Underneath It All (The Walsh Series #1)
Read Underneath It All (The Walsh Series #1) Online
Authors: Kate Canterbary
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance
By Kate Canterbary
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used factiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Kate Canterbary
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.
Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark(s).
Editing provided by Julia Ganis of JuliaEdits.
Cover designed by Hang Le of By Hang Le.
LAUREN
I
f I had
known I’d have a hot architect balls deep inside of me before the end of the weekend, I’d have made time for a pedicure. Also, a little chat about not losing my shit at all the wrong moments.
Hindsight was a bitch, and karma…well, I didn’t know her story yet.
But instead of prioritizing that pedi, I was sobbing in a stairwell. It probably owed something to stress or sleepless nights or hormones or the freaking lunar cycle, but there I was, mascara smudged and nose running, crying it all the way out. Reacting this way to a missed deadline was ridiculous and childish, but the number of things going wrong today was obscene, and it wasn’t even noon.
And this happened most days. Not the crying—that wasn’t a regular occurrence for me—but the dead ends, the brick walls, the square pegs and round holes, the things that wouldn’t go as planned.
It started innocently enough—all the best situations did. I used to teach third grade, and while I loved everything about it, I wanted to lead my own school. Conquer the world beyond my classroom. Do something incredible and bold and innovative.
For longer than I could remember, I’d toyed with applying for an absurdly competitive two-year paid fellowship program to launch a new school, and one day I finally did it. No one was more shocked than I was when the acceptance letter arrived. At the time, it didn’t seem like I was embarking on the world’s greatest obstacle course.
Part of me knew that receiving an offer to join this fellowship was a tremendous accomplishment and a validation of my hard work in the classroom, but most days I felt like a fraud. Someone would soon notice I wasn’t nearly as smart or talented or driven as I led them to believe. They’d realize I was sitting at my kitchen table at one a.m., trying to make sense of state guidelines for school lunch programs or wrestling with five-year operating budgets, and rip those generous start-up grants right out from underneath me.
Not so long ago, I was good at everything. Not just good—awesome. Parents lobbied to get their kids on my roster. My students outperformed their peers across the city and state. I was engaging and creative in the classroom, and managed every committee, event, and initiative at my school. Five golden apples lined my desk, one for each year I received the district’s Teacher of the Year award. The cognitive research I conducted for my Master’s thesis was mentioned in prominent journals and blogs. A girl could get used to that level of wonderful, and it made the present state of affairs even more dismal.
I expected the fellowship to be demanding, and I knew all about demanding. I was the chick who taught the largest, neediest classes while simultaneously running the book and science fairs, and coaching the middle school’s cheer squad, all while finishing my Master of Education degree and prepping for my principal licensure exams. But I never expected it to be quite like this. Working straight through weekends and holidays. Chained to my email. A slave to my action plan. Spending zero time in classrooms. Clinging to my sanity’s last threads upon finding a state office unexpectedly closed on the day of a filing deadline.
But as my father liked to say, there were three choices in life: giving in, giving up, or giving it all you’ve got.
I wasn’t giving in and I sure as hell wasn’t giving up.
This school was part dream, part reality, and all mine. So what if I couldn’t find time to collect my clothes from the dry cleaner or sleep more than a few hours each night? I could sleep when I was dead, and when that day rolled around, I didn’t want to think about all the opportunities I passed up over some miserable moments in a stairwell.
The right amount of stubborn resistance had me swiping raspberry red gloss over my lips and wiggling my shoulders back. The hours, the hurdles, the hoops—they weren’t stopping me, not when I had four inches of clearance rack Jimmy Choo goodness to get me through it.
A genuine smile fixed on my face, I sweet-talked my way through a few clerks to get what I needed. Within fifteen minutes, my documents were filed before the critical deadline and this particular fiasco was behind me, and I marched out of the state offices beaming. The satisfaction of crossing that off my list bordered on orgasmic, which was a commentary on either my work ethic or my shortage of orgasms. Couldn’t be sure.
The sweet talk was a double-edged sword in my world. Some blamed it on the California in me, others said it was the elementary teacher, and an odd few thought I was trying to be a psychic medium, but I think I’d always seen just beyond the masks people wore, to where they were real and vulnerable. I stared too closely, watched too long, but it never took much to see what was right there. People revealed themselves in glimpses and flashes, and I believed they usually wanted to be seen.
I was good at it—knowing what to say in awkward moments, interpreting body language and subtle cues, figuring out what people needed—and it was my undoing. My tendencies to put people at ease and draw them out occasionally made me the world’s greatest dumping ground. Add to that my inclination to adopt every project and solve every problem I encountered, and I neglected myself in the process. As my friends Steph and Amanda liked to remind me, those problems and projects occasionally took over, took all of me.
That was why I swore off men. I couldn’t worry about fixing all the boys in Boston anymore. There were schools to open and shoe sales to find, and I didn’t have the time to deal with man-children who owned a singular set of sheets and still called their hometown pediatrician for every sore throat.
I had an incredible group of friends, and a number of vibrators powerful enough to chip a tooth if not handled with care. There was no room in my life for men right now, and no need to make room.
With the meltdown behind me and two hours until my next appointment, I required a treat, and my first instinct pointed to cupcakes and tequila. While it seemed like the appropriate reward for navigating another mindlessly bureaucratic channel, I usually reserved the cake-and-liquor doubleheader for blue moons and holidays. Bypassing my preferred cupcakeries, I went in search of my other indulgence: lingerie.
My happiness was pegged to neither my measurements nor the number of pounds I wanted to drop, but I played the trade-off game, keeping my treats and cheats in some semblance of balance.
Croissant for breakfast, no drinks that evening. Cheesy enchiladas for lunch, no nibbling chocolate at midnight.
Of course, it didn’t always work that way.
My father was a Navy man, and after years of deployment, he transitioned out of the field and into training new SEALs. Each batch of sailors endured months of conditioning, “the good kind of torture,” my father would say, and his dinner table stories never skimped on the gory details.
That is, the details the government allowed him to share.
I wasn’t joining the SEALs anytime soon—my girl parts saw to that—but my father didn’t see gender as a reason to exclude me from the mock training operations he planned for my older brothers. He taught me how to use my height and low center of gravity to my advantage, but more importantly, he taught me to rely on myself.
Over and over, he told me there was nothing anyone could do for me that I couldn’t do for myself. He and my mother raised me on that ethos, and I believed it every time I dropped his SEALs on their asses. They weren’t comfortable perpetrating crimes against the commanding officer’s daughter, but they armed me with the knowledge and skills necessary to fight off attackers, escape kidnappers, fashion weapons from random items, and treat any number of injuries with salt water and a belt. But more than the badass technique, they instilled confidence, the internal faith that I was capable of anything.
I knew from countless survival exercise that soldiers often went into battle with little more than their wits, and if they did have a weapon, it needed to serve many purposes. My father saw to it that I had a small bunker of equipment at my disposal, but my armor was softer than anything Commodore Halsted would have recommended.
The streets of Boston were no battlefield and opening a school was not a covert op, but my weapons of choice were devastating heels and lacy undies. It wasn’t about the designer brands or lusting after this season’s hottest styles, and it wasn’t about being anyone’s eye candy. No, it was about the strength I felt when that sumptuous lace skimmed up my thighs and how only I’d know about those big girl panties swishing against my skirt. It was stepping into a platform heel and seeing the world from an entirely new vantage point, one where nobody ever mistook me for a college kid or intern.
Though the fellowship program paid me well, it wasn’t Agent Provocateur or Christian Louboutin well, and my habit required a certain amount of sale stalking. Forty-five minutes of salivating over unimaginably expensive lingerie later, I laid my hands upon some of the most beautiful mesh and dot lace panties.
I was one of the odd few for whom nude-colored underthings nearly matched my bare skin, and when I picked up the panties, I knew I’d look naked wearing them, and I loved that idea. I couldn’t contain the jolt of excitement rippling through me at the thought, a giggle slipping from my lips and attracting the side eye of the shopgirl. When I spied the matching bra in my size—finding 36DDs in La Perla was like seeing the ghost of Paul Revere riding through downtown on a unicorn—I knew this treat was precisely proportional to today’s victory.
Perhaps I wasn’t on karma’s shit list.
With my finery tissue-wrapped and stowed in my tote bag, I headed for my next appointment, and with any luck, an overdose of good news for my school.
Of all the issues I expected to encounter in my school-opening odyssey, finding a functional building or bare bit of land never cracked my short list. The fellowship established rigorous environmental and sustainability requirements, and the architects approved to handle that kind of work were few and far between—exactly seven in the state of Massachusetts with the mandated credentials. Two only touched multi-million dollar residential designs, two others weren’t accepting new business, and the last three belonged to a single firm—Walsh Associates—specializing in historic preservation.
It sounded charming, really: a business focused exclusively on keeping Boston’s old buildings looking new…ish. It was probably a New England thing; it seemed unlikely that a niche architect would find enough work in my hometown, San Diego, to stay in business.
