Bridget loved everything about construction. The sweet, sharp smell of freshly cut wood, the whine of a saw cutting through a two-by-four like butter, the way her guys laughed and shouted at each other over the noise of their tools, the power drills screaming as the drill bits were forced into metal, and Guns N’ Roses or Metallica blasting at top volume. Bridget couldn’t help but admire the contrast between destruction and construction; the sexy controlled chaos of the demo crew as they swung sledgehammers, crashing through walls and making the most spectacular noise and mess, clearing the way, opening up rooms to light and space. She loved to watch the carpenters who followed them in, moving around hundreds of pounds of building material, jaws set, muscles bulging, sweat gleaming on their brows, and then coaxing along the daintiest little detail work, getting the stain on the living room floor just the right shade, laying intricate patterns of pretty pink-and-gold Moroccan tile in the master bath.
Bridget liked the other parts, too. She felt fierce and smart when she ordered building materials, negotiating with supply houses, subcontractors and vendors, making sure her clients weren’t being cheated on materials or fees. She loved reading blueprints—her dad’s instruction had made her an expert in understanding the details, elevations and sections of the prints. She liked watching the supplies coming off the trucks and being boomed up through the windows. She admired the towers of lumber, the sheets of drywall, the gleaming cans of paint, all arranged and waiting like a promise. She liked meeting with the architect, the way she sometimes got excited about something new and clever he wanted and then often had to fight to hold his budget-busting flights of fancy in check. She was fascinated by the men who could do things she had never mastered herself. The electricians and the plumbers, the engineer who designed the electrical and plumbing and HVAC, coordinating with the architect to make sure everything was safe and up to code. She liked the small feeling of relief and pride she felt every time they passed another inspection and another building permit came through emblazoned with her company name—STEELE CONSTRUCTION—across the page.
Every afternoon, after everyone left, Bridget would walk through and take note of the progress made, make sure everything was neat and put away, that there were no dangerous wires left dangling, that all refuse was safely stored in mini containers, ready for pickup the next morning. She scanned each room, repaired anything that needed to be fixed. And then she walked out the front door feeling like a million bucks.
She had finally found something she loved doing, and, as it turned out, she was truly great at doing it.
“Guys, guys, guys!” she shouted over the building noise as she placed a stack of pizza boxes on the table. “Take a break! We’re coming in two days ahead of schedule, so I brought you lunch to celebrate!”
A cheer went up in the room as the men laid down their hard hats, gloves and power tools and crowded around the table, reaching for a slice.
“Pizza’s great, but where’s the beer, Steele?” said a portly guy in a tight white T-shirt.
“Like you need it, Murkowski. You think I don’t know what’s really in your water bottle?” teased Bridget.
As the men settled down to eat, Bridget took the time to do a quick walking tour of all three stories, bottom to top and then back down again. She kept a notepad in her hand and a pencil stuck into the bun in her hair to jot down anything she saw that needed refining or, if she saw something particularly good, a note to herself to praise the trade who did it.
They were nearly done, just doing the finish work on the last few rooms now. As much as Bridget loved walking through the rooms that were complete, there was something even more pleasurable about the rooms that were not quite there, where she could think about the tiny details and little problems that needed to be solved before they could clean it all up and call it done. A sloppy paint line on an electrical outlet, a piece of trim that wasn’t mitered correctly, missed caulking around the window, a stretch of ceiling trim that wasn’t lying flat—she wrote down each issue as she found it and smiled to herself, imagining what the owners of the house would think when they finally moved back in. She had taken what started as a dated, crowded, dark and gloomy townhouse, and turned it into something modern, light-filled, gracious and welcoming. A place where no detail would be overlooked, where the owners would get so much more than their money’s worth.
She sighed, imagining what it would be like to have a place like this all to herself.
Soon, she thought, remembering the long line of zeroes on the last check she had deposited into her new business account—Bibi Hashemi had not been wrong. Soon, soon, soon!
She wrinkled her nose, noticing an unswept pile of green dust near the linen closet, took her pencil out of her hair and carefully noted it down.
* * *
The afternoon before she handed the keys back to the owners, Bridget took her father for a walk through the house. Normally, he would have checked in repeatedly on any big project she was doing. He loved to come in and look everything over, make suggestions and give her lots of praise, but for some reason Bridget had wanted to make him wait on this one. She had shown him through at the very beginning, and then told him he could come back only when she was ready.
She smiled as they moved through the rooms, near enough to brush shoulders, showing him the wide-board pine floors they’d sanded and stained, the brick wall they had uncovered, the beautiful slate countertops in the kitchen, the antique, stained-glass fan window Bridget had personally dug up in a salvage place and installed above the front door.
She could feel how pleased he was.
“Very, very nice, darling,” he said, running his hand admiringly over the pristinely restored mantel around the living room fireplace. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Bridget felt that familiar warmth, that feeling of being completely understood, and took his words, as mild as they were, for the blessing they were meant to be.
Then she took a deep breath and turned to him. “Daddy?” she said softly.
He looked up from where he was inspecting the built-ins around the fireplace and met her eyes.
“You know that I’m moving out, right?”
Her father gave her a slow, sad smile. “I was afraid you were going to say that,” he said.
“I mean, I’m twenty-four. It’s time, Daddy. And listen, promise me you won’t worry, okay? I’m going to be just fine.”
He laughed. “You know I can’t promise you that, darling. But I’ll do my best, all right?”
Bridget felt tears spring to her eyes. She sniffed loudly as he laughed and pulled her into a bear hug.
“Oh, boy,” he said as he held her in his arms. “Oh, boy, am I ever going to miss you, kiddo.”
* * *
A couple of weeks later Bridget kissed her parents goodbye, promised to call every night and visit on weekends, took all her savings and moved into a fifth-floor walk-up studio on the Upper West Side. As she stretched out on the convertible futon in her living/dining/bedroom, surrounded by unpacked boxes and a couple of tinfoil containers of half-eaten Thai takeout, she smiled to herself. So what if there were only three windows and a view of the neighbor’s bathroom? So what if she could walk from one end of the place to the other in about ten steps? So what if it wasn’t a beautiful, spacious, perfectly renovated, three-story townhouse?
It was all hers; and she knew in her bones that it was just the beginning.
Chapter 3
Those first few years in Manhattan, Bridget hustled like she had never hustled before.
She hadn’t expected it to be easy, exactly. She knew that the Manhattan real estate and construction market was notoriously hard to break in to, that there was an impenetrable wall to keep outsiders out where they belonged. Bridget knew she would struggle. But she’d never realized just how long and hard that struggle would be.
Bridget understood that getting a jo
b in this business was all about connections and how you presented yourself. You didn’t get work unless your father, brother and uncle were in the business—or unless you networked like crazy. She had never been afraid to knock on doors, make cold calls, strike up conversations and hand out her card to everyone she met just in case they might be someone who actually knew someone. But even when she managed to find a potential client, a whole host of other unsolvable issues would immediately crop up. Where would she meet with the client? She was still working out of her one-room apartment. She could never let them see that. She could take them out to lunch, of course, but clients at this level were used to going to five-star restaurants—The Regency, Le Bernardin, Freds at Barneys—and ordering anything they liked, and even if Bridget managed to secure a reservation, her savings account was near empty and her credit cards were already maxed to their limits. And what would she wear? She only had one nice designer dress, and chances are they had already seen her in it. She couldn’t just show up in department store schmatte and hope they didn’t notice. These kinds of people always noticed those kinds of things.
And even if she managed to get around all these issues—figure out the clothes and the hair and the restaurant and the timing—ninety-nine percent of the time the potential “client” wasn’t really even looking for a GC. They were looking for a date. And once she made it clear that she was not interested, they would turn the other way with a smirk on their face. End of game. In this business women were limited to being secretaries, girlfriends, wives or whores. Bridget was none of the above. She simply didn’t fit in.
It was like being starved and standing with her nose pressed to Balthazar’s bakery window. Manhattan was growing ever higher into the sky. Everywhere Bridget looked, huge, beautiful buildings were going up. Men in hard hats were hanging off ladders, setting up scaffolding. Every time she passed a construction site and the workers whistled or catcalled at her, instead of getting mad, she imagined how it would feel when she was the one hiring men like them again. She felt dizzy with the longing to put her purple hard hat and little work boots back on, to have her hands on a set of blueprints, to make something out of nothing. Instead, she was barely scraping by, doing the kind of odd jobs and low-rent work that she had thought she’d left behind in the Bronx. Because no matter what her qualifications were, the only way into the construction industry in Manhattan was through a door marked Men Only.
* * *
“You’re too beautiful to be a contractor...”
Bridget kept the smile pasted on her face and stuffed down the urge to kick this guy in the crotch and run for her life. Despite her better instincts, she had left a hopping cocktail party chock-full of industry connections and come to this half-built industrial park in Mt. Vernon, in the middle of the night, with a virtual stranger, because he had promised the chance of real work, and she was just desperate enough to believe him.
She’d been invited to the party by a woman named Ava Martinez. Bridget had been at Barry’s Bootcamp, sprinting on the treadmill, when she noticed a gorgeous, leggy Latina woman next to her with the perfect ponytail and lime-green running shorts who was doing twelve to her eleven. Bridget gritted her teeth and pushed herself harder and took it to 12.5, and then chuckled to herself when she noticed the woman stepping up her own pace. Later, in the locker room, Bridget overheard Ava mention to someone that she was an architect, and so, despite Bridget’s still lingering certainty from high school that, no matter how hard she tried, women were never going to like her, she had forced herself to start a conversation by asking the leggy architect where she got her jog bra.
Ava, who was a shallow B cup on a good day, had raised an eyebrow at Bridget’s double Ds and said, “Macy’s. But if I had boobs as good as yours, I’d probably want something that showed them off better than this old thing.”
They’d chatted a bit more—and Bridget had made a point of telling her that she was a contractor. The next time they saw each other at the gym, Ava had approached Bridget and asked her if she wanted to skip the treadmill and go get pizza with her instead. “There’s a place with a wood-fire oven just down the block, and I have crazy bad cramps that the frigging treadmill isn’t going to help. I need some serious carbs.”
Bridget experienced a rush of giddy pleasure at having another woman confide in her about something as mundane as her period. This was exactly the kind of easy feminine intimacy she’d longed for throughout her girlhood. They’d sneaked out of the gym together, still wearing their workout gear and giggling like they might get caught. They’d split a cheese pie with extra mozzarella and a Caesar salad, then ordered a bottle of rosé and talked until Ava had to rush out for an appointment she’d forgotten about. But not before she’d invited Bridget to this party at her boss’s Upper East Side penthouse.
Bridget had dressed carefully for the night. After the brownstone job, she had splurged on a simple, black Stella McCartney sheath dress that hugged her every curve, showed just enough cleavage and what Bridget’s mother considered to be too much leg. Bridget loved that dress. She wore it every chance she got. With her five-inch black patent stilettos by Jessica Simpson—she was dying for the day when she could splurge on really expensive shoes, but these would do for now—and a chunky gold statement necklace, she felt so grown-up and professional and sexy that she wasn’t at all surprised when a short, dark-haired man in a very nice suit had introduced himself to her within five minutes of coming through the door.
Martin McDonald was the first commercial landlord and real estate developer that Bridget had met in real life, and she was starstruck. Men like him were the key to getting past these little piddling residential jobs she had been subsisting on. All she needed was one big commercial job with a guy like Martin, and she’d have her start.
McDonald looked exactly how Bridget had always imagined a Manhattan real estate developer would: his hair was slicked back, his tan was a deep, lurid orange, his suit and shoes probably cost the same amount as an economy compact car, and his teeth were such an unnatural white that they practically hurt Bridget’s eyes when he smiled. Bridget didn’t find him particularly attractive.
McDonald, on the other hand, seemed to be absolutely smitten with Bridget. He expressed surprise and delight when he found out she was a contractor, got her a champagne cocktail and then another and another, chatted easily about his many projects and then, as the party started dying down, casually offered to show her a place he was leasing out—two hundred thousand square feet of industrial space right outside NYC that he was planning on converting into a business park, and which, he assured her, he had yet to hire a construction manager for.
Bridget wasn’t stupid. She knew what an invitation to inspect an empty work site this late at night really meant. She knew that, when they got there, if it even existed, this guy would be all over her like a cheap coat of paint. But he had monopolized her so thoroughly all night that she had made no other connections, had barely even managed to wave to Ava from across the room, and like hell was she going home empty-handed.
McDonald’s driver took them to the site, McDonald doing his best to slide a little closer to Bridget every few blocks. Bridget kept her purse firmly on the seat between them and her face turned halfway toward the window, providing an endless stream of commentary on everything she saw as they drove by. The ride was nearly thirty minutes long, and by the time they got there, her throat was sore from talking so much in her effort to keep him at arm’s length.
The night was wet and gloomy, and the site only had hanging temp lights dangling from the open ceiling, but Bridget was relieved to see that it actually did exist. Endless raw space just waiting to be turned into offices and storefronts. Two hundred thousand square feet of work that could be for Bridget and Steele Construction.
Bridget explored the building, leaving Martin in her wake, making a mental list of what needed to be done. She let Martin look at her all he wanted while hitting him w
ith her pitch, rattling off her numbers, square footage costs for each trade, and hoping that she’d impress him enough so that by the time they’d reached the end of the walk-through, he would stop leering at her ass and start talking about drawing up contracts instead.
But when they’d finished, and Bridget finally turned around to meet his gaze, she knew her plan had failed. McDonald’s slow, predatory smile proved that he was obviously not thinking about hiring her for any work.
He took a step toward her. Bridget fought the urge to take a step back. “Did you hear what I said about using 5/8 drywall instead of 3/4?” she said desperately.
“Shhh,” he said, coming even closer. “Stop talking about construction. You’re too beautiful to be a contractor.”
One kiss, she thought as he closed the space between them. I’ll give him one kiss just to keep his interest, and then I’ll tell him about that electrician I know who will work for half price.
McDonald kissed exactly like he looked like he would kiss—with way too much tongue. His hands groped and kneaded Bridget’s body in a greedy and heedless sort of way.
Bridget broke the kiss and took two huge steps back, plastering a bright smile on her face. “So I know this electrician—”
He made a groaning sound and lurched toward her again like a handsy zombie. In a split second, Bridget had to make a decision. A huge part of her wanted to break this guy’s nose just like her dad had taught her, or at least give him a swift, sharp elbow to the ribs. But Bridget knew that if she punched one of Manhattan’s biggest real estate developers in the face, there was no coming back. It wasn’t even about working with him at this point; that ship had probably sailed, but if he ended up in the ER with a plaster on his nose, not only would he never hire her for anything, he would also surely make certain that she’d never work anywhere ever again.
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