without saying a word, she picks up the coffee cup on my desk and replaces it with a new one, its contents still steaming. Then she reaches for the trashcan under my desk and carries it outside. A few minutes later, she replaces it, empty.
I sit there, watching her as Grant drones on about one thing or another. He likes the sound of his own voice, which is why these calls always take thirty minutes longer than they should.
Taylor walks over to the desk Robert and Hudson share and tidies it up, wiping away dust before carrying their trashcan out to be emptied as well.
When she comes back inside, she moves quickly and quietly, keeping her gaze on the ground. It’s like she’s trying to blend in with the wall, which is absolutely impossible for someone like her.
Most of the time she wears her hair up in a ponytail, hidden. Today, it’s down and longer than I thought it’d be. Not Amish-girl-wearing-a-denim-dress long, but long enough that it catches my attention. It’s pretty. Pretty! Jesus. It’s brown, but to call it that would be like calling a tree plain ol’ green. There are other colors in there too, chestnut and honey, and right then, she glances over her shoulder, apparently aware of the attention I’m paying her.
I look up at the ceiling and recline in my chair.
“Grant, can you wrap this up?” Steven says, making me chuckle under my breath. “This could have been condensed into a two-sentence email.”
“You guys never read my emails!” he argues.
It’s the truth, but he only has himself to blame for that. Too many forwarded memes means he basically has to mark something URGENTLY URGENT in all caps before any of us bother.
Grant rushes to finish his rambling diatribe about nothing all that important and my gaze skates right back to Taylor as she finishes tidying up the other desk.
In jeans and her work boots, she shouldn’t be all that noteworthy. I’ve never heard a guy beg to see his girlfriend in a pair of boots versus a sky-high pair of heels, but maybe I’ve been stuck in the middle of the woods for too long because Taylor in a simple outfit of boots and a t-shirt has me nearly enraptured. The shirt pulls a little too tight over her chest. Her jeans are too big on her, but that just means they hang loose on her small waist, allowing a sliver of skin to show when she leans over. She tugs them back up and puffs a piece of hair away from her face as she surveys the space. Short of bringing in a vacuum and mop, she’s done all she can. She smiles to herself and then leaves.
I sit there with my phone pressed to my ear, unaware that the call ended five minutes ago. Everyone else has already hung up.
“Where’d you find Taylor?” Robert asks later that afternoon while we’re walking the site.
I peer at him out of the corner of my eye.
“How I find any of my employees—she came to the recruiting event.”
His brows perk up. Apparently, that wasn’t the answer he was expecting. “You didn’t know her before all this?”
My silence serves as a placeholder for my reply. I’d rather not lie to Robert. We’ve worked together for years, and I know from seeing him deal with my crew that I’d be hard-pressed to regain his respect if I lost it.
Our boots hit the dirt. Silence stretches on until he fills it.
“She reminds me a little of my daughter.” Then he snorts. “Nah, I take that back. My daughter’s a girly girl through and through. She’s never once asked me a question about a jobsite. Maybe I just mean that Taylor brings out some kind of paternal instinct in me.”
“Robert, are you going soft on me?” I smirk as we near the edge of the lake. We have soil engineers out here performing a secondary analysis before we continue leveling the ground.
He waves away my joke. “No, no, nothing like that. I don’t know.” He turns to study me. “She just seems a little…I don’t know, like a wounded bird. Don’t you think?”
I want to tell him it’s an act, that anything having to do with Taylor is a facade she erects for her own benefit. I saw that firsthand the night we met. She was the wounded bird then, too, and I wanted to be the one to rescue her. Turns out, I was the one who could’ve used