Jay Crownover - Built

She pushed some of her long, caramel-colored hair behind her ears and lifted an eyebrow at me. “Bad dream. How about you, Sayer? Why are you still up?”

I cleared my throat as I bent down to sweep up the glass.

It was late.

I was really tired.

I had a full day at work tomorrow and I needed to be up early enough so I could swing by the gym before I went into my office.

I had also agreed to have drinks with a fellow attorney after my final court appearance of the day. It was a semidate I had already rescheduled twice, so I couldn’t reasonably back out again without looking like a complete jerk. Doing any of that on a few hours of sleep was less than ideal, but I was getting used to running on fumes lately. I, too, was having dreams that woke me up in the middle of the night, that left me shaken, heated, and too wound up to stay in bed.

Only my dreams weren’t terror inducing—they were good. Oh, so fucking good. They were better than good. They were the best dreams I had ever had. Hell, the dreams were better than any kind of actual sexual experience I had ever had while wide-awake. They were the kind of dreams that had me jerking up from a dead sleep while I panted and sweated. I woke up twisting in my sheets and touching myself because the man that starred in each and every single one of them was nowhere around.

Control was everything to me, and Zeb Fuller made me want to lose it even when he was sound asleep in his own bed all the way across Denver.

I’d paid him a fortune to turn this broken-down, sagging, sorry excuse for a house into a stately, soaring, and magnificent home, and so Zeb had his hands all over my real-life dreams, not just my naughty midnight ones. He had finished the last of the remodel a couple of weeks ago, and ever since I found myself missing the sounds of hammering, drilling, and the rumble of his deep voice. All the dirty, sexy things I secretly wanted him to do to me were chasing me into dreamland, making for rough mornings and some serious dark circles under my eyes. I was pale anyway, so there was no hiding the evidence of Zebulon Fuller’s effect on me.

It was stupidly simple. I had a crush that I couldn’t shake, and it terrified me.

It made me feel off balance, unsure, and so damn sexually frustrated I wanted to pull out all of my long, blond hair by the roots just for a distraction.

I swore softly as a piece of glass slid across my fingertip when I bent down to usher the mess into the dustpan. I stuck the bleeding digit into my mouth and grunted in annoyance at myself. I had learned before I could walk that showing any kind of emotion was a weakness, a fatal flaw that would end with you in tears as the victor stood over your broken, weeping form with a look of pity and disgust on his face. I shouldn’t have jumped when Poppy startled me. I was supposed to be made of more glacial stuff than that. I didn’t react to anything—ever. Poppy was still staring at me with wide-eyed curiosity, so I pulled my finger out of my mouth and wiped it on the yoga pants I had worn to bed.

“I was having weird dreams, too. I thought a glass of wine would help put me back to sleep.” My tone was frostier than I meant it to be, but old habits were hard to break. My coolness was habit and it was armor.

She shifted her weight a little and again I was reminded of a timid woodland creature always ready to flee from danger. She was so pretty, so delicate, and no one should have had to endure the things this young woman had been through in her short lifetime. Poppy Cruz was only a few years younger than my own twenty-eight, but when her amber eyes assessed me with a knowing that felt ancient, it seemed like she was aeons ahead of me in both life and experience. Even though I had been raised by a father who was a tyrant, and had had to put my mother, who loved him and tried to please him right up until her last breath, in the ground before I was old enough to drive. My formative years had been spent trying to live up to standards I could never reach and mourning the loss of a woman I loved and loathed equally.

“You’ve had a lot of sleepless nights since Zeb finished all the work on the house. You seem … unsettled.”

I wanted to roll my eyes in exasperation with myself but held it back. I shouldn’t seem any way to anyone. My cracks were starting to show and that unnerved me to no end.

Was “unsettled” another word for horny enough to climb the walls? Because if so, then yes, I was most definitely unsettled. And I felt ridiculous for it. I’d never had the mere thought of a man distract me or cost me much-needed shut-eye before. I was supposed to have more restraint than that.

I dumped the broken glass into a plastic shopping bag and tossed it all into the trash. It took a few more minutes to wipe up the wine that was on the floor and that had splattered on the cabinets and bottom of the fridge.

“I guess I got used to living in the chaos of construction. Everything seems so neat and tidy now. So new. I’m sure I’ll get used to it. This is my dream home, what I always wanted. I think maybe the fact that I finally have it is still settling in. That’s all.” I had grown up in a home where what I wanted or needed wasn’t permitted, so the fact that I had something that was mine, that was tangible, solid, and real, something that was untouched from the taint of the past, still took my breath away when I thought about it.

I made sure everything was back to being spotless and snatched a bottle of water out of the fridge before turning back to Poppy when she quietly said:

“I thought maybe you were missing having Zeb around. He’s kind of hard to ignore.”

He most assuredly was hard to ignore.

Tall, tattooed, and built like a guy who hauled heavy stuff around and swung a hammer like Thor should be, Zeb was impressive, to say the least. But it went beyond the work-hardened muscles, low-slung tool belt, and the flirty charm he liked to throw around so effortlessly. There was something rock steady and so certain that shined out of his dark green eyes when he looked at the world around him and the people in it. There was an inherent confidence and assuredness that poured off of him when he looked at a person, like he knew without a doubt whatever he was bringing to the table was a thousand times better than what anyone else in the room had to offer. God, I could hardly handle how hot it was when he smiled and rubbed his hand over his neatly trimmed beard. Especially when that smile and knowing smirk was directed right at me.

I had never been into beards, and I always thought I preferred a well-groomed, well-dressed man. A man who looked great in a suit and tie and knew all about expensive cologne and hair product in the proper amounts.

As it turned out, what really flipped the switch on my usually inactive libido was a guy who looked like he could cut down a tree with one swipe and had unruly dark brown hair that looked like it rarely saw a comb or brush, let alone any type of product. It was a guy who made a sweaty T-shirt and torn jeans look like high fashion who kept me awake all night long while I fantasized what those work-toughened hands would feel like sliding across my naked skin.

I didn’t know what Zeb Fuller had done to me or to my common sense. All I knew was that he was keeping me up at night and making me resent every single time I turned icy and cold when he flirted with me. I hated that I couldn’t act normal around him because all I wanted to do was rip his clothes off and climb all over him. I wasn’t familiar with any of those emotions, so as a defense I locked them all down.

My awkwardness and ineptitude in the face of Zeb’s overt masculinity meant that I could never find any words beyond polite pleasantries, clichés, and platitudes, which I had no doubt gave him the impression that I was nothing more than a stuck-up bitch. I never intended to treat him like the hired help, but somehow that’s exactly what I had done, and now the job was finished, Zeb was long gone, and I was having phantom orgasms simply thinking about having his hands and mouth on me while I tossed and turned in my very empty and very lonely bed.