The office sat at the back of the Lakeside Design Center—a sunny contemporary building at the entrance to the soon-to-be gated community. Here, future homeowners could wander through showroom kitchens and model bathrooms to touch the fine finishes for their dream homes.
The showroom took up most of the building—glossy, staged “rooms” with carefully arranged vases and strategically placed throw pillows. All very aspirational and designed to separate people from their money.
Meredith loved perusing the design center. She enjoyed seeing her two-dimensional blueprints for a bathroom or kitchen turned into a real room. So many times, an architect parted with plans and maybe saw the finished product a year or two later. But the Lakeside builder wanted the homeowners to feel they were getting “semi-custom” homes and that was why access to the architect was important.
Behind the showrooms, down a short hallway past the shared kitchen and conference room, Acacia Architecture had been given a spacious office with three desks and a drafting table, a bank of filing cabinets, and a wide window that looked out over the future of Lakeside.
The current view was mostly red dirt, heavy equipment, and the skeletal beginnings of infrastructure. Sewer lines and electrical conduit weren’t glamorous, but Meredith found them beautiful in the way only an architect could. Every trench out there was a promise of what was coming.
Three hundred and twelve homes. A clubhouse. A pool, park, and gym that was taking shape on her computer that very moment.
Thriving in this new environment, Meredith only cared about two things—her design software and the constant flow of work.
All of the other details—scheduling, filing, permits, and, yes, the quality of the coffee—were in the capable hands of her administrative assistant. Well, one capable hand. The other had graduated to a removable cast, which gave Connor some freedom and a few obvious moments of discomfort.
He didn’t complain, however, and scheduled his hand therapy during off hours. So far, as their first week progressed, he showed up on time, took brief lunches, and stayed focused. They shared office space, a work ethic, and both liked instrumental jazz in the background.
But he also smelled nice and made her laugh and had an annoyingly attractive ability to know when she wanted coffee, so there were some distractions that she didn’t exactly hate.
She took a break from the public area design to return to the elevation revision for Lot 47, one of their first pre-sold homes. The buyers wanted to swap out the double-hung windows on the front facade for a Craftsman-style grid pattern, which was fine aesthetically but required some invisible math behind a pretty house.
Anyone could sketch a nice elevation. Making it stand up in a hurricane zone was the heavy lifting.
Connor was across the office, doing battle with a filing cabinet using only his left hand. The cabinet seemed to be winning.
“You need help?” she asked, lifting her hand from her mouse to rise.
“No, no. Stay on that project. These drawer runners,” he muttered, yanking the middle drawer with his good hand, “were designed by someone who hates people with one hand.”
She smiled, turning back to her calculations.
“You know, in a dentist’s office,” he said, “everything is filed digitally and stays in the cloud. Here, I feel like I’ve traveled back to 1987.”
“Blame the county,” she said. “They require hard copies of all permits, change orders, and inspection reports in addition to digital. Pippin added it to their homeowner contracts—page four, section seven. You didn’t read it?”
“It was that orWar and Peace,” he said dryly. “Tolstoy won.”
She laughed softly, not sure what she liked more—his unexpected sense of humor or the fact that he knew who’d written the classic. It was a tie.
“But tonight, I promise, I’ll read the contracts.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, and the look on his face was the oneshe’d been trying to ignore for three days—amused, warm, like she was endlessly entertaining to him, and he wasn’t even trying to hide it.
Feeling a little helpless in the face of just how cute he was, she turned back to her screen.
The problem with Connor McCarthy—and Meredith had been cataloging the problems, because that was how she processed things—was that he kept gettingmoreattractive. Quickly, too.
He wasn’t trying to appeal to her—he didn’t have to. He was just there, being competent and funny and unreasonably good-looking in a way that she’d initially dismissed as irrelevant to the work and now couldn’t stop noticing.
Even when he struggled writing left-handed, and his brows furrowed in concentration, he was…kind of a doll. And when he tilted his head slightly as he was listening to her, really paying attention like her father did when someone spoke to him—yeah, she liked that.
And don’t mention his hair. No, the slightly too long hair was definitely too long to be considered professional, and she almost said something but then he’d know she’d noticed.
She’d hate to see those pretty chestnut locks clipped away. It was too much fun to imagine…what they would feel like to touch.
Meredith. Stop. Pay attention to the wind-load calculations.
If that hair caused her to make a mistake and one of these million-dollar homes sprung a leak or cracked under the winds of a cat-three storm? She’d have one person to blame: Meredith Lawson.
Had she learned nothing from her last spectacular lapse in judgment? A man who’d fooled her, lied to her, and given her an unplanned pregnancy that had nearly cost Meredith herlife.
