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MADISON
“Ah, thank you…”
I watched as his Adam’s apple did its thing, his sexy neck flexing and pulsing as the cool liquid slid down his handsome throat. He finished the entire glass at once — he always did — which made me realize the man was a lot thirstier than he ever let on.
My God. He’s gorgeous.
My head stonemason wiped his mouth with the back of one tattooed forearm arm before handing back the empty glass. And then suddenly, there it was. The one thing I’d been waiting on all morning, that made every day complete:
Julian smiled at me.
“You know this is the best lemonade in all of Scotland,” he said this time.
“This is the only lemonade in Scotland,” I giggled. “Unless you count the fizzy yellow carbonated stuff they call lemonade here. Which of course, we both know it isn’t.”
“Nobody counts that stuff,” Julian said with a sly wink. God, his eyes were mesmerizing. Two stormy, blue-grey orbs I could get lost in for days, if I actually had days to get lost in them.
He turned and went back to work without another word, which was always a double-edged sword. On one hand it meant no more talking, no flirting, no anything other than the thirty seconds of interaction I looked forward to each day. On the other, it meant I got to watch him get back to work…
Julian was every girl’s wettest dream. Six-foot three, with thick, dirty blond hair that was long on top, short on the sides. His body seemed sculpted from the same stone he lifted and mortared every day, and as a result he had muscles on top of muscles. His thick, broad shoulders tapered down into two gargantuan arms, with biceps and triceps covered in a panty-melting array of sizzling hot, black-and-grey tattoos.
“Another?”
Julian shook his head as he always did, and I said goodbye. He’d already turned his shirtless back, which was every bit as beautiful as his front… right on down to the two little dimples just above the line of his gloriously tight blue jeans.
Holy. Shit.
It was the same thought I’d had yesterday. The same thought as every day, when I delivered ice water or lemonade to the hard-working crew of Westgate Castle.
Because yeah, that’s right. I owned a castle.
In Scotland, for fuck’s sake.
More accurately, I’d inherited one. Or even more accurate than that, it was a castle-in-progress. One that I needed to bring to a certain standard of renovations within a certain timeline, or I’d lose the chance to keep it.
Talk about pressure.
None of this was something I’d even remotely planned on doing, especially while growing up spoiled in California. Two years ago, from my cabana-striped towel on Santa Monica beach? I would have laughed my ass off at the very idea.
And yet here I was, crossing through the inner courtyard of a fourteenth-century castle. Carrying a tray of ice-cold lemonade across flagstones that were seven centuries in the ground, to another pair of laborers hard at work refinishing the keep’s ancient stone staircase.
“Just in time!”
Noah wiped his brow much the same way Julian had. He pulled off his work gloves and elbowed his partner, who dropped his sledge and spun to face me with the most incredible green eyes in the universe.
