Page 19 of His Build
The driver glanced at Lucy. “You okay, Lady?”
Graydon opened his mouth to speak, but Lucy stepped forward. “I’m fine,” she snapped. The only thing for bringing the color in her cheeks down was to shift away from the feeling. “I’m Lucy Fulham. I’m theladydoing the design work here.”
The man had the decency to blush himself. “Oh, right. You wanted the specs on the concrete finish.” He turned back up to the truck. “Brad!” he shouted. Then he turned back. “I’m Fred.” He smiled at her in a good-natured sort of way.
The door on the other side of the truck slammed and Lucy heard swearing.
A younger man came into view. He was a scraggly kid with dirt encrusted fingernails and blonde hair that fell into his face. He didn’t look at them and instead spat a long string of phlegm onto the gravel. Fred’s expression soured.
Lucy involuntarily took a step back, even though she was several feet away from both of them.
“His dad owns the business,” the older man said with a note of apology. As if that excused the kid’s immediate rude behavior.
When the younger man finally looked up through his curtain of hair, he gave Lucy an unabashed once-over. “Hey,” he said.
Lucy’s neck prickled. The last guy who’d given her such an obviously lascivious scan like that was the client back in the restaurant in New York, when Alfred had offered her this job. She’d walked out on that guy, but she couldn’t very well storm out on this one.
Graydon took a purposeful step closer to her. She could feel the anger bristling off him, and without meaning to, she angled her body in his direction, away from the sloppy guy in front of them.
“Can we see those specs?” Graydon said, his voice considerably harder than it had been speaking to Fred.
“Brad’d rather be out with his buds than on the job with an old fart like me,” Fred said apologetically. “But ya gotta earn a living, you know?”
“Fred,” Graydon said. “You’ve been at this for years. The kid should be so lucky to get paired up with you.”
The sloppy kid sneered at both men and spat again.
This time Lucy managed to keep steady even as a fleck of spittle landed on her boot.
The kid pulled out a rumpled paper from the back pocket of his jeans and thrust it at Graydon. Of course, pass it to the man. Lucy thrust her hand out and grabbed it before Graydon could. She unfolded the paper with the tips of her fingers—it was damp. Why, she didn’t want to know. As she was examining it, a pickup truck rumbled from the trees, followed by another right on its tail. The roofers. Great, an audience.
As the truck doors slammed and roofers hopped out, Lucy gave the papers a scan. It all looked in order, except… something flickered in her memory. She lifted up her clipboard. The specs on the damp, crumpled paper saidMidnight Steel 001-49C.The specs on her clipboard saidMidnight Steel Lite 001-49E.
“Morning,” Graydon mumbled to the roofers as they clomped by in their boots, rubbernecking at the postures of the four of them standing there.
“This is the wrong shade,” Lucy said, looking up from the paper.
Brad snorted. “Naw.”
“Brad, what color’s on the order?” Fred said.
“It’s the right color,” Brad said, folding his arms.
Lucy double and triple checked the two papers. It was the wrong color.
The concrete dye was the thing that had tipped Alfred into hiring Lucy. In his call on her drive up, he said initially he and his girlfriend were going to take over the design themselves. But a simple discussion on the tint of the floors had devolved into a heated argument, which Alfred said was exactly what he wanted to move away from in building this new place.
Alfred was a stubborn man, or at least he had been. He’d told Lucy it was something he was working on, as his bullheadedness had not only nearly ruined his life but had almost ended it, with a heart attack his doctor said had stemmed at least partially from stress. But working with a therapist—and with Lucy—Alfred was trying to turn himself around. “I need to be morezen,” he’d told her. When he and Susan had gotten into a two-day fight over what shade the polished concrete floor should be—“Who knew there was a difference between variations of gray, slate, steel, and iron?” he’d said—they’d decided to call it quits on the design. It was Susan’s idea to get in touch with Lucy. She’d learned about Lucy’s design history after seeing her blog post about ‘transforming your personal space to clear your mind.’ Alfred and Susan had transferred all decision-making to Lucy only after they’d finally landed on a color for the concrete. It was symbolic, Alfred said.
They’d chosenMidnight Steel Lite 001-49E.
“Sorry, the owners were very particular about this,” Lucy said, handing the damp paper back to him.
Brad let out an exasperated breath. “Lady, it’s the right fuckin’ color.”
The slap of the roofer’s ropes sounded above them.
Graydon practically snarled. “Listen,” he began, his voice steely. He took a step forward, but Lucy put a hand on his arm.
