They made small talk while they ate. They talked about Nick and the snake he’d found in the rock wall and how they’d found out Dill was a little phobic about snakes when Nick tried to show it to him. Luckily, he hadn’t actually fallen off the ladder. Ryan told her about Rosie’s shopping list for the wedding weekend, which was pushing three pages long, and that was with double columns.
He talked some about the family coming from New Hampshire, and she was captivated by the warmth in his voice when he talked about his cousins and their kids. And his aunt Mary and uncle Leo. He was a man who obviously loved his family deeply, and she thought back to that odd note in his voice when he’d pointed out he didn’t have any kids. He was really good with Nick, according to her son, and he’d probably make a great dad. Some woman out there was definitely missing out on a good man.
That was a depressing thought, so she shoved it aside and focused on the story he was telling her. Something about a cell phone quacking like a duck. Dill’s, she gathered.
“You’re the boss and you don’t seem to have any problem being a hard-ass. Make him change it.”
“I’m only a hard-ass when it’s called for. Okay, which is almost all the time. But I don’t make him change it, because it’s distinctive and I hate it so it catches my attention. Helps me keep track of how much time he’s spending playing with his phone and not working.”
“I’m surprised you put up with it at all. Aren’t there a dozen other guys who’d take his job and not quack all day?”
“Dill might be driving me nuts right now, but he’s got a knack for building, strong leadership skills and he holds himself and the other guys on a job with him to a standard of quality as high as mine. Once he outgrows this annoying-puppy stage, he’s going to be one of my best builders. He’ll be running jobs in a few years if he doesn’t screw it up in the meantime.”
She liked listening to him talk about his business. It was a world he was obviously comfortable in, and the relaxed confidence he exuded was pretty damn sexy.
Way too soon, their plates were empty and it was time for her to head back to the store. It had already been closed almost an hour, which was going to give her father fits if anybody complained to him.
“Thank you for lunch,” she said when they were standing out on the sidewalk.
“I enjoyed the company. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
She nodded, her heart doing a little happy dance in her chest as he walked to his truck. She’d like that. A lot.
Chapter Seven
There were no power tools running. Ryan closed the door of his truck and listened more closely. No work sounds at all.
Monday morning he’d had to make the drive back to Brookline to put out a few fires. An accounts receivable fire. An HR fire, because one of the dumbass new guys got fresh with his secretary’s assistant and only Ryan had the authority to fire anybody. And the electrical outfit they’d subbed a job to because Ryan’s regular guys were booked had started pulling wires before they’d pulled a permit and the inspector was good and pissed.
Now it was Wednesday and he’d gotten up at the butt crack of dawn to get back to Whitford so he could bust his ass alongside the guys to make sure the lodge looked as good as possible for his brother’s wedding.
But the guys apparently weren’t busting their asses. Somewhere, for some reason, they were sitting on them.
And he’d bet a week’s payroll Rose would know where they were. He went into the lodge and, after listening for a few seconds, heard some faint noises coming from the guest-room wing. He went down the hall and turned into the room the scuffling noises were coming from.
Rose wasn’t in the guest room. Dill and Matt were, though. Matt was standing in front of a set of bunk beds, frowning, with his arms folded across his chest. Dill was up on the top bunk, wrestling with a fitted sheet.
“What the hell are you two clowns doing?”
They both jumped a mile, and the one corner of the sheet Dill had managed to hook over the mattress popped off. “Shit!”
“Rose put us to work,” Matt said, as if that explained everything.
“You work for me.”
“Not today, boss.”
It was tempting to walk over and cuff him upside the head, but it wasn’t really their fault. When Rosie decided something was going to happen the way she wanted it, it generally happened that way. She’d probably steamrolled right over them.
“This isn’t possible.” Dill sounded as if he’d jump off the side of the bunk bed if only the drop was high enough to put him out of his misery. “You can’t reach the back of the damn mattress from the ground, but you can’t pull the mattress up to tuck the sheet in if you’re on top of it.”
“You can’t make a bed, but I let you build houses for me?”
“Oh, you think you can do it better?”
Ryan couldn’t even tell them how many times he’d made up that particular set of bunk beds. And the other set in the room. And the others in the lodge, along with the double beds and the queen beds. The chore list when you grew up in a lodging establishment was long and royally sucked.