by Hart, Renee
He turned and stalked out the door, grumbling to himself. I was confident now that I'd never see him again. And it was a wonderful feeling.
Chapter 16
When I got back home after the meeting, I found Harold waiting there for me, sitting in Babe the Blue Pickup Truck. He got out as soon as I parked my car, carrying a bouquet of flowers.
I took the bouquet and inhaled the sweet scent. “Oh, Harold, you sweet man.” I leaned up on my toes and kissed him. I caressed his smooth cheek. He had shaved now that the vacation was over, though part of me missed the grizzled look of the beard.
“I thought I'd do something to bring you a little cheer,” he said. “Just in case things didn't go well.”
“It went as well as can be expected.” I led him to the door and let us inside. “I don't think Sunil is going to be bothering me anymore.”
“That's a relief.” The tension let out of Harold's shoulders. I smiled at him and stroked his cheek. It touched me to see that he got so concerned about my troubles.
I dug through the kitchen cabinets for a vase, then filled it with water and set it on the table with the flowers. Then I brought out one of the last bottles of cranberry wine we'd retrieved from the farm and poured us each a glass.
I raised my glass and said, “To putting the past behind us, and moving forward.”
“To moving forward.” Harold tipped his glass against mine. “And burning bridges.”
I laughed, then sipped at the tart liquid, finding I was starting to develop a taste for it.
We moved into the living room and sat on the couch. I curled my legs under me and turned to face Harold. He looked like he had something on his mind. I put a hand on his leg and asked, “What is it?”
“Well,” he said, “I've been thinking a lot today about what we talked about. About the future, and children, and all of that.”
I squeezed his knee and smiled at him. “We don't need to decide anything right away. Wanting one simple thing, remember?”
The corner of his mouth twisted in a smirk. His hands kept fidgeting with the bottom of his flannel shirt. “What if I want something that's not so simple?”
My breath caught in my throat. I held myself very still. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I'm forty-three years old. Turning forty-four in a couple of weeks. I feel like I'm at the age where I don't want to waste time trying to figure things out when I already know what I want.”
My face started to feel warm. “And what do you want.”
“You.”
He turned to face me. He reached into his pocket.
I put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Harold...”
“You can wait your entire life trying to find the right time to start living it,” he said. “Or you can find that all the pieces are falling into place, and you want to make sure not to lose the chance that life has handed you. I spent a long time in a marriage that didn't fit, trying to force it to work. Now that I've found something that works, something that works all on its own, without me having to force it...” He looked down and cleared his throat. “Well, this is what feels right to me. I know this is what I want.”
Tears filled my eyes. I pulled my hand away from his arm and nodded, waiting for what I knew was coming.
He pulled the small black box out of his pocket. He turned it around a few times in his hands, then shifted in his seat. I thought for a moment he was going to get down on one knee, but I knew his knees were bad sometimes, and I didn't want him to struggle to get back up just because he wanted to make a romantic gesture. I shifted closer and took his hands in mine, cradling the box between us.
He cleared his throat, unable to quite look up at me. His face was red. “I'm not so good at this. I didn't actually have to do it the first time. We just eloped.”
“You don't need to ask, you sweet man. You already know the answer.”
I took the box and opened it. The ring was simple and unadorned. It was perfect.
He slid it onto my finger. It felt a bit strange to be wearing a ring there again, after more than a year without one. But it was comfortable.
I leaned in and kissed him. I slipped my arms around him and pulled him close. Then we settled side by side on the couch, my head laying against his shoulder. He put an arm around me and held me against him. It felt right. It felt comfortable. Perfect.
I already knew I would want to sell the house. There were too many memories from my life with Sunil here. Harold and I could find a new home together. A simple place, with hardwood floors and a fireplace. Someplace rustic, with history seeped within the walls and plenty of room to build new memories, a new life together.
And a couple of extra bedrooms, just in case there were a few new additions to the family in our future.
THE END
The Makeover 2
A Contemporary Romance
J.L. STARR
Copyright © 2016 by J.L. Starr
All rights reserved, worldwide.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Book Description
Shea Gordon has a problem. He's a senior vice president of a nationwide corporation, and he just learned that his grandfather, founder and CEO of the company, is planning to retire. And unless Shea can turn his life around fast and show his grandfather that he is a man with great plans for the future, his grandfather might end up selling the company to a larger, heartless corporation that would lay off thousands of workers after the merger.
Enter Jane Decker. She's a factory worker and one of the people whose job is on the line with all of the changes being made to the company. But when she gets hired by Shea as part of a plan to impress his grandfather and show how much he's changed, Jane has the chance to help save her own job and the jobs of all of her friends. There's just one catch. She has to spend the holidays pretending to be Shea's fiance.
This is a 30,000 word standalone romance with HEA ending and no cliffhanger. The first standalone in the series The Makeover follows this story.
Chapter 1
Jane pulled on a safety mask and pulled one of the molds out of her bin, then set to work sanding off any rough edges. The mold in her hand had been made from a cast of a child's foot to fit them for a custom-fitted brace that would, hopefully, help correct the deformity and misalignment of the child's foot and ankle. When the mold was properly made, it went a long way towards relieving pain and helping the patient walk without a limp or the use of a cane.
White dust filled the air as Jane sanded the mold until it was as smooth as skin. She ran her bare fingers along the material, searching for any minor bump or rough edge. A flaw in the mold would lead to a flaw in the brace itself, and even a minor defect could cause the patient serious problems. A flaw the size of a grain of sand, when the brace was worn skin tight, could rub the patient's skin raw and lead to a blister, or worse. Part of Jane's job was to make sure every brace her factory produced was perfectly formed and would fit a patient's body like a second skin.
She pulled down her mask and blew off some of the plaster dust, eyeing the mold for defects. When it met with her approval, she returned it to its box and set it in a bin with the other completed molds, ready to be sent down to the next stage of production. She'd gone through several dozen molds already today. It was steady, boring work that kept her hands busy but mostly let her mind wander. After the thousands of molds she'd worked on over the years she'd been working there, even the most precise work didn't begin to hold her attention anymore.
Her mind was wandering a bit when a voice called out, “Decker! I need a copy of your quota reports. Before lunch, please.”
Jane pulled off her mask and looked across the floor towards her manage
r's office. He had already moved on to talking to Laura about her shipping reports, and it looked like he was too busy for Jane to ask for a clarification. But it was strange for him to ask her for a copy of a report on a Tuesday. Normally she handed in her sheets on Friday, recording her day by day productivity. Most weeks the paperwork was a complete waste of time, but Harold insisted that he needed the reports to help set quotas and deadlines.
She washed the plaster dust from her hands, then took her clipboard with all of her recent forms and headed for the main office to use the Xerox machine. She didn't know for sure if Harold wanted this week's numbers, which only included a day and a half of work, or last week's numbers, which she'd already submitted to him last Friday. She made copies of both sheets, just to be safe, then headed to Harold's office to hand them in.
He barely glanced up at her when she walked in and set the pages on his desk. “Thanks, Decker,” he said. He kept his attention on his computer screen.
Jane turned to leave, but not before casting a glance over the other man in the room. She vaguely recognized him as upper management, possibly a regional director or a vice president. He'd been at the factory for the past two days, spending a lot of time behind closed doors with Harold. When she handed in her paperwork, the man was working on a laptop, using one of Harold's bookshelves as a second desk. She had no idea what he was working on or why he was in the factory, but from her past experience, when corporate types came down to the factory floor, the best thing you could do was to keep your head down and try not to get noticed. Some corporate people liked to interfere with production by offering “suggestions” about how to “improve” the work, but since none of them had ever worked with their hands for a single day in their lives, all they really did was cause problems and screw everything up. Like the time the regional director insisted she rearranged her entire worktable because it was “too cluttered.” She had put everything back where it belonged as soon as the director left, since she had things organized in her own way to boost her speed and efficiency.
The man glanced up at her just as she was leaving. He flashed a charming smile at her, his eyes moving up and down her figure. Jane resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the idea of the man checking her out when she was dressed in a frumpy dark blue factory jumpsuit, with plaster dust in her hair and under her fingernails.
She went back to her work station and wasted a few minutes tidying up. It was almost time for lunch, and there was no real point in getting back to work until after the lunch break. But with someone from upper management in the building, she had to at least look busy. She kept herself occupied until she figured it was close enough to break time that she wouldn't get in trouble, then she headed down to the cafeteria with the rest of the crew.
“So, who's the suit in Harold's office?” she asked her coworkers when they sat down for lunch. She shared a table with three of her friends, Holly, Suzanne, and Laura.
“I don't know,” Laura said, glancing over her shoulder and lowering his voice. “Do you think he's here to do more layoffs? I can't afford to get laid off right now. I've got a baby coming in June.”
“They wouldn't lay anyone off right before Christmas,” Holly said. “That would be too cruel.”
“You don't think a man in a suit that expensive can be cruel?” Jane said. She snorted, opening her lunch bag and pulling out her sandwich. “They don't care about us. People like that only care about the bottom line. Why else do you think they keep increasing our quotas?”
Jane and a few of the others had been deliberately slowing down production a bit since the summer, when several workers from their floor had been cut from the payroll. If the management saw that they could get things done faster than they already were, they'd fire someone else and increase quotas for whoever was left, all in the name of “greater efficiency.”
“Even still,” Holly said, gesturing with her fork as she spoke, “they can't cut anyone else and still expect us to keep up. I'm not taking on another person's work load so they can meet production demand.”
“I heard,” Suzanne said, lowering her voice and leaning closer, “they might be shutting down assembly, and dumping their work on us.”
“That's insane,” Jane said. The assembly crew worked in a different part of the building, manually assembling parts for various medical devices after production on them was completed. The molds Jane worked on would be used to create the polymer casts that were the main component of the orthopedic braces they produced, but after the casts were complete, it was the assembly crew's job to put the finishing touches on them. Depending on the product being made, that could include adding rubber soles, extra supports, or nylon straps to hold the braces in place.
Jane's friends often complained that the assembly crew were the laziest and least-skilled people on the factory floor, since all they did was put together the parts that had been crafted elsewhere. Jane herself didn't consider that to be particularly fair, but she did know a few particular members of the assembly crew that spent more time on their phones than they did getting any work done.
“You guys are just overreacting,” Holly said. “Trust me, it can't possibly be that bad. If there were any more layoffs, there wouldn't be enough people left to keep production running. This place would shut down without us.”
“I hope you're right,” Jane said. She needed her job. She was still paying off student loans, and she didn't even have her bachelor's degree to show for it. She'd switched majors twice in college, then eventually dropped out when she couldn't afford to keep up with classes anymore. She'd managed to transfer her credits to a community college in order to at least earn an associate's degree, and between that and the extra credits she had on her transcript, she only needed another year or so to finish school. If she could ever get back in, of course. She was already twenty-six, and at the rate she was going, she'd be in her thirties before she could pay off her student loans and afford to go back to school. To say nothing of her long-forgotten dreams of running her own business and being her own boss.
Jane finished her lunch, then got up to leave. Laura looked up at her and asked, “Are you in some kind of rush to get back to work? We don't get paid enough to cut lunch short.”
“I want to make sure I hit my quota,” Jane said. “Just in case.” All the talk of layoffs had her worried, especially since Harold had asked her for her reports so early in the week. She was starting to think that taking it slow and milking the clock wasn't the best idea this week. Not with someone from corporate in the building.
She managed to get through the rest of the shift without incident, right up until she saw Mr. Corporate heading her way. She'd spotted him checking in at a few of the other stations, talking to the other workers. He had a clipboard with him, and he kept jotting down notes about whatever the factory workers said. Jane kept her head down when he headed her way, hoping he would ignore her.
She watched him from the corner of her eye as he approached. His polished shoes clearly didn't belong on the factory floor, where all of the workers wore boots. The black polish had already been smudged, and there was a white smear of plastic dust staining the dark leather. Jane just hoped no one in the factory would be blamed for it. It wasn't like they could keep the floor clean while they were working, and the janitorial crew didn't come in to sweep up until the end of the day.
“Miss Decker?” the man said, looking up at her. “Shea Gordon, Regional Vice President.” He held his clipboard at the ready, a pen in his hand.
“Yes?” She barely looked at him, hoping this would be over with pretty quick.
“You're working on casting molds?” He looked around her workstation, picking a couple of things up from the bench and looking them over, then setting them back. Jane tried not to grind her teeth when she saw he put things back in the wrong place. She had a system for her organization, and she hated it when people didn't respect that.
“Today I am, yeah,” she said, pulling down her mask so she could answer his qu
estions without her voice being muffled. She just hoped she didn't end up coughing white dust all over his expensive suit.
“Would you say this past week, week and a half's numbers have been pretty standard?”
She shrugged, keeping her eyes on her work. She wasn't sure if it was rude of her to keep working while she was talking to him, but she was afraid of getting in trouble if she stopped working just to chat. “I guess so. I always hit my quotas.”
“And do you think the quotas the management sets are fair?” Shea jotted something down on his clipboard, then held his pen at the ready, waiting for her to answer.
She chewed on her lip for a moment, thinking about how to respond. The truth was, half the time she didn't think the quotas were at all fair. She could keep up with them just fine with the slow but steady pace she set every day, but that was without breaks and assuming ideal conditions, like not having to send any of the molds back because they were damaged or flawed in some way. The last time Harold had increased the quotas, it had been based on two weeks where everything had run perfectly smooth, with nothing to interfere with production. He didn't seem to understand that on a bad week, those same quotas would be impossible to meet due to circumstances beyond Jane's control.
Which is why she took her time and didn't go over the quotas regularly. She knew if she had just one good week, Harold would increase the quotas based on that week alone, and she'd be expected to meet a standard that she just couldn't keep up with the rest of the time.
“Miss Decker?” Shea asked. “When the management sets your quotas, are they fair? Do you feel like you can keep up with them?”
She took a deep breath and slowly let it out. If she said no, that the quotas weren't fair, she could get in trouble for complaining. If she said yes, then she could end up being screwed when Harold decided to ramp up production again. “I don't know,” she said. “Sometimes, I guess.”