The shower was a welcome relief. The soap and hot water washed away the smell of the creek, still clinging to my skin. Half an hour later, after having changed into pajamas, brushed my teeth, and swallowed some painkillers, I processed everything that had been discussed with Owen.
I threw myself down onto my bed, not feeling the least bit guilty that I was taking a day off from the mill. I rarely, if ever, took time even when I’d been sick. I decided I was allowed one day to think things through.
Would I be all that great at speaking on Owen’s behalf? He seemed convinced that I could do an outstanding job, but was that the belief of a desperate man who couldn’t face the idea of doing the one thing he feared the most?
That factored into it, but it wasn’t the full reason. Owen had been engrossed with everything I’d said the night before. Did I have something in me that he lacked? Something he needed for his plan to be successful. That made me feel valued in a way that I hadn’t in years.
There was so little time to prepare, and so much to do. So much to lose if it all went wrong.
I shook my head. I couldn’t think about the negatives right now. If I did nothing, then the worst would come to fruition, regardless. Rich and I would have to sell to the Frost Corporation.
Although Rich might not want to admit it out loud, I knew he would accept any other buyer over them if he could, even if it meant settling for less money. But there was no other buyer, so we had no other choice.
That meant I had to put everything into helping Owen. There was too much riding on this exhibit for me to give anything less than one hundred percent.
When Rich came knocking on my door, I was tempted to tell him to leave, so my train of thought wouldn’t be broken, but I gave in and told him to enter.
“Are you planning to go into work today?” he asked as he handed me a hot chocolate. Not a mocha. A hot chocolate with whipped cream and sprinkles. Nothing made me love my brother more than small gestures like this in the privacy of our home. I took the drink with thanks, sighing happily when the hot liquid hit the back of my throat.
“Not today. There’s too much to think about,” I admitted. “Are you going in this afternoon?”
Rich sat on the edge of my bed. “Maybe for an hour or so. But … I don’t know. I’m not sure I can handle being there and putting on a brave face for everyone. Not when I know what’s going on and what’s going to happen.”
Despite my brother’s morose, resigned face, I wouldn’t tell him about Owen’s plans. If I could come to him at the end of the month with a solid solution to save the mill, then he’d be entirely behind it, and happy for it, but ifs and maybes were not words he could get behind. If I failed, there was nothing lost or gained.
“Are we on the same page, Carl?” he asked, his expression serious.
I frowned. “About what?”
“About Mr. Smith’s … about the Frost Corporation’s offer. Are we on the same page about it?”
“We have a month to consider everything.” I licked at the whipped cream floating on the top of my hot chocolate. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“He warned us not to take all month.”
It was hard to feel frustration eating rainbow sprinkles, but the growl came out anyway. “That doesn’t change the fact that we have all month, and I plan to take every day.”
“Be reasonable.”
I put my mug down to face Rich as he stood up. “What do you mean, be reasonable? Taking time to think things over is reasonable.”
“Not when you and I both know there’s nothing else we can do. There are no other offers to consider.”
“But there might be. Someone may come in and—”
“And what?” Rich interrupted, his expression bordering on furious. “Want to buy a failing lumber mill just for it to continue to fail? Get real, Carla. No matter who buys it, they’ll knock it down and clear the forest to use the land for some other purpose, and you know it.”
“We can’t know that for sure unless we use all the time. There have to be other alternatives.” My voice was suddenly small. He was right, and that knowledge drilled home how risky my deal with Owen was. The chances of getting enough investors were challenging without all the added pressure from our failing company, but I had no other choice. I was prepared to fight to the bitter end. Rich was not.
“You can’t sign over the company without me,” I snapped at him. “Until we’re both in agreement, the mill can’t be sold. So, like it or not, we’re taking until the end of the month to consider the offer.”
“Why are you making it so difficult?” he yelled.
“Why are you so ready to give up?”
“Carla, we’ve poured our hearts and souls into this place. You think I want to give it up? We’ve done everything we can and more. At this point, I don’t see it as giving up. I’m submitting to the inevitable.”
“Then you and I have different views on what giving up means.”
We stared at each other, both furious. Neither willing to relent.
We had reached the core of an argument that we couldn’t work out by ourselves.
“Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” I yelled back.
Rich waved his arms around. “This. To us. I don’t want us to have a falling out over this.”
“So, if I go against you on this, that’s what will happen? You’ll, what? Stop speaking to me?”
Rich took a deep breath. “Yes. Until the end of the month, consider this our final conversation on the matter.”
“Oh, real mature of you, big brother.”
“That’s rich coming from the woman who won’t accept what’s right in front of her eyes.”
“Get the hell out of my room.”
“Gladly.” He stormed out, slamming the door so hard it rebounded and dented the drywall.
I sat back down on my bed, shocked to my core.
Rich never lost his temper. Certainly not as explosively as this. He had always been the calm one. The level-headed one. The one who was good with numbers and planning and keeping things on the straight and narrow. The one who studied hard at school and rarely broke a rule. The one who was first to take up the responsibility of running our parents’ mill.
I was the passionate, emotional, prone-to-anger sibling. The one who stayed out late as a teenager and didn’t listen to her parents. The one who traveled the world for a year by herself with little resources, even when her brother begged her to take a friend, or to wait a few years to save up money before going.
And yet, we’d always gotten along. We were best friends. There was nothing we couldn’t work out when we stood next to each other.
“Clearly, things have changed,” I mumbled, my face hot and angry with fresh tears.
In frustration, I picked up my half-finished mug of hot chocolate and flung it against the wall Rich had dented.
I immediately regretted staining the pale cream paint, but it was too late. The damage had been done.
Chapter Thirteen
Owen
The folders dropped to my desk with a satisfying thunk.
“This is everything you’ll need to know for the expo.”
“That’s a lot of reading material,” Carla looked up at me, wide-eyed.
“It’s not,” I replied. “A lot of it is schematics and designs, but it would benefit you to familiarize yourself with them. Their names and uses, and so on.”
“If you say so …”
Carla didn’t sound convinced, but she took the folders. “Mind if I take these to the sofa and dig in?”
“Not at all.”
The two of us were using the weekend to dig deep into everything I’d prepared for the exhibit. It was gratifying to know that Carla was still fully committed to my project even after having a few days to think about it. Now it was crunch time. There were three weeks until the exhibit and until Carla had to accept the offer for the mill.
Something seemed off about her, but she didn’t
want to talk about it. I wondered if the employees at the mill had locked on to the fact that their jobs were on the line. Or maybe she had had a fight with her brother. The two seemed close, but that could be me projecting my own sibling relationships onto her. They ran the mill together, so I figured they had to get along reasonably well.
Whatever the reason, she didn’t seem herself.
I nearly laughed at the notion. How could I know what Carla being herself meant? I barely knew the woman. And yet, although we had known each other for all of a week, a connection far stronger than the pull of the earth to the moon had occurred. Such a bond to anyone outside of my own family wasn’t something to take lightly.
So I could watch her read, I followed her into my living room and collapsed onto the other sofa with a piece of paper. I had to sort out a few internal measurements for the model homes being built outside. The first one was coming along. My brothers and I were nothing if not efficient. And with each one we constructed, the time required to build them would decrease, and our overall work capacity would increase. It was always satisfying when that happened. It was also one of the selling points of the project.
Carla caught me looking outside through the open sliding door.
“I was thinking your three-week schedule was going to be challenging, but it looks like you’ll have those homes built in time.”
I laid my hand over my heart. “I’m crushed you ever doubted me.”
“What about windows, power, and insulation? Will all that be ready when the actual houses have been built?”
I nodded. “Yes, but it’ll be tight. The priority is getting the solar roof panels up and fully connected to the rest of the house before the insulation. One way or another it’ll get done, simply because it has to be finished.”
“Yes. It has to be.” Her voice sounded troubled.
“Something wrong?”
Carla waved a hand. “No more than usual. I was thinking it’s absurd how much people achieve because they have to. We’re kind of a ridiculous species when you think about it.”
“I guess we are. I hadn’t considered it. Were you a massive procrastinator in school?”
“Huh?”
I pivoted on the sofa, staring at her as she shifted to face me.
“Were you a procrastinator in school, or were you a get-it-done-because-you-have-to kind of person?”
“Are you asking me if I left everything to the last minute?”
“I suppose I am.” Somewhere deep inside, I needed to know if she’d come through for me—for us.
She laughed. “I guess I was. My grades were always good, so I probably thought it didn’t matter.”
“I bet you get stressed as hell when a deadline is approaching.”
“Why, because I have so much to do and so little time?”
“Yes.”
“I see where you’re going with this,” she said, staring at me. Her lips pulled into a tight thin line. “What are you wanting me to say? That this whole thing is stressing me out, and I’ll probably stress you out because I won’t know what I’m doing until the day of the exhibit?”
“Now, you’re exaggerating.”
“Just say what you mean.”
“I think people get so much more quality work done when they’re in the zone.”
“Would you prefer someone who can get things completed at a reasonable pace, rather than all in one go followed by long periods of burn-out?”
I paused, considering. “I can see the benefits to both. But taking our deadline into account, I’d say I’d prefer that everything gets finished, regardless.”
“No pressure at all.”
My body shook with my suppressed laughter. “Nope, none at all.”
She rolled her eyes. “Are your deadlines this demanding for your brothers, too?”
“That depends on the project. Eli prefers a set schedule. Pax does things on the fly, which is annoying as hell because he worries us all and then gets everything done at about four in the morning.”
“And you?”
“Me?”
She put down the folder that she was holding in her lap and leaned over the armrest. We were only a foot or two away from each other. If I reached forward, I could easily have kissed her.
“Yes, you,” she murmured, a smile on her face. “How do you prefer to get things done?”
“I guess that depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether I actually want to do it.”
Her laughter rose to the rafters. “At least you’re honest about it. So, you procrastinate on the ones you hate?”
I shook my head. “The opposite, actually. If I don’t want to do it, then the only way to get it done is to break it down into set chunks of time. If it’s something I’m excited about, I won’t sleep for a couple days while the idea is coming, and then I won’t do anything for months until the deadline approaches.”
“That doesn’t sound reasonable or healthy.”
“Probably not, but once I get the idea out—once I know there’s proof of it on paper, or in a schematic, or file, then I can breathe easy. I know I can go back to it anytime because my entire train of thought is right there for me to pick apart.”
“So, if I extrapolate …” she said, smirking, “are you saying that the projects you hate require absolutely no thought or effort?”
“Exactly. What other reason would there be to hate them?”
“I don’t know. Could it be the design you’ve been given to build is boring? I know little about construction, only the materials you use to build.”
I got up suddenly and sat down beside her. She seemed surprised but didn’t protest. I should have been more careful—more professional, but the conversation was flowing so freely, and I couldn’t help but want to be closer to her. She drew me in like a mouse to cheese.
“Getting a boring design is pretty interesting.”
“That sounds like a load of bull.”
“No, seriously,” I laughed. “The fun comes in trying to shift the client into changing this or that about their plan or adjusting things that will make their build something special.”
“And if they refuse?”
“Then it gets boring, but the worst are the people who come to me with ridiculous designs they’ve created themselves, or they’ve paid out their asses for an architect to put together a fanciful, monstrous creation that can’t be built within their budget, timescale, or resources. That’s a headache … though usually one that Eli and Pax have to deal with. I’m not the people guy.”
“Eli’s the numbers guy, isn’t he?”
I nodded. “That’s what your brother does too, right?”
She almost seemed to flinch, but then she murmured in agreement. “I guess the two of them would probably get along, though I don’t recall them being anything more than ambivalent toward each other in school.”
“That’s because Eli’s a total dick.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Oh, he’s all smiles and politeness on the surface, and he’s the last one you’d expect it from, but he’s judgmental and supercritical of people’s motives. I think he believes everyone has an agenda because he usually has one himself. He also comes up with simultaneously the best and worst insults you’ve ever heard.”
She chuckled as I dared to move in closer. Our arms were touching, and it was getting uncomfortable to turn our necks to look at each other, so I shifted my body to face her.
“Seems like you get along with your brothers. You don’t say much about Paxton, though.”
“That’s because Pax doesn’t say all that much,” I admitted. “He’s much better now, pretty open when he’s with me and Eli. Give him a drink or two, and he’s a regular windbag, but in school, he stayed to himself for the most part. That’s his business, so whatever his reason was for it is his alone to talk about.”
Carla frowned. “He’s never spoken about it? Not even at the time? Your mom or dad never—”
>
“My mom probably did, but therein lies the problem of trying to speak to a kid who doesn’t speak.”
“Okay, but he’s much better now?”
I nodded. “Now he comes across as dark and mysterious.”
“Thanks for this, Owen.”
Her eyes turned glossy.
“For what?”
She turned away. “I just needed … I don’t know. It’s nice to hear about you and your brothers. About another family that’s close. There’s only me and Rich left. No aunts or uncles or grandparents or anything. It’s nice to imagine having a big family. You know, lots of people to speak to even if you get mad at one or two of them.”
Ah, so she’s had a fight with Rich.
Gently, I tilted her chin back so she would look at me.
“Everything will be okay.”
“How could you possibly believe that?”
“Because it has to be.”
She burst out laughing. “How long do you think we have to say that until we actually believe it?”
“As long as it takes.”
“You’re such a good guy. I feel bad about making fun of you.”
I leaned in until our noses almost touched. This close, I could feel the heat coming from her breath. I had to resist the urge to run my fingers through her hair and pull her in against my lips.
“You did that regularly before I met you?” I murmured, moving back a fraction, I focused my eyes on her mouth, making my train of thought so obvious it was almost painful.
“Only when I heard about another girl disillusioned by the great Owen Cooper after a date.”
“Hey, I was a perfect gentleman to them.”
“And absolutely nothing more. The bare minimum to get into their pants, and then you ran away.”
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