Love In Secrets (Love Distilled #3) - Scarlett Cole Page 0,21
little greasy, his pallor gray. “I’m a Rockies fan,” he said, his voice hoarse and gravelly. “I’m used to taking the rough with the smooth.”
Cassie smiled. Seeing him making jokes was the boost she needed. “Big day today. Are you ready for it?”
“Doesn’t matter whether I am or I’m not. I need it. Need to get back on my feet and back to work.”
Her father reached for her hand and she took it. His skin was a little rougher than she remembered, his knuckles more gnarly. At nearly sixty, he should be thinking about retirement. She knew he loved construction as much as she did. She came by her love for it honestly. Perhaps poured concrete ran through their veins instead of blood.
“You don’t need to rush back, Dad. This is going to take a while. More surgeries, physical therapy.”
Her dad sighed and allowed his head to flop back on his pillow. “I want to talk to you about that. I need your help.”
Cass’s heart dropped. She knew what was coming before he asked. “Jake told me you’d lost some staff and the distillery is behind schedule.”
Her dad nodded, looking even more stricken. “It’s a mess. I lost Paulo and Scott in project management, and I lost Ivan, Kamal, and Yusef in site management.” He stopped and took a few shallow breaths. “All of them went to ArCon. There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to fill all their roles myself. There’s the hospital, the distillery . . . so many projects on the go.”
Her dad started to cough. “Stupid throat’s still dry from those tubes.”
Cassie passed him a glass of water to sip on while the coughing subsided.
He looked at her, like he had when she was a child when she’d done something wrong. When she knew what she needed to do to make something right yet didn’t want to voice it out loud. But only this time, it wasn’t her fault.
“Are you going to make me spell it out or are you going to offer, Cass?”
Cassie shook her head. “I need to fly back to New York on Friday.”
“Need to or want to?”
“Need to. My boss isn’t taking it well that I’m here. I’m bridging two projects . . . my own, which is on schedule, and a colleague’s, which is seriously behind. It’s a school, Dad. A brand-new school that should have been open for the return after summer. There are kids in temporary halls and cabins to work around it.”
“But the company you work for is like ArCon, right? Someone could step in.”
Cassie shook her head. “You don’t understand, Dad. It’s hard enough being taken seriously as it is. I’m still one of a limited number of women who get to work on the kind of projects I do. The school? I’m fixing my boss’s, boss’s nephew’s crap. If I fix the school by December, I’ll get a major project in the new year.”
“Doesn’t sound like they treat you fairly, Cass.”
Cassie sighed. “They don’t. Construction is one of the last equality holdouts. You know this. How many women are on your building site staff? None. And it will remain that way until enough women stick with it to break down those gender inequities. Doesn’t make me want to do the job I love less. Just makes it trickier while I try and fix the balance.”
“And if I don’t fix this, Cunningham Construction goes out of business. Because the way this is going, I’ll have no team left. I’ll have no projects on the books, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have the people to do them. It’s everything I’ve ever worked for going down the drain.”
Cassie let go of her father’s hand and leaned back in the chair. “Maybe it’s time for you to retire, Dad. You could sell the company and have more than enough to live off.”
“I don’t want to sell it,” her father said, his voice so forceful he started to cough.
She reached for the glass of water again and helped him get the glass to his lips with his shaking hand.
Goddamn, she’d never been more conflicted.
She wanted to help him, she really did. But there was a piece of her that was fed up with men trying to make decisions for her that weren’t in her best interest. Elijah and Brandon at work. Her father here and now. She sighed. Again. What kind of terrible daughter was she that she struggled to put everything down to aid her father?