He held her weary gaze. “All good. Tomorrow, by noon, that roof will be on the arena. The crew worked their butts off today. They’re ahead of schedule.”
She gave him a warm look, one corner of her mouth moving upward. “I loved the fact that Maud was urging the house crews to compete with one another.”
Chuckling, Reese nodded. “She’s a force of nature, no question. We’re ahead of schedule on everything.”
“And everyone’s got to be feeling as bone weary as we do. Probably more so because we weren’t doing the physical work. All we were doing was giving instructions.” She looked at him with awe. “You’re the one who put that schedule together, Reese. That was a lot of detailed planning, figuring out when a crew would finish one section of the work, and when to send them on to the next leg of it. That was amazing. I could never have done it.”
“Bean-counter mind,” he joked ruefully. “Steve, you, and me all worked well together. It happened because the three of us hammered out that schedule.”
“Steve was amazing, too. He knows a lot about construction because he’s an architect. The man saved our butt a couple of times today when we didn’t have the right equipment for a particular job. He knew enough about bulldozers and end loaders to figure out a work-around to keep a job on schedule.”
“He’s built skyscrapers around the world,” Reese told her. “We all had our specialty that we brought to this dance, Shay. It was the right combination of people for a job of this size and complexity.”
“You’re all great leaders. Good people managers,” Shay said, sipping her tea.
“You did your share, too,” Reese reminded her. “You’re no slouch when it comes to construction either, Shay. You grew up with it here on the ranch and you had the diplomacy to get those crews pointed in the right direction with the right tools.”
“Compared to you two, I did very little.”
He stared at her, the silence deepening. “You had extra pressures on you today, Shay. Don’t discount what you did. Steve and I couldn’t do what we did without your help and support. It was the three of us that defined the day for all the crews.”
She managed a halfhearted smile. “You always make me feel important, Reese. You make me believe I can do it.”
“Your parents should have imbued you with that same confidence, but they didn’t, Shay. I want you to see who you really are, not who you think you are as defined by Ray.”
“Oh,” she muttered, shaking her head, “that family pattern?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, I sure didn’t do a stellar job today with my father, did I?”
He reached out, sliding his hand gently across hers. “You did fine. You went in and you won a battle.”
“I lost one, too.”
“There’s always setbacks when you’re riding a green horse. You know it’s going to buck you off sooner or later,” he teased. Reese didn’t want to let go of her hand, but he forced himself to. He saw the defeat in Shay’s eyes, knew she was thinking about how she had fallen into her father’s trap when he started trashing the vets. She was so passionate, her heart on her sleeve, that she didn’t know how to protect herself from people like him.
Reese knew how important a father was in a person’s life. He had a good father and it was because of him that he kept fighting to reclaim his soul from the destructive PTSD symptoms. Shay had a father who fed her nothing but the lie that she wasn’t lovable, that she wasn’t to be respected and that she didn’t count in Ray’s universe. Those kinds of signals from a father to his child were devastating, and Reese was looking at the results of them in Shay.
“I really screwed up, Reese. I was so damned mad at myself afterward. I guess . . . I guess I got lulled when my father was half nice to me before that.”
“You were both trying,” Reese soothed, holding her sad gaze. “But you’re both caught in that sick family pattern, Shay. I saw him struggling to be nice to you, to stop what he normally did or said to you. Both of you made a little progress today, and that’s what you should expect and be focused on.”
“But we snapped right back into our old pattern with one another later,” she grumped.
Reese gave her a sympathetic smile. “It happened only once.” He held her hand. “You’re going to have to realize trying to change your behavior with Ray is going to be a lot of baby steps, forward and back. It’s never easy. It’s probably one of the toughest things you’ll ever do in your life. And whether Ray ever decides to change isn’t up to you. But you can change yourself. That’s in your power and control. I’m damn proud of you and what you did out there today.” He squeezed her fingers, seeing her eyes grow warm. Seeing the desire in their depths, he added gently, “And today, you asked me a very important question. We need to sit here and talk about it, if you’re up to it.” He searched her exhausted expression.