A few of the others smiled and one gave a not so subtle chuckle. Bloody chauvinists! Bloody male, superior assholes thinking how smart they were with their flat working shoes and big yellow hard hats. Thinking that a woman’s place was probably in the kitchen and not on a building site. Well, I would show them all. Watch me as I nimbly skip across the gravel, step over the concrete walls, masterfully weave in and out of the steel poles sticking out of the grouooo—
“Ooooo,” I squealed and flapped as I lost my footing and started to fall.
An arm shot out and grabbed me. It was Ryan. His firm grasp stopped my fall, and he pulled me up straight. I looked away, I didn’t want to see the satisfaction in his eyes or hear his snide little comment, but instead I heard a small whisper.
“You okay?”
I turned to look at him. To verify that those words had actually come out of his mouth. But I couldn’t figure it out, because he’d already started talking to the others. And then, as if confirming I had heard incorrectly, he looked over his shoulder and fired a quick, “Nowwould be the time to take notes, Miss Granger,” at me in a tone that seemed totally incompatible with the tone I’d thought he’d used a few seconds ago. Yes, I’d probably imagined that.
And then suddenly, with no warning, Ryan placed a big yellow hard hat onto my head. The thing was so large that it covered the top half of my face. Great! So now I was also straining to see properly. And then slowly, ominously, Ryan turned to me with a strange smile.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ve introduced you yet,” he said, looking way,waytoo pleased with himself.
I shook my head. The hat almost fell off. “No, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” I smiled sweetly at everyone.
“This is Mr. Matthews, the foreman. Mr. James, the project manager. And this is Mr. García, the architect. Of García and Fernández Architectural Firm.” He said that last part with such a sly tone in his voice, but still, it took me a while to click.
“Mr. García is from . . .” He turned to the dark-haired man. “Where did you say you were born?” he asked.
My stomach plummeted. I broke out in a cold sweat.
“Brazil,” the man replied.
Yes, I broke out in a very cold sweat.
“What a coincidence.” Ryan eyeballed me with a look that I wanted to smack off his face. “Doris here spent some time in Paraguay. She’s fluent in Spanish actually.”
He was testing me. After the wig and the glasses, he was testing me on the other parts of my story too. I didn’t blame him.
“Oh, wow,” the García fellow said. And then he turned to me and my stomach crawled into my toes. “¿Cómo estás?” he asked.
I knew this! I knew this! I’d heard the director and the assistant director speaking Spanish to each other, and some of the lines we’d said on the show had been Spanish too.
“Bien, ¿y tú?” I replied, shooting Ryan a look.
“¿Cuánto tiempo llevas aquí?” he said to me.
I had no idea what the hell he was asking, but when I googled it later, it was something to the effect of how long had I been there?
What the fuck?I thought back to the show. Was there anything I could say back to this man so as not to give Ryan the satisfaction of catching me out? And so I said the first thing that jumped into my mind. A line I remembered from sitting in a very long edit while recording additional gargling sounds for my dying scene.
“¡He regresado de la jungla para vengarse la reputación de mi familia!” I said, and then quickly burst out laughing.
Mr. García looked at me strangely for a moment and then burst out laughing too. We laughed together for a while before Ryan quickly put an end to it.
I smiled to myself. It certainly wasn’t every day you got to say, “I have returned from the jungle to avenge my family’s name,” to an architect on a building site.
I turned and shot Ryan a very-pleased-with-myself look.
He scowled back.
CHAPTERFORTY-NINE
Ryan
He should have told her not to come, after what had happened yesterday. It had been awkward from the moment she’d climbed out of the car, and more so now that she was shuffling around on the gravel. It was very distracting, and as for that hard hat, she looked like a big yellow mushroom. An unbalanced mushroom, tottering around like a toddler learning to walk.
He really shouldn’t have brought her, he really needed to concentrate, but every few minutes he felt himself looking back at her to make sure she was okay. He tried to shake her from his thoughts and focus on the important task at hand. And itwasimportant. In fact, the future of his company rested on the success of this mall. “We don’t do malls.” He could hear Mr. Rautenbach’s favorite phrase repeating in his head, over and over again. When Mr. Grey had first proposed the idea of the mall, he’d initially been very much against it. They knew nothing about malls. But they needed to make money, and soon. His father would not just be rolling in his grave if he saw this mall, he would be cartwheeling in it. Mr. Rautenbach had come up with a solution. Short weekend breaks were up by 20 per cent, he’d said. They needed to build a few smaller hotels, closer to the city, to cater for that. People were still going away for short breaks during the recession, but the huge Stark leisure resorts were too far away for people to go to for the weekend. But his idea had been scoffed at—a mall was “a sure money maker”—and now they had sunk everything into it.
