I sigh, and finally climb out of my truck, head over to examine his handiwork.
He gestures at the trunk as I approach. “Well? What do you think?”
I examine it. Begrudgingly, I have to admit it’s actually pretty well done. “The joins are even, no overlapping or gapping, nice and tight. Sturdy, square…” I move the hinged lid. “I have to admit, I’m impressed.”
He grins, and if I was a woman of weaker moral fiber, my panties would probably be melting right now. “High praise, from you.”
I shrug. “I mean, it’s a box made from scrap lumber and plywood. But considering the source, I am moderately impressed.”
He rolls his eyes. “Last time we spoke, you didn’t think I’d know which end of a hammer to hold on to. And a couple weeks ago, you wouldn’t have been far from the truth.”
“Just one question.” I gesture at the trunk. “Why?”
He laughs, raking a hand through his hair. And dammit, why does that silly gesture put butterflies in my belly? It’s dumb.
“I dunno. I’ve been watching carpentry videos, and this seemed…attainable.” He plays with the lid, opening and closing it. “Next step is to figure out how to make the outside look nice, like with fancy wood.”
“Fancy wood. Just…wow.” I eye him. “Why are you watching carpentry videos, though? This kind of woodworking”— I gesture at the box—“has very little to do with that kind,” and here I gesture at the framing.
A shrug, and a nod. “I know. But it’s basic skills, I guess. If I’m going to own half of a construction company, I should at least have an inkling of a clue, right? And as you’ve pointed out, I don’t. So I’ve got to start somewhere.”
I gesture at the tools. “Put that stuff away. Let’s talk site checks.”
He puts everything back where it goes, locks the trailer, and follows me into the shell. At this point, I don’t need a tape measure to know if something is off but I still bring one, just because even if you can reliably eyeball the sixteen-inch space between studs, you still have to know.
“So, some basics.” I tap a stud. “This is a stud. Basic vertical support post. There should be no less than sixteen inches between studs, and no more than twenty-four.”
He rubs the back of his neck. “I’ve spent the last week and a half shadowing Cal, actually. I can’t say I know all the standards off the top of my head like he does, but I do have—” he pulls a small black Moleskine notebook from a back pocket, and hands it to me. “My handy-dandy…notebook!”
I can’t help a laugh. “Did you really just reference Blue’s Clues?”
“Yes, I did.” He breaks out in an embarrassed laugh. “Dell and I once got super stoned after school one day, and we spent an entire afternoon watching old school Blue’s Clues.”
I roll my eyes. “Not surprising in the least. Right about your maturity level, at that point, too.”
I flip through the pages: he’s filled dozens of pages with notes on construction standards, complete with surprisingly good diagrams. It’s like he put himself through a crash course on home building.
“Again, I’m impressed. You did all this in the last week and a half?” I hand the notebook back.
He nods, with another of those laconic whatever shrugs. “Yeah.”
I continue my check of the shell, measuring and double-checking, making sure everything is up to my personal standards. “So you really are actually planning on, like, doing this?” I walk up the bare plywood stairs to the second floor, eyeballing trusses and ceiling joists from below. “Buying out Dell…it’s really not some kind of joke the two of you are playing on me?”
He doesn’t answer right away. In fact, when I glance at him to see if he even heard my question, he seems to be wrestling with what to say, how to answer. His jaw is tight, and his brow furrowed.
After a long silence, he just shakes his head. “No, it’s not.”
I find a truss that’s clearly been put in well out of true, at the wrong angle, and with the entirely wrong kind of bracket—I take a photo and send it to Cal. “This, for example, is why we do site checks regularly, and why several people have to do them,” I say to Thai. “This kind of thing could be easily overlooked. Now, sure, this wouldn’t cause the ceiling to fall in or anything, but it would throw things off. Catch it now, and it’s an easy fix. Don’t catch it until the roof is going on? Much bigger issue.”
He nods. “Makes sense.” A pause. “Delia, I know you don’t really have much reason to trust me, but—”
“Nope. I don’t.” I give him an obviously fake, bright smile. “I don’t trust easily as a general rule, Thai, and the truth is, you’re in large part responsible for that. I don’t like you. I don’t want you on my jobsite. I don’t want you in my life. But like it or not, you legally own half of my company, and there’s nothing I can do about that, short of buying it from you, and to be quite frank, I simply don’t have that kind of liquid assets. So I’m stuck with you. Which really, really chaps my ass. So, whatever you’re going to say…don’t. I promise you, I won’t buy it, and I don’t want to hear it.”
He stares me down, and I have a split-second twinge of wondering if maybe I wasn’t being entirely fair. But then I remember eighteen years of being called Dino Delia and Donuts Delia, and brought cupcakes with Miss Piggy drawn on them, and having my books stolen and ruined, and my glasses broken, and snakes and mud and bugs thrown on me…
Maybe he’s not entirely that guy anymore. But that doesn’t mean I forgive him.
He holds my gaze for a moment, and then his expression hardens. “Fair enough, I guess.” He turns on his heel and heads for the stairs down. “I have a meeting in half an hour with Boyd, so I’m going to go.”
I frown. “A meeting with Boyd? Why?”
“I found a discrepancy in your books.”
“Like, our accounting books?”
“No, Delia, your Harry Potter books.” He pauses on the third stair down. “Not sure yet if it’s just an isolated thing, or if it’s part of a larger issue. Boyd wanted to go over it with me before we brought it to you.”
“You went through our books?”
“I went through everything, Delia.”
“What do you mean, everything?”
He snorts. “Your accounting, your projected profit margins, your average materials losses, your churn rate.” He hesitates. “I know that your dad had a habit of hiring pretty young receptionists, but that it was never for any reason other than having eye candy around the office. I know the Karsten account is way, way over budget and that at the current rate of construction it won’t be done for something like two years. I know Doug Mendes in the marketing department is completely useless, faked his credentials and references, and spends most of his day playing Warcraft when he thinks no one is looking.”
I blink, open my mouth, but he’s not done. Ugh, this again.
“I also know Boyd is on the verge of divorce because his wife has a spending problem and he’s been seeing Shannon in payroll for months. I know Constance has wine in her coffee thermos from around ten in the morning onward, but she’s totally reliable and, honestly, irreplaceable. I know your lumber supplier is about to jack up their costs by at least double, and you can’t afford that, but you’re having trouble finding a new supplier—and I may have a partial solution but I doubt you’ll go for it.” His eyes blatantly rake over me, head to toe; I have a meeting myself in a little bit, to look at a plot of land which could be our next big development project. Meaning, I’m dressed to the nines in a tight black skirt, flattering green blouse, and my best heels. “I also know you’re wearing the hell out of that skirt.”
And then he’s gone, trotting down the steps and to his truck. The engine is roaring and he’s gone—and I’m still standing with my jaw on the floor.
Did he…
Did he just…compliment me?
I actually, literally look up to the sky for flying pigs, or some sign of the impending apocalypse.
&
nbsp; The rest of what he said is percolating in my brain, but I’m still currently stuck on the last part.
You’re wearing the hell out of that skirt.
I mean, I do look good in this skirt. I wore it on purpose knowing I look damn good in it, because I happen to know the real estate developer I’m meeting is a bona fide member of the good ol’ boys chauvinist club, and responds best to women when they dress like he expects them to. And if wearing a tight skirt and low-cut blouse will get me a twenty-million-dollar contract? Duh.
But hearing it from Thai Bristow?
I’m still faint with shock.
Surreptitiously, I check in on everything Thai dumped on me.
Sure enough, the Karsten account is bloated and bogged down. I arrange a meeting with the Karstens for tomorrow so I can try and convince them to trim things back so we can get them into their new custom home in something less than twenty-four months and something like within budget. I monitor Doug Mendes most of the day, and sure enough, he does literally zero actual work; most of the time he was, as Thai claimed, playing a video game, and the rest of the time he was either in the break room, on the phone, or outside smoking. Easy fix: I call him into my office and dismiss him with his last paycheck in hand.
I watch Boyd exchange a quiet, intense conversation with Shannon, which does indeed smack of a side romance. Not really my business, though, as long as Boyd does his job and his thing with Shannon doesn’t affect his work performance. Same with Constance—I notice she comes out of the bathroom with minty fresh breath rather frequently, which I had noticed before but hadn’t really equated with anything in particular other than good oral hygiene; as long as her work doesn’t suffer, I don’t see that I have any reason or place to interfere on that front, and as Thai said, Constance is one of the few employees who is genuinely vital to our day-to-day operations.
The lumber supply thing is a known for me already, but I’m curious as to his possible solution he thinks I won’t go for.
And how the hell did he know about Dad’s thing with receptionists? It was a running joke by the time he died. They got younger, prettier, and with ever more ridiculous names. Case in point: our current receptionist is still Candy, who was Dad’s last hire. She’s younger than me, pretty as all get out, ditzy, is named Candy…but she’s a damn good receptionist, so I’ve kept her on. Dad knew what he was doing, after all.
How did he find all this out in the first two weeks on the job?
I have misjudged Thai on at least one front, it seems.
I’m used to being the last one in the office. Dad, who had a wife and children to go home to, was often here till seven or eight and sometimes nine. I, single, with no one at all to go home to, not even a cat, am often here till at least nine. No reason not to, right? I’d just go home and watch TV with a glass of wine, so I may as well be productive instead.
I’m going over the Karsten account, trying to find places we can cut the budget down. When Thai said it was bloated, he wasn’t kidding. I like a nice Carrera marble as much as the next girl, but does literally every surface in the whole house have to be marble? And…thirty grand on a built-in intercom and music system? Have they not heard of Alexa? Buy a couple of those and save thirty grand; it’s an older couple with no kids—what possible use will they ever have for an intercom? I appreciate upselling to pad the profit margin, but it seems Nick, the lead project manager for that account, has gone a little overboard. We want to make our clients happy with the finished project, not milk them for every last dollar and leave them broke in a house they hate because it’s overdone.
That’s not our company ethos. I make a note to have a talk with Nick later.
I don’t feel, see, or hear him, so focused am I on the account file.
“Still here, huh?” His voice is deep, rough, and intimate. Close.
I screech and leap half a foot out of my chair. “Holy shit, Thai—do not sneak up on me like that.”
He perches on the edge of my desk and toys with a tape measure that had been on my desk, flipping the end out and letting it snap back again…and again, and again.
“Working late, I see,” he says.
“I’m here till nine most nights, so no, I’m not working late. Midnight would be working late.” I take the tape measure from him before I bean him in the head with it. “What do you want, Thai?”
He taps the Karsten file I have spread out on my desk—most of our files are digital, but certain elements I prefer to print out and mark up with highlighters and pens. “What’d I tell you? Over budget, am I right?”
I sigh. “Yes, you were right. About Doug, too.” I slap the folder closed and lean back in my chair. “In fact, as much as it chaps my ass to admit it, you were right on all accounts.”
He crosses his arms over his chest, and I hate that my eyes are drawn to the thickness of his biceps and the breadth of his chest and shoulders. And how green his eyes are today. “I can help you out with that.”
“With what?”
“Me.” He smirks, but it’s sort of rueful. “Your problem with me is not that I’m incompetent. I think you know that. Really, your problem wasn’t even that I was lazy—that never had anything to do with you, except insofar as it influenced Dell.”
“Ah, and what is my problem with you, then?”
“I’m an asshole.”
A disbelieving snort escapes me, unbidden. “You admit it then?”
He arches an eyebrow, shrugs. “I’ve never denied it.”
I think back, doing a quick scan of my memories and realize he’s right. “So you just have never bothered with trying to not be a dick?”
“Nope, not really.” He laughs. “Funny, this conversation is oddly similar to another one I had just recently.”
“You mean another conversation where someone told you that you were an asshole?”
“And I maintained that I knew it, that I’ve always been an asshole, and I’ve never really tried to deny it.”
“It was a woman, I imagine.”
He smirks. “Got it in one.”
I roll my eyes. “Not a difficult guess. You don’t really seem like the boyfriend type.”
He narrows his eyes. “And you’re the girlfriend type, are you?”
My temper flares at that—I don’t care to examine my own hypocrisy too closely. “You know nothing about me, Thai—don’t act like you do.”
“And you know so much about me?” He’s maddeningly impossible to get a reaction out of—even as he retorts, he’s even-keeled and sports that cocky smirk.
“I just have a hard time picturing you doing the domestic thing. Buying a girl flowers, taking her to dinner and a movie…learning her name, sticking around after sex. Little things like that.” My knives are out, but this is Thai—he’s earned every last ounce of my enmity and vindictiveness a thousand times over.
He nods, but it seems less like agreement and more like he’s saying, So that’s how you want to play it? “Yeah, you’ve definitely got the inside track on my sex life, Delia. Must have been spying on me.” He stands up. Shoves his hand in his pocket, turns to go but glances back over his shoulder for one last parting shot. “But hey, at least I have a sex life. I don’t claim to know what goes on in yours, but something tells me when you do quit working long enough to engage in sexual intercourse, it’s with a clipboard and a checklist. Probably with guys who have three first names, and they probably wear suspenders, and loafers barefoot with jeans and have well-rounded stock portfolios and drive BMWs.”
I flush with rage…and embarrassment: the last guy I had sex with was named Robert Michael Duncan. And he wore loafers barefoot with jeans…and drove a BMW.
It was awful.
The sex, I mean. Quick, and awful.
“I don’t even have a clipboard,” I mutter, knowing the response is only playing more fully into his hands.
He laughs—out loud, and with genuine humor, shaking his head as he walks out. “Oh man, Delia. What a comeback.” He spin
s on his heel, shaking head again and grinning at me. “You are too funny.”
I just glare. “Asshole.”
He just winks at me and shoots me double finger guns. “You know it, babycakes.”
He’s gone before I could come up with a suitably venomous retort to being called babycakes.
He hasn’t changed that much, clearly.
Chapter Nine
Matthais
Ohhhhh man, I must have nailed that one right on the head.
I don’t even have a clipboard, she said.
Meaning, the rest must have been fairly accurate. I’d been making it up—I had no idea what her type was. Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about her much over the past ten years. Her sex and dating life are a complete mystery to me; I have no memory of her dating anyone in high school. I mean, logically I know she’s a normal woman with the usual needs and desires. But I just can’t picture what her type would be. What I said to her was just me being a dick, trying to goad her into one of those adorably vicious temper tantrums. Apparently, however, I’d inadvertently hit upon the actual truth—her sexual partners are boring, straitlaced, and probably selfish and shitty in the sack.
I am none of those things.
Based entirely on that interaction, I’d be willing to bet the title to my McLaren that Delia McKenna has never had an orgasm she didn’t give herself.
Say what you want about me—entitled, arrogant, narcissistic, whatever. True, not true, whatever. But what I’m certifiably not? Bad in bed, quick, or unaware of what my partner wants and needs.
Delia strikes me as someone who doesn’t know how to loosen up. How to unwind. How to stop controlling everything and just let someone make her feel good.
She probably has sex with her bra on, and the lights off.
I shake myself like a wet dog—why the fuck am I thinking about how Delia McKenna has sex? That is the absolute last thing on the planet I should spend mental energy thinking about.
The Parent Trap Page 7