Heat: Complete Series

By Alexis Blake

Here, presented in one volume, are the four stories that comprise the ‘Heat’ Series, a seriously hot and provocative romance by Lucia Jordan, written in her signature style of high passion and emotion.

Michelle, known as “Elle,” takes pride in her ability to prove herself in masculine roles, despite her attractive appearance. She loves to see the surprise and respect in men’s eyes, especially in her current job as a construction equipment operator. Although many men have tried to turn her head, she’s always ended the relationships completely unimpressed... and usually bored. She’s basically given up on finding a man who can conquer her, and she’s not expecting to find him on the construction site - then Damian appears. He’s an intense project manager, rugged, demanding, and extremely sexy. She finds herself irresistibly drawn to him. Will she allow herself to submit to his commanding demeanour, or will the intensity be too much? Will she risk her job for a man that might fulfil her forbidden desires?

This ebook contains very hot and explicit descriptions of romantic activity. Only mature readers should download this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wild Hearts Romance
• Release date: Nov 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311357663

Book preview

Heat

Published by Alexis Blake

at Smashwords

Copyright © 2013 Alexis Blake

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be constructed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental. All characters depicted are 18 years or older.

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Heat Book 1

Michelle smelled deeply of the smell of the construction site. For three years, she’d been working as an operator of heavy equipment, and she loved it. She loved the huge, vibrating machines, forcing them to do what she wanted them to do. She loved the surprise she always saw in the men’s eyes when they saw her work for the first time. She loved getting to the site early and enjoying the brief quiet moment before work started to roar to life. Michelle had spent the past ten years working to find a job that could give her this feeling of control. A year on a fishing boat in Alaska, a logging job back East, a cattle ranch in Montana: she had dominated all of these jobs and relished the looks she got when men saw that she could hold her own.

None of them ever expected her to be as good as she was when it came to physical labor. Despite the pulled back hair, lack of makeup and rugged clothes, Michelle didn’t look like she belonged on a construction site. When it was let down, she had long, soft brown hair and smooth, creamy skin. Her brown eyes were big and doe-like, with thick bristly lashes that made them look even better. She had a light sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks which kept her perpetually young-looking. Her body was sturdy but feminine. She had muscles and soft curves, a sexy combination. She wasn’t tall. She had strong arms and shoulders, rounded, firm breasts and strong, muscular legs. Her bow-shaped lips and huge eyes gave her face a look of innocence that always drew men in. And these traits proved extremely incongruous with her ability to work like a man. Better than a man, she often told herself.

She never bragged about her abilities to the men she worked with. She knew that quiet confidence was a better way to avoid alienating people. She just let her work speak for itself. And eventually, the men stopped viewing her as a sexy woman tossed on their construction site to amuse them, and she became one of them – respected for her work and treated practically like a man. Eventually, some of them became her friends and even asked her for advice on work and personal matters.

She scanned the site that morning. A group of guys were sitting on bags of concrete near the newly erected building that was just a small portion of the huge shopping mall they were building. The men held steaming coffee cups and egg sandwiches in aluminum foil, and they were laughing loudly about something. These were guys she worked with every day and she liked them.

They were all sweet guys, and a few of them were the types of men that would set many women swooning, but not Michelle. Some of them had tried asking her out, but after several refusals, the rumor had spread that she wasn’t interested and the men she worked with now basically treated her like one of the guys. It wasn’t really that Michelle wasn’t interested in men. She did date occasionally, most recently a very cute doctor who insisted she should marry him so she’d never have to work again, but she’d always been unimpressed with him. Somehow, the men she dated just all lost their appeal after a time and she ended up looking at them as nothing more than a brother. And these construction men were so familiar to her now that she couldn’t have felt attracted to them for anything.

Michelle walked over to them and they paused their conversation to greet her. Elle, yelled Jack, the oldest man on the crew, who was also the foreman of the group. Come over and set this guy straight. Jack reached in his coat pocket and handed her a sausage and egg sandwich wrapped in foil. It was still warm and she took a grateful bite. Jack’s wife was always sending extra food for Michelle, because she knew that it was Michelle’s advice every Christmas and on their wedding anniversary that had improved Jack’s gift giving exponentially these last couple of years. A long and increasingly loud conversation about football ensued and Michelle tried to keep her interest. But she wasn’t much of a football fan, for all of her other tomboyish traits. She would rather watch a raunchy reality show when she sat down in front of the TV. Not that she would tell these guys about her guilty pleasures.

Well, it’s about time, Jack said, standing up. She scoffed her sandwich and walked quickly to the excavator. This huge machine was her workhorse for the week as they dug a huge underground parking lot that was going to house the cars while people shopped in the huge shopping mall that was being built. It was the biggest piece of equipment on the jobsite, and she loved it when people looked twice and realized it was a woman operating it. Feeling the huge rumbling engine underneath her as she controlled the machine from her high perch in the little cage-like cabin was an odd pleasure that she relished. She couldn’t wait to get through the morning routine so she could climb the ladder into the cabin and get started.

It was a long walk to the excavator and the crew continued their conversation, but it had moved to work. Jack was telling them the plan for the day. They’d be excavating a huge area of earth, moving the dirt to a pile across the site, bit by bit. It would be a long, hard day. They would get a half hour break at noon. Oh, and there’s a new project manager on the job, Jack said, a slight twang of annoyance breaking through his voice.

Why are they sending the new suit? one of the crew members asked, referring to the new PM. It was commonly accepted among these men that many PMs were dictator-like control freaks who passed orders down to the crew without enough knowledge of the job. Some of the PMs worked completely by relayed information from the foremen and never even came to the jobsite. No one looked forward to getting a new PM on the job because there was always the chance that this on would be an asshole. Michelle had silently seen this coming for weeks. The PM that they’d been working with had come out to the job only once, and hadn’t offered any sort of advice or help to Jack when it came to the problems they were having. Michelle suspected that the job was severely behind schedule and probably losing money.

Construction is often a game of time. To get a job, a company has to do a bid, and the lowest bid will almost be the winner. To keep bids low, the only option besides cutting corners on materials, is to work efficiently and quickly. Once efficiency is lost, money is lost – and the result is a job that is in the red, losing money because overhead builds and the contract price doesn’t change. Michelle suspected that this job was in trouble because of all the issues they’d had with line spots. The area they were working had a network of underground electrical lines, abandoned sewers and water pipes. The spotters, the people who came with metal detectors to and spray paint to mark where all of the lines were under the ground, had been unable to locate all of them.

This meant that several times a week, work had to stop because a line was hit. The spotters had to come back out, and the safety department had to be involved as well. Not only was it a situation of lost time, it was also a safety concern. Hitting a gas line could cause an explosion, an electrical line hit could cause injury. If it was a water line that was in use, it could mean having to shut off the water to all the people along that line. Michelle had also noticed that the older lines were often leaking, and this could mean a collapse at some point.

When a sewer or water line breaks under the ground, it sweeps dirt away in an underground river, creating a huge vacant spot under the topsoil. Eventually, the top layer of dirt will collapse, creating a huge hole. If this happens, the pipe will often break, increasing the water flow. Michelle had heard horror stories of people, cars and even buildings falling into one of these holes and being swept away on a river of sewage. Luckily, no one had been hurt on this