by Maria Luis
“Perfect.” Then he leaned in, his rugged face mere inches from hers, and murmured, “I’ll let you out”—her breath caught with hope, and, yes, want from having him so close—“if you agree to be my manager on this project.”
The want faded as his words sank in. “What are you talking about, be your manager?”
“Exactly what I said. You get to be my boss.” He winked at her. Winked! “And I’ll be your assistant.” His knees popped! popped! as he rose to his full height of towering male. “I’ll let you think about it for a few minutes while I go explore.”
He wouldn’t . . .
Daisy got a full view of his awesome butt as he ducked around the corner into the next room.
“Reese!” she shouted, hands fluttering by her face. “Reese! You jerk! Get me out of here!” Her knees swung this way and that, hard enough that one of her cute flats went sailing across the room to smack against a dead potted plant. “You are such an as—”
“Kiwi”—he ducked his head past the wall and then met her gaze—“if I remember correctly, the word you’re looking for is kiwi.”
If she did have a kiwi, she would hurl it at his head . . . once she got her hands free, of course.
“I’m going to throw you over the side of the bluff and feed you to the fish.”
Posed up against the wall, he was the poster child for smug male. Crossed arms, legs crossed at the ankles. A smirk tugged at one corner of his mouth. “I’ll let you free. You just have to agree to my terms.”
Nerves ate at her. Daisy couldn’t do this, she couldn’t. She was great as the manager to a comedy club, even if she had been fired. She was even better as the assistant to Harvey Construction.
She was the side girl, the stage hand.
She wasn’t the girl who took center stage.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
Reese’s voice softened when he stepped in close. “You can.” His hands found the wood beneath her legs, and like some sort of mountain man, literally snapped the plank in half. “You can, Mae.” He untangled her arms from the baffling, then tossed the fabric out of the way. “I would never let you fall.”
Her heart broke into a stampede she’d never calm, not with him this close. “You’d get a concussion for me.”
Dark eyes zeroed in on her face. “Checked off the list already. I don’t voluntarily go for repeats.”
She tossed her head back with a burst of laughter, then winced when her skull rebounded off the chair. Reese was right there, curling his hand over her head, settling it at the base, protecting her from more hurt.
“Say yes, Mae.”
With his hand cradling her head, and his eyes locked on her face, she uttered only one word: “Yes.”
She only hoped he wouldn’t regret his decision when everything went up in flames.
Chapter Seven
“He’s going to kill me.”
Reese’s cousin-in-law, Lizzie Harvey, sent Daisy a wide-eyed stare. “He won’t.”
“Oh, he will. Trust me. When he sees the hot mess I’ve created, I’m going to find myself living in a cardboard box down on the beach.”
Daisy stared down at the order she’d called in for rosewood—to fix and replace the beautiful circular stairwell that was on the verge of collapsing in on itself. Since Reese and Gage were already at the Victorian with the rest of the workers, Lizzie had volunteered to keep Daisy company in the office.
Looked like the poor lady was going to get a crash course in talking Daisy off the ledge, too.
“I ordered rosewood. I swear that I ordered rosewood.” Her gaze ran over the itemized receipt, which, as her luck had it, had no rosewood anywhere on the menu. “Pine,” she muttered with a shake of her head. “I’ve been at this for two days and I’ve already ordered double the pine and not a single inch of rosewood, which is what I actually need.”
Lizzie sat down on the desk, her feet dangling off the side. The woman was beautiful, her makeup done in that “makeup free” kind of way that still hinted at mascara, foundation, and a touch of blush and lip gloss. More than the beauty, Lizzie Harvey was just so crazy nice that Daisy had taken an instant liking to her.
“How long have you been doing this job?” Lizzie stole a pen off the desk and then snatched the invoice from Daisy’s hand.
Daisy stared woefully at her computer. “A whopping forty-one hours and fourteen minutes.”
Lizzie laughed, the sound so full-bellied that it completely opposed her feminine features and the fashionista persona. “I’m talking about your job working for Reese, girl. How long have you been sitting at this desk and making magic happen?”
“Three years . . . give or take.”
“And, what? It’s taken you forty-one hours and fourteen minutes to forget everything you’ve learned in three years?” Shrugging, Lizzie set the pen and paper back on the desk. “That’s BS and you know it. You’re so worked up about disappointing Reese that you’re driving yourself insane.”
“It’s not just about disappointing—”
Lizzie cut Daisy off with a wave of her hand. “If I were you, I’d take advantage of this little boss setup you have going on right now.”
Daisy’s back straightened. “Take advantage?”
“Sure.” Smiling, Lizzie slid from the desk and plopped into the chair opposite Daisy’s. “You’re the boss, not him. Isn’t that what he said? He wants you to take the lead on this Shelter Island project?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“But what? I’ve listened to you bark out orders all morning to everyone else, even going so far as to let them know when they could take a leak. Which, I’ll admit, makes them fear you a little—going toe-to-toe like that with a bunch of macho guys requires balls that I just don’t have. You, on the other hand, didn’t even think twice.” Lizzie leaned in, an encouraging smile on her face. “You rocked that, Daisy. You told them what to do and you gave them your expectations. Why not do that with Reese?”
She couldn’t even keep the words in: “Because he’s my boss, that’s why.” Her chest heaved with a sigh of relief, and she plowed forward like a rebel with a cause. “I have no idea what’s crawled up his butt the last few days. Last week, we were normal. He grunted and told me what to do, and I made it happen.” She threw her hands up, then linked them behind her head. “Now he’s making me boss, buying a house that I said should belong to a family and not the next group of snowbirds from New Hampshire coming down to spend their winter vacations in the tropics.”
“Sounds like he thinks you can handle it.”
“It sounds like he’s lost his ever-loving mind.” She flashed Lizzie what she hoped was a tell-me-all-the-things smile. “You know him better than I do. Why is he doing this?”
Lizzie rolled her bottom lip under teeth. She glanced away, out the window to look at Providence Park and then the Town Hall beyond it. “You’ll figure it out.”
She snorted. “Yeah, right about the time I figure out what to do with all of this pine.” At Lizzie’s raised brow, Daisy added, “It’s not like it’s from a commercial hardware store. It’s a resale place a few towns over—once you buy it, it’s yours for life.”
“Ah, like ‘if you lick it, it belongs to you’ type of thing?”
“Exactly.”
But even after Lizzie left the office an hour or so later, Daisy couldn’t stop herself from considering what Lizzie had said.
If you lick it, it belongs to you.
Well, if the company credit card was the equivalent to a tongue, then the pine was all hers—for better or for worse.
Two hours later, Daisy was jogging up the stone steps of the Victorian in search of Reese. Her pace faltered when she noticed the missing front door—either they’d taken it down to restore or she had a feeling it was about to become kindling for a fire.
She hadn’t visited the property since her first trip out the other day, and it came as a shock to find that everything had been stripped bare from the foyer. The red
settee was gone, as was the damaged portrait on the wall. The chair that had collapsed under her was nowhere to be seen, and even the mirror had been removed from the stained walls.
Looked like the guys had been busy.
Drawing in a deep breath, she soaked in the familiar smell of sawdust. Her heart pinched at the memories of home-demo projects with her father at the helm. Daisy had always been his right-hand girl, especially as her mother had passed when Daisy was seven.
Heart attack, her dad had always told her.
Years later, in her early teens, even her protective father couldn’t shield her from the rumor mill. Fortune’s Bay was small and gossip was king. But her mother’s suicide hadn’t been rumor—it’d been the terrible truth.
“You always made your mother laugh, Daisy Mae,” her father always told her, “no one did that but you.”
It just hadn’t been enough.
“Mae? That you?”
Daisy blinked away the memories at the sound of Reese’s voice coming at her from the dining room area. Pull yourself together, girl. Do it now before he sees you.
He rounded the corner just as she gave her limbs a quick shake, and . . . oh, wow.
Despite the sadness that had crept over her, Daisy felt her mouth pull into an involuntary grin. She waved a hand at him. “You’re completely covered in dust.”
“The house is old,” he said, eyes crinkling with humor. “I’m not exactly expecting a dinner with the queen.” Reaching behind him, he came up with a dirty, white towel from the back pocket of his jeans. She watched with way too much interest as he ran the rag over his dirt-stained hands and all the way up to his forearms. Not that the wipe-down did much to clean him up or stop her from appreciating his raw, disheveled appearance. “Although you’ll work as a substitute, I think.”
Laughter burst from her. “I hope you’re not using that line on the women of Fortune’s Bay, Reese. It’s godawful.”
He slung the rag over one shoulder, then leaned against the doorframe that led to the dining room. Beneath the fabric of his T-shirt, his muscles visibly strained, and Daisy had no idea what to make of the fact that she couldn’t turn her gaze away.
“Can’t be that awful,” he said, “it made you laugh, didn’t it?”
“Well . . . yes.”
He winked, or maybe he blinked—it was tough to tell when her heart was thundering in her chest. “Mission accomplished then.” Without waiting to gauge her expression, he waved her forward and then headed into the dining room. “C’mon, my queen, I’ve got something to show you.”
My queen . . .
See? This, she wanted to shout out at Lizzie Harvey, this was what confused her! The endearments, the winks, the long stares that spoke to more than just a regular employee-boss relationship. Maybe he’s on drugs . . .
Maybe he was, but Daisy found herself trailing him, anyway, like a dog scampering after its owner.
Hell, maybe she’d secretly sniffed the good stuff, too, without realizing it.
Daisy came to a dead halt as she entered the dining room, her mouth falling open at the sight before her. “Um, Reese?”
“Yeah?” He sounded way too innocent when clearly . . . clearly . . .
“There’s no wall,” Daisy managed to get out. It was a miracle she had any words at all given the fact that the entire exterior wall of the room was gone.
“Oh, that?” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, all casual-like. Meanwhile his dark eyes glittered with pure mischief. “I thought the room could do with a view.”
Words. She needed words.
“Panoramic views,” Reese added, one corner of his mouth hitching upward, “in case that wasn’t obvious.”
Hand over her heart, she stared out at the bay and tried to formulate her thoughts into something cohesive. Even from here, a good two hundred feet from the shoreline, she could see late-afternoon sunlight glistening off the whitecaps of the waves. “And here I was thinking you might flip out when I told you that I accidentally ordered pine and not rosewood from Manale’s.” She paused. “But I’m pretty sure you’ve taken the cake.”
Chapter Eight
Reese had done more than just take the cake—he’d demolished it in the course of a morning and an afternoon, along with the help of Gage and the rest of his guys.
Rarely did he let impulsiveness drive him forward, but he was doing just that with the Victorian. If Daisy didn’t want to see the place converted into a bed and breakfast, then Reese was determined to give her exactly what she did want. This was going to be a house that a family would never dream of leaving. It’d be passed down from generation to generation, unlike his childhood home in New Orleans.
After his father had lost his job, their quaint, shotgun-style home had been sold within months, and they’d moved away from the Mississippi River, toward Central City. A cheap neighborhood in the nineties, but one that was fraught with crime and trouble.
By the age of fifteen, he’d grown accustomed to walking around his house in sneakers to avoid splinters in the soles of his feet.
You’ve moved them out of there now.
Sometimes Reese wondered if the condo he’d purchased for them in the French Quarter made up for all the troubles they’d experienced in their lives, but his mom and dad refused to leave the city that had birthed them. Case closed.
“What do you think?” he finally asked, stepping in close to Daisy. Her thick auburn hair hung down the line of her back, and she’d shoved the strands behind her ears as she surveyed the space where the windows and wall had been only eight hours earlier. They’d be putting up a tarp tonight as soon as Gage returned from across the bay with it. That was sort of the problem with working on an island—supplies weren’t just a short drive away and the water taxi remained king for transportation, even with the option to bring your vehicle onboard the larger vessels. “It’s a little breezy.”
Daisy swung her gaze toward him, and when she spoke, she sounded . . . wistful. “I can almost taste the salt in the air.”
He nudged her arm with his, restraining the urge to settle an arm around the curve of her waist and bring her in close. “I hear it’s good for the skin.” At least, that’s what Lizzie had said earlier in the day. He figured she knew—she was the one with millions of subscribers on her beauty YouTube channel. Reese just swung hammers for a living.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been reading Cosmopolitan again.”
He could hear the humor tinging Daisy’s voice, and, man, it was hard to keep his hands to himself. Soon. He hoped, anyway. “If by Cosmopolitan you mean Lizzie, then yeah I have been.” He paused, then turned to face the water completely. “Did you like her? Lizzie, I mean.”
If Daisy was startled by the question, she didn’t show it. A slow smile tugged at her lips and he couldn’t tell if the show of happiness was on account of the view of the blue waters or because of him. “She’s great. I don’t know what I’d been expecting when I showed up at the airport to pick up her and Gage, but she’s just so . . .”
“Talkative?”
Swatting his arm, Daisy laughed. “That’s not what I was going to say. She’s talkative, yeah, but she’s got good insight.”
“Yeah?” Reese dropped his gaze to the top of her auburn head, only to find her eyes locked on his face. His muscles tightened at the way she’d sucked in her cheeks, her teeth sinking into the cushion of her bottom lip. “What kind of good insight did she have?”
Daisy cut eye contact and slipped her fingers into the back pockets of her jeans. “Well, she did call me out for acting like a wimp.” She must have thought that he’d put up a fuss about that because she threw up a hand, palm out. “I was acting like a wimp. I let my nerves get the best of me, that’s all.”
“Mae.” He drawled that one syllable, his New Orleans accent coming out in full swing. And it worked—her shoulders jumped at his pressing tone and she tilted her head, a silently issued, all right, tell me what you want, if he’d ever seen one.
> So he did tell her, with his profile to the sea and his gaze seeking hers. “We’ve worked together for three years—”
She darted one finger up into the air. “Correction, I’ve worked for you.”
“Well now I work for you.” Reese swept up that finger in a gentle fist and tugged her inward, just by a step. “We have new terms.”
As though to prove a point, she arched her brows and turned to stare at the destroyed outer wall. “I didn’t authorize this.”
“You would have said no.”
Incredulous laughter fell from her pink lips. “You’re in the right position in this company, then, Harvey. You get to tell people ‘no’ all the time as you go and do as you please.”
This was the moment, right here. Either the air was physically crackling with chemistry or that was the sky threatening them all with a good time, lightning-style. Banking on the former, Reese took a leap of faith and said, “You’d be surprised how many times I don’t get to do as I please.”
From the way her brows furrowed, it was obvious she didn’t believe him for a second. Then she rolled her eyes, as though she thought it was all a game. “All right, boss, what exactly are you missing out on in life?”
She’d walked right into this one, unknowingly or not, and he refused to let the opportunity slip by untried.
He put his back to the sea, so that all he saw was her, Daisy, the woman who, on her first day at Harvey Construction, had called him out for signing off on a deal that had come down to him converting an historical landmark into a chain restaurant . . . or letting the other bidders walk away with the victory, so that they could move the public library to a bigger location.
Daisy thought of others first, and Reese’s only fear was that she would give in to what he wanted simply so she could avoid seeing him disappointed.
But he wouldn’t know how she felt unless he took a risk, and as she blinked up at him with her bottomless, coffee-colored eyes, Reese jumped off the proverbial mountainside that could destroy everything he’d worked toward in the last three years.
