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However, listening to him, Connie sincerely doubted what he'd just said. She'd come to quickly realize that Finn might appear laid-back, but the man was all go all the time.

“Who taught you how to cook?” she asked as she resigned herself to the meal before her.

She half expected Finn to say that he had picked things up while watching his mother fix meals in the kitchen.

He summed it up in one word: “Brett.”

Connie blinked and stared at him. “Your brother?” she asked incredulously.

To her best recollection, her own brother couldn't boil water. She fervently hoped he'd learned how by now, wherever he was.

Finn nodded, seeing nothing out of the ordinary with what he was telling her. “Everything I know how to do, Brett taught me.”

“Even construction?” she asked, thinking that perhaps she should have approached the older Murphy brother with a job offer, as well—because what she had seen with the ranch house had impressed her no end, and if Brett had had a hand in that, as well...

“Even construction,” Finn echoed. “He taught me the basics. I kind of took off with it on my own after that,” Finn admitted without a drop of conceit. “Brett's abilities—and vision—kind of went in a different direction from mine,” Finn went on to tell her. “Let me put it this way. Brett can fix a leaky faucet—I can install a new one along with a new sink,” he explained in an effort to illustrate his point. “Besides, Brett was always busy. He didn't have time to get caught up in anything fancy. He was keeping our family together, especially after Uncle Patrick died. Brett's the really practical one in the family,” he added, as if that explained everything.

She tried to glean what he was actually telling her. “And that makes you what, the dreamer?”

“No, that's Liam. He's the dreamer in the family. Me, I'm just the guy in the middle.” He grinned as he illustrated his point for her. “The guy not
too.
”

If anything, that made things only more obscure in her opinion. “I'm sorry,” she told him. “I don't understand. Not too...?” she repeated, at a loss as to what that meant or was supposed to illustrate for her.

Finn nodded then went on to give her examples. “Not too practical, not too dreamy. You know, not too hot, not too cold, that kind of thing. Always staying on an even keel, never too much of anything, just enough to satisfy requirements.”

She held up her hand to get him to stop. Was that how he saw himself? That was awful. “You make it sound so bland,” she told him.

Finn laughed softly. “Probably because it is.”

Connie looked at the man sitting across from her for a very long, quiet moment, thinking of the way this man she still hardly knew seemed to stir her in ways that she'd never experienced before.

“Not by a long shot,” she finally told him, though a little voice in her head warned her that she was giving too much away far too quickly.

“You want seconds?” he asked out of the blue. When she eyed him questioningly, trying to comprehend what he'd just asked, he nodded at her plate—which was somehow miraculously empty. When had she eaten everything? “Do you want seconds?” he repeated.

“No. No, thank you. It was all very good, but in the interest of not waddling onto the construction site, I think I'll just stop here,” she told him, pushing back her plate.

That was when he took her plate from her, put it on top of his own and then carried both to the sink. Connie bit her lower lip, curtailing the impulse to offer to wash them for him.

The next moment, as she watched, he quickly rinsed off both plates and stacked them in the dishwasher.

An efficient male, she thought to herself.

She took a deep breath.

It was time.

Chapter Eleven

Looking back at the end of the day, as far as first days went, this had to be the very best one she had ever experienced. The machinery showed up early, as did the men who were to operate it. That meant that excavation and ground preparations could begin right on schedule and even a little bit ahead of it.

Because of the work schedules she had laboriously written up ahead of time, everyone she had hired knew almost from the very beginning exactly what to do and what was expected. Detailed schedules were conspicuously posted in a number of places.

The biggest surprise of the day for her occurred shortly before two o'clock.

Stewart Emerson walked onto the construction site, managing to catch her completely off guard.

Connie had been in the middle of a conversation with Finn, outlining what she hoped would be the project's progress for that week, when she heard a gravelly voice behind her call out her name.

Stopping in midsentence, she turned away from Finn to see exactly who sounded so much like the man she thought of as her rock.

Her mouth fell open the second she saw him.

“Stewart?” Connie cried in disbelief as the big bear of a man strode in her direction.

As Finn looked on, he watched the rather petite young woman being enfolded and all but swallowed up in the embrace of a man who could have easily doubled as Santa Claus—if the legendary figure had been a towering man given to wearing three-piece suits.

“In the flesh,” Emerson confirmed. “I guess I'd better put you down. The men might not react well to seeing their boss whirled around the construction site like a weightless little doll.” Emerson's deep laugh filled the immediate area.

With her feet firmly back on the ground, Connie made no effort to put space between herself and the older man. “I wasn't expecting you. What are you doing here?” she asked.

Finn stood by, wondering who this man was to her. He would have had to have been blind not to notice how radiant she suddenly looked. She was all but glowing and her smile resembled rays of sunshine reaching out to infinity. He'd thought she was a beautiful woman before, but what he'd been privy to before didn't hold a candle to what he was seeing now. Whoever this man was, he clearly lit up her world.

The one thing he did know was that this couldn't be the father who was always criticizing her.

“I thought you might need a little moral support,” Emerson confessed, then laughed at his own words as he took a long look around the area. The entire grounds were humming with activity. “But you're obviously doing just fine—not that I ever thought you wouldn't. You don't lack for bodies, that's for sure,” he ascertained.

“Did he send you to check up on me?” Connie asked out of curiosity.

There was no accusation in her voice. She knew that despite the fact that Emerson had been her mentor and all around best friend all these years, the man did work for her father, which meant that he had to abide by whatever wishes Calvin Carmichael voiced whenever possible. The last thing she wanted was to have Emerson terminated because of her. She knew she wouldn't be able to live with this.

“Oddly enough, no, he didn't,” Emerson told her. “I meant what I said. I came down because I thought you might need a little moral support, this being your first real solo project and all. I mistakenly thought you might be in need of a pep talk, but here you are, all grown up and following in your dad's footsteps,” he chuckled. “The old man would be proud of you if he saw this.” Emerson gestured around the busy construction site.

“No, he wouldn't,” Connie contradicted him knowingly. “You know that. If he were here, he'd be pointing out all the things he felt that I neglected to do, or had begun to do wrong...” Her voice trailed off as she eyed the heavyset man.

“All right, he wouldn't,” Emerson conceded. “But just because he's always looking to find ways in which you can improve doesn't mean you're not doing a fine job to begin with.”

She knew what Emerson was trying to do, and she loved him for it, but she was beginning to resign herself to what she was up against when it came to her father—a bar that was forever being raised no matter how great her achievements.

“It's okay, Stewart, really,” she told the man, laying a hand on his arm. “My reward will be in a job well-done, not in any praise I'm hoping to get that'll just never come.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Finn was still standing just on the outskirts of her conversation. “Oh, sorry, I guess your visit threw me. I'd like to introduce you to someone, Stewart. This is my foreman, Finn Murphy,” she told the older man, hooking her arm through Finn's and drawing him into the small circle that she and Emerson formed.

“Finn, this is Stewart Emerson, the man who really runs Carmichael Construction Corporation.” And by that she meant the man who provided the corporation with a heart.

Emerson pretended to wince. “Ouch, don't let your dad hear you say that or I'll have my walking papers before you can say, ‘here's your hat.'” Leaning past the young woman he considered to be the daughter he never had, Emerson grasped the hand that her foreman offered and shook it heartily. “Foreman, eh?” he repeated. He released Finn's hand, but his eyes continued to hold the other man's. “You've done this kind of thing before?” Emerson asked.

Connie immediately placed herself between the two men again. “Don't browbeat my people, Stewart. I wouldn't have hired Finn for the position if I didn't think he could do the job.”

Emerson looked at her knowingly. “You'd hire a puppy to do the work if it looked at you with eyes that were sad enough. No offense, Murphy,” he quickly told Finn.

“None taken,” Finn replied, then added, “as long as you don't think that's why I have this job.”

The look in the older man's gray eyes was unreadable. “So this isn't your first time as a foreman? You've been one before?” Emerson asked him.

For the second time, Connie came to the cowboy's defense.

“You're doing it again. You're browbeating. And as to your question, Finn knows how to get men to follow orders.” Which, she added silently, he did, just that he did it in his role as a bartender.

“Does he issue those orders himself, or does he let you do all the talking for him?” Emerson asked, a healthy dose of amusement curving his rather small, full mouth.

“Well, I do know enough not to get in her way if she decides she wants to say something,” Finn told the other man politely.

Emerson regarded Connie's foreman thoughtfully. For a second, Finn thought that the older man might have felt that he'd overstepped the line. But the next moment, what he said gave no such indication.

“I just want to make sure that Connie's not being taken advantage of—by anyone,” Emerson emphasized pointedly.

“Understood,” Finn replied with sincerity. “But Ms. Carmichael isn't someone who
can
be easily taken advantage of. In case you haven't noticed, sir,” he pretended to confide, “she's very strong-willed and very much her own person.”

“Excuse me, I'm right here,” Connie reminded the men, raising her hand as if she were a student in a classroom, wanting to be called on. Dropping her hand, she got in between the two men again, looking from one to the other. “I appreciate what's going on here, but I
can
fight my own battles, you know,” she informed them, the statement intended for both of the men on either side of her. “Now, then, Stewart, let me take you into that trailer you remembered to send out for me and show you the plans I drew up. Maybe I can renew your faith in me once you review them.”

“My faith in you never faded,” Emerson informed her as he followed her to the long trailer that was to serve as both her on-site office and her home away from home, as well.

Finn hung back. He'd already seen the plans, both the ones that she herself had drawn up—strictly from an architectural standpoint—and the ones that the structural engineer she'd consulted with had put together.

In addition, he thought that if he tagged along, his presence might be construed as an intrusion under the circumstances.

Sexy and stirring though he found her, she was, after all, the one in charge of all this and ultimately, no matter what sort of feelings he might have for her, she was his boss. He had absolutely no business viewing her as anything else.

However, he silently promised himself, walking back to the backhoe, once this project was completed—and before she left Forever for Houston or her next assignment—he intended to carve out a little time alone for the two of them. There was no two ways about it. The lady most definitely intrigued him.

But he could bide his time and wait.

Patience, his older brother had drilled into him more than once, was the name of the game, and anything worth getting was worth the effort and the patience it took to wait it out.

* * *

S
TEWART
E
MERSON
HAD
been around the world of construction, in one capacity or another, for a very long time. Ever since fate had stepped in one night, putting him in the right place at the right time to save Calvin Carmichael from being on the receiving end of what could have been a fatal beating.

He had not only pulled the drunken, would-be muggers off Carmichael, but by the time he was done, he had also sent the duo to the hospital—which seemed only fair inasmuch as their plan apparently had been to send Carmichael straight to the morgue.

Shaken for possibly the first—and last—time of his life as well as uncharacteristically grateful, Connie's father had immediately offered the much larger—and unemployed—former navy SEAL a job as his bodyguard.

As the business grew, so had Carmichael's dependence on Emerson, causing the latter's responsibilities to increase, as well.

Taking nothing for granted, Emerson made it a point to become familiar with everything that his employer concerned himself with and thus, while he couldn't draw up his own plans from scratch, he developed an eye for what was constructually sound, as well as what made good business sense.

Emerson made it a point to become indispensable to the corporation—and the man—in many ways.

But to Connie, the tall, heavyset, bearded man who could have easily been mistaken for Santa Claus these days would always be her one true confidant, her one true friend.

While for years, she had wanted nothing as much as to finally win her father's approval, nothing meant more to her than Emerson's opinion.

It still did.

“Well, what do you think?” she asked, gesturing toward the two large drawings that were tacked up side by side on the bulletin board that hung opposite the trailer's entrance. Between the two plans, they encompassed both the esthetics and the practical side of the building that was destined to be Forever's very first hotel.

Emerson spent a good five minutes studying first one set of plans, then the other. Finally, he stepped back and nodded his shaggy, gray head.

“I must say that I'm impressed. But then, I'd expect nothing less than the best from you,” he told her, hooking his bear-like arm around her waist and pulling her toward him affectionately.

She laughed softly to herself, happily returning his hug. “That makes one of you.”

Emerson released his hold from around her shoulders and did what he could to hide his sigh. There were times when he despaired if the man he worked for would ever realize exactly what he had and what he was in danger of losing.

“Your father's a hard man to please, Connie. We both know that. Did I ever tell you about the time that, after standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, looking down for a good ten minutes, he turned to me and said, ‘I could have done it better in probably half the time.' If your dad thinks he can criticize God's handiwork like that, the rest of us can't expect to be treated any better.”

Though she gave Emerson no indication, it wasn't the first time she'd heard him tell her the story. Emerson had told it to her at least a couple of times, the first being a long time ago in an effort to make her feel better after her father had mercilessly taken apart a venture she'd been very proud of undertaking.

That was when she'd finally realized that
nothing
was ever going to be good enough to meet her father's standards, no matter how hard she tried.

But she wouldn't be who she was if she didn't keep on doing just that.

Trying.

Over and over again.

“I suppose I shouldn't care about pleasing him,” she told Emerson, “but he put so much on this project turning out right, I feel that if I don't meet his expectations, that's it, I'm out of the game. Permanently,” she added flatly.

“You'll never be permanently out of the game,” Emerson told her, even though he knew that was what he'd heard Carmichael tell her. “Doesn't matter what he says at the time. He needs you, needs your energy, needs you to keep going, to be his eyes and ears in places he can no longer get to. He'll come around,” Emerson promised in a tone that made an individual feel that he could make book on the man's words and never risk a thing.

“Meanwhile,” Emerson continued, his eyes on hers, “you seem to have put together a pretty good crew. They're moving back and forth like well-trained workers. And that foreman of yours—” He paused for a moment, looking at her significantly. “I'd keep my eye on him if I were you.”

“Why?” Connie asked. “Don't you trust him, Stewart?”

Emerson heard the slight defensive tone in her voice and wondered if she was aware of it herself. He had a better-than-vague idea just what it meant in this instance. “Hasn't got anything to do with trust,” he told her.

She was trying to follow Emerson's drift, but he did have a habit of going off on a tangent at times. This seemed to be one of those times.