Can't Touch This (Can't Touch This #1)

No one had wanted the mess and I couldn’t fault them. The typical wrap around veranda, southern style mansion with rickety balconies, pretty spindles, large bay windows, and enormous cold bedrooms in winter was a fucking money pit.

But it had potential. And I’d keep fighting for it.

I’d bought this wreck sight unseen.

Stupid, right?

(Go on, you can say it was stupid).

I still thought it was stupid even though I’d fallen a little in love with the place. I’d been there a year and already my parent’s life insurance fund had been put toward new windows, building work, and erecting a large barn just a few metres away from the main house where my rescued pooches lived.

Every day, there was a construction team on site so I wasn’t lonely.

But a year in a small town while trying to make friends wasn’t easy. Really, the only time I felt marginally happy (after my parents died on my twenty-eighth birthday last year from a fatal train crash in Spain) was when I tormented Vesper.

Her quick comebacks. The glare in her eyes.

She was alive.

Where so many people in this place were barely existing with no passion left in their dusty, dried-up veins.

I stretched in bed, letting my mind wander to the sexy vet and our consultation yesterday. She never did accept a date, but I had an odd feeling that she’d been close to saying those magic words.

Probably stupid optimism, or had I finally worn her down enough to break her?

How can I find out?

Grabbing my phone, I checked my emails while trying to come up with a plan to get her into my bed. I was expecting a large shipment of timber to replace the veranda this week—perhaps I could entice her around with promises of lots of wood.

Christ, you’re an idiot.

After checking my messages, I returned to my home menu. The image glowing behind the app icons showed one of the rental properties my deceased parents left me in their will.

The small two-bedroom bungalow had been mine until I moved into this run-down shack with lofty dreams of finally starting my life, finding a wife, and doing what was expected of a man about to hit his thirties.

Thanks to my parents instilling good values and grateful ethics, I would never take what I had for granted and stop working—even though I could retire right now.

Before my mum and dad died, they’d amassed a portfolio of fourteen rental properties that self-serviced their loans with over half already debt free. However, they were so meticulous in their investments, they’d even sorted out the owing balance with a life insurance policy to cover every outstanding mortgage, and provided me and my brother (not that he needed a penny) with a few million to ensure our lives and any future children we had would want for nothing.

When the lawyer called me into his office after the funeral (the day I’d moved temporarily back into my old bedroom—complete with Wonder Dog pictures and Incredible Hulk plastered to the walls—to sort through my parents’ things), he told me the news.

He’d looked at me with his bushy eyebrows expecting me to be happy I’d never have to work again.

I was fucking gutted.

Money meant nothing to me. Two lives had been lost. My brother and I were alone. No amount of wealth could change that.

I’d always been close to my parents but independent. I’d moved out at seventeen to pursue a trade—a plasterer, of all things. After growing up on renovation sites, while my parents worked side by side knocking down walls and putting in new kitchens for prospective tenants, I’d learned how to wield a paint brush before I was out of diapers.

Plaster dust and cement were in my lungs (which probably wasn’t a good thing and thank God I wasn’t around asbestos) but it was a passion that kept me close to my parents while making something of myself.

But that was before they died and left me with everything.

And I did mean everything.

Their elderly collie called Sheep (ironic seeing as the dog hated sheep) came home with me until he died a few months ago. He was old but I think he passed from a broken heart. He missed his master and mistress too much to care about hanging around.

I’d also inherited their terms for tenants who’d been with them since the eighties. No rent increase (even though the market was three times what it was back then) and they expected me to provide an heir to carry on the Carson legacy.