him through the house. “I can help you. She doesn’t have that much near the door. Just some stacked bins.”
Abbey unlocked the door to the garage and after one step in, they both stopped. Instead of the garage door, huge plywood planks covered the opening. Black, singed wood showed where the heat and fire had burned the wood at the mouth of the garage. Debris was strewn everywhere. Clearing the garage might take longer than she’d thought.
“Fuck,” Blake muttered. “That was a real car bomb.”
“No kidding,” Abbey breathed. It was completely surreal that someone was trying to kill her boss. The fact that they’d nearly succeeded multiple times sent a chill down her back.
Between the two of them, it took almost twenty minutes to clean the mess and move the bins and miscellaneous boxes to the back of the garage. The workers showed up a few minutes early, and Abbey and Blake went back into the house.
“I guess you can go,” Abbey told him. “No reason to stick around.”
Blake looked out to the two guys taking down the plywood, plus the two construction workers unloading the wood for the new garage frame and the other two guys removing the garage door panels from the truck. His gaze landed on her. “I’ll wait.”
“I’m fine,” Abbey insisted.
Blake grinned, and it was the sexy grin he’d hit her with in the elevator. “You are that,” he said.
She felt her cheeks heat. “I’m serious. You don’t need to stick around.”
“I know I don’t need to. I want to.”
“Don’t you have a life to get back to? Something that you had to cancel because Troy told you to come here?”
He didn’t answer her. He just gazed into her eyes and made it hard for her to form a sentence. In fact, the longer he stared at her the harder it got to think at all.
“He must be a pretty good friend for you to drop everything and show up here at the drop of a hat.”
Blake took a sip of the ice water in front of him and Abbey needed the reprieve from his gorgeous blue eyes. “Troy’s a good guy. Have you met him?”
Shaking her head, Abbey doodled on the notepad near the answering machine, which also had no phone in the base. Ugh. Julie! “Nope. Never met him.”
Blake took the pen out of her hand and moved the pad toward himself. He very neatly printed something on the page, tore it off and slid it in front of her. “My information. Again,” he said. “Don’t make me wait another six weeks. Don’t make me wait six hours.” He didn’t bat an eyelash as a half grin curved his lips. “I know how to find you now. And I will if I have to.”
Chapter Sixteen
By late morning of day two, Julie slammed Ari’s script closed and stretched. This screenplay had her itchy in all the right places. The love scenes were detailed and hot. She’d forgotten just how hot. Or maybe she was just more in tune with good sex after the other night. Just what she needed, to be hornier than hell with a man who didn’t seem to want to do anything about it. She made an executive decision. She planned on pulling answers out of this man’s mouth no matter how long it took and since she had sex on the brain...
“Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”
His double take in the rearview mirror might have made her laugh if she’d been in the mood, but she instantly regretted the personal question. Sometimes her mouth ran ahead of her brain.
“What?” he asked.
Oh, hell. May as well shoot for the finish line since she was already out of the blocks. “Quit stalling. You heard me.” She shifted her extended leg and felt the pull in the stitches as she leaned forward in between the front seats. His clean aftershave wafted up her nose and she took a long covert whiff. God, he smelled good, but she wouldn’t let that detour her. “You’re funny, smart.” You smell like sex on a stick. “You dive in front of bullets. Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”
He opened his mouth, closed it and opened it again. “I don’t know. Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” He passed a string of cars on the right and ate up the road like a monster.
Touché. “Even though I asked you first, I will answer you honestly. There is a lot of baggage that goes with dating me. When I’m working,