The X-rated stuff can stay in the bedroom where it belongs.
And speaking of bedrooms…
Nic squeals and starts waddling out of the kitchen as Mom and Rose round up the kids and laugh delightedly. I stalk Nic the whole way up the stairs and into our room.
“Perv.”
“Hussy.”
I’m smiling later, as she cuddles close and throws her belly over my side, her body draped over mine as she snuggles down and falls asleep.
She’s mine, finally, and all it took was for me to break every rule I ever made for myself.
No regrets.
~~~
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Chapter 1
“I don’t see how we have any other choice.”
I stand at the windows, staring down at the city. I’d always liked this view. When I was a kid, I imagined I could see the entire world from this vantage point. I knew now that it was only downtown Houston I could see, but it had seemed like the world then. It felt like the world now. This was my world. This was what I understood. This was the family business, and it was supposed to be my dad’s legacy to me. It was supposed to be mine.
But it wasn’t going to be.
“We’ve worked too hard, Daddy.”
“I know,” he said, coming up behind me. “But I don’t see where we have any other choice. Either we sell, or we merge with another company. Or we go down in flames.”
“I don’t want that.”
“Neither do I.”
“I don’t want any of it. Are you sure there’s no other way? What about a loan? We have that new property going up over in Katy. Maybe we could—”
“It’s already been used as collateral. We have nothing left, Addie.”
I nodded slowly, tears coming to my eyes. I blinked quickly, forcing them away.
No tears.
“I know it’s not what you wanted. But this might be a good thing. New blood. Maybe a new owner would have better ideas on how to take this company into the future.”
“I had ideas.”
“And I should have listened to them sooner. I’m sorry for that.”
My dad rubbed my shoulder, trying to make the pain go away. That was his way of dealing with me and my heartbreak. Rub my shoulder. Say things that didn’t really make things better, but made him feel as though he were doing something. He’d never been good at this parenting thing. Maybe if my mother hadn’t died when I was five…
But she had. There was no point in playing that what-if game.
I straightened my shoulders and turned away from the window.
“How long do we have?”
“I don’t know. A couple of weeks, maybe.”
“And you’re already looking?”
“The lawyers sent over a couple of names this morning. I’ll be meeting with their representatives over the next few days.”
“I don’t want to…” I cleared my throat, lifting my hair off of my neck to cool the heat that had suddenly risen up from my chest. “I don’t want to be part of it.”
“I respect that.”
“But I also want it made clear to whoever you choose that we don’t fire any of our employees. Most of these people have worked for the company since you opened the doors forty years ago. I won’t watch those people get thrown out onto the street while we go home and count our millions.”
“I will tell them. But I can’t guarantee that whoever buys the company will abide by that.”
“I know. But we’re going to walk away from this whole fiasco only taking a little hit. For our employees…this is their livelihood.”
My dad nodded. He looked tired. Older than he’d looked just that morning over his breakfast of toast. A part of me—the little girl that still lived deep inside of me—wanted to go to him and offer him a big hug. But another part of me—the precocious college-aged girl who’d come into this company six years ago, full of ideas—wanted to strangle him for not listening to any of those ideas.
Berryman Construction was my life. I’d grown up on construction sites, doing homework in the cab of my dad’s truck as he drove around, checking on the projects he oversaw. The moment I graduated college, I elbowed my way into the office, taking the lead on similar projects, walking the sites in my cowboy boots and worn jeans. I won the respect of the workers, fell in love. Got my heart broken. Did things I’m not proud of, but never did anything that didn’t benefit the company. This was my life’s blood. My history. It killed me to see it die a slow, painful death.
I needed to get out of there.
“I’ll be back in a while,” I said, grabbing my cell phone off the top of the desk and making a beeline for the door. My dad didn’t say anything. He knew me well enough to know when I needed space. God knew he’d had enough experience coming up against my stubbornness.
I walked for a while, wishing I was wearing those old cowboy boots instead of the heels and skirt I was wearing. We’d had meetings all morning. Bankers. They weren’t a very amusing bunch.
Ten million. That’s how deep in the hole we were.
Five projects, and each was deeper in hock than the one before it. We could sell every building we owned and still owe half that amount.
How did this happen?
Sometimes I wondered how things might’ve been different if Grant hadn’t walked out on me. If we had gotten married and run away as we had planned. Would we have made a life in California like he’d wanted to do? Or would we have ended up coming back here? Would we have run Berryman Construction together? Would we have made a success of it? Or would we have run into the ground faster than my dad had? Would we have had children by now? Or would we still be struggling?
I hated that my thoughts always went back to him, to that time. I was about to start college. He was a drywall guy on one of my dad’s project sites. I was working for Berryman for the summer, following my dad around from site to site, keeping track of the little details that seemed to escape him so easily with each passing year. When I saw Grant cutting drywall in the mud one afternoon, I thought I’d seen it all. He was like something from out of a cheesy, chick movie. So beautiful it was almost hard to look at him. His arms had muscles on the muscles, his chest straining against the thin undershirt that was the only thing between the sun and his tan skin. Dark hair that was a little on the long side, curls just thick enough to give him a rock-star look. But it was when he looked up at me and those startling blue eyes focused on my face that I was bitten.
No man had the right to have eyes that perfect. That clear. That incredibly sexy.
I hadn’t truly understood what that word sexy meant until the first time I set eyes on Grant McGraw.
I watched him for almost a week before I spoke the first word to him.
“Hey,” I said. Like I was twelve.
“Want to go see a movie with me?” he’d responded, like we’d been having this long, drawn-out conversation.
“Okay,” I said.
Okay. That was all I said. And the next thing I knew, three months had passed and we were planning our escape. We were going to elope. Sneak off to the justice of the peace and then tell my dad what we’d done. We thought—naively, I suppose—that if we got married first and told my dad later, he would have to allow it to happen. My dad was old fashioned. He believed that I should marry a man of my own station. What he meant was that I should marry the son of one of his stuffy friends. The son of a lawyer or a doctor or a business man. I was pretty sure he’d already begun arranging a meeting between me and the son of his cousin’s stockbroker—an architect at a big firm downtown.
Grant was a construction worker. He was poor. Uneducated. Not the kind of guy my dad would chose for me. But he was the man I wanted.
Apparently, however, I was not what Grant wanted.
He wasn’t at the diner where we had planned our rendezvous. And he wasn’t at his apartment when I went back and pounded on the door. Moved out, his landlord told me. No forwarding address.
Heartbroken.
I’d sworn I’d never allow anyone close enough to do that again. I hadn’t counted on my dad allowing the business to go bankrupt.
Heartbroken again.
I guess I hadn’t learned my lesson well enough the first time.
Chapter 2
I slipped into a bar down the street from our corporate offices. I rarely came in here, but I knew that some of the other executives at the office often came here after work each evening. I knew because I’d heard rumors of the sort of things they said about me and my dad when they were gathered together. It wasn’t always flattering.
Running a business isn’t always easy. It had crossed my mind more than once that it would be so much easier if I just took a lower-level job with someone else’s company. I’d be a pretty good personal assistant. Less responsibility. Less stress. But then I wouldn’t feel that rush of pride when I stood on a project site and knew that the building that hadn’t been there a month, or even a week before was there now because of me and what I’d done to bring it all together.
I imagined it was something like being a parent. You watched your child grow from nothing more than a few cells to a fully realized person. It was the same with an apartment building or a new corporate office. There was nothing but a pile of dirt there before you started. But with your planning, your hard work, it became something that would stand for decades. It was a work of beauty.
How could I give that up?
“What can I get for you?” a waitress who looked old enough to be my grandmother asked.
“White wine.”
She walked away and I found myself looking around the room, wondering about the other souls who were in a bar in the middle of a Monday afternoon. How many of them were without jobs? How many were hiding from bill collectors or overbearing wives or demanding bosses? How many were here simply because it was better than being anywhere else?
How many of them would be Berryman Construction employees after we sold the company?
My dad and I would walk away a couple million richer. Our prides would be hurt. Our position in the business community would take a ding. But we would survive. Our employees…not so much.
I remembered that summer, when I worked for my dad, moving from project site to project site, how the guys would go out for beers after work. It was something they enjoyed doing, a way to blow off steam. Would they lose themselves in that little pastime when they no longer had jobs and they were struggling to get another?
I liked the guys who worked for us. That summer, they invited me multiple times, but the disapproving look on my dad’s face—never mind that I was also underage—always made me turn them down. But I wondered what it would be like to feel a part of that comradery, to be like them.
Grant told me I wasn’t missing anything.
“They mostly bitch about the foreman and then go home to their wives and children.”
But I wanted to be a part of it because it was something. It was a companionship. I always felt separated because I was the boss’s daughter. Like I was untouchable. Not until Grant did I ever feel like I was a part of anything other than the life my dad had made for us where he worked all day long and didn’t know what to do with me when he finally came home.
Why was I thinking so much about Grant today? It had been seven years since the last time I saw him. Seven years since we made plans to sneak away and get married. Seven years since he stood me up at our rendezvous spot and forced me to go home like a dog with its tail between its legs.
Not even my personal assistant spoke to me unless I spoke to her first. How pathetic was that?
I thanked the waitress when she set my wine glass in front of me. I considered it for a moment, thought of how my dad would approve of such a ladylike drink.
“Excuse me. I’ve changed my mind.”
The waitress regarded me with weary eyes. “Yeah?”
“Could I get Jack Daniels? Straight up?”
That weariness turned into surprise and then amusement.
“Of course.”
She took the wine glass back and returned a moment later with a shot glass filled with a deep tawny liquid. I’d never drank whiskey before. I stared at it for a second, then picked it up and downed the shot.
It burned like a son of a gun all the way down.
The waitress laughed. “You might be better off with the wine.”
I shook my head. “Bring me the bottle.”
The woman’s eyebrows rose. “Are you sure?”
I nodded.
I’d done everything my dad had always told me to do. I was on the debate team in high school. I was a track star, too. I got straight A’s in college. Graduated summa cum laude. Ran his company according to his direction, allowing him to ignore all my ideas. I pumped everything I had into the company, devoted every minute of my life to it for the last three years. And now it was failing.
So why continue to be the perfect executive? The perfect daughter? The perfect…whatever?
“I’m sure.”
Chapter 3
My jacket was gone. My hair was flowing down my back, loosened in public for the first time in three years. It wasn’t proper for an executive to wear her hair down, my dad told me once. He disproved of secretaries who came to the office with new haircuts, didn’t trust the ones who wore their hair short. He felt that a woman should always have her hair up and well coifed.
What did coif even mean?
I moved to the music, not really sure that my movements matched the rhythm, just loving the way it felt to shake my hips and run my hands over my sides. How long had it been since I’d last danced like this? I couldn’t even remember doing it in high school, though I was pretty sure I attended a few of the dances the administration grudgingly allowed us. I went to a private school where academics were everything. But I remember going to one dance in particular. I remember sitting by the refreshment table, wishing the boy I liked hadn’t come with the class president.
I was done wishing and dreaming and living a life I didn’t want. I was done letting men walk out on me, letting my dad tell me what to do every moment of my life, and pretending none of it bothered me. Everything was changing. Why shouldn’t I change, too?
That thought in mind, I stiffened only for a second when a man came up behind me and slid his hands around my waist. I leaned back into him and closed my eyes, my thoughts going to a place I hadn’t allowed them to go in a very long time.
“Don’t you know you’re supposed to be intimidated? The boss’s daughter and all that?”
Laughter made his eyes crinkle around the edges. “I’m supposed to be intimidated by a slip of a girl who’s half my size?”
“You are. Because if I go to my daddy and tell him you were mean to me—”
“He’d kill me. Yeah, I get that.”
“No. He’d just fire you.”
Grant pushed me back against the wall. “What would he do if I did this?”
He kissed me, his lips brushing lightly against mine. It was beautiful, just like the half dozen or so he’d offered me over the past few weeks. But something changed almost immediately. That brush, that chaste little kiss, became something deeper. Something much more intense. It became something I’d not experienced before in all of my eighteen years of life.
To say I was sheltered would be to say an alcoholic likes to have a drink after work. I didn’t date in high school. My first kiss was from a classmate at graduation. I had the sexual experience of Mother Theresa when I met Grant. So, for him to kiss me that way was like a god offering a mere mortal the secret to immortality. It was a gift I couldn’t refuse.
But it was also a gift I didn’t quite know what to do with.
My body melted against his, but my teeth seemed to be in the wrong place. I opened my mouth wider, but then it seemed to be too wide. And then I closed it and nearly bit the end of his tongue off.
He laughed. “You are so innocent.”
I blushed, humiliated. I bru
shed his hands away from my hips and tried to move around him, but he pulled me back.
“What?” he asked softly, lifting my face so that I was forced to look him in the eye. “What’s the matter?”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“No,” he said, his breath warm on my skin. “I’m awed by you, Addison. You are so beautiful, so intelligent…”
“So innocent.”
I said it in a mimic of his tone, trying to belittle him. Trying to make him feel the way I felt. But he just ran his thumb over my bottom lip, his eyes drinking in everything about me like he wanted to devour me there on the spot.
“What’s wrong with innocence?” he asked. “Personally, I love the idea that I’m the first to touch you this way. That I’m the first to taste your kiss.”
As though his words invited his touch, he bent close and brushed his lips over mine again. This time my head just kind of shut off and allowed my body to take control. And that…that was how it was meant to be.
I turned into the arms of the man I was dancing with, expecting impossible height and intense blue eyes. What I got was an average-looking man with average brown eyes. But he had full lips and a need in those eyes that was familiar. When was the last time a man had looked at me that way? Men didn’t look at me that way. A woman executive in a man’s business? They looked at me with resentment if they looked at me at all. So this…it was refreshing.
I moved closer to him, raising my arms above my head as I started a little shimmy that moved my hips provocatively against him. He smiled, his hands sliding up over my waist only to go back down again, over my ass like it was his to explore. I didn’t really mind. I liked the music. I didn’t recognize the song or the artist, but I liked the steady rhythm of the drumbeat, liked the way it seemed to reverberate in my bones.
We kissed a lot, Grant and me. I snuck away as often as I could to be with him. Long, hot afternoons tangled on his couch in that run-down little apartment he had on the wrong side of the city. Even longer evenings in his bed after…
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