Blue-Collar Boys - Repairs & Maintenance (Book 2: Steamy Erotic Romance Stories)

  Blue-Collar Boys: Repairs & Maintenance

  By Aria Hawthorne

  Copyright © 2013 by Aria Hawthorne

  Kindle edition

  ISBN: 978-0-9890858-1-6

  Published by French Kiss Press LLC

  http://frenchkisspress.com

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Be sure to check out Book 1 in the series:

  Blue-Collar Boys – Service Calls

  Website: frenchkisspress.com

  Twitter: @frenchkisspress

  Camper

  When Audrey Brooks quit her job and separated from her husband, she never expected that she would move out into the country where she would impulsively buy an old farm house and fifty acres of corn fields with her entire life savings. And she certainly never expected to sink fifty-thousand dollars into remodeling the old farm house into a bed and breakfast, catering to couples seeking a romantic getaway. After all, Audrey was no longer part of a “couple” herself. Earlier that year, she had suffered a miscarriage, which led to the dissolution of her marriage. Now, she was thirty-six-years old, woefully alone and single, and feeling well-past her prime. Starting a business, centered on serving up omelets and romance to happy loving couples, was definitely not something Audrey planned; it was something that Audrey impulsively committed to—her first, spontaneous decision in years. And she had little hope that it would ever be a success. But Audrey didn’t care. The fear of failure was a welcomed distraction from her more pressing fears of never marrying again. So when Audrey decided to buy an old farm house and remodel it into a bed and breakfast, she never expected that she would meet any eligible men, much less hire one, like the young handsome electrician who was responsible for rewiring her entire property. And with this young handsome electrician, Audrey certainly never expected that she would engage in the best, most electrifying sex of her life.

  His name was Camper. He was the assistant electrician of the lead electrician—an old-timer from the near-by town who had been hired by Audrey’s general contractor. Audrey tried hard not to pay attention to the details of the renovation. That was what she was paying the general contractor a hundred dollars an hour to do. But from the first moment they met in her front lawn, it was hard not to notice Camper—and his tall, strong figure underneath his denim overalls. And it was even harder not to notice the way he looked at Audrey with stern, brown eyes that betrayed vulnerability in their darkness.

  She greeted her general contractor in front of her porch and he proceeded to introduce her to the lead electrician, who liked to spit out his slimy chew into her grass.

  “Audrey,” she repeated, turning to the younger electrician and extending her hand. The younger electrician glanced down at her hand with subtle surprise, as if he was used to being passed over rather than being acknowledged. He immediately accepted Audrey’s hand with a polite, appreciative shake, but failed to respond with his own name.

  “This here is Camper,” said the old-timer, completing the introductions.

  The younger electrician waited and watched them in silence. Audrey surveyed Camper’s mute gaze, and glanced at the old-timer for direction.

  “He might be deaf,” the old-timer electrician said, squirting out brown ink from the side of his mouth. “But he’s not as dumb as he looks.”

  Camper watched Audrey’s eyes frown. It was a rude thing to say about a handicapped person, much less his own employee.

  “His parents left him in the trailer park, just down the street,” the general contractor added. “Right in front of Mrs. Gary’s RV. She’s the one who discovered him and took him in, despite the fact that it was obvious that there was something wrong with the boy.”

  Both men turned their eyes onto Camper, and Audrey followed their gaze. She thought she noticed a change in Camper’s face, as if he had heard their words with his eyes. Audrey watched as Camper glanced away and kicked up a patch of grass—a distraction invented to hide the shame of being treated like a silent pet. Then, he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his denim overalls and pushed his anger deep down inside. Audrey recognized his anger because it was the same anger she had felt after her miscarriage—a helpless, isolating injustice that no one else understood.

  She immediately looked away. It was all so impolite, so disrespectful. Camper knew they were talking about him, the details lost in the silent murmurs of their lips. When Audrey glanced back, she saw Camper glancing up at the sky with a scowl of protest.

  “It was old Mrs. Gary who named him ‘Camper,’” Audrey’s general contractor continued, “and gave him a home until she died. Died this past May, wasn’t it, Jet?”

  Scratching his beard, the general contractor chucked a glance at the old-timer electrician.

  “Yup, believe it was,” Jet, the old-timer said, spitting out his chew into Audrey’s grass.

  Audrey looked down at the slimy brown tobacco. She was really starting to hate working with repairmen.

  “The boy can read and write, so he’s good for something that way. All’s I have to do is make sure that I write everything out.”

  Audrey glanced back at Camper, but his mute gaze shifted away before she was certain about whether or not he understood the conversation. Instead, his dark brooding eyes softened in the sunlight as he surveyed the whole of her house, and contemplated how he planned to bring light to Audrey’s dark home. He was at least fifteen years younger than Audrey, but his sturdy shoulders and tapered waist felt like a protective presence standing next to her.

  “Well, let’s go inside, shall we?” Audrey finally said, breaking the awkward silence.

  The three men ascended her porch steps and entered into her house for the grand tour of the torn-out plaster walls, gutted by the drywall crew earlier in the week. It was impossible for Audrey to image that her house would ever be anything more than a dusty maze of risers and beams, a skeleton of exposed wooden bones and pink insulation guts. As the men ducked their way past dangling electrical wires, Audrey noticed that Camper was the only one taking diligent notes, sketching out floor drawings of each bedroom and surveying the best possible placement for each outlet and circuit breaker box. Meanwhile, the old-timer electrician and Audrey’s general contractor seemed more interested in catching up on the latest town gossip and recapping the problems with the local high school’s football team. Suddenly, without warning, Camper’s body brushed past Audrey on his way to the other side of the room, and she felt something slip into her palm. It was a small torn leaflet from his note pad and it read:

  We should install copper pipes to run the electric wires… It’s code—because it’s a safety issue—and you’re paying for it either way. Make sure you ask for it.

  Audrey looked at the note with interest. Camper’s penmanship was perfection; each word flowed across the page like soaring calligraphy, and it was clear that whoever taught Camper how to write had made sure that his cursive was meticulous. No one could ignore Camper with handwriting like that.

  “Are you going to be installing copper pipes first, before running the electrical wires?” Audrey suddenly asked aloud.

  The old-timer electrician stopped talking about Coach Olson’s broken foot and chewed on Audrey’s words.

  “Well, it’s really not necessary…” the general contractor started to say.

  “Isn’t it code?” Audrey quickly insisted.

  The general contractor fell silent with a frown. Obvious
ly, he wasn’t used to dealing with single women who knew a damn thing about electrical wiring, much less home inspection codes. And he didn’t like it one bit.

  “It’s going to cost us more,” the old-timer nodded to the general contractor, running his eyes over the bedroom with the first real bit of interest in the house.

  “If it is code, then it should have been included in the original contractor bid,” Audrey said. “Please be sure that the electrical wires are run through copper piping. It seems like it could be a fire hazard if you do it any other way.”

  “Of course,” the general contractor forced a smile while simultaneously calculating how much profit he was losing by eating the cost of installing all the electrical wiring to code. “Just an oversight on our part. Not to worry, Miss Brooks. We’ll take care of you.”

  Audrey glanced at Camper. He was measuring the length of the floor boards and mapping out his measurements in his notepad. Her eyes followed the curve of his strong back as he knelt forward and extended his measuring tape in one direction, then the other. His brown bangs fell over his dark eyes as he worked with precision and diligence within his world of silence. When he stood again, his shoulders relaxed and his long form glowed against the soft light of the window. Then, his eyes looked up to see if they had finished discussing the room. Audrey clenched his note in her palm. Camper saw her hand contract, and he nodded in agreement. In that moment, Audrey knew that she would be taken care of because it would be Camper who would take care of her.

  * * * *

  From her bedroom window, Audrey heard Camper arrive every day for seven weeks at eight o’clock sharp. He was never early and never late; instead, he was consistent and dependable. Audrey was thirty-six years old. She had been married and divorced, and before that, she had dated a long string of men who were charming, seductive, and completely unreliable. Now, as Audrey watched Camper slip out of his maroon pickup truck and strap on his utility belt—from left to right, the same way every time—she realized there was something incredibility sexy about a man who was dependable. Every morning, Camper removed his tool box from the passenger seat of his pickup truck and crossed the lawn with brisk strides towards the house. And every morning, Audrey had to fight the urge to run out of her bedroom and up to the large attic window, just to keep him in view as long as possible.

  It was a ridiculous, school girl crush. He was barely an adult. Twenty, going on twenty-one. Audrey had asked her neighbor, Marge Thompson, about him. Marge Thompson was only ten years older than Audrey, but she was already a widow. Marge’s husband had been killed in a hunting accident, and like Audrey, Marge Thompson lived alone in the neighboring farmhouse on the east side of her property line. When Audrey first moved in, Marge Thompson had come over a hand-full of times, and Audrey quickly learned that Marge’s favorite pastime— besides quilting and canning jams—was learning everyone’s personal business. It was from Marge that Audrey had learned about Camper’s entire life history. Abandoned by his mother in the trailer park when he was only a child. Taken in by old Mrs. Gary, who found him tinkering with the broken headlight on her RV. The only thing anyone knew about the boy was from the note, pinned to his back. It read: A deaf child is just too much for a welfare mother to handle right now. God forgive and God bless.

  Mrs. Gary took in the boy, gave him a name, and raised him like he was her own. Even taught him how to read and write as much as she could, or at least, until Camper got too big for home-schooling, and he had to be sent to the local high school with all the other teenagers. He was a slow learner, though—Marge told Audrey—not being able to hear and speak and all. It took him a good five or six years to graduate from high school. Just this past year, in fact. But unfortunately, not before old Mrs. Gary passed on. Cancer. A real shame. Had a tumor the size of a cantaloupe inside her abdomen.

  Every morning as Audrey watched Camper arrive at eight o’clock sharp from her bedroom window, she replayed his life story in her mind, and wondered if his mother regretted abandoning him. Audrey felt certain that his mother would be proud to know that her deaf son had grown up to become such a responsible young man. Camper was the only workman that came to her house every day. In contrast, Audrey only heard from her general contractor once a week. The painter and tile guy were waiting on the carpenters who were waiting on the ventilation guys who were waiting on the plumber. And the plumber had called—twice—to reschedule. Everyone had an excuse for why they couldn’t begin their work, except Camper. Camper was the only one who came every day—installed circuits, welded pipes, drilled holes, snaked electrical wire—and left when the sun melted away, casting dark shadows inside the gutted rooms of his work space.

  By the third week, they had adopted a tentative routine of communication. Audrey would wait on her front stoop for Camper to arrive—eight o’clock sharp. Audrey could have easily left the door unlocked, but it seemed more polite to personally greet him. Besides, she liked watching his maroon pickup truck roll up her long, pebble driveway and park behind her silver city sedan, as if he belonged there. He would slip out of the truck, construction boots first, then twist his slender frame out from behind the driver’s side door and strap on his utility belt over his denim overalls. He would never acknowledge her first. Instead, it was Audrey who would rise from the porch steps, and wave “hello.” After the first few mornings of personally greeting him, she learned that she would have to wait a minute or two before Camper could find the courage to look up at her with a humble nod, as if he was terrified that she might try to start a conversation and force him to betray the fact that he couldn’t speak or read lips.

  But Audrey never tried to make conversation. She liked not having to make small-town small-talk with Camper, but rather, she enjoyed the simplicity of their interactions. She would simply point to the basket, overflowing with more green apples from her orchard than she knew what to do with, and hand over a glass of homemade apple cider that she had brewed the night before. Audrey had no idea if Camper liked apple cider, but he always accepted the glass with a timid smile and a boyish curiosity that spoke to her through his silence; it asked her why she lived alone and why no one else was around to take care of her. Audrey never had an answer. Instead, she would drop her eyes when she felt her cheeks flush pink, and accept Camper’s emptied glass back into her trembling hands. And although it was always Audrey initiating these moments of contact, it was never Camper who looked away first.

  After a steady month of Camper’s visits, Audrey began to see the progress. And by the time autumn rolled around, he had almost completely finished rewiring the entire interior of Audrey’s farmhouse while everything else remained unfinished. There were still no painted walls. No plumbing. And no heat. The HVAC guys still hadn’t finished the duct work because they couldn’t be in the same space at the same time as the plumber who had a bad habit of rescheduling. Winter was coming and the majority of Audrey’s house was still a barren cave. But at least, she had Camper, who seemed determined to make sure Audrey’s house had electricity before the end of autumn. And although Camper’s electrical switches still dangled from the exposed wooden frames in each bedroom, Audrey felt hopeful that everything would turn out okay, as if the young handsome electrician was bringing her future slowly out of the darkness and into the light.

  When the weather cooled and the leaves began to change, Camper moved outside to install the exterior gang boxes and outdoor outlets before the ground hardened with the first frost. Audrey liked watching Camper work from her bedroom window, his strong denim body moving between the bursts of orange and red leaves of her sugar maple tree, just outside her window sill. During the day, she would leave for a few hours and shop at the flea market for interior decorations—landscape paintings by local artists, wall mirrors with decorative cast iron frames, polished nickel curtain rods with crystal finials. Audrey was waiting for the drywall guys to finish out each room and for the painters to prime the ceilings so that Camper could install the brass antique candelabras that s
he had just bought from an estate sale. But that afternoon, she had found a coil of used Christmas lights, fifty feet or more of clear bulbs shaped like crystal rain drops. Audrey quickly snatched up the coil, paid the three dollars, and returned to the farmhouse with a sense of joy in her heart. She may not have walls to paint or floors to carpet, but with Camper diligently running electricity to the outside of her house, she suddenly felt determined to help bring a sparkle to the dreary prospect of each night.

  Unfortunately, for Audrey, after five years of living in a city apartment without the proper room for a Christmas tree, she had forgotten what a bitch Christmas lights could be— much less an uncoiled, fifty foot strand. Perched high on a ladder, tangled up in loops of the evergreen cord and glass bulbs, Audrey struggled for three hours to string lights over the sugar maple tree’s long branches, fighting kinks in every foot of cable along the way. And what was worse—she knew Camper was watching her. Ever since she exited the house, threw open the barn door, and proceeded to drag out the fifteen-foot ladder—by herself—Camper had been watching. While rewiring the porch lights, he began to track her movements with his silent gaze. And it was his pensive, inquisitive glance that made Audrey’s heart beat faster and made her more determined to prove that she wasn’t just some dull, middle-aged city woman who couldn’t do anything except make sour apple cider.

  But three hours later, with her neck and shoulders aching, and less than a third of the Christmas lights roped around the tree in uneven, incongruous spindles, Audrey was starting to hate the fact that she really was just a dull, middle-aged city woman who knew absolutely nothing about stringing up Christmas lights. She cursed aloud on her ladder, her eyes shifting across the front yard, where she caught Camper’s gaze, staring back at her. He was packing up his truck, preparing to leave for the day. The sun was setting, threatening to leave Audrey in the dark—in the same place she had been struggling all day with these damn Christmas lights. Audrey and Camper made eye contact. The first eye contact all day.