Page 585 of Summer Heat
Before, when Granddad was still alive, folks used to hire me out of respect for him after I took over his company. He had personally taught me everything he knew, and arranged for me to work my butt off for the best of the best in the Pacific Northwest right out of high school.
Maybe that’s why I feel a sort of kinship with Jason. It’s a well-known fact that Jason’s father was a self-made billionaire who raised Jason the way he’d grown up, working from dawn to dusk.
Back before Steele Developments International went global, they created their fortune working low-glamour, high-stakes projects like dams and bridges, after years building everything from highways to military barracks and even prisons.
When Jason joined the family business, he brought his savvy smarts and started landing them top-dollar projects like sports stadiums and premiere golf course resorts, along with lavish luxury communities for the outlandishly rich, skyrocketing their net worth to what it is now. And he did it all, not from some glass office, but out with his men on the jobsites getting covered in grime, swearing up a storm, and eating out of food trucks right alongside them.
I respect him for that.
Like Jason, I practically grew up with a hardhat, spending most of my youth surrounded by brusque, hard-working, I-am-who-I-am-take-it-or-leave-it construction guys.
It was awesome.
Though I’d had a mom, it was my grandfather who raised me. And he raised me right. Granddad made sure I could build a house from top to bottom with the bare minimum supplies, while ensuring I could also use every tool and work every piece of machinery.
No one pushed me harder than he did, and because of that, working my way up through the trades to becoming one of the youngest and most qualified general contractors in the state a couple years ago had been a breeze. And though I’ve never run point on anything as grand as the stuff Jason normally takes on, I’ve had my fair share of commercial success.
I’ve handled swanky high-rises and specialty gyms, as well as schools and even a small strip mall once, but again, regardless how good my work was, I wasn’t just a woman in a strongly male-dominated profession, but also one with a reputation for downright odd people skills that used to be muttered about enough to make the big projects—and long-term topnotch crewmen—harder to come by after Granddad finally passed.
It didn’t bother me too much though. I just kept my head down and gave all I had to the projects I did get.
Work is work. That’s what Granddad always used to say.
I miss hearing his words of wisdom. Miss him, period. Every day.
When he died, I lost the only person in the world who ever got me, or ever truly liked me. Sure, my mom loved me in her own basic, biologically-encoded way, but she definitely never liked me. Still doesn’t, in fact. We essentially butt heads over everything.
Case in point, after my mom found out what I had planned for the money Granddad had left me, she made what should’ve been good deeds feel like root canal surgeries.
She rolled her eyes over every check I wrote to fund scholarships for disadvantaged youths wanting to enter the trades, whined about the donations I made to various construction charities in areas recently hit by natural disasters, and then downright bitched over the contribution I made to the new wing at the hospice center I’d ended up moving him to when I discovered the deplorable conditions of the care home she and her husband at the time had initially stuck him in.
That’s why, when I got the approval to build Granddad’s memorial gazebo in his favorite park, I didn’t touch what was left of his life insurance money. I didn’t even tell her what I was doing at all.
The last thing I’d wanted was any of her negativity to touch that memorial. She would’ve ruined it by complaining about my paying more for the see-through glass top for sure, and no doubt disparaged my decision to splurge on the wheelchair swing. What’s worse, she wouldn’t have understood why I did either.
Granddad used to love sitting on his porch swing and looking up at the stars at night—two things she would’ve known if she’d cared enough to spend any time at all with him.
Her loss.
She missed out on getting to know the greatest man I’ve ever known. A man I still partly believe is watching over me and my career. Because let’s face it, if not for the swing and the gazebo, I never would’ve gotten onto Jason’s radar in the first place.
The memorial had caught Jason’s attention sometime last year after his dad’s passing, though he didn’t find my information and make contact until just a few months ago when he first started having problems with the construction manager he ended up firing.
And now here we are, with me heading a project I’m absolutely in love with. For a man I’m starting to have decidedly unprofessional feelings for.
Talk about a rock and a hard place.
Now emotionally as well as physically exhausted, but no closer to sleep, I give up trying to fight my insomnia, and decide to get some work done.
Sewage pipes today, definitely.
Maybe that’ll give me a brief reprieve from thinking about the man.
10
| SUMMER |
WEDNESDAY
