Chapter 6
Three days into the Lakeside project and Meredith had already designed two custom elevation revisions, finished the optional bonus room floor plan for the Sanibel model, and had started the preliminary sketches for the pool house and gym.
She rarely looked up from the dual monitors displaying her Revit software, which meant she was lost in work, one of her favorite places to be.
When she did take a thirty-second break, she couldn’t help but notice the new digs were just about perfect, which was not a word she used lightly.
The office sat at the back of the Lakeside Design Center—a sunny contemporary building at the entrance to the soon-to-be gated community. Here, future homeowners could wander through showroom kitchens and model bathrooms to touch the fine finishes for their dream homes.
The showroom took up most of the building—glossy, staged “rooms” with carefully arranged vases and strategically placed throw pillows. All very aspirational and designed to separate people from their money.
Meredith loved perusing the design center.
She enjoyed seeing her two-dimensional blueprints for a bathroom or kitchen turned into a real room.
So many times, an architect parted with plans and maybe saw the finished product a year or two later.
But the Lakeside builder wanted the homeowners to feel they were getting “semi-custom” homes and that was why access to the architect was important.
Behind the showrooms, down a short hallway past the shared kitchen and conference room, Acacia Architecture had been given a spacious office with three desks and a drafting table, a bank of filing cabinets, and a wide window that looked out over the future of Lakeside.
The current view was mostly red dirt, heavy equipment, and the skeletal beginnings of infrastructure. Sewer lines and electrical conduit weren’t glamorous, but Meredith found them beautiful in the way only an architect could. Every trench out there was a promise of what was coming.
Three hundred and twelve homes. A clubhouse. A pool, park, and gym that was taking shape on her computer that very moment.
Thriving in this new environment, Meredith only cared about two things—her design software and the constant flow of work.
All of the other details—scheduling, filing, permits, and, yes, the quality of the coffee—were in the capable hands of her administrative assistant. Well, one capable hand. The other had graduated to a removable cast, which gave Connor some freedom and a few obvious moments of discomfort.
He didn’t complain, however, and scheduled his hand therapy during off hours. So far, as their first week progressed, he showed up on time, took brief lunches, and stayed focused. They shared office space, a work ethic, and both liked instrumental jazz in the background.
But he also smelled nice and made her laugh and had an annoyingly attractive ability to know when she wanted coffee, so there were some distractions that she didn’t exactly hate.
She took a break from the public area design to return to the elevation revision for Lot 47, one of their first pre-sold homes.
The buyers wanted to swap out the double-hung windows on the front facade for a Craftsman-style grid pattern, which was fine aesthetically but required some invisible math behind a pretty house.
Anyone could sketch a nice elevation. Making it stand up in a hurricane zone was the heavy lifting.
Connor was across the office, doing battle with a filing cabinet using only his left hand. The cabinet seemed to be winning.
“You need help?” she asked, lifting her hand from her mouse to rise.
“No, no. Stay on that project. These drawer runners,” he muttered, yanking the middle drawer with his good hand, “were designed by someone who hates people with one hand.”
She smiled, turning back to her calculations.
“You know, in a dentist’s office,” he said, “everything is filed digitally and stays in the cloud. Here, I feel like I’ve traveled back to 1987.”
“Blame the county,” she said. “They require hard copies of all permits, change orders, and inspection reports in addition to digital. Pippin added it to their homeowner contracts—page four, section seven. You didn’t read it?”
“It was that or War and Peace,” he said dryly. “Tolstoy won.”
She laughed softly, not sure what she liked more—his unexpected sense of humor or the fact that he knew who’d written the classic. It was a tie.
“But tonight, I promise, I’ll read the contracts.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, and the look on his face was the one she’d been trying to ignore for three days—amused, warm, like she was endlessly entertaining to him, and he wasn’t even trying to hide it.
Feeling a little helpless in the face of just how cute he was, she turned back to her screen.
The problem with Connor McCarthy—and Meredith had been cataloging the problems, because that was how she processed things—was that he kept getting more attractive. Quickly, too.
He wasn’t trying to appeal to her—he didn’t have to. He was just there, being competent and funny and unreasonably good-looking in a way that she’d initially dismissed as irrelevant to the work and now couldn’t stop noticing.
Even when he struggled writing left-handed, and his brows furrowed in concentration, he was…kind of a doll. And when he tilted his head slightly as he was listening to her, really paying attention like her father did when someone spoke to him—yeah, she liked that.
And don’t mention his hair. No, the slightly too long hair was definitely too long to be considered professional, and she almost said something but then he’d know she’d noticed.
She’d hate to see those pretty chestnut locks clipped away. It was too much fun to imagine…what they would feel like to touch.
Meredith. Stop. Pay attention to the wind-load calculations.
If that hair caused her to make a mistake and one of these million-dollar homes sprung a leak or cracked under the winds of a cat-three storm? She’d have one person to blame: Meredith Lawson.
Had she learned nothing from her last spectacular lapse in judgment? A man who’d fooled her, lied to her, and given her an unplanned pregnancy that had nearly cost Meredith her life.
She was here to design houses and build her career and prove that she was more than a cautionary tale about trusting handsome men with nice hair and wives they conveniently forgot to mention.
She was saved from further navel gazing by the sound of the office door opening.
A man walked in with the energy of someone who expected to be the most important person in any room.
He was mid-forties, stocky, with a broad face and thinning blond hair combed back from a high forehead.
He wore khakis and a blue Pippin Lake Development polo that strained slightly across his midsection.
He carried a clipboard and wore an expectant expression that put Meredith on alert.
“I’m looking for Eli Lawson,” he said before they could greet him, scanning the room with a quick, assessing glance that landed on Connor, who was closest to the door. “That you?”
“He’s out at a meeting with the site team, actually,” Connor said, straightening up from the filing cabinet. “Can we help you?”
“And you are?”
“Connor McCarthy. I’m the admin support for the project.”
The man’s eyebrows lifted a fraction—processing, recalculating. His gaze swept to Meredith, then back to Connor. “So you’re not one of the architects?”
“No, I’m a one-armed dental student who’s passable at filing.” Connor said it with a straight face. “The architect is right there.”
He gestured toward Meredith, who stood and extended her hand as she got closer.
“Meredith Lawson. I’m the project manager for Acacia Architecture on Lakeside. How can I help you?”
The man shook her hand with the brief, minimal-pressure grip of someone who considered the gesture a time-wasting formality. “You’re Eli’s kid?”
“Among other things,” she joked. “And you are…”
“Vance Brennan. I’m the new project liaison between Pippin Lake Development and your firm. I’ll be the point of contact for change orders, contractor coordination, schedule updates—pretty much everything that moves through this building comes through me.”
“Good to meet you, Vance,” she said warmly. “We heard a new liaison was coming from corporate. I actually have some questions about the permitting timeline for Phase One, if you have a few minutes.”
Vance glanced toward the empty third desk. “Is Eli going to be back soon? I’ve got a change order here that needs architectural sign-off.” He held up the clipboard.
“I handle all change orders for Lakeside,” Meredith said evenly, gesturing toward the paperwork. “Let’s take a look.”
He made a face. “Actually, it’s just that this one’s got some wonky structural implications, and I figured Eli would want to—”
“If it has structural implications, wonky or otherwise, then it definitely comes to me. I’m the architect of record on all Lakeside residences.” She held out her hand for the clipboard. “May I?”
He handed it over with a hesitation so brief it was almost invisible. Almost.
Meredith scanned the change order. Lot 112.
The homeowner wanted to convert the standard upstairs hall bath into an expanded laundry room with a utility sink, which meant relocating the plumbing stack and adjusting the load path for the floor joists above.
They also wanted two additional windows on the east-facing wall of the primary bedroom, which would require recalculating the shear wall requirements. And a new permit.
“This is straightforward,” she said, picking up a pen to make a note in the margin.
“I can have the revised plans ready by end of week. The plumbing relocation will need an updated mechanical drawing and a permit amendment, but I don’t see any issues with the structural load.
I’ll confirm the shear wall numbers once I run the calcs. ”