LITMIR.BIZ

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      Heaven knew Tony could certainly use a little love himself right now. Or maybe a lot, Angelo amended, given what Tony had been through in the last year.

      “Driving you crazy, huh? I take it you don’t mean that in a good way.”

      “Good way?” Tony echoed with an incredulous, dismissive snort. That’ll be the day.

      Trying to curb his temper, Tony ran a restless hand through the black mop of hair that stubbornly insisted on falling into his eyes, much the way it had when he was a boy. But that boy would never have thought his heart could have been so completely and painfully ripped out of his chest as it had been a little more than a year ago.

      Lines about his mouth, mirroring the ones etched into his soul, deepened as he thought of the short, opinionated architect who could make herself heard above a hurricane. She had become, in an incredibly short period of time, the total bane of his existence. Tony didn’t need to be saddled with this problem. It was all he could do to remember to put one foot in front of the other. To get through each day. Overseeing the construction project was hard enough without having to deal with her.

      “Good and Michelle Rozanski do not belong in the same sentence.” Tony rolled his own words over in his head. “Same sentence? Hell, they don’t belong in the same zip code.”

      Wanting to show his cousins just what he was up against, Tony began rifling through the chaotic disorder on the tiny, scarred metal desk, looking for the blueprints that they were supposed to be using to build Bedford’s newest high school.

      Shad glanced at Angelo again. This was the most emotion any of the family had seen Tony display since they had first coerced him to leave Denver and stay with them in Bedford. His sister had been right. Throwing Tony headlong into a brand-new project for the company had been the right thing to do. Dottie had known that he needed to have his mind on something other than his pain.

      “It can’t be as bad as all that,” Shad commented.

      A lot he knew, Tony thought darkly. Neither he nor Angelo had had any more to do with the feisty pain in the butt than exchange a few words at the initial meeting at city hall. They certainly hadn’t had to endure her incessant contradictions at every opportunity. Bad didn’t come anywhere near explaining the day-to-day work environment. He’d thought his association with the architect would begin and end with that brief meeting at city hall to accept the blueprints. He hadn’t realized the meeting would be only the beginning—the beginning of constant daily warfare in which his side appeared to be sustaining the most casualties. He never knew when she could come flying in through the trailer door with another bone to pick, another change to argue. He’d taken to locking it, just to claim a little peace of mind.

      “It’s worse,” Tony snapped. Where the hell was that blueprint? The one of the second floor off the high school’s music-and-arts complex. He’d just had it. Tony shoved more papers aside. “She has an opinion on everything.”

      “Most women do,” Shad deadpanned, trying to hide his grin behind his hand. This was looking very promising. When Tony had first arrived on his aunt Bridgette Marino’s doorstep a little over two months ago, he’d been a shell of the young man who had worked long summers beside them at one construction site after another. The light and laughter that had always been in his cousin’s green eyes had completely vanished.

      Now at least there was something there. Granted, anger wasn’t the greatest emotion, but it was better than nothing. It meant he was coming alive again, beginning to react to things around him instead of just sleepwalking through each day.

      Knocking over an oversize, red-bound book, Tony continued searching. “Not like this.”

      Frustrated, he glanced up at the other two men. “She thinks she’s right—” Then Tony bit off a curse as another falling book narrowly missed his toe. He’d never been a very organized person, but in the past thirteen months he’d found himself facing nothing but chaos everywhere he turned. Which was just the way he felt inside.

      “At the risk of repeating myself,” Angelo said amiably. “Most women do.”

      Most women, but not Teri, Tony thought, the memory bringing with it the sharp, deep stab of pain. Teri, with her quiet, unassuming soul So quiet and unassuming that at times he’d all but had to coax responses out of her. She’d always been more than willing to bow to his wishes, uncontested.

      He supposed in a way that had spoiled him. It certainly hadn’t prepared him to deal with a blue-eyed, sharp-tongued wrecking ball who was unshakably convinced that everything she said was etched in stone somewhere, residing on the same shelf as the Ten Commandments.

      “Maybe,” Tony said. “But not like this.” Finding what he’d been searching for, shoved under the stained blotter, of all places, he pulled it out and made a futile attempt to smooth the long, curled paper out on top of his desk. “Have either of you taken a close look at these blueprints of hers?”

      His patience in drastically short supply, Tony gave up trying to flatten out the paper on the cluttered surface and rounded his desk. Beckoning his cousins forward, Tony crouched down, placing the blueprint on the floor and spreading it out there.

      Tony wasn’t sure just where to begin. Aesthetically pleasing, the proposed complex for the high school had more than one trouble spot. Several sections of the buildings appeared to, for all intents and purposes, simply defy the laws of physics. He stabbed a finger at what appeared to be the worst offense. He singled out the king post beneath the glass section of the roof.

      “There, look at that. The woman actually thinks that’s possible.”

      Shad and Angelo looked and saw the inherent flaw. Tony was right, at least to some extent. It would take a little compromising on both parts to work around the problem. But both men felt that Tony was up to it, given time. Relative or not, no matter how much their hearts went out to him in his time of emotional turmoil, neither Shad nor Angelo would have handed him the assignment if they hadn’t thought him equal to it. After all, he was a damned good civil engineer.

      Since they had begun expanding their firm, merging with Conrad & Son when Angelo’s wife, Allison, came aboard, they’d had more new business than Salvator Marino could ever have conceived of when he’d originally started the small company. Then the company had been restricted to remodeling and upgrading bathrooms. Now there were no such restrictions on their expertise. More than one of the newer shopping malls in Southern California bore the stamp of their labor.

      Nodding his head as if he were commiserating with Tony, Angelo looked at the man beside him and said, “Handle it.”

      “I’ve been trying to handle it.” Tony knew he wasn’t the type to complain at the slightest provocation, but there was just something about this woman that seemed to set him off. Maybe it was how she looked at him—smug, determined, ready to cut him down to size. Or maybe it was just that he’d jumped in when he should have started out wading. Maybe this was too much of a project to take on, and he shouldn’t have agreed to do it.

      He was tired, he told himself. Too tired to be reasonable tonight. Maybe things would look better on Monday.

      “If I try to handle it anymore,” he said to his easygoing cousin, “my fingers will be wrapping around her throat.” Unconsciously he rubbed his thumbs along his forefingers. He had to admit the thought had some merit to it.

      Angelo laughed. “I said handle it, not her.”

      Tony’s frown deepened. “Handling it means handling her.”

      Still squatting over the blueprints, Tony looked down at them again. Heading up an operation was nothing new to him. He’d been in charge of enough of them at his old company, and coming back to work for Marino, McClellan & Conrad was essentially like coming home again, at least for the most part. But he’d been at the top of his game before. Now he had trouble pulling his thoughts together for more than a few minutes at a time, trouble moving from the beginning of each day to the end of it.

      It never seemed to get any better.

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