“That’s it, you’re paying my dues at Weight Watchers.”
“Hmm?” Lucas looked up from the sheaf of papers he had been staring at for an hour without really reading any of it and looked at his secretary. “Evelyn, what’re you talking about?”
“This.” She held up an oversize frosted cookie and shook it at him. “Ever since Rafe married Katie, we’ve got these amazing cookies in the break room every day.”
“That’s a bad thing?” he asked, smiling.
Evelyn was in her late fifties with a rounded figure and short, graying brown hair. She was smart, efficient and knew as much as Lucas did about running crews and the customer base. She’d been with him for five years and had long since let go of her polite, businesslike tone with him.
“I’ve gained five pounds,” she muttered and gave the cookie a glare before taking a bite and nearly groaning in pleasure.
“Don’t eat them,” he said with a shrug.
“Excellent advice,” she muttered with a dark look. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Evelyn, was there a point to this?”
She sighed in defeat, took another nibble of the cookie and said, “There’s trouble on the Johnson site. The crew started digging for the new gas line before the WeDig people came out to clear the site and they hit the water line.”
“Perfect.” Anger churned his guts. His crews were more professional than that. They knew damn well that any digging had to be cleared by the city guys who came out to tell them where gas, water and cable lines were, giving them specific areas to avoid. “Who’s in charge of that site?”
She rolled her eyes. “Warren.”
“Damn it.”
“Exactly,” Evelyn said. “He’s on line two right now, wanting to talk to you.”
“Good. I’ve got a few things to say to him, too.” He waved one hand at his secretary, who backed out of his office chewing on her cookie and moaning like a woman having sex.
Oh, now there was an image he didn’t need in his head. Evelyn. Having sex.
He snatched up the phone, pushed line two and snapped, “Warren, what the hell is going on? You dug before getting the go-ahead?”
“Not me, boss. It was Rick. The new guy. Got impatient, I guess. I was making a run to a supply shop for more pipe. When I got back, it was like the Great Flood out there.”
“You’re in charge, Warren,” Lucas told him, tired of the man’s excuses. Whenever anything went wrong on one of his sites, he was never around. Always off doing something else. “You give the orders on this project, and you take your orders from me. You damn well know better than to dig before WeDig comes out to clear it and the guys should know it, too.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No more buts. I’ll be at the site in a half hour. For now, get some pumps in there to clear the yard and get that water pipe capped off.”
“Already done.”
“That’s something anyway…” Shaking his head, he added, “Keep the guys on site until I get there.”
“Right, boss.”
When he hung up, Lucas was still furious, but almost grateful for the shift in his thoughts. If not for Warren’s ineptitude, he’d have nothing on his mind but Rose Clancy. And he’d already done nothing but think about her since the night before.
She had haunted his dreams, making sleep nearly impossible, and then this morning over his cup of coffee, he’d smelled her in his kitchen. It was as if she was imprinting herself on his consciousness.
Now, Lucas thought back to how Dave had always described his sister. Younger, softer, easily hurt and scared of her own shadow. She hadn’t sounded all that appealing to him until the day he first met her. Then, her looks had bowled him over first and her laughter had hit him hard. There was something about a woman who knew how to laugh, he thought now. Maybe it was because growing up, he’d never heard his own mother laugh at a damn thing. Whining on the other hand…she had been very good at that.
As soon as that thought entered his mind, Lucas deliberately shut it down. It had sounded bad—disloyal—even to himself. His mom had done the best she could. She had just been too…alone.
Hell. Memories from his childhood weren’t going to make this situation any easier to deal with. Disgusted with himself and his lack of concentration, Lucas pushed aside all thoughts but those related to work. For most of his life, work had been his sanctuary. The place in the world where everything was as it should be. Where the rules were well-defined and always followed. Here, Lucas kept his finger on the pulse of the company. Here, he wasn’t questioned, just obeyed. Here, he was—
“How’d it go last night?”
“What?” He looked up as Sean strolled into his office and plopped himself down into one of the three chairs in front of Lucas’s desk. He was chewing on one of the frosted cookies.
“Did you know we’ve got cookies in the break room now?” He held one hand to his heart and bowed his head. “Thank you, sister Katie….”
“Yeah, I heard,” Lucas muttered. “Apparently a Weight Watchers class is in the offing.”
“Not for me,” Sean said with a laugh as he licked the last bit of frosting from his finger.
Lucas sighed. “Is there a reason you’re here?”
“Yep. Curiosity. How did it go last night? You know. With Rose?”
“How did you know about that?”
“Your secretary told my secretary, who told me and…” He shrugged and grinned. “Here I am. Seriously? Cooking lessons?”
Frowning, Lucas leafed through a pile of papers on his desk. He didn’t want to talk about this with Sean. Hadn’t he just been focusing on not thinking about her? For all the good it had done him.
In spite of his best efforts, she kept popping back into his mind. Her smile. The way light flashed on her long blond hair. The sound of her laugh and the fresh, lemony scent of her. It was all right there whether he wanted it to be or not.
“Nothing to say?” Sean whistled low and long. “Must be even more interesting than I figured.”
Glaring at his brother, Lucas demanded, “Don’t you have something to do?”
“Actually, yeah. I’m headed out to look into a new service provider. With the way the company’s expanding, our old one just isn’t keeping up.”
Lucas didn’t even have to pretend disinterest. Sean was enamored of all the technological aspects of the business, but once he started talking about it, Lucas’s eyes glazed over. “Good,” he said. “Go do it.”