LITMIR.BIZ

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was right. It wasn’t up to him, and naturally they’d need to get on it as quickly as possible.

      “We have a lovely area where you can wait,” she said and gave Neely directions. “The doctor will come out and talk to you when he’s finished.”

      “Thank you.” Neely gave her a quick smile and, still worrying, followed the directions to the waiting area. The last time she’d been in a hospital was when John had suffered a heart attack. Swift and, ultimately, fatal. It wasn’t the same thing at all.

      But it had been as unexpected as Max’s accident was, and somehow even though her mind told her to relax, her body was on adrenaline overload. She walked right past the waiting area without realizing it.

      “Neely.”

      She spun around at the sound of the voice calling her name. “Sebastian?” She stared in consternation at the man standing in the doorway to the waiting room. “What are you doing here?”

      “Max called me.”

      She let out a breath. Of course he had. She might be Max’s daughter, but Sebastian was his second in command. Slowly she turned and walked back to the room. There were several other people sitting and waiting for other patients. They glanced up disinterestedly as Sebastian led her to a small conversational group and gestured for her to sit down.

      She sat. Sebastian sat in a chair next to her. He looked calm and composed, the way he always did. The Iceman returns, Neely thought.

      But looking at him more closely, she knew she was wrong. There was tell-tale strain on his face. His jaw was clenched. As she watched, he flexed his fingers, as if he would have cracked his knuckles if he’d been willing to display any feelings at all.

      “Did you get here before they took him into surgery?”

      “Just.” Now he did crack his knuckles.

      “Is he going to be all right? How bad is it?”

      “I don’t know a lot. Apparently they’re talking about pins and plates. He didn’t sound thrilled. But he didn’t know too much yet. I suppose it depends on what they find when they get in to do it.”

      “Yes.” Neely swallowed. “He’s going to be livid that he won’t be able to go climbing over things, that he’ll have to oversee from the office.”

      “Yeah, well, he’s not going to.”

      “Not going to what? Stay in the office? He’ll have to!” Trust Max to not know his own limits. She shifted in her chair and gave a despairing shake of her head.

      “No, not oversee,” Seb said. “He’s going to be laid up too long. There will be things he can do, certainly. But not the projects he has to be on the ground for. He can stay home and work on new designs. But as far as the other stuff goes, I’m overseeing or delegating.”

      His words took a minute to penetrate. The significance of them took even longer.

      Finally Neely cocked her head. “What other stuff?” she asked.

      And Sebastian ticked off several projects that she knew Max was involved in. “I’m delegating those,” he said. “But I’ll keep an eye on them.”

      “And Blake-Carmody?” she asked, because that had been Max’s baby, the one he’d brought her in to work with him on. Was she going to get to do that one?

      “That one,” Sebastian said, “is mine.”

      * * *

      If Neely thought Sebastian was a workaholic before Max’s accident, it was nothing to what he became afterward.

      “You don’t have to do everything,” she said. It was like a mantra, she said it so often over the next few days, because regardless of what he’d said about delegating, he didn’t seem to be delegating at all.

      He was up at the crack of dawn, working hour upon hour, going between the office, all the construction sites, the design meetings and the hospital where he kept Max updated but, by his own admission, “not very updated,” because Max needed to rest.

      Sebastian, apparently, needed no rest at all.

      Or needed it less than he needed to prove something to himself.

      He was gone before she even got up in the morning, and he rarely got home in time to grab a late meal before Neely went off to bed. One night he didn’t come in before she went to bed and he wasn’t there when she got up, so she wondered if he’d even been home at all.

      “No,” he said when she asked him later that morning when she stuck her head in his office at work.

      “You can’t go without sleep.”

      “I caught a nap on the sofa.” He jerked his head toward the small one in his office. She couldn’t imagine how anyone over the age of ten could have caught any sort of nap on it, without becoming a pretzel in the process. Sebastian was six feet two inches of solid muscle and bone. And stubbornness.

      “Not good enough,” she said.

      He gave her a steely look. “I didn’t have time, okay? I’ve got to get up to speed on Blake-Carmody. I have a meeting with the committee on Friday and Max said they still had some reservations about the lobby and atrium.”

      “Can I help? I just had a meeting with Blake. I know how he thinks.”

      Seb shook his head. “No. It’s fine. Thanks. This is my end of things, not yours.” He gave her a quick distant smile and bent over his work again.

      Dismissed, and knowing it, Neely backed out of his office. But she was still concerned. And a bit peeved at his dismissal. Did he think she was only able to appreciate her own work?

      Later that day she said as much to Max.

      He was still in the hospital, his leg immobilized with seven pins and a plate, which he grumbled about continually. There was no way he could come to work and take some of the pressure off Sebastian. Neely knew that, but she thought he might tell Sebastian to ease up a little.

      But Max just shrugged against his pillows. “He’s conscientious. Doing what needs to be done.”

      “He’s just like you,” Neely countered.

      “Somebody has to be,” Max rejoined with a grin.

      But Neely didn’t smile in return. “Do you really think so?” she challenged him. “Is it really the way you’d advise him to live? After what it did to your life?”

      And mine, she didn’t add aloud.

      Max’s grin faded and he plucked at the sheet with his fingers. “I don’t know,” he admitted after a long moment. “I thought so when I was his age.”

      “And now?”

      He shrugged and raked his fingers through his hair. “I can’t tell him that,” he said.

      “Why not?”

      “It’s a guy thing,” he said simply.

      “Oh, and that means he should just work himself into the ground?”

      “Not necessarily. It means he has to get his own priorities sorted out. I can’t do it for him. He has to figure it out on his own.”

      “Like you did,” Neely said, for the first time being just a bit sarcastic with her father.

      Max’s mouth tipped in a wry smile. “Exactly.”

      And Neely supposed he was right. But Sebastian didn’t seem to be doing so. He kept up the dawn-till-well-past-dark schedule as the week wore on. He did turn some projects over to second in commands. But from Neely he refused all offers of help.

      Wednesday, though, he was in the middle of working on the atrium proposal when Vangie had a meltdown right in his office.

      Neely had

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