by Jordan, Skye
Miranda closed her eyes and sighed. “Rebuilding a relationship with Gypsy feels a lot like trying to mend a fence that’s made out of rotten wood.”
He stroked the backs of his fingers against her cheek. Damn, she was beautiful, her face flushed with color, lips swollen from his kisses, eyes sleepy and sated. “Then you salvage what you can and blend what’s left with a few fresh pieces straight from the lumberyard.”
She smiled, a flash of white in the dark. “Nice metaphor.”
He ran a hand down her hair, then her spine, pausing when he reached her ass. Her skin was so soft, her curves so sexy.
“Miranda.” He waited until she met his eyes. “I want this to work. I want to keep seeing you.” When she gave him a deer-in-the-headlights look, he went on, hurrying to get out his ideas before she shut down. “New York is a two-hour straight shot from here. I could come as often as possible. I could send you tickets to come to New York.”
She leaned away, focusing intently. “You’re just fantasizing, right? You have to know how unrealistic that is.”
“People do long-distance relationships all the time. I know at least half a dozen people who come to New York for a job during the week and drive or fly home on the weekends.”
“With our schedules?” She exhaled, the sound heavy. “Let’s take things one day at a time. You’ll be here for a little while, right? At least another week?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Let’s revisit this then.” She smiled, but the expression was sad. “You may be tired of me by then.”
15
Jack leaned against the fender of his car and crossed his arms as he stared up at Pinnacle’s largest ongoing project. He forced his mind from Miranda. Despite another amazing night together, she hadn’t waffled on her resistance to anything ongoing between them.
But there were problems here too. Big ones. Problems draining the company of what little cash flow they’d had since Bruce bailed. Jack desperately wanted to plug the leaks.
Klein pulled up behind Jack in a Lexus SUV. He stood from the car with a file folder an inch thick and pulled off aviator sunglasses as he approached.
“Jack.” He offered his hand and they shook, then Klein took up the same position as Jack and looked up at the building. “Your instincts were right. Alex Fischer is a problem here.”
A tingle coursed up Jack’s spine. “Have him arrested, on the jobsite. Today. Now. I want to send a message to the entire company—”
“I know how pissed you are,” Klein said. “I know this is a total betrayal of a long-standing relationship, but there are more people involved than just Alex.”
Jack turned to face him. “Who? How?”
“I’m still figuring it out. I’ve been tracking the excess supplies you red-flagged through project case files, inventory records, shipping manifests. I’ve followed where the supplies came from, when, and how. And I’m matching that up with the building’s progress, figuring out what should have been used when, how much, and where the excess currently lives. I’m still tracking down the missing excess, because I believe where it ended up will tell us a lot about who the other players are in this scam.”
Jack nodded. “Solid plan.”
“But not an easy one. It seems as if once the shipments are logged in here, parts of them disappear with no trace. No sales records, no shipping information.”
Jack’s mind was already tripping over connections. “You think they’re being transported by personal vehicles?”
“I do.” Klein glanced up and down the street before looking at Jack again. “Construction workers often work side jobs, right? And contractors are always looking to cut their costs. A lot of guys won’t ask or care where the discounted supply comes from. Especially not if they’ve worked with the guy offering those supplies.”
“I know a guy who knows a guy,” Jack said.
“Who’s got a brother-uncle-cousin…” Klein continued.
“That’ll be hard to prove,” Jack said. “We don’t have surveillance cameras on the employees’ parking lot.”
“But you have them here.” He gestured toward the building. “And whoever is picking up these supplies would have to bring their vehicles onto the property to load up. I’ve been working my way through the footage, getting makes and models of vehicles on-site. There hasn’t been much after-hours traffic, which means—”
Jack’s focus narrowed on Klein. “They’re stealing it in broad daylight. Right in fucking front of us.”
“Maybe. I’m trying to match the makes and models of vans and trucks seen on the site’s surveillance cameras to company and employee vehicles.”
“That might nail the people buying the supplies, but it won’t nail Alex.”
“Those employees are going to want to roll on their food source for a lighter sentence. This happens in the drug trade all the time. A fabricator sells to a major player who sells to street punks who sells to a user. The user rolls on the seller who rolls on the major player. We have to start at the bottom and work our way toward the top to nail Alex. That’s how we’ll ultimately get him. How he’ll serve time.”
Jack shook his head. “I knew that bastard didn’t fall far from his rotten tree.” Jack’s fists were clenched so hard, his fingers ached. “I want every last fucker involved.” He looked at Klein. “How many other bad apples have we got?”
“Right now, I’m focused on tracing half a dozen employees. In the end, you’ll probably only have enough evidence to prosecute one or two.”
“Fine. I just want this cleared up and a direct message delivered to the employees. My dad’s going to have a clean slate when he gets back to work.”
16
Miranda twisted and stretched into an impossibly crazy angle to make a weld at the corner of two freshly set beams. She felt like a sloth, slinking along the underside of a metal I beam on the twenty-sixth floor of the newest office building to grace the Nashville skyline, hooked into a harness that pulled on her in all the wrong places.
It would have been a lot more comfortable if Jack hadn’t worked her over inch by luscious inch last night. She’d left his bed mere hours ago and was cursing herself both for going at it so hard on a work night and staying to fall asleep in his arms.
Her heart fluttered at the memory. Then a steel beam swayed past her as the crane operator wrangled it toward another steelworker, reminding Miranda she couldn’t afford to be distracted up here.
Weld done, she righted herself and let her blood settle before she shimmied along the beam until she reached the next weld point. She and a few ironworkers were the only crew members working on this floor today. There were no walls, just a slowly assembling skeleton.
Once she welded the top of the beam, she swung to the underside and started again. Sometimes these welds required moves worthy of a circus act.
“Randy.”
She heard Alex yelling at her but didn’t look away from her work until the weld was complete. As the project expediter, Alex managed the flow of all supplies to the building site. He was also the son of one of the partners. He was a couple of years older than Miranda, but they’d been in high school at the same time. They hadn’t been friends then, but they’d grown on each other since she’d been hired. They’d risen through the company side by side, Miranda on the site, Alex in management. Alex had gone to bat for her whenever there was an opportunity for promotion or a pay raise. And she knew him well enough to know that the tight set of his shoulders now signaled trouble.
After righting herself, she looked his direction. He had his head down, his gaze on a clipboard in his hand. She straddled the beam and stretched her back. Her whole body groaned, exhausted from the night before. Damn Jack Taylor. But she smiled.
She lifted her welding mask. “Hey. What’s up?”
Alex glanced over his shoulder toward the stairs, then started up the ladder.
Miranda laughed, incredulous. “You don’t belong on a ladder, Alex. You’re going to get
that pretty suit dirty.”
When his head reached the beam, Alex stopped and met her gaze, his expression sober and frustrated. “The owner’s son is on-site, shaking things up.”
“Owner of what? The building?”
“No, us.” He used the clipboard to point to the floor. “Pinnacle.”
She’d worked for Pinnacle six years, and not in all that time had she seen the company’s owner on a jobsite. But it wasn’t unusual for worker bees to have little to no information about the executives. “Why?”
“Says he’s auditing the project and he’s putting some new policies in place.” He offered her a clipboard. “Sign this.”
She took it and glanced at the list of welding supplies. “What is it?”
“One of those new procedures the asshole is demanding. He wants double signatures on all supply orders, like we’re fucking first graders. You’re the welding foreman, so you need to check over the order for welding supplies.”
She supervised a welding crew of six, all of whom were working on lower floors today. Approving an order had never fallen under her job description before. “This is stupid.” She offered the clipboard back to him. “You’ve been doing your job as long as I’ve been doing mine. You don’t need me looking over your shoulder.”
Alex rested his elbow on a ladder rung. “Look, he just let six of our day laborers go. I don’t think this is the time for either of us to be telling the guy his ideas are stupid. This isn’t a big deal. Let’s just make the fucker happy.”
“Well, shit.” Miranda took the board back and looked over the order. “This is a big order. More than we need for the next couple of months. Why are you ordering so much?”
“For the better price.”
“Is it a substantial savings? Because if you have to store this off site, it could end up costing you the same or more in the long run.”
He pointed to a line item for welding wire. “Look. I’m getting a spool of wire free. Heard you were coming up short at Warrior Homes. I was going to talk to Jen about approving one or two of those spools for donation.”
Miranda looked up. “Are you serious? Even with this audit going on?”
“This audit is about control, not money. You let me worry about the paperwork.”
“That would be so amazing. It’s the very last thing we need to plow through the rest of the homes.” She signed the order. “This project is still viable, right?”
“Of course, sure. Hey, don’t worry. You’ve got seniority, you do amazing work, and you’re dependable as hell. You’ll be fine.”
He took the clipboard back. “Between me and you, this guy is a grade-A asshole. I spent a lot of time with him growing up when our dads were building the company. He’s always been an arrogant, entitled little shit. Never had to work for a damn thing growing up. He’s a cutthroat, pompous ass, and he’s sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. Don’t worry, I’ve always got your back.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
She watched Alex climb down the ladder and jog down the stairs to a lower floor, hoping he had enough pull to keep her job safe if it came to that. The last thing Miranda needed was to lose this job before she had either funding or enough savings to launch her business. And there was medical insurance and retirement to think about.
Pinnacle took the best care of their employees, offered the highest wages and generous bonuses. She was vested now, and she didn’t want to change companies at this point in her career. Not unless she was starting her own. And now, as she watched Alex disappear down the stairway, getting a jump on that business of hers suddenly seemed even more important.
She pulled her welding mask back into place and twisted herself into an upside-down pretzel to start the next weld. Miranda laser-focused her attention on her torch to push her worries away.
Twenty minutes later, she heard Alex yelling her name again. Still upside down, she glanced in the direction of the stairs and found a gaggle of supervisors in jeans and florescent orange T-shirts emblazoned with the company logo. They were clustered around a man dressed in business casual, wearing one of the shiny company hard hats they kept around for visitors.
Shit. She didn’t want to deal with this. The men loved to show Miranda off, the token female on their crew. And a foreman to boot. Miranda resented the dog-and-pony show. She just wanted to do her work and be left alone. Miranda ignored him, hoping he’d give up and move on. Unfortunately, he didn’t.
When she looked over again, the group was closer. Her gaze skimmed the men and focused on the one that stood out. The man who had to be the boss’s son. A man who looked a lot like…Jack.
Heat seared a path straight down her chest. She pulled herself back to the top of the beam, let the blood drain from her head, and looked again.
It was still Jack.
Her stomach dropped to her feet. Her mind skipped back to the bar, then to his hotel room, scrounging for information to make sense of this. One by one, the pieces clicked into place, and the resulting picture was not pretty.
Jack was the son of Pinnacle’s owner. The owner who’d been mentally derailed for the last year and stripped of the company’s operating funds by his partner. That partner was Alex’s father. The company Jack was trying to save was Pinnacle.
Holy. Shit.
His gaze scanned the open space, his expression grim. Miranda’s heart was beating so hard, she heard it in her ears. Anxiety crawled along her skin. Her chest grew tight, her stomach jumpy. She wanted to throw up.
Her instincts had always told her to keep her work and personal lives separate. As the only woman on a hundred-and-something-man crew, how her peers saw her was vital to her success. Especially as a supervisor. Men didn’t take well to having women telling them what to do on the job.
She put a lot of effort into keeping the men she worked with thinking of her as one of the guys. It was why she let them call her Randy, why she swore up a storm whenever she hung with them, why she never brought up anything remotely female while they were sitting on the edge of a skyscraper having lunch, why she’d turned down so many requests for dates, no one even asked anymore.
And she had no doubt, the second Jack locked eyes with her, every man present would know exactly what was between them. She wasn’t prepared to face that. Not here, not now. Not with the boss’s son.
Jack was distracted by the other men as they talked about the site, the building, the progress, their protocols, budgets, and deadlines. Miranda took the opportunity to get back to work and focused on a top weld. She did her damnedest to pretend they weren’t even there. If she didn’t see them, they didn’t see her, right?
She was concealed head to toe in coveralls, boots, gloves, and a welding helmet that hid her entire head, complete with a breathing apparatus that kept the air she breathed clean and cool. The only way he could guess she was female was by her size, but there were other small guys on the crew. A couple who were even shorter than she was.
The group neared, and a sick feeling sank in the pit of her stomach.
“Randy,” Alex called again.
She released the torch’s handle, shutting off the flame. Clenching her teeth, she straightened and turned her attention on the group, but didn’t raise her helmet.
“Randy,” Alex said, “this is Jack Taylor, the son of Pinnacle’s owner. Jack, this is our welding foreman, Randy.”
Miranda was so blessedly thankful for Alex’s political incorrectness in this situation. If he’d said forewoman, she was sure Jack would have taken more of an interest. She was a unicorn in this industry after all.
But Jack’s expression remained rigid and fierce. Normally, she would have taken off her gear and swung down to the floor to shake hands and greet an executive with a proper amount of respect. Now, she just gave him a two-fingered salute. He lifted his chin, part response, part brush-off. Like she wasn’t important enough to acknowledge.
Alex’s description flooded back. “A grade-A asshole… An arrogant, entitled li
ttle shit.”
Miranda felt her brain tip a little, as if she was seeing things from a whole different perspective. Which was the real Jack? The one she’d had in bed? Or the one Alex had described?
“Randy’s the best in the business.” This came from the project’s foreman and Miranda’s big boss, Ted Gillespie. “Has worked on just about every building in this skyline, isn’t that right, Randy?”
She gave a nod, hoping no one expected her to open up a dialogue. Thankfully, Jack didn’t seem to care about her reputation or whether she gave him the signs of respect she would have if she hadn’t let him do unspeakably erotic things to her just hours ago.
As if to mock her, sweat slid down the indentation of her spine, duplicating the sensation Jack’s tongue had created such a short time ago.
Then someone drew his attention, the group focused elsewhere, and Jack eventually followed the others back toward the stairs. Miranda’s shoulders sagged with relief. She twisted so her back was toward the stairs just in case they returned, flipped her visor up, and took deep inhales of the fresh Nashville air. She looked over the city, completely wigged out by this revelation. “Oh my God.”
Behind her, fierce lowered voices raised gooseflesh along her arms. Voices she recognized. Jack and Alex, arguing.
“You’d better not know where your father is,” Jack said, his voice serious and threatening. A tone Miranda had never heard, but one that raised the hair on the back of her neck. “Because if I find out you knew what he was doing and hid it, getting fired will be the least of your worries.”
“Don’t come onto my jobsite and throw empty threats around. You have no proof of anything, and if you come after me, you’d better be armed to the teeth, because I will fight back,” Alex responded with none of the reverence the boss’s son deserved. “You’re still the same self-absorbed prick you’ve always been. I’m not telling you again—back the fuck off.”
Miranda’s heart pounded. Her head went light. Acid churned in the pit of her stomach. This was getting messy. Really messy. The kind of messy she wanted to back away from the same way she would a hungry mountain lion, slowly and quietly.