AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘We checked that. The glass fits the frames fine, it’s just the frames that don’t fit the house.’
I sigh. ‘OK, leave it with me.’
‘What on earth are you doing up there?’ Noah’s voice calls from the ground. Thankfully, this time, his tone is curious rather than furious.
‘Looking at windows that don’t fit. Why?’
‘The trucks with the Portakabins for the sales office have just arrived, and they want to know where they’re supposed to go.’
‘I would have thought that was pretty clear. It’s well marked out.’
‘Yeah, but they’re covering their backsides. They want you to tell them, so it’s your fault rather than theirs if it’s wrong.’
‘Charming,’ I mutter under my breath. ‘Fine,’ I call. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘What do you want us to do with these?’ Mike asks, indicating the window frames.
‘I can’t delay the interior works while we wait for the right windows,’ I tell him. ‘Can you work with John to board up the top floor openings, so we’re watertight at least?’
‘It means the top floor of the house will be completely dark. Not ideal,’ John tells me.
‘I know. We’ll just have to get some lights in there so people can still see what they’re doing, OK?’
‘You’re the boss, darlin’.’ He smiles because he knows it annoys me when he calls me that.
‘You are such a bloody dinosaur,’ I tell him as I head back to the ladder to go and sort out my next problem. ‘How on earth your wife puts up with you, I have no idea.’
‘She loves me even more than you do,’ he grins.
Once I’m back on the ground, I follow Noah to the site entrance, where two huge lorries have the new sales office on the back, in sections, with a crane parked up alongside them. The two show homes are now complete with the exception of furniture, which is arriving later this week prior to the sales office opening on Monday. We have two sales people starting, Deborah informed me, called Kayleigh and Breanna. I was a bit worried that she’d come down to conduct the interviews in person, but thankfully she did them online. I find it slightly odd that we haven’t seen her once since I started, but nobody is complaining, least of all me.
We’ve had a bit of rain over the last few days; not enough to slow down the work, but enough to make the ground claggy. My boots are covered in mud, and I’ve learned that there’s no point trying to keep jeans clean either. My current pair are sporting an impressive bracelet of mud around the ankle of each leg. At Noah’s suggestion, I’ve invested in an ugly waterproof seat cover for the Fiat to stop me getting mud and cement dust on the upholstery, and I now have a pair of trainers in the boot, along with a bag for my boots, so I don’t fill the footwell with mud either. The site office has not fared so well, and the floor is festooned with muddy footprints. I’ve given up trying to keep it clean, at least until the ground dries up again, anyway.
‘What happened to the fear of heights?’ Noah asks me, as we stroll towards the trucks. ‘You were clambering all over that scaffolding like you were born to it.’
I turn to him and smile. ‘I had a good teacher who helped me to overcome it,’ I tell him.
‘I knew I should have charged you.’
‘Umm. I think you did pretty well out of it, didn’t you?’
Over the last few weekends, Noah has found all sorts of jobs for me to do. Once the soffits and fascias were painted, he decided that he ought to renew the guttering while he was up there, so I’ve been helping with that, as well as replacing the rotten, timber-framed windows with modern, double-glazed units. To be fair, I didn’t actually have a lot to do with that as Mike came and helped him with the heavy lifting, but he (deliberately, I suspect) had a tendency to leave tools he needed in his van, so I would be regularly sent up and down the scaffolding, bringing them to him. I haven’t minded as it’s been mostly enjoyable and I’ve learned a lot too. I am also getting slightly addicted to his doorstop sandwiches; they’re always delicious and well-filled, plus I have to confess that I rather enjoy watching him make them, especially if he’s wearing a tight T-shirt. Ava keeps telling me I should put my ‘no office romances’ rule in the bin and, to use her phrase, ‘jump his bones’. I’ve made it very clear to her, every time she’s brought it up, that there is no way that is going to happen, and Noah hasn’t given off the slightest signal that he’s interested in me anyway, but she won’t let it go. I actually find it liberating, knowing that we’ll never be more than work colleagues and, I hope, friends, but that doesn’t stop me appreciating his physique.
I haven’t heard a thing from Lee since he hung up on me the day after I arrived. That doesn’t surprise me; he will have been waiting for me to make the first move, apologise to him and beg for his forgiveness. I was thinking about it the other day, and I realised I couldn’t remember a single time in the whole five years we were together when he apologised to me. He doesn’t take up a lot of my head space, because my days are usually flat out dealing with issues and fiddling with the schedule to try to ensure we stay on track despite Williamsons’ efforts to derail us, and I’m not very good at leaving work behind me in the evenings either. On the rare occasions that Lee does creep into my thoughts, they tend to go more in the direction of wondering how I never noticed what a narcissist he was at the beginning. I will admit to being curious about whether Orchestra have done anything with the recording, but I’m not sure whether they can without corroborating evidence; although Lee seemed pretty confident they wouldn’t find any, that was before Ava pulled her little stunt with the recording.
‘Where do you want this office then, mate?’ the crane driver asks Noah, completely ignoring me. This is the part of my job I hate the most. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have tried to completely overlook me in favour of literally anyone with a penis.
‘No bloody idea,’ Noah replies, winking at me. ‘You’d better ask the boss.’
‘And where is he?’ the crane driver replies.
‘I’m here,’ I tell him.
‘Oh, sorry, love. I didn’t see you there.’
Of course you didn’t, I’m tempted to reply. After all, five foot four women wearing yellow hard hats and hi-vis are renowned for blending seamlessly into the background, aren’t they?
‘Can you see that concrete plinth over there?’ I ask him, pointing at it.
