if what happened was as weird as I think it was, but they probably wouldn’t believe me. You got hit on by four smokin’ hot guys at once? Now that I say it to myself, it feels like the world’s tackiest humble-brag.

I have all the numbers ready to present when Mr. Bosley comes back from his lunch meeting, but he’s absolutely infuriated and waves me off dismissively. He’s pink all over, even down his neck. “Cancel my 1:30 appointment, Ms. Dockett. I have things I need to deal with.”

“Oh, of course—” But before I can even finish talking, he slams his door closed.

I blink at air. What happened at his lunch meeting?

After postponing his appointment, I hear Mr. Bosley’s raised voice booming inside his office. He runs his own small heating and plumbing empire, the “tri-county destination for your HVAC needs.” It’s working for him, given the Tesla he drives in to work every day, but the business isn’t usually so stressful.

After obsessing all afternoon, I text my friends Hannah and Aisling to meet me for drinks—if just to get my mind off of things. They usually have interesting stories to tell about their coworkers at their tech company, one of those places that has work-sanctioned beer nights and free kombucha on tap. We exchange a few messages, and they agree to meet up at our favorite place for chicken wings and beer. Maybe this is just the thing I need.

It’s always good to see my high school friends again, even if we’ve found ourselves in very different places in life. We met when we were fourteen, and they’ve been my support network ever since.

Once our hands are all covered in hot sauce and our first round is gone, I tell them the story of the landscapers.

“Ew,” Hannah says with a grimace. “They were working on a fancy house and howled at you? What the fuck does that mean?”

Aisling rolls her eyes. “Men are so gross. It doesn’t matter where, they’re still gonna be gross.”

“Then one of them asked me out,” I say. “And I knew what they wanted.”

My friends cringe at the same time.

“Disgusting,” Hannah says. “Can’t even leave a girl alone to exercise.”

Then we spend the rest of the night talking about all the nasty things men have done to us over the years. We’ve all given up on online dating. The last time I went out with someone, it was with Chris. He’d acted so sweet on our first date and was fabulous at pretending to care about my life. At the end of the night, we hooked up, and he didn’t even attempt to make me orgasm. Once he was finished, he put all his clothes back on and left my apartment before I could even get his number.

“They just want the T-and-A,” says Hannah, scowling. “One and done. Assholes.”

When it starts to get late, Aisling and Hannah say goodnight, but I decide to stick around for another drink and take an Uber home. I’ll just jog back this way in the morning to get my car, and then I can avoid the landscapers. Maybe I should start running in the evening, or pick another place farther from my apartment.

I’m plotting an alternative route while I toss back my drink, when I hear a familiar voice from down the bar.

“Tiff?”