Page 17 of Working for Him

"Okay," I say, and mean it.

His place is quiet when we get there, and he pours wine while I curl into the corner of his couch, my shoes off, and feeling looser than I have in weeks.

"You're being very romantic tonight," I observe. "It's almost suspicious."

"I contain more depth than the hard hat suggests."

"Clearly."

He sits beside me, close enough that his arm settles along the back of the couch behind my shoulders, and for a while we just talk, nothing important, easy back and forth that fills the space the way good conversation does. Eventually it drifts somewhere quieter, somewhere I don't usually let it go.

"Why do you leave places?" he asks. "Why is temporary your default setting?"

"Because it's safer," I finally say. "If I don't stay long enough to put down roots, I can't get hurt when things fall apart. And they always fall apart eventually. My last job, I'd been there three years. Trusted people, thought I'd found somewhere I could stay. Then one bad call, one incident where I was right but politically inconvenient, and everyone I thought had my back threw me under the bus to save themselves."

"I'm sorry that happened to you."

"It taught me a valuable lesson. Don't stay long enough to care."

"That's a lonely way to live."

"It's safe."

He turns to face me more fully. "What if I told you that you could have both? Safe and connected?"

"I'd say you're an optimist."

"I'd say I'm someone who's willing to prove it. For however long it takes." He pulls me against his chest. "I'm planning on being around indefinitely. I’m planning on being the person you can count on when things get hard."

"That's a lot of faith to put in someone you've known less than a month."

"Maybe. Or maybe I just know a good thing when I see it. And you, Rena, are the best thing that's happened to me in a very long time."

My eyes sting with tears which I refuse to let fall. "You're making it very hard to maintain my emotional distance."

"Good," he says, and kisses me again, slow and tender this time, all urgency replaced by something dangerously close to love even though neither of us has said the word yet.

CHAPTER 10

Caleb

The site's running smoothly three weeks after Millbrook, the two of us settling into something that feels less like an experiment and more like a routine every day. Rena stays at my place four nights out of seven now. There's a drawer in my dresser slowly filling with her clothes. It should scare me more than it does.

Tommy jogs over one afternoon, grinning. "Crew wants to know if you and Rena are coming to the thing at the Foundry tonight. Celebrating hitting phase two on schedule."

"I'll ask Rena," I say, and he fist-pumps before jogging off.

She agrees, though I catch the flicker of nerves when I mention it. "Will it be weird? Me being there as the consultant who's sleeping with the site supervisor?"

"Probably. But they already know, and pretending we're not together would be weirder at this point."

By the time we arrive, the bar's packed, Kayla is behind it with a knowing smile. The crew gravitates toward us almost immediately, and I watch Rena shift into easy warmth, accepting compliments on her work with the kind of graciousness that reminds me why I fell for her. Marcus tells her, seriously, that she saved his ass with a rebar spacing call. By the time we've been there two hours, she's laughing at Tommy's terrible jokes and looking more relaxed in a social setting than I've ever seen her.

Gus and Marlene pull us aside near the end of the night. "The union's been talking," Gus says. "We want to formally recommend you two as a consulting team for future municipal projects. Site supervisor and safety consultant as integrated oversight, not separate entities. What you two proved is that when you work together from the start instead of fighting each other, you get better results."

Rena and I exchange a glance that has a whole conversation in it. "Can we think about it?" she asks.

"Of course. I just wanted to plant the seed."