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

“You suck,” I grumbled.

“Sorry, chickadee, I only suck for the right guy.” She winked. “And last time I saw you naked, you didn’t have a worm in your shorts.”

“Eww, a worm?” I burst out laughing. “Seriously, Pol, who the hell have you been dating?”

“Um, Vesper?”

My shoulders rolled as our receptionist—a nineteen-year-old first year vet student, Amanda—stuck her head around the door. “Mr. Carson is requesting your services.”

Dangnamit, it is him.

“Oh, I bet he is.” Curtailing my laugh, I pointed at Polly to keep her thoughts to herself. “You…zip it.”

Polly held up her hands as if at gunpoint. “I wasn’t going to say a thing.”

“He said it’s urgent,” Amanda added. “He’s pacing. He says he won’t leave until you’ve done what he requires.”

Oh my God, that man and his high-handed demands.

Perhaps I should head out there on my knees already in grovelling pose, so his need for utmost obedience and servitude was fulfilled.

Tearing my gloves off, I huffed. “What does he have this time?”

Forearmed was forewarned, or was that the other way around? Either way, it wouldn’t make dealing with this man any easier. He was the thorn to my rose, the cloud to my sun.

He annoyed me, all right? I didn’t need a reason why. And I definitely didn’t need my business partner making me feel as if I cheated my own self-worth if I occasionally —just occasionally—slipped and looked at his butt.

It was a good butt.

Damn it.

Amanda looked over her shoulder. “It’s a wiener today.”

“Oh, no. Not again.” Flashbacks of our first meeting unravelled in my head like a bad horror movie. Him flopping the wiener on the table and growling for me to fix it. Him looking at my sparkling equipment and saying if I saved his wiener, he would be back with twenty more.

It had sounded like a crude pick-up line.

And who the hell had twenty wieners?

I hadn’t believed him.

Yet the next week, he was back with a Shih-mo and a Puggat (they sound exotically incredible but they’re just fancy names by breeders to sell crossbreed dogs for thousands of dollars). I didn’t condone the use of hybrid names, but I did condone mixing bloodlines. There were too many mental and immune issues with purebred canines.

Poor Dalmatians were devolving in their mental capacity and becoming the equivalent of doggy rejects because they’d been inbred too many times.

But that’s beside the point.

He’s here with yet another pet project.

And I was his victim.

Polly burst out laughing as she patted my shoulder. “I bet he has a big wiener.”

I groaned. “Seriously, what are you? Twelve?”

“Would a twelve-year-old know that when I say wiener with sarcasm, I’m really talking about his cock?”

I plugged my fingers in my ears. “Ugh, I don’t want to think about his cock.”