Now, however, Maria’s accusations, although false, triggered something that Garrett had been missing, and the last puzzle piece fell into place. Nick’s feelings for Courtney weren’t platonic. Son-of-a-bitch. Garrett didn’t know how he’d missed it or how he even felt about it. It was the truth that Courtney was like a little sister to him, just like Erin, and if Nick ever hurt her . . . he’d have to answer to him.
But at this particular moment in time, all Garrett could really focus on was Maria and the quandary she presented. There was no question, he wanted to get her naked and horizontal as quickly as he could.
When she’d been snapping at him earlier, he’d been this close, this fucking close to saying ‘you’re fired’, and then picking her up and planting her legs around his waist and pushing her back against the tiled wall. It would have been ridiculously easy to pull her flimsy swimsuit aside and open his pants. He could have been inside her within five seconds flat. That’s what he’d wanted to do. That’s what he’d been about to do.
But then that guy had turned up and she’d taken that goddamn phone call that had screwed with his brain. Even if he hadn’t been fluent in Spanish, he still would have been able to tell how professional and accommodating she’d been, just by her tone. But he was fluent, because he’d minored in the language, and he’d understood every word of her end of the conversation. And not only had he experienced first hand the care with which she’d handled the paying guests, he’d also seen and heard how much the other employees relied on her.
The ramifications hit him all at once . . . he wasn’t going to be able to fire her; there was no way he could cut her loose. The general manager in charge was pure shit, and although Garrett hadn’t had the displeasure of meeting the man, Courtney had been adamant that the guy was on the short-list. So the hotel needed Maria, at the very least, for the duration of the transition. And that left Garrett in limbo, in a purgatory of indefinite blue-balls hell. He hadn’t anticipated that attaining his goal would be difficult in this particular way. He’d been assured the girl was a troublemaker, so he’d assumed he would just terminate her employment. Once that happened, he’d be able to get his hands on her.
Shit.
He was beginning to get a splitting headache.
Who knew that coming here would only make things go from bad to much, much worse?
So, the spoiled blonde woman wasn’t his girlfriend. Right. Maria didn’t believe that shit for a second . . . well, maybe for a couple of seconds last night when she’d been poleaxed at her first sight of Garrett Rule. Gorgeous didn’t even begin to describe the man. How tall was he exactly? There was no question that his height and the width of his shoulders were intimidating. And his face. She blew out a breath.
Hopefully, as bad as her morning was going, when he finally dragged his ass out of bed, he’d just fire her and get it over with. It truly would be so much easier. She had a job waiting for her whenever she wanted it at one of the larger, swankier, waterfront hotels down the road. Granted, she wouldn’t have on-site accommodations as she did with this job, but then, she wouldn’t be on call twenty-four hours a day, either.
But for right now, this was her hotel, or at least that’s the way she thought of it, and she was going to perform the same professional job she always had . . . right up until the moment he woke up and forced her to the pavement.
With that being said, she waded through the mess that was mid-construction on the west side of the third floor. Standing amidst five burly construction workers, wearing heels and an over-the-knee, pencil-slim skirt, she looked over the new sheetrock, checking out the substantial progress made since the morning before. Well, maybe things weren’t going so badly after all.
Juan, the supervisor in charge of the contract workers, stopped what he was doing when he saw her enter the suite and addressed her in Spanish. “You like what you see, Miss Maria?”
Maria smiled at him but ignored his sexual innuendo. He’d been harmlessly flirting with her ever since his crew had begun the project, and she knew he didn’t mean any offense or disrespect. She looked over the walls at the invisible seams. “Yeah, I do,” she answered back in Spanish. “Your crew does a great job. We’re lucky to have you.”
With dramatic flair, he put his hand over his heart. “What we do, we do for you.”
She burst into a laugh and shook her head. “Ah-huh. And the paychecks I hand out every week mean nothing, right?”
“You got me there, pretty,” he said with a smile before picking up his paint roller again.