“You only need to worry if it’s the bad guys targeting you,” said Lucas. “I’m one of the good guys.”
My hands found my hips. “Is that so.”
“Oh, sweetheart, you had better believe it.”
And at that moment, after apparently being unable to get off his arse to collect some damn papers, Dane popped out of his makeshift office, Elliott on his heels, and stopped still in the hallway too, his expression as he surveyed Lucas sour.
“Callie,” he said, “you realise this isn’t our property and you can’t just have whoever you like come over.”
Of course he was blaming me. Well, I could easily just say Lucas had turned up on his own, get the heat off myself… but I didn’t think he’d really buy it unless I also told him I had absolutely no control over what Lucas did, and that was just asking for trouble.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I’ll try not to have this happen in future.”
“It’s my fault,” Lucas spoke up. He slung an arm over my shoulder—not the sort of hold a guy put a girl in when he wanted her to feel cherished, but definitely for show. “I just needed to have a private chat with Callie. She’s a hard woman to get hold of, you know.”
A memory flashed into my mind. I’d been a kid back then, and I hadn’t known the difference. It had felt like maybe it was real. And even now I knew, it felt as good to me as it had back then. Better, because now I understood what I was only just starting to want as a ten-year-old.
“It’s all right,” said Dane, folding in the face of Lucas of course, though he was still giving me a really dirty look. “We just don’t want to have the owners coming in to see we’ve let absolutely everybody on the site. You need to come to me first if you need to see Callie.”
“Or, you know,” said Elliott, “there’s me.”
“Just go upstairs if you want to talk, okay?” said Dane. “Nobody’s working there today, and we can sneak you out if we have any visitors.”
“Good to me,” said Lucas. His hand slipped off my shoulder, and he ran his fingers diagonally across my back until he could gather up my hand. “Come on, Callie, I promise it’ll be quick.”
“Don’t do this again!” Dane called after us. “Callie’s got to work!”
“Thank you so much for this,” I muttered as I climbed the stairs after Lucas. “Now my boss is going to think I’m so caught up in a guy I can’t do my job properly.”
“Maybe you can’t,” Lucas said. He was still turned away from me, and his voice never communicated much.
It made me feel really frustrated. “Is this always how it’s going to be with you,
Lucas? Whenever you get it into your head to hang out with me again, you’ll just do whatever you can to screw my life up publicly?”
Lucas turned as I joined him on the landing. “What the fuck are you talking about.”
“I swear you’ve been trying to get me to lose my job all along. You didn’t like that I had one at all, that it was getting in the way of you just dragging me off whenever you liked. Now you’re trying to make me look like I don’t even care about the job.”
“I’m trying to get you to quit,” Lucas said. “This isn’t a job, it’s a dead end. I can find much more enjoyable ways for you to waste your time if that’s what you want to do.”
“What I want is for you to stop trying to sabotage me,” I retorted. “This ‘dead end’? It’s my way into a proper career, something I can do in the future that isn’t just going to be desk work drudgery.” I lowered my voice automatically, even though I knew the walls in these new houses weren’t anywhere near as thin as the ones at my place. “My plan is to move out of this role in the long term, either go up into managing sites like on the level Dane does, or even be a contractor, run my own business. Honestly I’d love to drive one of the machines they bring through before they start building the house. I’m not the best intellectually, it’d be something I could do that wouldn’t require me to be some business whiz.”
Lucas pulled me into one of the upstairs rooms and pushed the door shut behind us. I flinched at the slam, but Lucas’s face was amused, not angry.
“We’ve both seen the way those boys treat you, Callie. You’re a bit of eye candy around the office to them, always will be. If you try to put yourself forward as some kind of candidate for leadership at Dane’s outfit, or, heaven forbid, you show up aboard a backhoe wanting to dig up a site, he’s going to block it. He’ll come up with some bullshit excuse that sounds good—another prospect with more experience, or some shit—but the truth will be he’d have you in a second if you were a man. But you’re not, and that’s just how it is.”
I could barely stop myself from rolling my eyes at him. “Seriously? I think we’ve actually been letting women out of the basement even for as long as you’ve been alive, Lucas…”
“I didn’t mean I fucking think you should be some Stepford bitch,” Lucas retorted. There was something dangerous in the way he was looking at me, a spark that seemed to be passing between our gazes, but I was getting pretty used to that feeling of danger where Lucas was concerned. I stood my ground. What more was he going to do to me? “If I thought you really wanted a fucking backhoe, I’d go slap one on hire purchase this fucking instant. Be the first investor in your goddamn business.”
That completely threw me off. “Really?”
“Well, I’d have to break into an account I’m not supposed to touch to do it,” he said, “and there’d be hell to pay with the parents, but sometimes it’s just worth it, you know?” I would never have wanted to admit it to him, or to anyone really, but his smile as he talked about doing bad things really did things to me.
“Anyway,” Lucas said. “I know that’s not what you really want to do. You’re just trying to make a point, a stupid fucking point. And I say stupid, because you’re not ever going to be allowed to make it. You’ll just waste your time. Those fuckers will let you waste your time until the last minute because they enjoy their little show. And I’m not so sure I think they deserve that show.”
“I provide more value to Stacks Brothers than just visual appeal, Lucas.”