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  “My grandmother is trying to get us all married.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  He shrugged, and she tried mightily not to notice how lovely it was to witness his powerful muscles move underneath the well-worn fabric. But her traitorous girl parts hummed every time he moved. And they quivered when she caught a whiff of whatever soap or beard wax he used. Sea salt and eucalyptus.

  “Maybe she thinks no one will marry me if I’m a mess.”

  There was something underneath his words that seemed off, but she brushed it away. “You don’t seem like a mess to me. Aside from the day drinking and telling random women to take off their clothes as soon as they walk through the door.”

  “It wasn’t random.” He looked at her again, and she would swear that there was heat in his gaze as it dipped over her breasts and to her hips. But the movement, the flick of it, was so brief, she was likely imagining it. Men like Max Delgado didn’t notice women like Letty, much less want them. “But I don’t need you.”

  He took a swig of his drink, which had her narrowing her gaze at him.

  Of course not. If men like Max, beautiful Max, didn’t want women like Letty, they certainly wouldn’t need them.

  He cleared his throat. “I mean, I don’t need your services.”

  So, he was saying there was a chance. Letty looked around the studio. Piles of junk lined the walls. She wasn’t one to judge how an artist worked. Once, she and Simon had trudged through the Everglades to find an award-winning artist making a decoupage mural that featured her own toenail clippings. As much as that had squicked her out, she couldn’t deny that the result was impactful—an artist literally putting herself into her work.

  And Max’s organizational problems didn’t reach the level of unhygienic. Still, she could help him. She knew she could. After he saw the results from one day, he wouldn’t be able to resist asking her back.

  “If I’m going to be paid for the day, at least let me work.”

  He looked up from the paper in front of him and stared at her. “You’re not going to interfere with what I’m doing?”

  The hint of vulnerability revealed by the question grabbed at something inside Letty. She’d always had a tender heart and liked to take care of people. Broody Max couldn’t scowl away that urge. “No. My goal would be to make it easier for you to get work done.” Unlike that glass of whiskey he’d just downed.

  “How?”

  Now that he’d opened the door with questions, she was going to walk straight through. “Well, my initial plans were to organize your space by type of materials—labelling everything in a way that won’t harm the material and making it easier for you to access.”

  “I know where everything is.”

  It was Letty’s turn to arch a brow. There was no way his brain had everything catalogued. Simon had the same kind of ego about his own innate organizational skills. She’d had to be careful about not stepping all over his self-image. He hadn’t believed he’d needed her for her actual job because she’d been so unobtrusive. Even though starting her own business was her first steps out on her own, she could bring the same skills to bear for Max.

  Her brain flooded with the other kinds of skills she could bring to bear with Max. Although her aesthetic appeal wasn’t as universal as her sister’s, and she had enough baggage from her mom’s constant harping that she didn’t like being looked at naked, she enjoyed sex when she could get around that component. And she was good at it. At least, she’d thought so before Simon. She shook her head, trying to dislodge self-defeating thoughts and any ideas of getting intimate with Max.

  The intrusive lust rolling around with her anxiety didn’t make sense. She’d never had a problem compartmentalizing her professional self with her sensual needs. Even with Simon, it had been all about work at work, and she’d been all about them once they were alone at her apartment. Never his—that should have been her first clue that he’d never been into her.

  Because she’d been a means to an end.

  “Mr. Delgado—”

  “Max.”

  “Max.” She stepped closer to him, catching more of his smell—something she wished she could bottle and sell as “Hemingway’s Sexy Essence.” She gathered her defenses again before saying, “I’m not going to interfere with your work.” She gestured at the blank page in front of her. “My goal is to make your life easier so you can get more done.”

  He sat back on the old stool he perched on. The metal and screws protested as he inadvertently revealed a small swath of skin between his jeans and shirt. Just enough to show dark hair leading to the body part she’d let herself speculate about while alone, in the dark, in her room. Only after she was done with the job.

  Swiping at her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, she forced herself to meet his gaze again. “And I’d planned to make a website.”

  She couldn’t be sure whether the amusement dancing in his lush, green eyes was about her staring at his junk or the idea of a website until he said, “Why do you think I need a website?”

  Chapter 2

  When she’d licked her lips, Max Delgado knew he was a goner. His grandmother did not play around with her plan to seduce him into getting on with his life and find a nice girl already. There wasn’t anything not nice about the girl standing in front of him. From her full lips to her smooth, tawny skin, right down to the tetas he longed to bury his face in and the hips he wanted to mold and fondle as he sank deep. She was gorgeous.

  But, because his grandmother had sent her, he needed to treat her as an enemy. Now that her subterfuge had gotten his baby sister married, Grandma Lola was incorrigible. As soon as she’d moved to the U.S. from Cuba permanently, she’d set about fixing all of her grandchildren’s lives.

  Little did his grandmother know, or anyone other than his father, that he wasn’t in the position to be settling down. He wished that Lola would turn her attentions to his older brother, Joaquin—he owned his own business and wasn’t still mooching off their parents. Max couldn’t settle down, not until he could make his own way.

  And not with a girl like the one standing in front of him. He’d clocked her expensive handbag and designer jeans as soon as she’d walked in. Joaquin had bought a similar bag for their sister Laura as a Christmas present last year; Max had made her a copper wire sculpture depicting her role as Carmen for the New York City Ballet.

  The woman standing in front of him was rich, whether she wanted people to know that or not. And she would never be interested in someone like Max, a loser who still mooched off his parents while dreaming of making it big in the art world.

  Lola might have been right about Laura and Charlie being perfect for each other, but she was woefully off with the aim of her Cupid’s arrow here.

  At least now he knew why she’d been using his laptop to look at Tumblr porn the other day. She hadn’t been looking for herself—she was finding out what he was into. And she’d used that information to find his kryptonite and send her to his door.

  If Letty had been from the agency—sent here to model for his next commission—he had no doubt that he would have enticed her into dinner and sex. She was everything he liked in a woman—lush and gorgeous. When she’d first walked in the door, there’d been something self-conscious and endearing about the way she’d held herself.

  Until he’d tried to send her way. Then, steel seemed to encase her spine, and she’d advanced on him with evidence and argument. Her adamant refusal to leave woke up his curiosity. Girls with highlights that cost a car payment—another piece of economic information he’d gleaned through having a little sister—did not beg for a day’s work. Her mettle and the way he wanted to learn more made her more attractive—and dangerous.

  Still, he had no intention or desire to cooperate with Lola’s plan to get him and his brother married. Granted, his sister seemed happier than she’d ever been, b
ut he wasn’t going to follow her down that road. As eighty-five percent certified miserable bastard, he didn’t impose himself on women for longer than a few weeks or months—just long enough to let the fucking burn off and for problems to arise.

  Aside from barely being able to support himself, he was too much like his father to ever risk ruining a woman’s life. Even as a child, he’d taken after his moody father. Before his mother had gotten addicted to pills to escape her husband’s anger and disapproval, Max recalled the worried looks from his mom whenever he’d had a temper tantrum. He remembered those looks and the mollifying words that had followed as well as he remembered his father hitting his mother when she’d tried to shield her children from his temper. It didn’t help that if he didn’t spend hours a week in the gym, he’d look exactly like his lanky father. And his insides were no different.

  As soon as his irritation with a woman started to outweigh the fog of lust, he cut a woman loose. He wouldn’t impose his genetic inheritance on anyone else. His father’s temper was even why he’d chosen a job that would allow him to be his own boss. The fact that his father would have preferred him going to architecture school—something useful—made it all the better. After Max’s older brother, Joaquin, had come out of the closet, their father’s venomous brand of hope had fallen to Max. Because he was his father’s son, he’d taken sick pleasure in dismantling his father’s dreams for him.

  Alejandro Delgado didn’t deserve hope after what he’d done to his family.

  But Max didn’t deserve it either. He was too much like his father not to harbor the same sickness. That’s why every minute Letty Gonzalez spent with him was a risk. There was an inherent sweetness to her that hit him in the face like a two-by-four when she’d walked in the room. Her judgment-risking curves, her scent in the air, and the way she smiled at him—open and hopeful—were all blaring red warning signs.

  Asking her what she could do for him professionally was a waste of time. It was his dick taking control of the helm. Still, he couldn’t help it.

  “Well, you don’t have a website.” Fuck him, she stepped closer and pushed her phone at him again. “This is just a quick-and-dirty mock-up.”

  Quick and dirty. She realized the implication in what she’d said and blushed. His cock got hard. Like there was some sort of communication between her circulatory system and his. Blood rushed to her face and chest and his dick all in concert. But there wouldn’t be anything fast about what he wanted to do to her. He’d treat her like work and making her come would become his obsession.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. She was sweet, and she blushed at an offhand sexual innuendo. His dark desire to lick every inch of her skin wasn’t going to be fulfilled. He forced himself to look away from her cleavage and to her phone.

  She surprised him. It didn’t look quick-and-dirty at all. The site she showed him had some photos she must have pulled from gallery shows. It put the work up front instead of him, which made him feel instantly comfortable. The one thing he hated about being “an artist” was the idea that his personal life was always up for discussion along with the work. Because he put himself into his sculptures whether he wanted to or not, people seemed interested. And he knew what he looked like—he wasn’t stupid. Just like people responded to rock stars and actors, they responded to artists on a smaller scale. People lusted after him because they bought into the shit image of him as a philanderer.

  Artists had groupies, too. But they didn’t understand that he had a string of girlfriends instead of one woman to call his own for their own good on purpose. For one thing, he was a jerk. For another, he wasn’t about to put money into wooing a woman he wouldn’t keep when he could put it into sustaining his career. He liked that Letty hadn’t made that worse by creating a website that made him the center of it.

  “This is good.” And fuck him, the blush deepened. All of her contradictions were so compelling to him. The shy smile and the spine of steel. He could fall into her big, greenish-brown eyes and drown if he wasn’t careful. Without caution, he might just spend days and years biting her plush lips and raining kisses down on her neck. But he was careful, much more than his space revealed.

  He looked around at the haphazard piles and tried to see things from her perspective. It looked like a disorganized mess. If he were being completely honest with himself—and her—he would be able to admit that putting things to right would help him get more done. In the past couple of years, his career had grown to the point where he didn’t have time to pay attention to the details of his life. And the piles of shit around his studio reflected how muddy his mind could be sometimes.

  The whiskey he’d been drinking while waiting for the model who’d apparently stood him up didn’t help, either. That hadn’t been the point—the point had been to pretend that his father hadn’t left him a message that they needed to talk about his finances. Soon.

  “How much do you charge per hour?” Even if he shouldn’t hire her, the best way of keeping his hands off of her would be to do just that. If she was on the payroll, he could put a wall up in his brain to keep himself from seducing her. He didn’t like the idea of men in positions of power preying on women. One thing—maybe the only thing—that separated him from his father. Alejandro had had financial power over Sylvie, and he’d used the fact that he had all the money to keep his mother pinned in an unhealthy dynamic for decades.

  Only recently had Sylvie sought treatment for her pill addiction and filed for divorce. She’d started trying to repair her relationships with her children, and he was emotionally raw from having to look back on how fucked up his childhood had been.

  Maybe that was why Letty’s freshness affected him so much. Why the way her face lit up at his acquiescence hit him in the chest as well as under his jeans.

  “Sixty dollars.” Something about the way that she knew what she was worth compelled him even more. So much of a bad idea. “I think it will only take two weeks or so.”

  He could do two weeks without thinking about kissing her. Maybe.

  * * * *

  A few hours later, Max finally got his grandmother on the phone. Lola had always been hard to pin down—his grandfather, Rogelio, had been trying for decades. She’d dumped Rogelio and stayed in Cuba when the rest of the family had moved to Florida thirty-five years ago. Only recently had she moved to the States after some of her property had been destroyed by a tropical storm. His sister, Laura, had made the uncomfortable discovery that not only had their grandmother moved to be closer to her grandchildren, but she had apparently moved on from her grudge against Rogelio.

  They were back together, and love was in the air for Lola. Driven by her failure to stop her daughter from marrying the wrong man, she wanted all her grandchildren settled.

  But—problem was—Max had no intention of cooperating. Although it was nearly impossible to resist Lola’s machinations when she had her mind set, he would try his very hardest to be firm with her.

  “Max!” Lola sounded excited to hear from him when she finally picked up her phone. “You never call me. What’s going on?”

  The wily old lady knew exactly what was going on. Crafty Abuela. “Letty is very pretty.”

  “I knew you would like her.”

  “That’s not what I said, Abuela.”

  “But she seemed so sweet over e-mail—”

  “Over e-mail because you tricked her into thinking she had a job.” Even beyond his attraction and his desire to tamp it down by making her his employee, he’d seen the desperation in her gaze when she’d thought he would send her away. “That wasn’t nice or fair to her.”

  “Of course, it’s fair if you get your act together and woo her.”

  “Not going to happen, Abuela.” He sighed, not wanting to share the whole truth with Lola, but unwilling to welch on his deal with Letty. “And I can’t really afford her.”

  “Not a problem. I am pay
ing for it.” She paused for thanks. When Max didn’t respond, she said. “Fine. Rogelio will pay for it.”

  Max laughed. “This kind of makes you some sort of a pimp. Why can’t you just stay out of my life?”

  Lola muttered a cavalcade of curses under her breath, beyond even Max’s fluency in Spanish. But he caught “stubborn” and “stupid” in there a few times, so he had an idea of what she thought of him right then.

  “Listen, I understand where you’re going here, but we’ve had this discussion.” His grandmother had failed to grasp how serious he was about staying single. She thought she could wave her magic wand and make his whole childhood okay. She didn’t see him as a man walking a tightrope of tenuous success that could snap at any moment.

  Unlike Laura, Max had accepted Lola’s return without hesitation because he’d understood why she’d ended her marriage. He’d never understand why she’d started one in the first place. And while he didn’t understand why she’d return to a man who would cheat on her and tear away her pride by moving to the U.S. to be with the woman he’d cheated on her with, she could do whatever she wanted. But Lola needed to grasp the seriousness of his commitment to bachelorhood. “I have no intention of marrying. Ever. I’m assuming you only sent her so that I would sully her virtue in unspeakable ways.”

  “You will do no such thing, Maximillano Rogelio Hernandez Delgado.” The full name meant he was in much more trouble than he’d thought.

  “Then, you need to understand that you will be paying Letty for her assistant services for the next two weeks.” He could feel his grandmother’s delight at her tactical win over the phone. “And only her assistant services.”

  “At least you’ll get that mess of a studio cleaned up.” Lola abruptly hung up the phone.

  Max barely kept himself from throwing the infernal machine across the studio. With his luck, he’d never find it again. He really did need someone like Letty to help him organize.