a gift. So?”
“Yes,” she reluctantly admitted. “I don’t really like to talk about my clients, but yours was way better. Kathy burned the onions so badly, I had to throw one of my favorite pans away.”
He shuddered. “Hope she kept the name of the last caterer she used.”
Laughing, Rose said, “That was just mean. She’s going to get the hang of it.”
He studied her for so long, Rose began to shift uneasily in her chair. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said with a shake of his head. “But you really are a positive, glass-is-half-full kind of woman, aren’t you?”
Rose tensed briefly. For most of her life, she had pretty much been the Pollyanna type. She looked for the good around her and generally found it. Until, of course, her ex-husband had not only snatched off her rose-colored glasses, but also ground them to dust under his heel.
After that, she’d had to fight to regain her sense of well-being. She’d had to force herself to smile until, eventually, it had become real. And now, she wasn’t going to go back to the dark side again. She wasn’t going to apologize because she liked rainbows and puppies and laughing children.
“Seeing the empty half doesn’t make you more mature or more intelligent,” she said softly. “It only means you’re looking for what you don’t have. How is that a good thing?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” she said, folding her napkin and standing up. “I like a half-full glass. And if yours is half-empty, then I’m sorry.”
He stiffened as if she’d hit a sore spot. Instantly, Rose regretted the fact that their semipleasant evening had deteriorated somehow. But maybe it was better this way. Keep the distance of teacher and student between them. Because he hadn’t hired her to be his friend—or anything else. This was a job. A good-paying job at that, and she wasn’t willing to risk it by opening up doors that should probably remain closed.
“My glass is just fine, thanks,” he said, his voice hardly more than a low rumble of sound.
“Glad to hear it.” Rose looked at him, and, in spite of knowing that she should just keep her mouth shut and protect this very well-paying job, she just had to say, “Maybe your glass is full, but if it’s holding the wrong things, what difference does it make?”
“What?”
“Never mind. Dumb analogy anyway. Look, why don’t I help you clean this up? Then we’ll make out a menu and a grocery list for tomorrow.”
She left him sitting at the table and even though she didn’t look around, Rose knew he was still watching her when she started loading the dishwasher.
“That’s it, you’re paying my dues at Weight Watchers.”
“Hmm?” Lucas looked up from the sheaf of papers he had been staring at for an hour without really reading any of it and looked at his secretary. “Evelyn, what’re you talking about?”
“This.” She held up an oversize frosted cookie and shook it at him. “Ever since Rafe married Katie, we’ve got these amazing cookies in the break room every day.”
“That’s a bad thing?” he asked, smiling.
Evelyn was in her late fifties with a rounded figure and short, graying brown hair. She was smart, efficient and knew as much as Lucas did about running crews and the customer base. She’d been with him for five years and had long since let go of her polite, businesslike tone with him.
“I’ve gained five pounds,” she muttered and gave the cookie a glare before taking a bite and nearly groaning in pleasure.
“Don’t eat them,” he said with a shrug.
“Excellent advice,” she muttered with a dark look. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Evelyn, was there a point to this?”
She sighed in defeat, took another nibble of the cookie and said, “There’s trouble on the Johnson site. The crew started digging for the new gas line before the WeDig people came out to clear the site and they hit the water line.”
“Perfect.” Anger churned his guts. His crews were more professional than that. They knew damn well that any digging had to be cleared by the city guys who came out to tell them where gas, water and cable lines were, giving them specific areas to avoid. “Who’s in charge of that site?”
She rolled her eyes. “Warren.”
“Damn it.”
“Exactly,” Evelyn said. “He’s on line two right now, wanting to talk to you.”
“Good. I’ve got a few things to say to him, too.” He waved one hand at his secretary, who backed out of his office chewing on her cookie and moaning like a woman having sex.
Oh, now there was an image he didn’t need in his head. Evelyn. Having sex.
He snatched up the phone, pushed line two and snapped, “Warren, what the hell is going on? You dug before getting the go-ahead?”
“Not me, boss. It was Rick. The new guy. Got impatient, I guess. I was making a run to a supply shop for more pipe. When I got back, it was like the Great Flood out there.”
“You’re in charge, Warren,” Lucas told him, tired of the man’s excuses. Whenever anything went wrong on one of his sites, he was never around. Always off doing something else. “You give the orders on this project, and you take your orders from me. You damn well know better than to dig before WeDig comes out to clear it and the guys should know it, too.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No more buts. I’ll be at the site in a half hour. For now, get some pumps in there to clear the yard and get that water pipe capped off.”
“Already done.”
“That’s something anyway …” Shaking his head, he added, “Keep the guys on site until I get there.”
“Right, boss.”
When he hung up, Lucas was still furious, but almost grateful for the shift in his thoughts. If not for Warren’s ineptitude, he’d have nothing on his mind but Rose Clancy. And he’d already done nothing but think about her since the night before.
She had haunted his dreams, making sleep nearly impossible, and then this morning over his cup of coffee, he’d smelled her in his kitchen. It was as if she was imprinting herself on his consciousness.
Now, Lucas thought back to how Dave had always described his sister. Younger, softer, easily hurt and scared of her own shadow. She hadn’t sounded all that appealing to him until the day he first met her. Then, her looks had bowled him over first and her laughter had hit him hard. There was something about a woman who knew how to laugh, he thought now. Maybe it was because growing up, he’d never heard his own mother laugh at a damn thing. Whining on the other hand … she had been very good at that.
As
