Make You Mine, page 5
“Is he going to use it for his damn horses and carriages?” Joe rose and stared moodily out the window at the river. “I can’t stand the thought of our party barn being filled with horse crap.”
“No, I just told you they want it for events.” Jack released a frustrated breath. “It’s time to let the old place go, guys. We need to focus our time and resources here or we’re going to be.
“Are things really that dire?” Cam asked.
“The economy is tough right now and people aren’t building like they were even a couple of years ago. We’ve got bids out, and I’m meeting with a group that wants to put a distribution center up off the highway this fall. But we need these houses, so everything depends on Custom Homes right now. We’ll get the specs started—Annabelle, do you have those drawings done yet? The houses for the workers you were telling me about?”
Annabelle nodded. “I’ll email them to you. Four designs that are all one story, right around fifteen hundred square feet, but I’m trying to give them each a little personality.”
“Great.” Jack placed both palms on the table and shoved up out of his chair. “Anybody else? Missy, get me Hank Thatcher on the phone. If he okays Bowman, then we’ll hire him and you can call the others and thank them for their time.”
*
“I still can’t believe he hired someone else.” Maddie scowled, despite having finished an hour’s worth of yoga. “Is the new guy already on the job?”
“Yup, started a coupla days ago.” Annabelle Walker sat cross-legged on her yoga mat, stretching her arms in the air. “I’m so sorry, Maddie. I swear I don’t know what Jack was thinking. I saw the other résumés. You were far and away the best.”
Maddie closed her eyes and lay face down on the mat in an exaggerated child pose. She’d met Annabelle when she’d started classes a few nights ago here at Tierney Flaherty’s yoga studio, and the two of them had hit it off immediately, hanging out at the juice bar to chat after practice. When Maddie revealed that she’d applied for the job of crew supervisor, she was delighted to learn that Annabelle was the architect for Walker Construction. They’d taken themselves off to Holly’s Tea Leaf Café for something sweet after class that night and talked endlessly, but kept coming back to the exciting possibility that they might be working together.
But alas, that isn’t meant to be.
“I knew when I didn’t hear after a week that it wouldn’t be good news. Missy was so sweet—honestly, I don’t know who was more disappointed, her or me.” Maddie lifted her head and arched her back. “I guess I’m back on the job hunt. I probably should’ve been out there already, but I really thought I had a good chance at Walker.”
Annabelle popped up and began rolling her yoga mat. “Missy said you were the best of all the candidates, but Jack can be . . . I dunno. Weird. He didn’t even mention anyone he interviewed. Only said he was going to hire this Shea Bowman guy, who could start immediately.”
“I could’ve started immediately.” She didn’t know why the fact that Annabelle’s hottie cousin Jackson had passed on her felt so personal, but it did. It made her wonder if he really was embarrassed that she’d seen him in the elevator with the sexy brunette. Like that would matter a damn to her qualifications as a crew supervisor.
“I know. For what it’s worth, Bowman left Thacker Construction about a month ago. Maybe they haven’t hired anyone new yet.”
Maddie gazed up at Annabelle and felt a brief stab of envy for her flat belly and nonexistent behind. Nobody should look that perfect when they’d just been through a sweaty hot yoga class. She shoved her fingers through her hair and redid her messy bun before going into downward dog and then easing to a stand. She was plenty flexible but not so much that she could pop up from padmasana pose. She actually couldn’t remember ever being able to pop up from sitting cross-legged.
“Want to go by Mac’s and grab something to eat? I haven’t had supper yet.” Annabelle pulled her jacket over her sleek yoga tank and pants.
“Oh, thanks, but I’ve gotta meet Carly Hayes on my way home to look at an apartment and then shower and change to be at the hotel at midnight for my shift.” Maddie would’ve loved dinner and a chat with her new friend, but she was still too pissed with Jackson Walker to handle any more conversation about it. Her emotions were high over the handsome CEO, and that baffled her. She needed some time to sort through her feelings before she figured out where to send her résumé next.
For the moment, she thrust his broad shoulders and startling blue eyes to the back of her mind. She had that appointment with Mac’s partner, Carly Hayes, at six thirty to look at the apartment above their garage. Apparently, it was the place to land for wayward singles who turned up in River’s Edge. Kitt had rented it before she married Rye, and the last person who lived there was Jasmine Weaver, who, according to Maddie’s dad, ran the local arts center in town. Kitt had hooked her up with Carly when Maddie mentioned trying to find her own place.
Annabelle laughed. “Oh, Carly’s a sweetie pie, and that apartment has been through at least five of my friends since I got back to town from Indy.”
“Did you consider it?”
“It was occupied at that point—I think maybe by Aidan Flaherty . . . not sure exactly. Besides, we’d just finished building the Box Factory condos, and I got a great move-in deal and now I love it there.” She snapped her fingers. “You should come look at them! I think there’s a couple of one bedrooms available. It would be an investment instead of dropping money on rent.”
Maddie followed her down the stairs and out onto Jefferson Street. “I don’t think so. I’m not ready to make that much of a commitment to stay in River’s Edge. Carly says they’ll do a month-to-month lease, and if I have to go farther afield to find a job, I’ll be moving, anyway.”
Annabelle nodded sympathetically. “What would it take to convince you to stay?”
Maddie offered a wry smile. “Well, thanks to your cousin, that ship has probably sailed.”
“Oh, Mads, I’m truly sorry.”
Impulsively, Maddie gave Annabelle a quick hug. “It’s not your fault at all or his; I shouldn’t have put all my eggs in one basket, that’s all. I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
They walked to the corner and stopped. After exchanging another squeeze, Annabelle turned west on Main to head toward her house, while Maddie checked her Notes app for the address of Mac Mackenzie’s garage apartment. With a deep breath, she copied and pasted the address into her maps app. Her own place . . . It was a start, even if she wasn’t at all sure how she was going to pay her rent.
Chapter Five
“I don’t care if he’s on a damn Zoom call. I’m going in there!”
Jack could hear Eli’s raised voice even with the doors to his office closed tight. Then came Missy’s soothing tone and Cam’s voice, whose words were a bit quieter than Eli’s, but still urgent. What the hell was going on out there?
He was nearly done with the interminable online meeting he was in with the four men who had recently bought twenty-six acres north of the highway and were looking for a company to build a distribution center for their e-commerce business. He’d heard all he ever wanted to know for his entire lifetime about product mixing, cross-docking, order fulfillment, and packaging in the meeting that had gone on for nearly two hours. The men seemed to like Annabelle’s drawings—what’s not to like? A huge building with a bunch of loading docks, but they had to give Jack every detail about how they intended to use the space she’d designed. He was beyond ready to close the meeting, but they kept coming up with more things to discuss, and he was reluctant to shut down because it seemed as if they were ready to sign on the dotted line.
At last a break in the conversation came, and miraculously, the hubbub from the other office had stopped, so he could click off Mute. “Gentlemen, I’m so pleased that you’re impressed with our ideas and design. If you’re ready to make a decision, we’d like to get started for you as soon as possible.”
The oldest of the four, Carl, who didn’t look to be more than twenty-five, gave him a thumbs-up. “I think we’re ready to sign with you, man. So, like . . . Randy and me are down here in Louisville, but we’re headed back up to Indy tomorrow. How ’bout we make a right turn on 56 and stop by your offices to finalize the deal?”
One of the others, a bespectacled guy who looked to be about twelve and had been loud and contrary throughout the whole meeting, shook his head. “Nope, not so fast. I still want to take another look at the other bids one more time.”
“Michael, we’ve been over the bids a thousand times,” groaned the tall one named Drew, who’d spent the entire meeting tossing a Nerf basketball into a small hoop hanging on a door opposite his chair, catching it, and tossing it again. “Let’s go with these guys.”
“I want to talk about it again.” Michael’s lower lip stuck out in a pout. If Jack were a betting man, he’d put a hundred bucks on the fact that the kid was sitting in his parents’ basement—the wall behind him looked like knotty pine—the kind of paneling people used in rec rooms in the sixties.
From Missy’s research, Jack knew that this start-up was soaring up the e-commerce ladder, selling technology at a colossal rate and making money hand over fist, and that Michael, the little rat, was the one who threw in most of the capital. The other three—Drew, Carl, and Randy—didn’t have nearly as much financial skin in the game, but they were hard workers and eager to grow their already very successful company. Michael had been the one with all the questions that, so far, Jack had been able to field with no problem. It wasn’t Walker Construction’s first distribution center rodeo. They had built one several years ago upriver near Cincinnati.
“Why don’t I bug out and let you four discuss this among yourselves? We’d love to work with you, and I believe we can give you exactly what you’re looking for. Carl, text me if you plan to come by tomorrow. We’ll have contracts ready for you if you do.”
Michael smirked while the other three simply looked like they were over it, but finally, Carl smiled. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Jack. Thanks for everything.”
Clicking out of the meeting, Jack dropped back in his chair and closed his eyes for a second. Then he rose and strode across his office, yanking open the double doors. “Missy? What’s going on out—” That’s when he saw Eli and Cam standing out on the mezzanine that overlooked the entrance to the building. They both looked like thunderclouds. “What’s up, you guys?”
Eli crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the railing. “We gotta talk, Jack.” And Cam nodded grimly.
Curious, Jack jerked his head toward his office. “Come on in.”
Eli got straight to the point. “We just fired Shea Bowman.”
“What?” Jack’s heart sank to his socks. “You fired Bowman? Seriously? He’s only been with us a couple of weeks.”
“And that was all the time he needed to totally screw us up.” Cam tossed himself into the chair across from Jack’s desk. “For the third day in a row, he put three crews up on the specs, where the foundations are barely poured yet, so they’re up there watching Anthony and his guys pour footers and form up the stem walls while the theater is still not quite finished, and they want a soft opening in two weeks. Hell, Jack, he’s got carpenters picking up sticks around the sites to get ready for the landscapers, and Joe doesn’t even have a design yet. And the idiot is marking trees to come down after we’d already decided we were leaving as many of the old-growth trees up there as possible—that’s not his call, man, it’s Joe’s!” The explanation came out fast and all in one breath. Cam paused, his eyes glittering. “Eli and I have been at the theater all night working, because Bowman told the crews no overtime. If we’d pulled some of the people in with us, it would’ve constituted overtime.”
Eli jumped in. “He’s been treating Angie and Dawn like crap all week. Not enough to be considered actual sexual harassment, but he’s walking a fine line. This morning he sent them down to work on Mark Weaver’s new boat barn. Only the two of them, which is nuts, since we’re raising the rafters down there right now and that takes way more than two people. We’ve got to get that building up and get our crew out of there before Mark starts pulling boats out of storage, or there’s gonna be a helluva traffic jam at the marina, something Roy and Lila reminded me of when I ran into them up at Noah’s this morning.” Eli paced, his voice raw with frustration. “We sent four guys over there after we canned Bowman, and the rest we divided between the theater and River Run. We gotta get their clubhouse moving again. Gerry and Jane are having the pool installed next month, and they’d like the building completed by the end of May. And, by the way, Bowman is pissed as hell, so you’re probably going to be hearing from him.”
“Holy hell, Eli. You don’t have the authority to fire anyone.” Jack’s first thought came out completely unbidden.
Eli clenched his fists, and Jack could tell he wanted to come across the desk at him, but he stopped behind Cam’s chair instead. “No, I don’t, but Cam’s a director, so he can. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said we. It was Cam who fired him, and you are missing the point here, Jack. Things are a mess, and if we don’t fix it and fix it fast, we’re going to be in a world of hurt if we get any of the projects we’ve bid on.”
Jack took a deep breath, then another. He now had all five crews scattered around the area and no one corralling them. Dammit.
Suddenly, Annabelle appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on in here? I could hear you guys yelling all the way down the mezzanine.”
Jack waved her in. “We no longer have a construction super. Cam fired Bowman’s ass.”
“Thank heavens for that.” She patted Cam’s shoulder. “Good on ya, bro.”
Jack narrowed his eyes. “What have you heard?”
“Only that he treats Angie and Dawn like slaves—he sent them for coffee and doughnuts for the whole crew up at the spec site yesterday. And what the hell does he have crews up there for, anyway?”
Eli touched his nose, then pointed a finger at her. “Exactly.”
“Well, crap . . .” Jack scowled and stepped to the open door. “Missy, can you bring me the rest of—”
Missy hopped up from her desk. “Right here.” She handed him a couple of stapled sheets.
Jack didn’t even have to look at it to know it was Madeline Ross’s résumé. “Where are the others?”
She stared at him, her lips a grim line. “You don’t need the others.”
His gut tightened and a million different responses went through his head before he finally took the résumé and gazed at it for a full minute. There were no words to describe how much he didn’t want to do this, but when he looked up at his brother’s and his cousins’ expectant faces, he shook his head and lifted his chin to Missy. “Okay. Call her.”
Annabelle jumped on that. “Nun-uh, you have to talk to her.”
Dismayed, Jack tossed the papers on his desk and wiped his sweaty palms on his pants leg. “Why?”
“Because she’s got an interview with Thatcher tomorrow, and they’re going to offer her a helluva position, and she’ll be moving to Louisville before you can ask her to dinner and a movie.” Great. Clearly, Annabelle knew about his fascination with Madeline. “For Pete’s sake, Jack, I know why you didn’t want to hire her—”
“We all know,” Cam added with a grin that made Jack itch to punch him, although he never would.
“What do we all know?” Joe, dressed in his standard work gear of battered khaki pants, a stained sweatshirt, and dusty boots, wandered in to join what had apparently become an impromptu Walker Construction board meeting.
“That Jack has a crush on Madeline Ross.” Eli smirked.
Joe, thankfully, avoided the upholstered wing chairs and instead sat down in Jack’s leather chair behind the desk. “Oh, yeah, we all know about that.”
Heat rose from Jack’s collar, and he unbuttoned his top button and loosened his tie. What a damn nightmare this day had become. “Look, you guys, I’m not seventeen and this isn’t high school.”
Annabelle agreed with a bright smile. “You’re absolutely right, coz. That’s why you need to go to her, hat in hand, and beg her to work for us.”
Cam gave him a hard stare. “Jack, the woman built an app to keep jobs and crews and materials organized. She’s the perfect super. Hire her!”
“How do you know about the app?”
“Missy showed us her résumé,” Joe put in from Jack’s chair.
Missy’s expression dared him to say a single word. God, they were ganging up on him.
He speared his fingers through his hair, walked to his desk, and picked up the résumé. “Fine then. Missy, call her and make an appointment for me to meet her at the Cotton—” He swung around. “No, not the Cotton Mill. At Mac’s tonight at six.”
“No, Jack. You have to go to her now,” Annabelle insisted, and the others were nodding in agreement.
“No appointments through Missy,” Eli declared. “This is too important. She has to say yes. If she doesn’t, we’re goners.”
“I don’t think it’s quite that dire.” Jack ran his fingers under his collar. The drama was getting to him, along with the anticipation of having to see her again. He was sweating and he was going to need a clean shirt.
