Worth The Effort (The Worth Series Book 4: A Copper Country Romance) (6 page)

“You know what?” she said to the waitress as she brought Alison and Petey’s beers to the table and set down Deni’s water. “I will have a beer after all. Bud Light, please.”
 

The waitress let out a sigh, but returned to the bar area.
 

“So, Sawyer. Shit, man, it’s really good to see you. How many years has it been? Seven? Eight?”

“Ten,” Sawyer said with dead certainty.

“Really? That long?” Petey said, and took a drink of his beer.

The waitress returned with Deni’s beer, and she took a drink. Alcohol wasn’t a problem. She and Alison had discussed the possibility of anti-depressants, but Deni had wanted to hold off on that step until she’d tried the light therapy. Her SAD was mild, relatively speaking, and she wanted to see if she could get through this season without medication, though she knew it may be the next option available to her.

“I would have sworn it was only—”

“Ten. It’s been ten years,” Sawyer said firmly. He took a long drink from his beer, draining it. He held it up in the air, motioning the waitress for a refill.

“Oh, shit. Right. Of course. Sorry, man,” Petey said, looking sheepishly at Sawyer, then at Alison as if needing help.
 

She put her hand on Petey’s arm and squeezed. To Sawyer she said, “Petey only has finesse on the ice.”

Sawyer smiled at Alison and at the waitress, who handed him a fresh beer. The waitress sighed again, but in an entirely different way.

Deni didn’t blame her. Good lord, the man was handsome when he smiled. Too bad he didn’t seem to do it often.

His smile was so blinding that it took Deni a moment to realize that there was some undercurrent going on between the other three that she was unaware of.

“Dude, I’m really—”

Sawyer held up a hand. “It’s fine. Don’t sweat it.”

One of those “guy” looks passed between them, and just like that it was dropped.

They took a moment to look at the menu, then put their order in. Petey ordered another beer for himself. Deni and Alison worked on their first.
 

“So, Deni, is it?” Petey asked her.

“Yes. Short for Denise.”

“Becks here ever tell you he’s the only guy in the Copper Country who ever knocked me on my ass on the ice?”

“Ummm. I just met him today—so, no.”

“Well, he is. Only guy ever to do it. Shit, there are guys in the NHL who can’t knock me on my ass, and Sawyer here did it a few times.”

Sawyer snorted. “About a thousand years ago. And you were a freshman to my senior.”

“No other senior did it,” Petey said, then raised his beer and tipped it in Sawyer’s direction, a salute of sorts.

“You played hockey, too?” Deni asked Sawyer. He didn’t have the build that Petey Ryan did, but he was still a big man. Not having grown up in the U.P., Deni wasn’t as familiar with hockey as the natives were, but she had season tickets to the Tech games.

Though she hadn’t used them much this year.

“In high school,” Sawyer answered her. “For Calumet. Petey went to Houghton. Alison went to Hancock. All Copper Country, but…”

“You’re all rivals.”

The three of them looked at each other and broke into smiles. “You betcha,” all three said at the same time, causing Deni to laugh.

“How’s your brother doing?” Petey asked Sawyer.

“Which one?”
 

“I meant Huck. I saw Twain not too long ago. He was at Katie’s wedding last fall.”

“I’m not really sure. I haven’t seen him in quite a while. I left my dog there tonight, and I’m hoping he’ll be home when I pick her up.”

“Wait a minute,” Deni said, holding up a hand. “You have brothers named Twain and Huck? And you’re Sawyer?”

He nodded. “Yep. Mom was a bit of a Mark Twain freak.”

“So why not Mark? Or Tom? Or Samuel? Or even Clem for Clemens?”

“Mom was also a bit of a nut job.”

Deni laughed, and Sawyer smiled at her. The sheer voltage of his…his…manliness when he did that had her reaching for her beer.

“Baby, help me out here. Name some other Mark Twain novels,” Petey said to Alison.

“
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
.”

“Arty,” Petey proposed to Sawyer.

“
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson
.”

“Willy,” Petey threw out. They all laughed. Petey turned to Alison and said, “Damn, if it doesn’t turn me on when you get all brainy.”

“Be good,” Alison said, warning in her voice. She looked embarrassed, which made Deni feel better about sitting at a table having beers with her therapist.

Petey leaned over to Alison, but Deni could still hear him when he whispered to Alison, “But baby, you don’t like it when I’m good.”

The look of intimacy that passed between them was so strong, so raw, that Deni had to look away.

And met Sawyer Beck’s gaze as he watched her.

He had the most expressive green eyes. Green, not brown as she’d thought back at the office. Everything else on his chiseled face was stoic, implacable. But his eyes… His eyes held a story. One that Deni couldn’t read.
 

“Katie has friends in the golf world who are sisters named Franny and Zooey after the Salinger novel,” Alison said, pulling Deni’s attention away from Sawyer and his eyes. Then, for Deni’s sake, Alison added, “Katie’s one of my best friends, and she married Darío Luna last fall. Darío and Petey are the ones who came up with this idea of an indoor driving range.”

“Yes, Andy told us a little bit about how the idea came to be,” Deni said.

“Basically, Darío needs a place to practice in the winter, and I need something to do with my time now that I’m retired.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. An injury? The knee, was it?” Sawyer asked.

“Yeah. But I’d actually decided this year was my last anyway. It just sped the process up a little.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Sawyer said.

Petey looked at Alison as he answered. “I’m not.”

Alison blushed, and Deni again felt like an intruder.

“So Alison, you and Petey? Are you sure it wasn’t you who was injured? Like a concussion or something?”

“Fuck off, Becks,” Petey said, then looked at Deni, “’Scuse my language.”

“Well, Deni, you got Petey to do one thing no one else in this town has been able to do—apologize for his language,” Alison said.

“I have two brothers—bad language doesn’t bother me.”

“That’s good. ’Cause if we’re going to work together, that’s pretty much a prerequisite,” Petey said, flashing a grin.

Wow. With a charm-filled grin like that, no wonder her mild-mannered therapist had fallen for this potty-mouthed brute of a man.

“Speaking of which,” Sawyer said, a bit of edge in his voice, “let’s talk a little business.”
 

Their food arrived, and as they ate, Petey brought them up to speed on what he was envisioning.
 

“The challenge is keeping costs down. First in building it and then in maintaining it. Because it’s never going to be a big revenue generator. And that’s not even the purpose.”

“What exactly is the purpose? Your main goal in this undertaking?” Deni asked. She wiped her hands on her napkin and pulled a tablet out of her bag.
 

“Well, I was only half kidding when I said it was for Darío to practice and me to have something to do. That’s a big part of it.” Deni jotted a few things down, then looked back to Petey for him to continue. “This area is golf crazy, second only to hockey crazy. And the golf season is so damn short, it just seems like it could be something people would use.”

“So, even if we used materials that let in most of the light during the day, we’d need enough lighting to clearly light it up in the evenings for night golf,” Deni said, writing again.

“Yeah, exactly. It’d have to be open late into the evening, so people could go after work, after dinner. You might even get a crowd of guys who go after they put their kids to bed, or would go do this instead of going out for a beer with their buddies. We’re even toying with the idea of trying to get a liquor license and having a few tables where guys could have a beer after they hit a bucket.”

“Weekends, of course, would be big,” Deni said, not even looking at the others anymore, now quickly writing notes. “So you’d be looking at energy costs almost twenty-four/seven.”

“Yeah, and that’s the bitch of it all. I don’t know if that makes this thing even feasible.”

“That’s for us to figure out,” Sawyer said. There was a sense of authority, of confidence, in his voice that made Deni look up from her notes. He leaned forward, his forearms on the edge of the table. “Let us take this on, Petey. If there’s a way to do this, we’ll figure it out.”

Petey looked across the table at Sawyer, then he took a quick glance at Alison. Deni thought she saw Alison give a small nod, but it may have been her imagination.

“When you say ‘us,’ who exactly do you mean? Are you going to be working on this yourself?” Petey asked Sawyer.

Deni sat back in her chair, waiting for Sawyer to explain the process, and groups of people, that Petey would work with at Summers and Beck. The survey team, then the costing process, and then finally—hopefully—the choosing of the contractor and the actual building. All of which would be overseen by a project coordinator, most likely Jim or Bob, or possibly Andy himself. Although Snide Randy had been made lead on more projects lately, making Deni feel that Andy might be grooming Randy for a partnership.

“Yes. I will be seeing this through every phase,” Sawyer said, shocking Deni.

Today, Andy had made it seem like Sawyer was here merely for the meet-and-greet schmooze dinner. That he’d make the pitch for Petey to use Summers and Beck and then head back up to the mountain and his hut.

Okay, so not a hut. And maybe not even on Brockway Mountain. But still. She hadn’t expected him to lie outright to a client. Unless he wasn’t lying and was indeed going to take lead on this one.

Deni wasn’t sure which scenario was least likely.

“Of course, others will be involved. First thing, we’ll get our survey crew up to your land and get some specs. And then our costing guys will start working on a budget and ongoing cost-versus-revenue analysis.”

Oh, okay. He was easing Petey into the idea that others would take over for him when he headed back up to the mountain.

“But I will be the lead on this and will oversee every step of it myself,” Sawyer said, looking straight at Petey.

The man was not lying. He was going to come out of hibernation for this job.

Which was an important, high-profile job, but not one that would make the company much money. There were a lot of other projects—some of the new buildings at Tech they were trying to land—that could have used the attention of a partner more.

But you didn’t hide away on a mountain if you didn’t have at least a touch of eccentricity—and possibly a little of downright crazy.

“Deni’s going to be my second on this. Like I said, others will be involved, but you’ll be working with the two of us.”

Petey was nodding, chewing on a piece of pizza. He finished, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and said, “Let’s do this. You guys start. I won’t go anywhere else with this thing until we take a look at what you come up with. If the numbers can work, you have the business.”

He wasn’t even going to bid it out? Deni kept her mouth shut. Either this Petey Ryan was the world’s worst business man or…
 

She watched as something, some look, passed between Petey and Sawyer. A measurement of some kind. A judgment. Something Deni didn’t fully understand. But Alison did. Deni could tell by her therapist’s body language that Alison approved of whatever was passing between her man and Sawyer.

Deni had been in the Copper Country long enough to know that things were sometimes done quite differently than in the real world, but this exceeded anything she’d seen before.

Still, she kept her mouth shut, not even bringing up the fact that surely tomorrow her role in this project would be turned over to somebody with more experience in this type of structure.

“How about Darío?” Sawyer asked. “How involved will he be?”

“Not very. He’s here for the next month while the tour is on the west coast, and until the baby gets a little older.”

“Right. Andy mentioned something about somebody having a baby.” He sat back, his arms falling from the table. He took his beer bottle and noticed it was empty. He motioned to the waitress, then looked around at the level in the others’ bottles and held up three fingers. Deni eyed her nearly full bottle.

“Yeah, Darío and Katie had a baby girl about, what”—he looked at Alison—“three weeks ago?”

“Four,” Alison said.

“Right. Four. Two of which were the longest two weeks of my life,” he said, still gazing at Alison. She put her hand on his arm. Deni thought she heard Alison whisper, “Mine, too.”

“Anyway…” Sawyer said, trying to guide Petey back. “Darío’s involvement?”