Page 55 of Forty and Fighting Dirty
She shot me a sideways glance, a smile playing at the edges of her mouth. Not for the first time, I wondered how it would feel to be let inside Piper’s defenses. To be someone she trusted. Around me, she always seemed to have her guard up—not that I could blame her. I was the same way.
“The concept is called the red thread.”
I looked at the yellow fabric swatches and the mood board with all kinds of yellow and yellow-adjacent prints. There wasn’t a bit of red thread in sight, other than a few small touches on one of the floral prints she’d chosen. “Okay…”
Her laugh was clear and bright. “I’m not talking about red, specifically. It’s the principle of having one cohesive, unifying theme throughout our design. So we’d lean on natural textures like wood, stone, and wool, with tones of yellow to bring warmth and cohesion.”
“I see. But…yellow?”
She met my gaze. “Yes. Yellow. In this house, we are not afraid of color. Got it?”
I put my palms up. “Okay. I trust you.”
She opened her mouth as if to retort, then tilted her head and finally nodded. “Good. We should talk about logistics. I’m a single mom, and I don’t have much time. Between that and workramping up with the ski season starting shortly, I think it’s best we talk about expectations.”
“Well, luckily for you, I’ve got your boss’s ear, and he’s willing to give you some flexibility.”
Her eyebrow arched. “Uh-huh.”
“If you were able to split your time between here and the office, you think we could get this done?”
“It would be workable,” she hedged. “But wouldn’t that be muddling things? What if there’s a conflict in scheduling between here and the office?”
“We’ll deal with that if and when it comes up,” I answered with a shrug.
Piper let out a long breath and nodded. “Okay.” She faced me. “So we’re doing this. We’re working together.”
I stuck out my hand. “Shake on it?”
Her swallow was audible. She glanced at my hand for a long moment, then exhaled sharply and slapped her palm against mine. We shook once, firmly, and then dropped the touch. My palm tingled where she’d held it.
We did another walkthrough—this one considerably less contentious—and I explained all the elements of the house that would have to be repaired. There was water damage in both bathrooms and under the kitchen sink. A few of the windows were cracked and needed to be replaced. The water heater was on its last legs.
“We’ll have to be careful not to overcapitalize,” she said when we were done, eyes scanning the front room again, lingering on the fireplace where she’d found me when she first walked in.
I watched her, my own gaze tracing the line of her neck and the delicate curve of her jaw. “Correct,” I said, pleased that we were on the same page. She turned to meet my gaze, and something stirred in the pit of my stomach.
When I’d first met Piper, I thought she was a stuck-up woman who worried too much about her precious principles. But now I saw something else. I’d seen her be warm and nurturing with her kids, all the while being so strong it almost defied belief. Strong enough to want to carry her son out to the car on her own, to move the whole family to a new town and start over on her own.
Strong enough to go toe-to-toe with me in front of an audience of coworkers, and then again in front of all the townspeople who were obviously on my side, just because she thought she was right.
And shehadbeen right. I’d cut in line that first day. Sure, I owned the café, and all I wanted was black coffee that the staff knew to have ready for me around the same time every day, but I’d still made a habit of cutting to the front of the line.
I wasn’t doing that anymore. When I needed coffee, I either stood in line and ordered if I wanted something fancy, or I went behind the counter and poured a drip coffee for myself.
She’d been right about the design of the lodge and how we needed to make it feel like somewhere the people of Lovers Peak would want to be. We were running with her design, and I’d completely struck the word “minimalism” from my vocabulary.
And she’d been right about the raffle ticket. If we’d fought a legal battle, I wasn’t sure I would havewon.
Piper had made me change my ways already with the coffee and the lodge, and we’d only recently started being civil with each other outside the very strict boundaries of work-related topics.
There was yearning inside me—a desire for Piper to point all that warmth and strength and nurturing energy in my direction. But there was an undercurrent of panic too, because last time I’d let a woman pretend to take care of me, she’d used the opportunity to bleed me dry and make me feel like nothing would ever be right again.
Oblivious to my swirling emotions, Piper straightened and faced me. “Looks like we’ve got a lot of work to do,” she noted, “but there’s a chance we could do something really special here.”
“As long as we don’t kill each other in the process.”
Her smile was wry but entirely genuine. “I wasn’t going to say that part out loud.”
