“I’ll draw you a map.”
“Thank you. A waterfall!”
“Now eat. Enjoy the view.”
She did eat, and she did enjoy the view. It was actually much easier to get to work when she could just glance up and watch Drew, rather than making a special trip away from her desk and to the window.
Later that afternoon, she headed down to the helicopter loading dock with her checklist and began sorting through the boxes and muttering to herself.
“Candles? Check. Centerpieces? Check.”
“Hi there.” She swung around.
Drew was watching her, a little smile playing across his handsome features.
“Hello.” Oh, God, did she have to sound so formal and geeky?
“Do you always catch your tongue between your teeth like that when you are lost in thought?”
She hadn’t been aware she was doing it, and pulled her tongue back into her mouth. He laughed. She blushed.
“The pavilion is looking great,” she said, trying to think of something—anything—to say. She was as tongue-tied as if she were a teenager meeting her secret crush unexpectedly at the supermarket!
“Yeah, my guys are pretty amazing, aren’t they?”
She had not really spared a glance to any of the other guys. “Amazing,” she agreed.
“I just thought I’d check and see if the fabric for draping the pavilion has arrived. I need to come up with a method for hanging it.”
“I’ll look.”
But he was already sorting through boxes, tossing them with easy strength. “This might be it. It’s from a fabric store. There’s quite a few boxes here.” He took a box cutter out of his shirt pocket and slit open one of the boxes. “Come see.”
She sidled over to him. She could feel the heat radiating off him as they stood side by side.
“Yes, that’s it.”
He hefted up one of the boxes onto his shoulder. “I’ll send one of the guys over for the rest.”
She stood there. That was going to be the whole encounter. Very professional, she congratulated herself.
“You want to come weigh in on how to put it up?” he called over his shoulder.
And she threw professionalism to the wind and scampered after him like a puppy who had been given a second chance at affection.
“Hey, guys,” he called. “Team meeting. Fabric’s here.”
His guys, four of them, gathered around.
“Becky, Jared, Jason, Josh and Jimmy.”
“The J series,” one of them announced. “Brothers. I’m the good-looking one, Josh.” He gave a little bow.
“But I’m the strong one,” Jimmy announced.
“And I’m the smart one.”
“I’m the romantic,” Jared said, and stepped forward, picked up her hand and kissed it, to groans from his brothers. “You are a beauty, me lady. Do you happen to be available? I see no rings, so—”
“That’s enough,” Drew said.
His tone had no snap to it, at all, only firmness, but Becky did not miss how quickly Jared stepped back from her, or the surprised looks exchanged between the brothers.
She liked seeing Drew in this environment. It was obvious his crew of brothers didn’t just respect him, they adored him. She soon saw why.
“Let’s see what we have here,” Drew said. He opened a box and yards and yards of filmy white material spilled out onto the ground.
He was a natural leader, listening to all the brothers’ suggestions about how to attach and drape the fabric to the pavilion poles they had worked all morning installing.
“How about you, Becky?” Drew asked her.
She was flattered that her opinion mattered, too. “I think you should put some kind of bar on those side beams. Long bars, like towel bars, and then thread the fabric through them.”
“We have a winner,” one of the guys shouted, and they all clapped and went back to work.
“I’ll hang the first piece and you can see if it works,” Drew said.
With amazing ingenuity he had fabricated a bar in no time. And then he shinnied up a ladder that was leaning on a post and attached the first bar to the beam. And then he did the same on the other side.
“The moment of truth,” he called from up on the wall.
She opened the box and he leaned way down to take the fabric from her outstretched hand. Once he had it, he threaded it through the first bar, then came down from the ladder, trailing a line of wide fabric behind him. He went up the ladder on the other side of what would soon look like a pavilion, and threaded the fabric through there. The panel was about three feet wide and dozens of feet long. He came down to the ground and passed her the fabric end.
“You do it,” he said.
She tugged on it until the fabric lifted toward the sky, and then began to tighten. Finally, the first panel was in place. The light, filmy, pure-white fabric formed a dreamy roof above them, floating walls on either side of them. Only it was better than walls and a roof because of the way the light was diffused through it, and the way it moved like a living thing in the most gentle of breezes.
“Just like a canopy bed,” he told her with satisfaction.
“You know way too much about that,” she teased him.
“Actually,” he said, frowning at the fabric, “come to think of it, it doesn’t really look like a canopy bed. It looks like—”
He snatched up the hem of fabric and draped it over his shoulder. “It looks like a toga.”
She burst out laughing.
He struck a pose. “‘To be or not to be...’” he said.
“I don’t want to be a geek...” she began.
“Oh, go ahead—be a geek. It comes naturally to you.”
That stung, but even with it stinging, she couldn’t let To be or not to be go unchallenged. “‘To be or not to be’ is Shakespeare,” she told him. “Not Nero.”
“Well, hell,” he said, “that’s what makes it really hard for a dumb carpenter to go out with a smart girl.”
She stared at him. “Are we going out?” she whispered.
“No! I just was pointing out more evidence of our incompatibility.”
That stung even worse than being called a geek. “At least you got part of it right,” she told him.
“Which part? The geek part?”
“I am not a geek!”
He shook his head sadly.
“That line? ‘To be or not to be.’ It’s from a soliloquy in the play Hamlet. It’s from a scene in the nunnery.”
“The nunnery?” he said with satisfaction. “Don’t you have a fascination?”
“No! You think I have a fascination. You are incorrect, just as you are incorrect about me being a geek.”
“Yes, and being able to quote Shakespeare, chapter and verse, certainly made that point.”
She giggled, and unraveled the fabric from around him.
“Hey! Give me back my toga. I already told you I don’t wear