by Tina Leonard
The one thing he did know was that this couldn’t be the father who was always criticizing her.
“I thought you might need a little moral support,” Emerson confessed, then laughed at his own words as he took a long look around the area. The entire grounds were humming with activity. “But you’re obviously doing just fine—not that I ever thought you wouldn’t. You don’t lack for bodies, that’s for sure,” he ascertained.
“Did he send you to check up on me?” Connie asked out of curiosity.
There was no accusation in her voice. She knew that despite the fact that Emerson had been her mentor and all around best friend all these years, the man did work for her father, which meant that he had to abide by whatever wishes Calvin Carmichael voiced whenever possible. The last thing she wanted was to have Emerson terminated because of her. She knew she wouldn’t be able to live with this.
“Oddly enough, no, he didn’t,” Emerson told her. “I meant what I said. I came down because I thought you might need a little moral support, this being your first real solo project and all. I mistakenly thought you might be in need of a pep talk, but here you are, all grown up and following in your dad’s footsteps,” he chuckled. “The old man would be proud of you if he saw this.” Emerson gestured around the busy construction site.
“No, he wouldn’t,” Connie contradicted him knowingly. “You know that. If he were here, he’d be pointing out all the things he felt that I neglected to do, or had begun to do wrong...” Her voice trailed off as she eyed the heavyset man.
“All right, he wouldn’t,” Emerson conceded. “But just because he’s always looking to find ways in which you can improve doesn’t mean you’re not doing a fine job to begin with.”
She knew what Emerson was trying to do, and she loved him for it, but she was beginning to resign herself to what she was up against when it came to her father—a bar that was forever being raised no matter how great her achievements.
“It’s okay, Stewart, really,” she told the man, laying a hand on his arm. “My reward will be in a job well-done, not in any praise I’m hoping to get that’ll just never come.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Finn was still standing just on the outskirts of her conversation. “Oh, sorry, I guess your visit threw me. I’d like to introduce you to someone, Stewart. This is my foreman, Finn Murphy,” she told the older man, hooking her arm through Finn’s and drawing him into the small circle that she and Emerson formed.
“Finn, this is Stewart Emerson, the man who really runs Carmichael Construction Corporation.” And by that she meant the man who provided the corporation with a heart.
Emerson pretended to wince. “Ouch, don’t let your dad hear you say that or I’ll have my walking papers before you can say, ‘here’s your hat.’” Leaning past the young woman he considered to be the daughter he never had, Emerson grasped the hand that her foreman offered and shook it heartily. “Foreman, eh?” he repeated. He released Finn’s hand, but his eyes continued to hold the other man’s. “You’ve done this kind of thing before?” Emerson asked.
Connie immediately placed herself between the two men again. “Don’t browbeat my people, Stewart. I wouldn’t have hired Finn for the position if I didn’t think he could do the job.”
Emerson looked at her knowingly. “You’d hire a puppy to do the work if it looked at you with eyes that were sad enough. No offense, Murphy,” he quickly told Finn.
“None taken,” Finn replied, then added, “as long as you don’t think that’s why I have this job.”
The look in the older man’s gray eyes was unreadable. “So this isn’t your first time as a foreman? You’ve been one before?” Emerson asked him.
For the second time, Connie came to the cowboy’s defense.
“You’re doing it again. You’re browbeating. And as to your question, Finn knows how to get men to follow orders.” Which, she added silently, he did, just that he did it in his role as a bartender.
“Does he issue those orders himself, or does he let you do all the talking for him?” Emerson asked, a healthy dose of amusement curving his rather small, full mouth.
“Well, I do know enough not to get in her way if she decides she wants to say something,” Finn told the other man politely.
Emerson regarded Connie’s foreman thoughtfully. For a second, Finn thought that the older man might have felt that he’d overstepped the line. But the next moment, what he said gave no such indication.
“I just want to make sure that Connie’s not being taken advantage of—by anyone,” Emerson emphasized pointedly.
“Understood,” Finn replied with sincerity. “But Ms. Carmichael isn’t someone who can be easily taken advantage of. In case you haven’t noticed, sir,” he pretended to confide, “she’s very strong-willed and very much her own person.”
“Excuse me, I’m right here,” Connie reminded the men, raising her hand as if she were a student in a classroom, wanting to be called on. Dropping her hand, she got in between the two men again, looking from one to the other. “I appreciate what’s going on here, but I can fight my own battles, you know,” she informed them, the statement intended for both of the men on either side of her. “Now, then, Stewart, let me take you into that trailer you remembered to send out for me and show you the plans I drew up. Maybe I can renew your faith in me once you review them.”
“My faith in you never faded,” Emerson informed her as he followed her to the long trailer that was to serve as both her on-site office and her home away from home, as well.
Finn hung back. He’d already seen the plans, both the ones that she herself had drawn up—strictly from an architectural standpoint—and the ones that the structural engineer she’d consulted with had put together.
In addition, he thought that if he tagged along, his presence might be construed as an intrusion under the circumstances.
Sexy and stirring though he found her, she was, after all, the one in charge of all this and ultimately, no matter what sort of feelings he might have for her, she was his boss. He had absolutely no business viewing her as anything else.
However, he silently promised himself, walking back to the backhoe, once this project was completed—and before she left Forever for Houston or her next assignment—he intended to carve out a little time alone for the two of them. There was no two ways about it. The lady most definitely intrigued him.
But he could bide his time and wait.
Patience, his older brother had drilled into him more than once, was the name of the game, and anything worth getting was worth the effort and the patience it took to wait it out.
* * *
STEWART EMERSON HAD been around the world of construction, in one capacity or another, for a very long time. Ever since fate had stepped in one night, putting him in the right place at the right time to save Calvin Carmichael from being on the receiving end of what could have been a fatal beating.
He had not only pulled the drunken, would-be muggers off Carmichael, but by the time he was done, he had also sent the duo to the hospital—which seemed only fair inasmuch as their plan apparently had been to send Carmichael straight to the morgue.
Shaken for possibly the first—and last—time of his life as well as uncharacteristically grateful, Connie’s father had immediately offered the much larger—and unemployed—former navy SEAL a job as his bodyguard.
As the business grew, so had Carmichael’s dependence on Emerson, causing the latter’s responsibilities to increase, as well.
Taking nothing for granted, Emerson made it a point to become familiar with everything that his employer concerned himself with and thus, while he couldn’t draw up his own plans from scratch, he developed an eye for what was constructually sound, as well as what made good business sense.
Emerson made it a point to become indispensable to the corporation—
and the man—in many ways.
But to Connie, the tall, heavyset, bearded man who could have easily been mistaken for Santa Claus these days would always be her one true confidant, her one true friend.
While for years, she had wanted nothing as much as to finally win her father’s approval, nothing meant more to her than Emerson’s opinion.
It still did.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked, gesturing toward the two large drawings that were tacked up side by side on the bulletin board that hung opposite the trailer’s entrance. Between the two plans, they encompassed both the esthetics and the practical side of the building that was destined to be Forever’s very first hotel.
Emerson spent a good five minutes studying first one set of plans, then the other. Finally, he stepped back and nodded his shaggy, gray head.
“I must say that I’m impressed. But then, I’d expect nothing less than the best from you,” he told her, hooking his bear-like arm around her waist and pulling her toward him affectionately.
She laughed softly to herself, happily returning his hug. “That makes one of you.”
Emerson released his hold from around her shoulders and did what he could to hide his sigh. There were times when he despaired if the man he worked for would ever realize exactly what he had and what he was in danger of losing.
“Your father’s a hard man to please, Connie. We both know that. Did I ever tell you about the time that, after standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, looking down for a good ten minutes, he turned to me and said, ‘I could have done it better in probably half the time.’ If your dad thinks he can criticize God’s handiwork like that, the rest of us can’t expect to be treated any better.”
Though she gave Emerson no indication, it wasn’t the first time she’d heard him tell her the story. Emerson had told it to her at least a couple of times, the first being a long time ago in an effort to make her feel better after her father had mercilessly taken apart a venture she’d been very proud of undertaking.
That was when she’d finally realized that nothing was ever going to be good enough to meet her father’s standards, no matter how hard she tried.
But she wouldn’t be who she was if she didn’t keep on doing just that.
Trying.
Over and over again.
“I suppose I shouldn’t care about pleasing him,” she told Emerson, “but he put so much on this project turning out right, I feel that if I don’t meet his expectations, that’s it, I’m out of the game. Permanently,” she added flatly.
“You’ll never be permanently out of the game,” Emerson told her, even though he knew that was what he’d heard Carmichael tell her. “Doesn’t matter what he says at the time. He needs you, needs your energy, needs you to keep going, to be his eyes and ears in places he can no longer get to. He’ll come around,” Emerson promised in a tone that made an individual feel that he could make book on the man’s words and never risk a thing.
“Meanwhile,” Emerson continued, his eyes on hers, “you seem to have put together a pretty good crew. They’re moving back and forth like well-trained workers. And that foreman of yours—” He paused for a moment, looking at her significantly. “I’d keep my eye on him if I were you.”
“Why?” Connie asked. “Don’t you trust him, Stewart?”
Emerson heard the slight defensive tone in her voice and wondered if she was aware of it herself. He had a better-than-vague idea just what it meant in this instance. “Hasn’t got anything to do with trust,” he told her.
She was trying to follow Emerson’s drift, but he did have a habit of going off on a tangent at times. This seemed to be one of those times.
“Then what...?”
For once, Emerson didn’t hide his meaning behind incomprehensible rhetoric that left the listener baffled for days—because he wanted to be certain that she was aware of what was going on. It was one thing for him to catch her off guard, and another to have some stranger do it.
“Your foreman looks at you as if you were a tall, cool drink of water, and he had just come crawling in on his chafed hands and knees across the length of the desert.”
Connie stared at him in bewildered disbelief. “What does that even mean?” she asked. Finn had been nothing if not polite. If anything, she had been the one who’d stared at him that first day.
Emerson grinned. “That means, don’t work any long hours alone with the man or you might find something besides this building being created.”
What would Stewart say if he knew that she’d spent the night in Finn’s house? Connie couldn’t help wondering. She was fairly confident that Stewart would ultimately believe anything she would tell him. However, she was also certain that he’d worry twice as much as before—for no reason.
She shouldn’t worry. She trusted Finn implicitly—and more important, even though she was admittedly more than just mildly attracted to Finn, she trusted herself not to jeopardize the project.
That was what was important here. Not the blush of a possibly fleeting romance, but the project.
The hotel.
Winning this invisible wager with her father and being assured that her career with the company was a done deal. Anything else came in a distant second—if that.
“I never knew you had such a rich imagination, Stewart,” she said, grateful that her cheeks hadn’t suddenly rebelled and given her away. “Finn only thinks of me as his boss. There are plenty of women around for him to choose from if he has other inclinations,” she added innocently.
“I think he’s already made his choice,” he told her pointedly.
“And I think you’re being way too protective of me—not that I don’t appreciate it,” she added, lovingly patting the man’s cheek. “So, how long do I have you for?” she asked, effectively changing the subject.
In response, Emerson looked at his watch. “Just another couple of hours, I’m afraid. I’m flying back to Houston at four-thirty,” he told her. “Your father’s looking into acquiring another company to extend his domain, and I told him I’d be there to sit in on the meeting.”
“Extension? Again?” she asked with a shake of her head. Wasn’t it ever going to be enough for him? she wondered.
Emerson raised his wide, wide shoulders and then let them fall in a vague shrug. “Your father does have the resources.”
Connie sighed and shook her head. “That’s not the point. Is it really a smart move to spread himself so thin? What if he suddenly experiences a cash-flow problem? What then?”
Emerson laughed at the objections she raised because those were the exact same ones he’d raised with his employer. “And that’s one of the reasons he has his suspicions that you’re more mine than his.” And then he went on to say what they both knew to be true. “Your father doesn’t think that way, and ultimately, he’s the boss.”
“Still doesn’t make him right.”
“No,” Emerson agreed. “It doesn’t. But it also doesn’t give us anything to fight with, either. He does what he wants to when he wants to.”
Truer words were never spoken, Connie thought. She picked up a clipboard from the table. The next week’s schedule was attached to that, as well.
“Well, I’ve got to get back to work.” She paused and then quickly kissed the older man’s cheek. “Thanks for coming to check up on me.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” he told her in all honesty. “And Connie?”
At the door, about to step out, she paused to look back. “Yes?”
“For what it’s worth, I like him. Your foreman,” he specified. “I like him.”
She hadn’t expected that warm feeling to go sweeping through her. It threw her for a second.
“Good. I’ll let him know. Maybe the two of you can make an evening of it sometime,” she said with a stra
ight face.
The sound of Emerson’s booming laugh followed her out of the trailer.
It was, for her, the most heartwarming sound she knew.
Chapter Twelve
Connie looked up from the wide drawing board in her trailer, startled to see Finn walking in. She knew the broad-shouldered man was only six-one but somehow, he just seemed to fill up the entire trailer with hi presence. Given the size of her trailer, that was saying a lot.
“I knocked,” he told her. “Twice.”
She had no doubt that he had. She’d been lost in thought, oblivious to her surroundings, for the last half hour or so.
Connie merely nodded at his statement. “Is there a problem?” she asked, ready to send him on his way if there wasn’t. She was having trouble concentrating, and the schedules were overlapping in areas where they really shouldn’t.
He and Connie had been working closely now for the past four weeks, and he’d gotten somewhat accustomed to her being braced for something to go wrong. Thus far, nothing had. If anything, it had been the complete opposite since they’d started work on the hotel.
But that still didn’t change her attitude.
“No, no problem,” he assured her. “As a matter of fact, it’s going pretty damn well, don’t you think?”
It did look that way, she had to silently concede. Working in what amounted to two complete shifts, utilizing whatever daylight was available and relying on strobe lighting that she’d had brought in less than six days into the job, Connie had to admit that Finn and the crew had made tremendous headway. The two backhoes were kept humming sixteen hours a day until the excavation was completed.
In addition, the weather had been incredibly cooperative. They had no rain days to interfere with the schedules she’d so carefully drawn up. All that had put them ahead of schedule, something she was not about to take for granted.