Shay laughed a little. “Well, I’m not one to normally get a break, but I’ll sure take this one, Harper.”
Reese said nothing, thinking that Shay deserved a helluva lot more breaks. He lifted his chin and looked at the vets. “What I’d like from each of you by tomorrow morning. You all have experience with construction, one way or another. Give me your list of what you think is important to do regarding the arena. No detail is too small. If you were going to handle this job, what would you do first, second, and third? What would your priorities be? What order should they be done in?” He saw the vets give him thoughtful looks as they ate.
“Yes,” Shay added, giving Reese a warm smile, “let’s use our own experience. It can help Reese and Steve set up an agenda to make this project a success.”
Reese saw that his request made the vets feel good about themselves. They were included in the process, not left out or ignored. The feelings at the table right now had never been more positive and upbeat. A strong sense of purpose threaded through all of them, and it reminded Reese of the years he had command over his company of Marines.
There was a delicate balance in the managing of people. And although he knew these vets were autonomous and he was no longer a commanding officer, the feeling of doing something good for the team, soared through Reese. For once in the last two years, he felt like he was turning a corner. He was believing once more that he had what it took to manage people and do it well. The proof, however, would be in that meeting tomorrow afternoon with Steve Whitcomb.
*
“I can’t sleep,” Shay mumbled to Reese as she walked out into the kitchen. It was near one o’clock in the morning, and he was sitting at the huge table, a lot of paper and files spread out around him. Shay had gone to bed at ten, exhausted.
Reese looked up and his heart swelled. Shay was in an ankle-length lavender flannel gown tonight, and wore those ratty-looking red slippers on her feet. There had to be a story to those slippers because from the looks of them they needed to be thrown away. Her hair was mussed, eyes drowsy as she walked to the sink and poured herself a glass of water.
“Want some, Reese?” She held up the glass.
“No . . . thanks.” He liked the sense of peace in the kitchen. “Why can’t you sleep?”
Making a muffled, unhappy sound, Shay turned and shuffled over to the table. “My mind is going a thousand miles an hour.” Looking down at his work, she added, “My brain looks like the stuff you have spread all over the table.”
Chuckling, Reese stood and pulled out the chair for her.
Shay rolled her eyes at him. “I can pull a chair out from the table just fine.”
“I know,” he answered patiently, his hand on the back of the chair. “You can blame it on my manners. Have a seat?”
Grumbling under her breath, she sat down. “Thanks . . .”
His mouth curved a little more as he sat down, picking up his pencil. “Are you always this grumpy when you get up?”
She rolled her eyes. “You have such a dry sense of humor, Reese. Who knew?”
“Well,” he said as she sipped the water, “if we keep meeting like this at night, we’ll know a whole lot more about one another over time. Won’t we?”
Rubbing her face sleepily, she set the glass down. “The other vets don’t know about my insomnia,” she muttered. “And the only reason you do is because there’s no room in that bunkhouse for you. Don’t tell them. Okay?”
He wrote down a few items on his list that he was going to present to Steve. “All your secrets are safe with me.” He hesitated, searching her drowsy face. “Are you sorry that you let me stay here?”
“No, not at all.” She reached out, touching his shoulder briefly. “I like your manners, Reese. You’re a throwback to another age and time. It just catches me off guard because no one, except the vets here, pulls out my chair for me. It’s nice and I appreciate it.”
“I’m not that old, Shay.”
She giggled and ran her fingers distractedly through her hair, trying her best to tame it behind her shoulders. “I didn’t mean it quite like that.”
“Nothing wrong with manners,” Reese said lightly, writing down some figures on another piece of paper. “The world seems to have forgotten a lot of them over the past three decades.”
“Military men tend to go the other direction. And it is nice, but as a Marine, I wasn’t treated like a woman. I was treated like a Marine.”
“Rightly so, but this is different. We’re in the civilian world now.” He gave her a quick glance before transferring more numbers to a third list, his brow scrunched.
“You had women Marines in your company?”
“I did. In the motor pool. Mechanics. Drivers. Good at what they did. The men gave me more problems than the thirty women in my company ever did. They were squared away, responsible, and displayed great teamwork. And they could shoot straight.” He smiled over at her, watching her cloudy blue eyes slowly begin to clear. Shay wasn’t someone who woke up very fast, he was discovering.
“I shot expert while in the Marine Corps.”