Page 58 of Making the Cut

Luckily, Viv didn’t mind us staying in for the most part and letting me cook, because as she put it, “then we can bang whenever we want to.”

I watch her sitting at her laptop on the couch while I make lunch on Sunday. Her eyes are bunched in concentration and her glasses tip down her nose. I didn’t even know she wore glasses.

I also didn’t realize how good she would look in my shirt. It was the one I’d worn on Friday that was now missing four buttons because I was too damn impatient to unbutton it in the heat of the moment.

No regrets there.

“Hey, I have a question,” I start when I feel like the moment is right.

“What’s up?” she asks, looking over the back of the couch at me with a soft smile. She lifts her glasses onto her head and I’m hit with a vision of us, ten years down the road doing this exact thing, maybe with a kid or two running around.

“How come you don’t start your own marketing company?”

She sighs and sets her laptop on the couch cushion, sauntering around it to stand at the counter to watch me cook. “It’s crossed my mind before. Why do you ask?”

I shrug. “I was just thinking, you already do the work for Warren and CT. I know a lot of other people who could use your skills. Even April and Chris talked about hiring you too, for their work. That’s a lot of clients.”

She shrugs. “It costs a lot to start up a business like that, plus I’d have to get a corporation set up, find an employee or two, and I don’t even know how to go about that at the moment. I wouldn’t make a profit for a while.”

“Do you have savings?” I ask, keeping my tone light. We’ve just ventured into a physical relationship and I don’t want to push, but I also care about her and wonder if she is wasting time at Hansen Marketing.

“I do. But not enough that I couldn’t not make money and still live.”

I nod and shrug my shoulders. “Well, if you ever decide you want to do that, I’ll support you however you need.”

She leans over the counter and gives me a sweet kiss. She eyes the food and says, “Hey, so, can this keep for say… twenty minutes?”

I lift a brow, looking over the food. “We only need ten.”

She throws her head back and laughs loudly while I swoop her up and over my shoulder, smacking her ass on the way to the bedroom.

Yeah, life was pretty fucking amazing.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“You can’t fix other people. They’re going to fuck shit up and even if you try and stop them from self-destructing, they’ll do it anyway. Selfish is the way of humans.” – Garrett

ARCHER

I’m whistling while cleaning up in the back of the house we’re working on. All the trash and extra rubble that got thrown out from the siding people is still here, and since Devon is missing, I am helping them get their shit moved so new people can come in and work.

Sweat drips down my brow, but I couldn’t care less. This past weekend left me in the best possible mood, I’d woken up this morning with Viv standing above me, two cups of coffee in her hands and a smile on her gorgeous lips. I thought I was dreaming.

Until she set them on the nightstand and straddled my hips, staring down at me like I was her personal fantasy.

Fuck. It was a perfect weekend, and I’d shown up this morning happy.

Until Devon didn’t show up again, and I had zero idea what I was supposed to be doing. Mason and his crew were finally cleared to get in here, so they were working on the plumbing before the guys who would do the electrical would be here in a week or so.

There were a couple of good guys. Don and Charlie were the two hardest workers that I noticed, they were working alongside me to get things cleaned up. They were on the crew that did siding so as soon as this was done, they’d be going on to another site.

“What are you so happy about?” Don asks, or more like grumbles as he tosses broken two-by-fours in the dumpster.

“Nothing,” I answer with a shrug, but a smile slips onto my face.

“Uh-huh,” Charlie answers, whipping his ball cap off to wipe the sweat off of his brow. “No guy cleaning up at a site is fucking whistling. If I had to bet, our boy Archie got some this weekend.”

Don shakes his head, he’s a few years younger than us. “Please, no piece of ass would make anyone this happy to be working.”

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