“Hey, Addison,” Billy called as we were leaving the last site.
“Billy,” I said, retracing my steps to give him a big hug. “I thought you were on the Teller Street project.”
“I am. I just came over here to give the guys a hand.”
I shook my head. “You have the day off. You should be at home.”
“What’s a day off?”
He laughed, but then he focused on Grant, his eyes narrowing slightly as he took in his presence. “So you bought the place, huh?”
“Where did you hear that?” Grant asked.
“I hear things.” Billy took my hand and squeezed like a parent might do. “You didn’t mention anything about it when you were here before.”
“Had to keep it quiet. Didn’t want word to get around before the deal was done.”
Billy inclined his head slightly, his eyes moving over me. “Your dad—he get a good deal?”
I glanced at Grant before turning to Billy, a forced smile on my lips. “Grant’s going to save the company, Billy. That’s what matters now.”
“Your dad gave me a job when I desperately needed it. Never looked at my resume, never batted an eye when I told him I’d been in prison. Just handed me a tool belt and told me to get to work. He’s a good man.”
“He is,” I agreed.
“Did he get what he deserved out of this deal?”
I nodded, the fake smile gone. I could never lie to Billy. He was a living lie detector. He could tell when I was lying even over the telephone. He was the first to realize Grant and I were seeing each other all those years ago, because of the way I talked about him, I suppose. Or maybe it was as simple as the way I looked at him.
“He most definitely did,” Grant said.
His eyes were on me as he said it. The look in his eyes dared me to argue with him. And I wanted to, but how could I? My dad agreed to this deal, so even if I thought it was wrong—though I wasn’t sure I did—there was nothing I could do about it.
Billy seemed relieved. He smiled as he took my hand and one of Grant’s.
“And the two of you, back together. That’s nice.”
I shifted on my feet a little. “We’re working together, Billy. That’s all.”
“Yes, well, time spent together will bring you back to each other. You wait and see.” He squeezed my hand and leaned into me. “I always knew the two of you were meant to be.”
I glanced at Grant, who was watching me with that same thoughtfulness.
I pulled away. “We should really get back to work.”
I kissed Billy’s cheek and walked away, expecting Grant to follow close behind. But he stayed with Billy, talking about something I couldn’t hear. Business, I assumed. But part of me suspected that it was something else. Grant and Billy had been close. Grant started working for Berryman Construction fresh out of high school. Billy took him under his wing, not only taught him how to hang drywall quickly and efficiently, but taught him how the world worked, too. If Billy was a father figure to me, he was very much a father to Grant, too.
I climbed into the truck and waited. A few minutes turned into ten minutes. Billy was animated in the way he was talking to Grant. Grant, though, stood quietly and listened, reminding me of all the times I’d observed them together on the construction site all those years ago. Grant was cutting drywall in the mud the first time I ever saw him, but then Billy walked up. They were standing exactly like they were now.
“Who is that?” I asked my dad.
“I don’t know. One of the drywall workers.” He handed me a clipboard. “He’s been with us for three or four years.”
“And you don’t know his name?”
“There was once a time when I knew all their names. But that was back before we had more than three hundred employees.”
“Billy seems to like him.”
“That’s probably why he’s been with us for three or four years. Billy trains them well.”
I watched them, the way Billy talked to him, the way he bent his head a little so that he could hear Billy. There was respect in the way he watched the older man. I wandered over there even though my dad had told me to stay close to him when we were on a site. I’d been coming to the sites since I was a little girl, but I usually stayed in the truck. I’d been working with my dad for only a few months now, mostly in the office. This was the first time he brought me out to the site, the first time he let me walk with him among the organized chaos, and I was already breaking the rules. But I was curious about this tall, dark-haired man.
“Hi, Billy!”
Billy’s face beamed as he turned toward me. “Miss Addison,” he said with something like reverence.
I smiled, but my eyes were on the stranger. Billy must have seen that, because he immediately gestured to him. “This is Grant McGraw,” he said. “One of our best drywallers.”
I inclined my head. But before I could speak, my dad was behind me.
“Addie, you’re to stay with me, remember?”
And he was pulling me away.
Never spoke a word to Grant. But the way he looked at me…I would never forget that moment. And when he asked me to the movies a week later, I was gone. I would have run away with him then. I was so naïve; I thought nothing else mattered but that look. Maybe it was because there had never been anyone else. No one in high school was interested in the little, awkward girl who knew more about framing a house than popular culture. Or maybe it was because I was so desperate to be loved…I don’t know. Whatever it was, Grant had this power over me that had yet to fade.
I watched him as he climbed into the truck, tension in his shoulders. Whatever he and Billy had talked about, he was upset about it.
“Back to your place?”
“Do you have time for lunch? I think there are a few things we should discuss.”
I just nodded, throwing the truck into gear and heading back downtown. I didn’t even ask. I automatically went to this little diner tucked into a small, residential neighborhood where my dad used to take me all the time when I worked with him. The waitress, an older woman with bright red hair, smiled when she saw me.
“Addison,” she said. “It’s been a while.”
“Things have been a little slow.”
“It’s spring now. Should be picking up.”
“Should be.”
I slid into a booth at the back of the dining room and Grant followed, slipping in across from me.
“They know you here.”
“My dad and I used to have lunch here several times a week when I first went to work for Berryman Construction.”
“You went right to work with your dad after leaving Yale?”
I shrugged. “What else was I going to do?”
“You have an Ivy League education. You could do just about anything.”
“Maybe. But this company is my legacy.”
“Is it really that important to you?”
“How could you not know that?”
He bit his bottom lip as he watched me, then his eyes dropped to the tabletop. “I suppose I should have.”
We ordered when the waitress came back over, coffee in a carafe for our cups. When she was gone again, I poured myself some of the dark magic and sipped at it.
“What did you want to talk about?”
“I think we could make a few changes in the materials we use on these sites.”
My eyebrows rose. “We use top-of-the-line materials.”
“And some of those could be a little more environmentally friendly.”
“We follow guidelines.”
“Could do more, though.”
I shrugged. “I talked to my dad about that sort of thing. He thought it would be more expensive because we would have to train our workers how to use those new materials.”
“I think it would be worth it in the long run. Make us more acceptable to some of these clients who want to think they’re reducing their environmental footprint, or whatever they call it.”
“These clients you’re talking about seducing? Are there some of those among them?”
“Yes.”
I picked up my coffee cup again, took another long sip. “If you can get Billy onboard…”
“Yeah, well, I was kind of hoping you could do that. He’s a little peeved with me at the moment.”
I muffled a giggle. “Peeved?”
“He thinks I should have allowed your father a position with the company when I bought it.”
“Why?”
Grant hesitated. He picked at something sticky on the tabletop, his eyes moving everywhere but near my face. The tension was back in his shoulders, making them seem broader than they really were.
“There are things about my past I never really wanted you to know,” he said quietly. “I sort of assumed your father would tell you after I left—things to make you feel better about not running away with me.”
“He didn’t talk about you at all. He took me home and told me to pack for Yale. That’s all.”
His eyes came up to mine. “I’m sorry for that.”
I shifted, my gaze moving to the window. “I think he thought it was just a summer fling. That I’d get to school and realize how inconsequential it really was.”
“Did you?”
I thought about the long hours I spent curled up in bed those first few months, refusing to participate in all the activities they had going on for freshmen. Even my roommate gave up on me after the first few weeks, tired of trying to drag me out of bed. I was something of a zombie those first few months. After that, I went to class. I went to parties. I socialized. But inside I was still hiding under the covers of my bed, pretending the world had ended when my heart got broken.
I looked at him. “Does it matter?”
“I didn’t want to leave you, Addison. But my brother needed that medication, and money was the only way to get it for him.”
“I know.”
“He’s a doctor now. He’ll save dozens of lives over the course of his career. Don’t you think that matters?”
“Of course it does.” I ran my finger over the rim of my coffee cup. “But I could have given you that money.”
“You could have. But I never would have asked.”
“So it was okay to take it from my dad, but not from me?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
He shook his head as though the movement would help him organize his thoughts. His eyes were wide and tight on my face, as though he were trying to make me understand just by looking at me. But I didn’t understand.
The waitress chose that moment to return with our food. Plates piled high with eggs and steak and potatoes. By some coincidence, we’d ordered almost the same thing. But I was no longer as hungry as I’d been when we’d walked through the door.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, both of us pushing at our food with our forks. I kept thinking what it waste it was, but I couldn’t stomach even a single bite. All I could think about was how easy it was for him to take that money and walk away. If he’d really wanted to be with me, would it have been that easy?
“My mom died when I was just a month or two from graduating from high school,” Grant said into the silence. “I had a full scholarship to UT Austin. I was going to be a lawyer.”
I nodded. I’d known about his mother’s death. He told me late one night while we were walking back to his car from a movie theater. We’d only been dating a couple of weeks. He was very clinical about it, but I could hear the pain in his voice when he talked about his mother.
“My father left when I was eight. She was a housewife. She had absolutely no work experience. She had to take a job cleaning houses for this company that paid her off the books. And then she managed to get a job in a hotel. Menial work. But she did it for our family, so that we wouldn’t end up on the streets. And then she just died one day. Collapsed in a guest room. No fanfare, no long illness. I always believed it was the stress of having to work so hard all those years.”
No mention of a brother. No discussion of how he helped his brother finish high school and get a scholarship to UCLA. Just that little bit of information. But I was already so head over heels, I thought the fact that we’d both lost our mothers was a sign that we were meant to be together.
“Why didn’t you go to school?”
“Kevin. He needed me. And a lack of money. My mom left behind what little was in her bank account and nothing else.”
“What did you do?”
“I quit school. Got a job working in a fast-food restaurant.”
I couldn’t imagine him in a place like that. I looked at him, trying to see one of those little paper hats on his head. I couldn’t.
“But that didn’t work out. I couldn’t keep my temper under control. I was…angry. Very angry.”
That I could imagine. I was only five when my mom died, but I was a little ball of anger for weeks afterward. For me, it had been different. She was sick. I knew it was coming. My dad knew. Yet, we were both blindsided by the finality of it all. My memory of it was spotty, but I had very strong memories of my dad sobbing late at night when he thought I was sleeping. Whenever I was angry at him as a teen, I remembered those moments. Remembered that he was human.
“One night, I had too much to drink. I went for a walk and ended up on a construction site. And I destroyed everything I could get my hands on, tools and materials and standing structures. Then I passed out.”
“And Billy found you.”
“Billy found me. Threatened to call the police. I begged him not to, told him about my mom and my little brother. Then your dad showed up.”
I watched him, watched emotion dance over his face. I knew how the story ended. It was obvious. But it made me wonder how he could turn on my dad if he owed him his life, as well as his brother’s.
“He gave you a job. And Billy helped you deal with your grief. Very sweet.”
“Yes, well, it didn’t go quite like that.”
My eyebrows rose as I studied his face. “How did it go, then?”
“Your dad wanted to call the police. He told me I was a loser who would always be a loser. He told me there was no hope for someone like me and he didn’t want me anywhere near his construction sites.”
“Did he call the police?”
Grant shrugged. “No. Billy convinced him to let me go. But I went back. Every day I went back until Billy knew I was serious. Until he convinced the foreman to give me a chance.”
“Why would you do that? Why would you want to work there after what my father said?”
“Because I heard his words in my head every time I closed my eyes. And I had to prove that he was wrong.”
“You worked for him for, what, four years? Don’t you think you proved it to him?”
“He never noticed me. Never even knew my name until I started dating you.”
I nodded. “Is that—”
“No.” He reached for my hand across the table, but I pulled back so that he only grabbed empty air. “That had nothing to do with why I asked you out.”
“But it sure was convenient. He suddenly remembered you well enough to know you would take the money when he offered it to you.”
Grant’s eyes narrowed. “Is that what you think?”
“What should I think?”
Silence fell between us. I pushed my plate away.
“We should go. I have stuff to do at the office.”
He nodded. “Rebecca wanted to know if you could meet her at my apartment on Monday afternoon to discuss the furniture and such.”
I stood up and took another sip of my coffee.
“You can get a cab, right?”
And then I was gone.
Chapter 13
The lobby was crowded when I walked into the building first thing Monday morning. A lot of worried faces focused on mine and relief replaced some of the uncertainty that lived there. Hands touched my arms, people calling out
to me, asking what all of this was about. I could feel their fear and I wanted to reassure them, but there were so many of them.
I was only a few feet into the crowd when a man came over and slid behind me, guiding me through the crowd while trying to keep the people—my employees—from touching me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m security. Mr. McGraw asked me to escort you to the podium.”
“What podium?”
He gestured to the very back of the wide, long lobby. Standing in the center of the elevator bay, looking out on the growing audience, was a raised platform with a podium behind it. Grant stood there with Rebecca, leaning down just slightly to hear something she was saying. Angela was there, too, scanning the crowd, clearly looking for someone. When her eyes landed on mine, she seemed relieved.
The security officer gave me a little push and I was beside the platform. Grant nodded to the man even as he reached down to help me up. I wanted to refuse his hand, but the platform was several feet off the ground and I would have looked ridiculous without his help. It was bad enough that I’d made the unwise choice of wearing a tight A-line skirt that barely fell to my knees.
“I think it would be best if you speak first,” he said.
No hello. No good morning. Just instructions on how to proceed.
I moved behind the podium and looked out at the crowd. For the first time I realized how many of them were middle aged or older. The younger people were mostly laborers with the construction crews. The office staff were all older men and women, people who had been with the company since its conception or shortly thereafter. I saw Billy in the crowd, a few of the foremen who were clearly unhappy to miss some daylight hours in order to appear at this mandatory meeting.
“Good morning,” I called into the mic, making it screech a little. I stepped back as Rebecca tried to reach over and adjust it. “I’ve got it,” I told her, shooting a dirty look in Grant’s direction. “Good morning,” I tried again, and this time there was no screech.
The crowd grew quiet almost immediately. More than four hundred eager, and some frightened faces stared up at me. I’d never been incredibly good with public speaking. My knees were beginning to knock despite the fact that I knew ninety percent of these people on a first-name basis.
LUCI (The Naughty Ones Book 2) Page 91
