Truth and Humility

by J. A. Dennam

  “You want to tear it down?” she asked incredulously, her hand keeping her hardhat firmly in place as she gazed up at the structure.

  “Of course not. The Cahills have kept it preserved, but the name plaque needs to be restored. Now, the steps aren’t stable, so you’ll have to wait for Stan to bring the cherry picker around. Think you can handle that?” He ate up her steely glare like candy. This was going to be too easy.

  “Is the rest of the structure stable?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “I don’t really need a cherry picker.”

  Yep. Simple. Hands on hips, he glanced pointedly at her with a look that dared her to disobey. “Wait for Stan, princess. He can give you a hand.” He turned to leave her there, but sized her up one last time before doing so.

  Danny knew that sexist comment was meant to test her, to humiliate her. She watched him retreat back to his trailer of electrical cabinets. Despite the look of disdain, she noticed the man had one fine ass as he strutted across the yard in his tight jeans and work boots. Two hundred pounds of solid muscle mass. And those black eyes had been so intense, serious as a stroke of bad luck and ready to rip her apart if she so much as sneezed like a girl.

  Who was this guy? What position did he hold at Cahill Salvage? Because if she was taking this kind of crap from a grunt, she’d have to come up with some riotous payback.

  The minutes ticked by. Unaccustomed to sitting down on the job, Danny paced in the dirt for a while then made a few passes around the base of the tower to eyeball it’s simple X braced design. It stood approximately eighteen feet, roughly two stories high, and there was no sign of wood rot or hardware rust. The thing was sound.

  Still no cherry p8"> no cheicker or babysitter named Stan. Didn’t her résumé state her eighteen years of experience? Tom must have blown it off as a typo once he took his first look at her.

  She checked her watch. Twenty minutes had passed. This was ridiculous. As she entertained the idea of scaling the tower – babysitter Stan be damned – she walked to the fenced-off border of the site behind the tower. That chain link fence was there to prevent anyone from falling down the steep wooded embankment below, but she wondered how well it would hold up against a runaway forklift. With a sigh, she scanned the grounds one more time for Stan and his cherry picker. Nothing.

  “Screw Stan,” she muttered, and took her first damning step.

  The anticipated sound of crashing debris reached Austin’s ears like sweet music. Not bothering with a visual confirmation, he hopped down from the trailer, shrugged back into his white undershirt and ambled toward the water tower. His one regret was missing the show. But the look of abject misery on Danny Bennett’s delicate face – her flyaway hair devoid of hardhat – was absolutely priceless. Well worth the sacrifice of the clay antique that had graced the water tower for over a century.

  “Mizz Connor!”

  Danny’s blood went cold. Still clutching broken pieces of weathered clay in her hands, she peered sheepishly over the side of the platform. The shadow beneath his hardhat masked the look she knew was there. “I - I didn’t touch it, I swear! It just…fell!”

  It was one of the most humiliating moments of her life. Her walk of shame. Witnessed by the same meatheads that had teased her so mercilessly before.

  Forced to follow the brute to whatever unforeseen horrors awaited her in the offices, Danny was positive she was about to be fired on her first day. She had more skill in her pinky finger than anyone here on his best day. She was used to giving orders, not taking them, especially from sexist pigs. This went about as far against her grain as a drag queen at a Republican convention.

  They reached the walkway and entered the door to the right of the commons room. As they walked through the first office toward another in the back, Conan what’s-his-name delivered instructions to a coarse looking woman at the front desk.

  “Sue, I’m going to need the appraisal for the water tower and a copy of Dan Connor’s application.”

  “Sure, boss.”

  Boss? Great. Now she was certain this man was no grunt.

  A security monitor behind Sue’s desk confirmed she’d probably been observed weighing her sanity at the gate earlier that morning.

  “Have a seat, Miss Connor.”

  The door clicked shut behind him and Danny’s blood rushed to her ears as she slowly lowered herself to a swivel chair facing a very nice, very organized mahogany desk. Never having been in this position, she didn’t quite know what to expect. And then all thought process came to a stuttering halt as soon as she spied the nameplate.

  If Austin had any doubts Danny Connor was a Bennett, they were dispelled as soon as he noticed the color leave her face. He picked up the nameplate that had her locked up, looked at it disinterestedly then returned it to the desk in a place she could see it better. “You know…it just occurred to me I never introduced myself.”

  Austin Cahill

  Chief Operating Officer, Safety Director

  Her golden brown eyes stuck to the plate for a moment, then slowly traveled upward to meet his. “Austin Cahill,” she said with a nervous swallow.

  “Danny Bennett.” His gaze never strayed, drinking in every emotion that crossed her stricken features. “Welcome to hell.”

  Chapter 3

  It was the worst possible scenario for a Bennett...and she was living it. Every nerve ending went up in smoke when she realized she’d walked right into a trap of some kind. The “grunt” was a Cahill. And he knew who she was before she walked through the gates. What was he even doing working in the salvage yard? Cahills had a reputed aversion to physical labor, especially in a dirty, repugnant, glorified garbage dump. Their strength was their wealth, their ability to pay others to do the work, to do the thinking. It’s what made Cahill Corporation the booming business it was today. Just a few years ago, their board of CEO’s decided to add explosive demolition to their repertoire of services, doubling their reported annual revenue. And all they had to do was order it. Snap their fingers.

  The Bennetts, on the other hand, earned their own money with hard work and skill, skills that had been handed down through the generations since Niles Bennett started tearing down buildings in the mid 1800’s. Their strength was in their numbers and in their ability to achieve the impossible. They were experts, the hardest of workers, and through time they grew quite a large business. Not nearly as large as the Cahill’s, but large enough to hire over seventy outside employees in order to keep up with the steady flow of contracts; however, each team was always supervised by a Bennett. The family was always involved, always in charge.

  Bennetts got their hands dirty and loved every minute of it. And now they, too, had just added a new department to their rnteepertoire of services. At Derek’s urging (because Danny knew her father would deny her if she asked) their father agreed that there was an increasing need for welding and repair work. So off to school she and Derek went to become certified in just about every kind of welding that was available. Finally, she was creating things, fixing things, building things. And she fell in love with it. Fell in love with school, her restless brain thirsting for knowledge, for the chance to get a degree and build things for a living. Suddenly, the new welding and repair department wasn’t enough for her. She needed more until her father accused her of never appreciating what he’d already done for her.

  I can’t help but think it’s because you’re a female, Danielle, he’d said. You’re brothers are all about the business. You are all about you!

  But that wasn’t it at all. Was it so wrong to wish to broaden her horizons? Just because her eight brothers were satisfied with their lives, did that mean she must be shackled to the sledgehammer for the rest of hers?

  As Danny thought of this, she was also forced to consider her current predicament. Her attempt to broaden her horizons had landed her in the worst place a Bennett could imagine…at the mercy of a Cahill.

  She covered her eyes with her knuckles and groaned.
“He works. Crap.”

  Austin raised a brow. “Something you weren’t counting on?” No answer for that one. “You wanna hear something ironic?” Her hands plopped down and she glared. “You can thank your brother for that. Always admired your family’s work ethic.”

  Her voice was sharp as knives. “Why didn’t you just tear up my application?”

  Austin sat down behind the desk and opened a drawer. “You mean the application you loaded up with misinformation?”

  “I didn’t lie about anything, I just didn’t…complete it.”

  He slapped a few documents on his desk and closed the drawer with his boot. “It’s fraud. They have laws against that.”

  “If you think you can throw a lawsuit at me because I failed to supply my last name, you’re out of your mind!”

  Her middle name was Connor? Odd. His hand came up, casually dismissing the notion while his other hand scribbled on the top sheet. “The thought crossed my mind, but then I asked myself,” he paused and smiled sardonically, “what would be the fun in that?”

  Danny gripped the arms of her chair willing her heart to slow down. His mood made her wonder what he was writing on that paper, knowing it had something to do with the “fun” he had planned for her. “Look, all I wanted was to work. I had no ulterior motive, it’s just that I need money to pay for college and –”

  “Dreams are nice,” he said, completely deadpan. “I’ve had some, too. But if you want to work, you came to the right place, because you’re about to get more than you bargained for.”

  Of course he wouldn’t care about her motives. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Here are those documents, boss.” Sue was in and out fast, but not before Danny could get a better look at her. She had the appearance of a truck driver, stocky build, wide forehead, straw-like hair the color of earth and a few plump, rosy moles on a tough face. The woman’s voice was more feminine than her looks would suggest, but Danny would have sensed a softness in her without hearing it.

  Austin took the folder that was handed him and leaned back while he leafed through it. “Do you know what the NRHP is, Dan?”

  She rolled her eyes at the deliberate misuse of her name and sat back in her seat. “No.”

  “National Register of Historic Places. You see this property is on that register, as well as the water tower you just defaced.”

  “I told you I didn’t touch that plaque, it fell off before I even made it up there.”

  “And how did you get up there?”

  “I climbed.”

  “When I specifically told you to wait for Stan.”

  “Stan never came!”

  “Then you should have come to me.” He let it sink in for a moment, sensed when it did then shoved a small stack of papers under her flared little nose. “If you did what you were told, you never would have touched that water tower and that plaque wouldn’t be in pieces right now.”

  “What’s this?” she asked in a small voice.

  “An appraisal. You just destroyed a $25,000 piece of history sculpted by Edward Kemeys.”

  Her face went peaked. “I’m sorry?”

  “And as far as I know, you did it deliberately.”

  She shot to her feet. “What? Why would I do that?”

  He stood now, meeting her nose-to-nose. “Maybe you didn’t like what it said.”

  “I didn’t even read it before it was smashed!”

  A photo sliced through the space between their faces and it took her eyes a moment to focus. When they did, she was able to take a good look at what the plaque used to read along with the intricate western-scroll border around it.

  Cahill Homestead

  Ean"New Romstablished 1886

  It didn’t take a genius to catch on. “You think this was personal because the plaque doesn’t have the Bennett name on it? ”

  “Isn’t it always personal, Bennett?”

  And then she came to another revelation. Danny shoved the photo away from her face and let out an incredulous laugh. “Oh, I get it. It’s personal, all right. Personal for you.”

  “You walked through my gate, lady, not the other way around.”

  “And you think you can use me to get back at Derek.” When he didn’t deny it, she shook her head and paced with hands on hips. “I should’ve known. What are you going to do, duck-tape my mouth, tie me to a chair and send him pictures?”

  Austin would have laughed if he weren’t so fired up, but this was the moment he’d been waiting for and he was determined to make it count. “Maybe I believe in an eye-for-an-eye.”

  Danny’s hands balled into little fists at her side, unfazed by the threat. “My brother didn’t drown your girlfriend.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “He doesn’t talk about it. But I know him, and you did too, once. He loved you like a brother despite the risks. He vowed that the feud wouldn’t touch his friendship with you, but he was wrong! The feud always gets in the way, always!” As it was now getting in the way of her college plans.

  “And who’s fault was that?”

  “Yours!”

  Austin suppressed a growl and his eyes narrowed to blackened dangerous slits. “Sleeping with a woman isn’t quite the same as getting one killed. And I didn’t know who I was sleeping with. Your brother knew exactly who Rena was when she drowned in that river.”

  “Oh, come on! How many ‘Brynns’ with blond hair do you know, Austin? It’s not a common name and as soon as you heard it you should have backed off.”

  Maybe, Austin thought, having considered that very thing after the deed had already been done. But he’d be damned if he was going to apologize again for an honest mistake that happened "48at happnine years ago. The teenaged girl he remembered was no angel and certainly no flower. Oh, Austin, make me come, she’d begged as he pounded into her like a young jackhammer in the back of his ’66 Mustang. Yes! More to the left! There, yes!

  “Brynn was a slut,” he replied dryly. “Derek was better off.”

  Danny blew out a disgusted laugh and continued to pace out her frustration. “It never occurred to you that she may have known exactly who she was sleeping with?”

  “Of course it did. After. And, hey, I was the one used in that deal.”

  “You broke Derek’s nose.”

  “He threw a punch, I threw a punch.”

  Her eyes traveled to the hooked scar beside his brow. “And the whole thing could have been avoided if you’d just thought with your head instead of your –”

  “Watch it. There isn’t a sixteen year old kid out there who doesn’t.”

  “Oh, come on,” she scoffed, “Bennett-versus-Cahill. We’re all pretty well schooled on the history of this feud, how it works, how people take advantage. Even at that age you should have known what Brynn was doing. You were just too horny to notice.”

  “Is that what you’re doing, Danny?” When she stopped her pacing to frown at him, he crossed his arms, looked back at her pointedly. “Taking advantage, I mean.”

  Jeez, the man was thick. “I never wanted anything to do with you or the damned feud.”

  “You threw rocks at my head when we were kids. What do you call that?”

  She closed her eyes and took a cleansing breath. “I was seven. And they were acorns, not rocks.”

  Likely story. “I thought acorns floated.”

  Who cared? “Not the ones on the ground,” she bit out as if he should know.

  “Well, it felt like rocks,” he mumbled, remembering the painful knock on his scalp like it happened yesterday. He sat back down and indicated she do the same.

  “I want to stand.”

  “Too bad.” Such a rebellious one, he thought deliciously, wondering how heettering h could use that particular weakness to his advantage, even when she finally complied. “I want to wrap this up, I have work to do. This is a contract. Read it. You’ll want to sign it. If you do, no legal action will be taken against you. If you don’t, you’ll be conta
cted by our attorneys within the next 24 hours.”

  Danny snatched the paperwork in her hand and scanned through it as Austin continued to scribble on a notepad. She couldn’t get past the first page. “You’re saying I owe you $25,000.”

  “Yep.”

  “And I must pay off the debt in manual labor.”

  “She can read.”

  “What in hell makes you think I’ll agree to this?”

  “Second page.”

  She flipped and read on. “You’ll have charges brought against me for ‘vandalizing’ a historic structure listed on the National Register?”

  He stopped what he was writing and spared her a matter-of-fact glance. “I’d take the deal if I were you. It’s cheaper.”

  “Vandalizing? Don’t you think that’s a stretch?”

  “It can be anything I make it, Bennett.” He re-focused his attention on the document. “You brought this on yourself. You can fight it if you want to, but history proves Cahill lawyers are better than yours.”

  Well that was the damned truth, she thought, her heart sinking to her toes. Everything in that last statement was true. She had thoroughly screwed herself by disobeying orders and in the process set her college plans back at least a year. And if she or her family were pursued legally, well...she’d be busted.

  “Okay. I’ll sign it. But only under the condition this doesn’t get back to my family.”

  The woman still thought she had a say and Austin wasn’t in the mood to let her down easy. “You aren’t in any position to make deals. As soon as you sign on the dotted line, I own you.” Her tough façade slipped a little. “And don’t fool yourself. I’m counting on this getting back to your family.”

  “So Derek will come after me? What little ‘trap’ are you setting for him?”

  “Don’t even think to accuse me of anything you can’t prove, lady. I won’t be the one to tell your precious brother, but it’ll get out eventually. When it does, if Derek decides to come for you, I’ll deal with him my way.” His scowl indicated she sign already and he watched her until she reluctantly took the pen from his outstretched hand.