Worth The Effort (The Worth Series Book 4: A Copper Country Romance) (4 page)

“Yeah, about that. Explain it to me again. You were a little excited on the phone.”

“So, I’m at the rink with the girls. And there’s Petey Ryan skating with a girl.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Sawyer said.

“No, not that kind. I mean a little girl. She looked to be about Jessie’s age.”

At Sawyer’s blank look, Andy added, “Around ten.”
 

“Right,” Sawyer said. He figured if he had to, he could guess the ages of Andy’s daughters pretty closely.

The oldest, Heather, was born right around the time they’d completed their first really big job, an office park in Marquette. So she’d be close to fifteen.
 

Andy and Jane’s second daughter, Megan, was born thirteen years ago. Probably right around this time of year, because Sawyer remembered Andy grabbing some leftover Valentine’s candy from the drugstore to bring to Janie just before she was due.

And Jessie. Jessie had been born three days before…

“So, around ten,” Sawyer said.

“Yeah, thereabouts.”

“I didn’t know Ryan had a kid,” Sawyer said. And why would he? He’d been out of the loop for that long. Why would he think he would have known if Pete Ryan had had a kid along the way?

And why did the thought of it piss him off so much?

“It’s not his kid. I think she’s a friend’s kid or something. Jessie was telling me as I drove the girls home that this little girl—Annie, I guess—had been in a wheelchair until a couple of years ago.” Andy snapped his fingers. “That’s it. That’s why I remembered her. She’s the kid they had the benefit for a couple of years ago. The first Annie Aid?”

He was looking at Sawyer like this should all mean something. It rang some vague bells, but he just shook his head at Andy and motioned for him to go on.

“Right. Of course. Sorry. I forgot I was talking to the Brockway Mountain Hermit.”

“Ha ha. Get back to the story.”

Andy grinned. He obviously knew how much Sawyer hated that some people teasingly called him the hermit. Warmth spread through Sawyer as he joked with his old friend and talked shop. He started to match Andy’s grin, and then a pang went through him and his face turned to a scowl.

“So, you saw Ryan at the rink?” He motioned to Andy again. “I don’t have all day, you know.”

“You don’t? Really?”

And that just about summed it up. Sawyer
did
have all day to sit and listen to Andy’s stories of taking his three daughters skating.

But there was no way he could endure it.

“Andy…” he warned.

“Okay. Okay. So, he and I start talking as the girls are all getting out of their skates. And he says that he’d been meaning to call me. That he and Darío Luna have an idea, and they wanted to run it past me.”

“This Luna guy, the one you mentioned last night? He’s a golfer, you said?”

Andy gave an exasperated sigh. “Yes. A very good one. He’s won three majors. I know at least one of them was a Masters.” Andy looked away, his mind wandering. “I’d better look that up, eh? Might be good to pull out sometime in conversation.”

That. That was why Andy ran the business and Sawyer stayed behind the scenes. It would never occur to Sawyer to look up someone’s accolades so they could be dropped into a conversation. And yet, Andy did it in a very non-cheesy, non-used-car-salesman kind of way.

Sawyer sent up a silent thank you for sitting next to Andy Summers on his first day, in his first class, at Tech.

“So, you were at the rink…”

“Right. I said I could meet any time. He said he was actually meeting Darío in an hour at the Cat’s Meow for a beer. Asked if I wanted to join them.”

“Thus the 3 a.m. phone call.”

“Yeah. We weren’t there that late. Well, maybe they were. I left after we’d talked business and got the promise that you could take him to dinner tonight to talk about it more.

“They were celebrating. Darío and his wife had a baby a few weeks ago, and I think this was the first time the guys had been out to celebrate it. Petey was ordering shots when I left. I heard him tell Darío he’d call Al somebody to come pick them up, or I would have stuck around to make sure they got home okay. Must be a good buddy to come get two guys from a party he wasn’t even invited to.”

“So…”

“So then I spent a few hours looking at numbers and space and doing some preliminary research on indoor driving ranges.” He sighed again, and looked Sawyer in the eye. “And then I called you.”

“Yeah, explain that part to me again.”

“Well, Petey asked specifically about you. How involved you were with the business. How you were…doing. You know.”

Sawyer waved his hand in a “keep going” motion.
 

“I said you were good. Semi-retired but still involved.” Sawyer shot Andy a withering look, but Andy ignored it and kept going. “He seemed very interested in you. Said you played hockey against each other?”

“A thousand years ago. High school. He played at Tech with my brother.”

“Well, whatever. I finally asked if we could get a meeting with them. Darío said he wouldn’t be available much. I guess he’s busy with the new baby, and then they’re leaving in a few weeks for him to play the Florida swing of the tour.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s when the golf tour—never mind. It doesn’t matter. What matters is Petey Ryan is doing the legwork on the project and checking in with Darío when needed.”

“Okay. And…”

“And you, my partner, are having dinner with Petey Ryan tonight to extol the virtues of doing business with Summers and Beck.”

“Well, shit.”

“Exactly.”

Chapter Three

The engineer has been, and is, a maker of history.

~ James Kip Finch

“F
irst off, I am
not
the Brockway Mountain Hermit. That was Bill Mattila. He died nearly thirty years ago, and they’ve since torn down his shack.”

There was a gasp from someone in the conference room. A very female gasp. Sawyer looked in Sue’s direction, but her head was looking down at her tablet, hand poised to take notes. She hadn’t deemed his icebreaker worthy enough to jot down, so the gasp probably hadn’t come from her.

Sawyer didn’t look in the direction of the other female in the room.
 

“I’ve met some of you. Most of you I haven’t. I’m…looking forward to working with you on this…exciting new project.” There. Just like Andy had told him to say.

He looked toward Andy, nodded and then sat down in the seat directly to Andy’s right. Like he was some mafia consigliere or something.

“Thanks, Sawyer. And a big thank you for becoming personally involved in this project.”

Andy went on as Sawyer mentally snorted. Yeah, right. He
wanted
to be personally involved. Like Andy hadn’t tried everything on the phone last night to try to get him to come. None of it had worked, and Sawyer had held firm until Andy had tried the one thing guaranteed to work on him.

Guilt.

He’d tried to hide it, so Andy wouldn’t realize it was Sawyer’s Kryptonite. He’d pretended that Andy had just finally worn him down. But no, it was the guilt.

And it hadn’t even been a huge guilt trip. Just a mention about how things were tight at the firm, and they could really use this job to springboard this type of thing to other northern areas. And that if they didn’t they may have to look at layoffs.

That was what had done it. Sawyer honestly couldn’t care less about the firm’s bottom line. He didn’t need much to live on and probably had enough to get by for the rest of his life if he so needed. But the company did support ten other employees and their families. Not to mention the contractors they worked with and all the subsidiary workers.

The realization that a decision he made could have that kind of ripple effect had had Sawyer’s stomach in knots since he’d gotten off the phone with Andy.

The no sleep hadn’t helped, either.

“So, let’s start this off,” Andy was now saying, Sawyer having missed his pep talk. Andy rose from his seat and went to the long wall in the room that was covered with a whiteboard. He opened a marker and stood, poised to write down greatness.

“Let’s start with obstacles. Don’t even throw out solutions yet. Just obstacles.”

“Cost,” someone said. Sawyer thought it was Jim, but it could have been Bob. Andy wrote.

“Support for the heavy snowfall,” somebody else said. Andy wrote.

They were all adding ideas, some looking at their tablets or laptops in front of them, some eyes on Andy. Except her. She of the pink nails and small gasps.

She was looking right at Sawyer.

When he met her eye, she quickly looked away. First she looked at Andy. Then, as if sensing Sawyer was still watching her—which he was—she bowed her face to her laptop.

She was young. Younger than Sawyer would have thought. He vaguely remembered their last full-time hire had been around six years ago. So, she was obviously older than the twenty-two, twenty-three, that she looked.

Her hair was a chestnut brown with some golden highlights and was pulled back into a low ponytail. A very thick ponytail that hung down between her shoulder blades. A few loose wisps fell in front of her as she gazed at the laptop screen, and she reached out and tucked them behind her ear, the hot pink of her nails flashing.

The nails seemed out of character. She was dressed in a black turtleneck with a gray cardigan over that.

Thwarted by the table in his effort at seeing more, Sawyer surreptitiously rolled his pen off the table and then leaned over to get it.

She was about halfway down the long table from him, but he could easily make out the long gray wool skirt and black tights. She wore comfortable looking clog-type shoes that had a fleecy lining peeking up against the black of her tights.

Sawyer sat back up in his chair and glanced at the whiteboard that Andy was filling up as the others had been speaking. But not her. She hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t typed anything into her laptop, either.

She glanced at Sawyer again, then quickly away. He couldn’t tell her eye color from here, but he’d guess a deep brown. Maybe with gold flecks, like her hair. Her cheekbones were high and pronounced, and she had lips that movie stars paid for. In fact, she kind of reminded him of one. Sawyer couldn’t recall the name, not much of a pop-culture person. The one who was married to Ben Affleck. Yeah. This girl reminded Sawyer of that actress. Strong but pretty, wholesome, all-American. And with a mouth that had men thinking about—

“Sawyer? Thoughts?”

Oh yeah, he had a few. But none that Andy could write on that board.

And that realization—that he’d had a sexual thought of
any
kind—had Sawyer reeling.

“Um…lots of thoughts, Andy,” Sawyer said, covering. “But I’d like to hear more from the group.” He looked at the board, scanned it quickly. “Does anybody want to extrapolate on the heating situation? How do we economically heat this huge thing enough that people can take their coats off and hit golf balls for an hour when it’s ten below out?”

People started throwing out ideas, referring to notes and laptops. Andy kept scribbling on the board.

Sawyer rose and walked to the other side of the room, ostensibly to get a better look at Andy and the board. But where he stood happened to be directly behind the girl.

Woman. Intellectually he knew she was a woman, not a girl, but Sawyer had a hard time wrapping his mind around thinking of her as anything but the new girl.

Who had been here over six years.

He got close enough that he could see her laptop screen, but not too close that he was right on top of her. She had a couple of windows open. One was a web page that had a story about the collapsed Metrodome in Minneapolis. The other was a Word document with a bunch of bullet points. He could just make them out. They were nearly word for word the things that were on the board, though she hadn’t had her hands on her keyboard once and had not offered up any of them.

But she had thought of them all already.

Maybe they all had. Sawyer had.

But no. Most of the others were taking notes or referring to things on their laptops and clicking away. Some of the ideas they voiced sounded like they’d just thought of them. Which was fine, this is what this was—a brainstorming session.

But she’d stormed her brain already, and Sawyer found he liked that about her.

There was one bullet point on her list under a heating subheading that wasn’t on the board.

“Any others?” Andy asked, ready to move on to a bare spot on the board for another topic.
 

Sawyer waited to see if she’d mention anything, but she kept silent.

“What about methane?” Sawyer said, surprising himself.

The girl’s already straight back stiffened, her ponytail softly swung with the movement.
 

“Could be a viable option,” Sawyer continued. “Worth taking a look at, anyway. Could help keep ongoing costs down.”