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

But I didn’t because I wasn’t an asshole.

But I had sent a nice cordial message instead: Morning, my sexy vet. I had a dream about you last night. You were in my bed and naked (how come you weren’t naked last night?), and I punished you for being so bloody perfect by making you scream my name while the builders were downstairs listening.

I wasn’t lying.

That dream had almost made me have a wet wake-up call for the first time since I was a damn fifteen-year-old. Normally, I would censor my messages, but this time, I didn’t.

She’d shown me what lived beneath her polite exterior and I wasn’t afraid of being honest anymore.

But that was before she ignored me.

As the day wore on, and my body became covered in plaster dust and paint splatters and David, my foreman and friend, drove me nuts with questions about why I was such a bloody space cadet, I feared I’d done the wrong thing.

At knock off time, after the workmen had retired for the night, I wiped my face with a damp cloth and sat at the second-hand kitchen table—I hadn’t bought any new furniture until the build was complete so as not to damage or be overly protective—and unlocked my phone.

Bringing up the current message thread with Vesper, I typed: Just because I had a dream that involved others listening in and I spanked you last night doesn’t mean that’s all I am. I mean, shit…I don’t know what I mean. I’m not a fuck wit who’s just after sex. That’s basically all I’m trying to say.

Tossing the phone onto the table, I ran my hands through my hair. “Way to go, idiot. If she didn’t think you were a moron before, now she does for sure.”

The phone started dancing as a call came through.

Snatching it up, I didn’t look at caller I.D in my rush to talk to her. “Ves, look I’m going out of my goddamn mind. Come here. I’ll go there. I just really, really need to see—”

“Whoa, gotta stop you right there, bro. Don’t need to know anymore.” My brother’s chuckle came down the line as he sang la la la-la-lah like we used to do as idiot boys.

“You.” I slouched in the chair. “What are you doing interrupting my torture pining for the hottest girl I’ve ever met?”

“Holy shit, did I call the right number? Who are you and what did you do with my brother?”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be a jerk. I remember what you were like with Gillian in high school. You walked around with a rod in your pants and moonbeams in your eyes for weeks.”

“Yes, until I tapped that, and the curse was broken. I tell you man, women are witches. They have some sort of hocus-pocus that bypasses our brains and turns our dicks into sex zombies.”

I couldn’t deny he had a point.

“So you were happy that the feelings you had for Gillian vanished once you’d been with her a few times?”

I didn’t know why I was sad about that. This thing with Vesper—whatever it was—I wanted it to last, not poof and vanish. I liked this fugue state. I loved being demented with the thoughts of getting her naked and under me, but I also couldn’t wait to get to know her mind and secrets, too. The pieces I’d grown to know I liked.

Really, really liked.

“Yeah, thank Christ. That girl was a whiner and a fake.”

“A fake?” I scratched my chin, dislodging plaster dust I’d missed. “Yeah, she’d fake her orgasms and faked her interest in me. She only wanted me for the free rides I could give her in my super fly cruise.”

“By super fly, you mean dad’s hand-me-down Chrysler?”

“The one and only.”

Rupert was two years older than me. His grades were average while mine were high. His attention to school was lacking while his interest in women was as big as King fucking Kong. Me, I was too stuck-up and too fussy. I liked girls—sure, but I didn’t like what they tried to hide.

Rupert went on to be an uber successful franchise owner. When he was seventeen, he ordered some vinyl off an Asian website and painstakingly cut out decals that said Carson Car Rides and stuck them on the wheels of our dad’s Chrysler. He got so many compliments and requests for personalised logos, he spent all his free time (and even time at school) carving letters with a pen knife and printing off different fonts on the computer to keep up with demand.

It grew so big, he became known outside the village we lived in and attracted the attention of a large investor.

Overnight, he went from a seventeen-year-old about to drop out from school to a successful business owner with a multimillion-dollar backer who made him not only a national star but international too.

Now, his tyre decals, vehicle panel stickers, window logos, even shop designs and boat skins were international hits. His company morphed into Carson Creatives. And he’d been a large sponsor of the indie rally in Singapore last year which locked and loaded his career.