by Holley Trent
“No, no, no.” He sat up and thumbed away her tears when her body shook with sobs. “It’s all right. It’s just too much to think about right now, huh?”
“I thought I had everything figured out.”
He rolled her over and held her tight, rocking her a bit in his arms and tucking his chin atop her head. “Me, too, honey. I did, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Valerie felt nauseated and upended, and she couldn’t blame the condition on condom failure or bad deli meat. “Leaning in” sounded like a great professional advancement strategy in theory, but executing it required brass eggs.
She was trying to find hers.
She sat in her boss’s office in D.C. with her computer case across her lap, drumming her uncapped pen against the leather.
Theodore was keeping her waiting. She knew the trick. The longer she sat there second-guessing herself, the more nervous she’d get—the more likely she’d think to herself, “You know what, never mind. I didn’t want that anyway,” and he didn’t even know what she wanted. She’d been vague enough in her meeting request that he couldn’t possibly know what she was going to say. All he knew was that he was going to give her twenty—she glanced at her watch—fifteen minutes to do it.
She scoffed and gave her head a shake. “Oh, fuck. I can’t believe I’ve been playing these games for going on ten years.” At least when Tim played games with her, there was a glimmer of hope her prize at the end of it all would be a sound fucking.
Even thinking about him made her heart ache. He’d said when she’d stepped off his boat Sunday evening that he didn’t want to call whatever they were “broken up,” but she knew that was going to happen sooner or later. Some woman would work hard enough to get his attention and show him that she had all the right credentials—and none of the wrong kinds of attachments bogging her down—and he’d have to let Valerie go. It was inevitable, and it was for the best, but for the moment, she didn’t want to give up any chance of being able to touch him or be touched by him. She craved his attention even more than she wanted her first cup of coffee in the morning.
“Sorry to keep you waiting so long. Got a real shit storm I’m dealing with.” Her boss, Theodore, breezed in and Valerie somehow managed to suppress her eye roll when she saw he wasn’t alone. He’d brought a tagalong to her meeting.
How fucking disrespectful.
If he wanted to play that game, though, so would she.
She remained seated, tapping her pen against her laptop bag, and raised her eyebrows in greeting.
“So, how are things down in Shora?” Theodore asked.
His sidekick, Neil, plopped onto the sofa along the wall near the door, crossed his legs at the knees, and didn’t even bother putting on the pretense he wasn’t listening.
She glared at him, leaving no room for doubt that her mood was anything but unfriendly.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” he said blithely. “Ted and I have a meeting right after this, so he said to just come along.”
“Did he?” she murmured. “How efficient that he’d cut into my meeting—not even knowing what it was about and how much time it might take—with yours. No chance for me to discuss anything of a personal nature or even comfortably hash out projects you’re not involved with. And why aren’t you in Miami? That development was supposed to be built on an aggressive timeline. Done already? I’m impressed.”
Neil’s smug grin fell away.
She looked at Ted and stopped drumming her pen. “You know, for the amount of time I’ve been working for this company—which has been since right after my apprenticeship—I’ve never endured so much disrespect. Instead of me gaining more clout and benefits within the company, you and everyone else here offend me more and more with each passing day.”
Ted furrowed his brow. “Are you asking for a raise, or…”
“Are you really going to ask me to discuss that in front of Neil, who obviously either lacks decorum or enough common sense to exit the room to allow me a private conversation in the meeting time I made?”
“I’ll just…wait…in my office,” Neil said, and finally stood. He waited there in front of the sofa for a moment as if he expected someone to say “Oh, no worries. I’ll be done in just a moment,” but Valerie wasn’t going to make that offer. He got special treatment just for being Ted’s nephew, so the very least Valerie was going to demand was time to let her boss knew how she felt about it.
Neil padded away but left the door open.
Valerie shrugged. Whatever.
“I’ve been getting some calls asking if you were leaving the company.” Ted shuffled some papers atop his desk.
“Oh yeah? Tell me about them. Maybe I’ll entertain them.”
“So, you have been looking?”
“I’ve been doing my job, Ted. Down in Shora for the past seven-and-a-half months, dealing with permits and plans. Pushing paperwork through to get things built to Lipton’s specifications and to make the community attractive for future retailers who’ll want to lease in the area. And what have I had, huh? One pointless roadblock after another because the developer is too inflexible to concede that cookie-cutter doesn’t work for every community, and especially not a Southern community where people are going to want to personalize and individualize their homes. That’s important to them.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m glad you asked,” she said with false enthusiasm. “That’s part of the reason I’m here. I need to be able to offer customizations to the people buying lots in that development. And I’m not just talking about getting Carine to throw in a refrigerator upgrade when the clients are unhappy that we can’t move the kitchen island a foot to the left.”
“It’s semi-custom housing. They know what they’re getting.”
“You’re going to fail, then. You don’t understand that community. You don’t understand the people who are looking to buy there.”
“Well, tell me about them.” He made an indiscreet glance at his watch.
She ground her teeth. “Well, you’re making it very clear that we don’t have time to get down to the nitty-gritty details, but you should know that I do details better than anyone else. I pay attention to things that are going to be problems and I fix them before they are.” She pulled the report she’d carefully compiled from her case and slid it across his desk. “That’s some of the feedback Carine gathered from people who’ve visited the office in Shora and ended up not committing to purchasing a lot. The ones who didn’t have a problem with the community strictures had problems with the outdoor living areas attached to their homes. The ones who didn’t have a problem with that had issues with the floor plans and how they didn’t necessarily make sense for what their families needed. They always said things like, ‘I’d commit to this one if…’ and there’d be some change that would only take me a day to draft. I need to be able to promise them those things.”
“We don’t do that.”
“Just in case you didn’t hear me”—likely due to his head-in-ass problem—“I need to be able to do that. And if you don’t want me to do that, find yourself a Neil or an Oscar or a Lee who will. They’re fine with just coasting on the status quo without doing any customer service, but I’m not. I design homes for people, not investors. Get out of my way and let me do it.”
“Or…”
She ground her teeth harder to suppress her scoff. He was really going to push back and try to make her back down by using that passive aggressive managerial bullshit. He didn’t think she’d use her own ultimatum, but if she had to, she would.
She wasn’t going to keep attaching her name to projects she was ashamed to discuss. Her potential was so much greater, but it was being squashed. She was being used as a workhorse, which was fine for some people. Kevin thrived in that role and didn’t expect special treatment inside it. The dickheads in her office, though…they wanted to do the bare minimum and get special perks, too. She was beyond sick of it.
�
��Or,” she said, zipping up her case, “you’ll find that you’ll need to put someone else in Shora. I’ve always finished what I’ve started or tried to before I got transferred to the next site, but no developer or architecture firm owner in his or her right mind would deny me at the very least an interview. There’s a firm in San Francisco that’s been recruiting me pretty heavily for five years.” A woman-owned company that Valerie was so intrigued by, but hadn’t wanted to entertain because she wasn’t ready to abandon her little bit of family on the east coast. “I wouldn’t only have a job, but a career there. I didn’t get into architecture just because it was a job. It was what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do my best at it like most people who make things for a living.”
She grabbed her purse from the floor and stood.
“So. I don’t have an office here, just a cubicle I’m never in because I’m always on site somewhere having no life of my own, but that’s okay. I can work anywhere. I’ll be in my cubicle for the rest of today and part of tomorrow and then I have to go back to Shora and let a lady know whether she should resign herself to having the perfect lot and a not-so-perfect stick-built house. Let me know what your supervisor thinks about that proposal on your desk, so I can act accordingly.” She smiled at him, nodded, and said, “I’ll send Neil in for you next.”
“Thanks,” Ted said through unmoving lips. His face was so red, Valerie wondered if she should get a pin or something to deflate him gently before he exploded violently.
But really, she didn’t care. She left and gestured for Neil to go on in as she exited the office. He stood there three feet from the doorway twirling his coffee stirrer in his mug as if he couldn’t entertain himself in any other way except to eavesdrop.
She finally did allow herself the eye roll she’d been holding back. Then she made her way to the elevator, endured the lecherous wink-wink from a certain CFO as she waited, and said a prayer for serenity as she walked through the cubicle maze on the third floor.
Plopping down at her empty desk, she pulled out her personal phone and scrolled through the call log while her computer booted up. She hit Dial when she found the number she needed.
“Hi, Cindy. This is Valerie Lawson. I’m an in-house architect with Lipton. Ms. Thomas has been trying to get in touch with me. Could you please put me through to her or to her voicemail box if she’s not available?”
This is it.
Valerie typed in her computer password and stared, unseeing, at the Lipton logo on the desktop background as the machine finished loading software.
The line rang three times on the other end, and Valerie plotted out the voicemail message in her mind.
“Ms. Lawson! What a surprise!”
Valerie sat up, shocked and unprepared. “Um, hi, Ms. Thomas. I wanted to talk to you about the message you left.”
“Are you ready for a change?”
“I think I am. I…” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I am. I can’t work like this anymore.”
Or live like it. Valerie pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath to quell the tingles in her sinuses. She wasn’t going to cry, even if it was all so overwhelming. Severing ties. A potential move.
Tim.
San Francisco was going to be too far a commute, even for him. There’d be no way around it. If she took that job—assuming it was offered—they’d be over.
She wasn’t ready, but what choice did she have?
___
Tim looked up from the flight tracker app on his phone to find Heidi leaning on his desk and squinting at him. “What?” He put his gaze right back on that red dot. Valerie was halfway between San Francisco and Norfolk and he was going to meet that plane when it landed. She didn’t know that, though. She didn’t even know that he knew where she was. Tim hated having to squeeze his network around its collective neck to get information, but when it came to Valerie, he’d do desperate things. Carine had given him a half-assed answer, so he’d gotten a bit more information from Frank, and—oddly—the most from Kevin, who was awaiting her return for completely different reason than his father. He wanted to know what was happening in the development of Shora. Tim just wanted to take her home.
And keep her there.
“I had an idea,” Heidi said.
“About boats? The last time you had an idea about boats, we built that monstrosity with the all-pink interior.”
“It sold, didn’t it?”
It had, and others exactly like it, actually. “The Heidi” had been a small, limited-edition boat and they’d sold five in a month. People still asked about them, but Tim was so not going there again. He was still finding bits of pink upholstery fluff floating around in the factory.
“But, no,” Heidi said dismissively. “This isn’t about boats. This is about you.”
“What about me?”
She closed the door and pulled a chair up closer to the desk. “Do you remember when Petra came into your office shaking and crying because she needed to take some time off for maternity leave?”
“Yeah. That was weird. She thought she wasn’t going to have a job when she got back.”
“Right. You thought it was weird, but it happens to women enough that it’s a legitimate fear.”
“She’d been here for five years and always did good work. I had no reason to believe she wouldn’t continue to do so.”
“Exactly. And we just picked up the slack for her around here when she was gone because that’s what communities are supposed to do when babies are born. What if you could do the same for Valerie?”
“What are you suggesting? If she were a boat designer, we’d have absolutely no issues. I’d hire her on here and we’d cover her, but she’s an architect. I can’t do anything for her.”
Heidi shook her head. “Follow along, now. I wouldn’t have married you if you didn’t have a decent-enough brain. She doesn’t have much room for compromise in her career trajectory, but you do.”
Huh.
Tim rubbed his beard contemplatively. “Okay, I think I see where you’re going.”
“Let’s be doubly sure. If you somehow managed to talk Valerie into marrying you—”
“Heidi,” he warned.
“Hey, I’ve always spoken plainly. Should I continue?”
He sighed.
“Thought so. As I was saying, if you manage to get her down the aisle and she agrees to give you a couple of kids, there’s no reason she has to be the one to take all the time off. Unless she wants to, I mean.”
“I agree.”
“I figured you would.”
“But how would that be possible? I’m short one supervisor here and I’m the only one who has a handle on all of the day-to-day operations.”
“We’re talking in hypotheticals about something that wouldn’t happen for a year or more, probably. By then, we could certainly figure something out, and if push came to shove, you put that baby in my office and go do what you have to do.”
He lowered his chin and gave her a level glare. “Really?”
She shrugged. “Things’ll calm down in a couple of years. I’m convinced of that. Maybe it’s unorthodox.” She laughed. “But, hey. Nothing about Heidi and Tim Dowd is orthodox or has ever been anything close.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“You own the business, and you can do what you want. You set the rules for the office culture. Got that?”
“I get it.” Him. Valerie. Their kids at work. Heidi pitching in. It’d be a ridiculous situation, but it didn’t matter as long as they were loved. To hell with what anyone had to say about it.
“Well, go get her. What time is her flight in?”
“Two hours.” Tim was already on his feet and reaching for his keys.
It was an easy solution, and apparently, easy was the hardest thing to think of first. If Heidi’s solution didn’t make Valerie stop and think, he didn’t know what else possibly would.
“Better hustle,” Heidi said. “Traffic’s gonna be a
bitch.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Before she’d started working at Shora, Valerie hadn’t considered herself to be an easy-to-startle woman, but she’d become skittish as a cat in the last half a year. Seeing Tim swoop in from the airport shadows like Batman nearly put a cramp in her heart.
He took her overnight bag, laced his fingers through hers, and rescued her from the curb where she’d been watching for Carine’s borrowed car.
“What are you doing here?” she asked as he pulled her toward the parking deck.
He didn’t respond. He just hitched her bag up higher on his shoulder, kissed her hand, and kept her moving.
“Carine was supposed to pick me up. Does she know that—”
He stopped her—feet and mouth—with an urgent kiss that not only took her breath away but left her plane-cramped legs feeling wobbly as spaghetti noodles.
And then he stared down at her as if he were waiting for her to collapse and wanted to be there to catch her when she did.
“Batman,” she muttered.
Shaking his head, he got her moving again. Not a word crossed his lips between the time they left the curb and he installed her into the passenger seat of his truck. He’d parked in the back of the row at one of those “asshole angles” in which no one could park on either side of him, but with a vehicle that large, Valerie understood why he would.
“You should get something smaller with better gas mileage for when you’re not hauling stuff around,” she teased.
He raised an eyebrow at her as he pulled her seatbelt across her waist.
“Maybe a little Fiat?” She snorted and giggled at her own joke. She was loopy as hell. If she never again flew cross-country twice in thirty-six hours, it’d be too soon. She’d done most of her sleeping in the past couple of days on planes, and plane sleep was hardly real sleep. It was the sleep of the damned and came with neck cramps and knee bruises from the dickheads in the window seats who always waited to go pee right after she nodded off.