Messing With Mac Read Online Free

and damn expectations. He lived in the area known as The Tracks, which before the Town Council and Historical Society had gotten a hold of it meant that he lived on the wrong side of the tracks.
    He appreciated the irony of it.
    In ten minutes he was walking into his own little house, little being the key word here. The first thing he did was toss his mail—unread—on the table, where it knocked over the existing pile of unpaid bills.
    Didn’t matter. No matter how big that stack got, he was still free. Free of his family’s obligations, well-meaning but smothering nonetheless. Free of his ex-wife—whom he had to thank for all those un paid bills.
    He’d refused to let her live off his very generous family and their money, refused to make her the socialite she wanted to be. As a result, she’d taken everything he owned and then some before purposely and completely destroying him in the only way she could.
    By aborting his child.
    But he wasn’t going there, not tonight. He stripped, hunted up a pair of beat-up old shorts and headed back out for his own anger management class.
    A long, punishing run.
    Â 
    A T THE CRACK OF DAWN the next morning, Mac drove back to Taylor’s building. He had a soft spot for this hour, before the sun had fully risen on the horizon, as no one had yet screwed up his day.
    Today he’d have a crew working on the demolition, tearing out drywall down to the wood studs, then stripping old electrical and plumbing lines. Yesterday had been just for him, a way to burn off some accumulated steam. And he’d had plenty of it. There’d been that call from his mother, who in spite of her own life and full-time, very demanding job, was warm and loving and more than a little certain he was wasting away without her home cooking, and when was he going to come home for a Sunday meal?
    Then had come the call from his old captain, wanting him back on the police force, which he’d left at the same time as his divorce four years ago. Much asMac had loved being a cop, he loved rebuilding and renovating more, and always had. He’d been building things, working with his hands, ever since he could remember, and his love of doing so hadn’t changed.
    But his purpose had. Life was too damn short, as he’d learned the hard way, and he intended to spend the rest of it doing what he loved. And what he loved was taking old, decrepit, run-down historical buildings and restoring them to their former glory. He’d been doing just that since getting off the force and had never looked back. He’d started out working for a friend of the family, learning the trade. For two years now, he’d been on his own doing mostly single rooms within existing buildings until this last year when he’d taken on whole buildings for the first time.
    He’d found his calling. Taylor was his biggest client to date, his biggest job and his stepping stone to the next level.
    He hoped. Thanks to Ariel, who’d dragged him through the coals financially, morally and every other way possible, he couldn’t afford to renovate his own place, not yet. Fine. He’d do it for someone else and work his way up. He had no problem with that.
    And with that single-mindedness, he parked rightin front of Taylor’s building—a miracle given the deplorable parking in South Village—and fervently hoped she’d made herself scarce. He had a crew to think about, and he wanted their minds on work, not on a beautiful woman, no matter how good she’d looked swinging a sledgehammer in all her finery.
    His crew was waiting for him, just standing on the front steps, which made no sense. They knew better than to stand around wasting time.
    But they weren’t just standing, they were smiling and nodding like little puppets to…surprise, surprise…Taylor.
    â€œIt came from Russia,” she was saying, holding up some sort of vase as he strode up the walk, annoyance