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

Although the properties were all mine, I wasn’t allowed to sell them. They believed in housing those who needed help just as much as those who could afford it.

All inherited fortune must be used for good.

I was allowed a wife and to dote on her, but I wasn’t allowed to gamble.

I was allowed children and to spoil them, but I wasn’t allowed to blow it on a ridiculous mid-life crisis convertible.

Damn it, my plan is foiled.

They’d thought of everything but it boiled down to: I was to help others.

It was the worst decree ever. Because what the hell did I know about helping people? I didn’t know the first thing about being a good Samaritan. And judging by the hate stares I’d earned from Vesper, I wasn’t good at flirting either.

I guess that was where inspiration struck to help animals in need of rescue. That empathy for the victim kept me busy and worked with my parents’ final stipulation.

Sheep had given me the idea actually. He’d run off on one of our rare walks before he croaked and I’d had to chase the crazy thing. He’d disappeared into a bush by Thorn River and whined when I found him.

He’d plonked himself next to the scruffiest little mutt I’d ever seen. He looked as if he’d been dragged through a bush (probably had seeing as he was sitting in one) and his white and tan fur was smeared in mud.

He’d been the first I rescued.

But not the last.

Not by a long shot.

“Ry!? Are you awake yet?” David, my head foreman, banged on my bedroom door. Not that it was a door—just a piece of plywood covering the entry while the rest of the house crawled with workmen.

Although I’d taken my parents decree to help others and twisted it into helping four-legged friends, I also employed a decent amount of people in town. Currently, I had seven men working eight hours a day to create the best home I could for me and my rescues.

And, if by some miracle a woman enters the picture, it will be hers, too.

“Yeah, yeah.” I crawled out of bed and shrugged into a navy t-shirt just as David kicked the plywood to the floor.

“This is your wake-up call.” He laughed, striding in with his tool belt groaning under the weight of chisels and hammers. “Get up, sleepy head. Don’t make me drown you in paint.”

“Hey, dressing here.” David and I had worked together for a few months and the camaraderie between us gave me that element of fun I was searching for. “You’re such a douche.”

“Takes one to know one.” He fisted his tape measure, pulling out a length of metal measuring, trying to whip me with it. “No sleeping on the job. Get.”

“I could dock your pay for that.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

He winked. “You’d miss me too much.”

Got me there.

Chuckling, I grabbed a pair of dusty paint-splattered jeans and hauled them on. “Is the crew here?”

“Yup, just unloading the extra timber now.”

“Great.”

Running hands over my face to wake myself up, I moved past him. “You’re mighty chipper this morning.”

He slapped me on the back as we headed down the curved stairs toward the large cobwebbed and rain damaged foyer. “It was date night with the wife. She got tipsy. We did things.”