LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWO

      WHEN HAD A man ever asked Harley to be his wedding date?

      When was the last time she’d felt like going to a wedding?

      She couldn’t remember on either count.

      Harley had turned Vince down, of course. The wedding was in California the weekend after next, but he’d wanted her to fly out with him this Saturday.

      Take to the skies with Vince?

      Thunderclouds lined the southern horizon.

      There was a time when Harley O’Hannigan thought the sky was the limit. A time when everything she’d touched had turned to gold.

      Daughter of a couple who owned a tile and granite outlet in Birmingham, she’d been the girl most likely to succeed in high school, valedictorian of her college class, the young architect hired to design beautiful structures for a boutique agency in Houston.

      And then reality struck. The balconies she’d dreamed up for a uniquely modern theater couldn’t be built with today’s construction techniques. She’d only shared the drawing with Dan because unbuildable designs could be entered in architectural theory competitions. Winning those awards brought agencies and architects prestige. But Dan had done the unthinkable. He’d presented her design to a client as doable. And they’d bought it.

      She’d begged Dan to back out of the deal. But the press he’d received from the sale was amazing, and had led to more architectural business and more requests for impossible, pie-in-the-sky ideas. Instead of admitting the balconies couldn’t be done, Dan had found a contractor willing to begin construction with the interior still up in the air. Literally.

      Backed into a corner where all she could do was put Fail on her résumé, Harley had quit, only to be told she’d signed a non-compete clause when she’d been hired. Oh, and since her employment package included the firm paying her college debt, she couldn’t work as an architect if she didn’t work for Dan. Not for four more years. He’d told her he’d reconsider the four-year limitation if she came up with a solution that didn’t compromise the design. Her mind was a blank slate.

      She wasn’t qualified for any other job that could support her former lifestyle. She’d moved out of her high-rise condo. She’d sold her Lexus SUV. She’d let go of dreams of greatness in the clouds.

      And she couldn’t tell anyone why. There was a nondisclosure clause, too.

      Clause-clause-clause. Harley wanted to go back to a time when the only clause she knew was Santa. For the girl most likely to change the world, it was humiliating.

      Her parents told their neighbors Harley was discovering herself. Privately, they’d counseled her to find a lawyer, not that she or her parents could afford one. Harley’s friends thought she’d finally cracked under the pressure of perfectionism. They’d offered platitudes and shoulders to cry on. Harley had rejected them all. Taylor, Harley’s older brother, had just shaken his head and told her she should have known buildings always came back to straight lines and right angles. That’s how he and their parents approached tile work and life—eyes on the task in front of them—unlike Harley, who was always dreaming.

      Without any professional avenues open, Harley had taken a job as a tile installer, a trade her father had taught her growing up. She’d rented a small studio apartment in an almost up-and-coming neighborhood. She kept her head down, away from the clouds. But her eye occasionally drifted toward the architectural elegance of the Houston skyline. And she wondered what she’d do in four years when her non-compete restriction expired. Straightforward lines or curvature that challenged?

      In the meantime she lived day-to-day, job-to-job, paycheck-to-paycheck. But the only way she could do that was to have a functioning tile saw.

      She stopped at the tool repair shop Vince had mentioned. It was open late because it catered to construction companies. She carried the saw inside.

      “Were you in a traffic accident?” Bart, the owner, looked like he’d forsaken years of trips to the barber and opened a running tab at the tattoo parlor next door. He had long brown hair, a haystack beard and line upon line of ink on his arms. “You need to secure your equipment when you drive.”

      Harley didn’t care about Bart’s body art, his hair style or his sad attempts at humor. She cared that his hands were nicked and greasy. It meant he was busy making tools go again. “This happened at a job site. Some idiot trashed it.” Because some idiot couldn’t figure out how to make balconies float like clouds. “Can you fix it?”

      “Give me two weeks.” Bart stood back, possibly because he’d given customers bad news like this before. Possibly because construction workers could be as volatile as stiffed loan sharks.

      Harley fought shoulders that wanted to hunch in defeat and reminded herself that nothing was ever set in stone. There was always another card to play. “How about two days?”

      “It’ll cost ya.” Bart’s mouth rolled around before he admitted, “And I might not be able to fix it.”

      Harley felt sick. Her hand drifted to her waist. “And when would I know that?”

      “When I’m done.” Bart curled his scarred fingers around the handle of her saw, as if preparing to claim it. “No matter what happens, you’d owe me a hundred dollars just for taking it apart. Fixin’ costs extra.”

      One hundred dollars and days of uncertainty. Her eye caught on a used tile saw in the corner with a six-hundred-dollar price tag. “What if I sold it to you for parts?”

      “I’d give you sixty bucks.”

      That’s all? He must have sensed she was desperate.

      Harley tried to look like she wasn’t. “How about a hundred?”

      Bart shook his head. “I can come up as high as seventy. And even then, I don’t think I’m gonna get seventy dollars’ worth of parts out of it.”

      A good, new tile saw would cost around a thousand dollars. Seventy wasn’t going to get her close. And she hated the idea of taking out more credit. What would she do if the truck broke down again?

      Harley thanked Bart for his time and lugged the saw back outside.

      Her head was pounding. All she wanted was a cold shower and someone to make her dinner.

      She thought of Vince and his talent at the grill, of his invitation to his brother’s wedding, of the tenderness of his kiss.

      That cold shower. Sadly, it was the only one of her fantasies going to come true tonight.

      Tomorrow, however,

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