“Yes, sir.”
Adam turned away, felt the heat of the man’s irate stare on his back and impassively headed to his trailer set up on the street bordering the city park. He’d positioned his mobile office in about as centrally located a position as he could get while still being able to survey most of main street Mirabelle on which he and his crew would be focusing their efforts. There’d been some minor damage out at the Rock Pointe Lodge resort, up on the golf course and at Mirabelle Stable and Livery, but the rest of the mayhem wrought by the tornado had been concentrated in the village center.
As he crossed the street, his personal assistant, Phyllis Pennick, came out of the trailer holding a stack of messages. Phyllis was in her mid-fifties and of medium height with short, salt-and-pepper hair. She was rail thin, no doubt from smoking—outside, he’d always insisted—a pack of cigarettes a day. Some managers might begrudge the time she took away from her desk to appease her habit, but as far as Adam was concerned she more than made up for that one flaw with her organizational skills. Her husband had died almost a decade ago, so she had no problems traveling on the job, and, as with most good executive assistants, he didn’t know what he’d do without her.
“Darwin called,” she said. “His bus broke down somewhere in Iowa last night and they’re waiting for a part. He figures they’re going to be at least a day late.”
That meant the initial supplies would be here tomorrow, but a big part of his crew wouldn’t. It wasn’t the first—and it certainly wouldn’t be the last—time that’s ever happened. Although he tried to hire as much local labor as possible, knowing an area devastated by a tornado could usually use the inflow of employment dollars, he brought the majority of his construction workers, including several foremen and supervisors, along with him to every job.
“I’m going to get myself a sandwich while I can,” she said. “You want one?”
“Sure.” He reached the steps to his trailer office and noticed his kids’ nanny, along with his daughter and son, coming down the hill from the house he was renting up in the residential section of the island. Carla had standing, strict orders to not bring Julia and Wyatt anywhere near his construction sites and had never once violated the rule in the three years she’d been working for him. This had to be something big.
As they neared Adam, Wyatt caught sight of him. “Daddy!” he called.
Adam waved. Carla quickly bent down to Wyatt’s level and pointed at the play equipment. Then she let go of the four-year-old’s hand, and he ran over to the play equipment without a second glance toward Adam. His seven-year-old daughter, Julia, on the other hand, never took her eyes off Adam’s face.
“Hi, Daddy,” Julia said, looking more than a little worried as she and her nanny approached him. “I know we’re not supposed to come down to your work, but Carla said it was important.”
“It’s all right. I’m sure Carla had a good reason.” The nanny’s eyes were red and puffy as if she’d been crying. “Julia,” he said. “Go play with your brother for a few minutes while I talk with Carla.”
“But, Daddy—”
“Julia,” he said calmly. His soft-spoken strategies in dealing with his employees worked just as well with his kids. “What did I ask you to do?”
Crossing her spindly little arms, she frowned at him, but then headed over to Wyatt.
As soon as his daughter was out of earshot, he turned to Carla. “What’s going on?”
“It’s my mother,” she said, her voice breaking. “I don’t know if you remember, but she’s been sick.”
He remembered.
“They found lung cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, gathering herself.
“Do you know what you want to do yet?” he asked softly, bracing for the worst. The only thing he’d ever been able to count on in the construction business is that he couldn’t count on anything. He’d deal with this problem the way he dealt with everything else.
“I have to go home to take care of her.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Could be two months. Could be a year. I don’t know. I’ll be staying as long as she needs me. I think it’s best for the children if you find another nanny.”
Something bad happened without fail on every single one of his jobs. This was the construction business, and what he did, moving from town to town, rebuilding after disasters, had more than its fair share of plans going awry. Last time they’d been to Arkansas, his roofing crew had been late by more than a week. In east Texas, one of his foremen, a good friend of Ray Worley’s, had shown up on the job site in the morning still drunk from the previous night of partying and Adam had had to fire him. In Oklahoma, they’d had another tornado come through not a month into the job, forcing them to start almost from scratch. He’d gotten used to problems, had accepted them as par for the course. But this? This was different. This impacted his kids.
Carla had been his children’s nanny ever since Beth—ever since his wife had died three years ago. Carla had been the only constant in their ever-changing landscape. Wyatt, too young to understand much of anything, went about playing on the park equipment as if nothing was amiss. But Julia? She was watching him. Always, she watched him. No child should have to grow up so fast.
“The children.” Tears streamed down Carla’s face. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Harding.”
“It’s all right, Carla. We’ll survive.”
One way or another, they always did, but he was getting a very bad feeling about this Mirabelle project.
“MEN.” MARIN CAMDEN GLANCED at the group of construction workers eyeing—no, more like ogling—her as she and her mother took a ferry across the choppy surface of Lake Superior to Mirabelle Island. “They’re all pigs.”
“I imagine Artie and Max might just take issue with that very generalized opinion.” Marin’s mother, Angelica Camden, chuckled softly. “Your brothers—my sons, mind you—are definitely not cut from the same cloth as those crude strangers. Or, for that matter, Colin.”
At the mention of her ex-fiancé, Marin turned around and gripped the ferry’s railing. “That’s what you want to think, but how do you really know? Men hide their affairs very well these days, and Artie and Max would hardly spill to either one of us.”
“Well, I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but affairs are just one of the many ways men break their vows,” Marin’s mother said, frowning as she adjusted her dark sunglasses. “Sometimes the most subtle infractions can be the most painful.”
There was a great deal of truth to that statement. Discovering Colin had been screwing around behind Marin’s back almost since the day they’d started dating more than six years ago hadn’t been quite as shocking or cutting as discovering the identity of his lover when she’d returned home early from a work conference and found them in bed together. This, on the same day she’d discovered the top management at the Wall Street firm she worked for were under investigation for ethics violations and had decided to quit her job.
She still wasn’t entirely sure what to think. Was Colin’s betrayal her fault? Had she been just too assertive and demanding? Not sexy or sensual enough?
“Still,” Angelica continued, “I refuse to believe that there are no men worthy of love and commitment.”
Marin shot a glance in her mother’s direction. She’d known