Chapter 30 #2
He enjoyed lunch with his friends, but even after Colt arrived fifteen minutes late, he pressured Ilsa to get him his to-go orders, and he left after only sitting there for thirty-five minutes. Barely long enough to chat, order, and eat.
Ty frowned as their friend walked away, and when he met Trap’s eyes, Trap sighed.
“Yeah, there’s definitely something going on there,” he said.
“I don’t think that food was for his kid,” Ty grumbled.
“You think he’s taking a cheese quesadilla to his girl?” Trap chuckled and shook his head. “No, sir, that food was definitely for Birdie or Jonas.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Ty raised his hand to get Ilsa’s attention. “Can we get some coffee?”
“Sure thing,” she said, and she looked at Trap. “You too?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, because while he had plenty of work to do, Trap had hired new people, and they already knew he’d be at lunch. Therefore, he felt no need to rush out of there and get back on the job.
Perhaps his focused effort on resting more was finally paying off.
Later that afternoon, Trap’s phone pinged with a bloopy, bubbly sound, indicating that Lila Mae had just messaged him.
He currently worked about three hundred yards away from the Intake Center, putting up the walls of Cat House Three, now that he’d finally finished Cat House Two.
He’d started his afternoon here wearing a T-shirt and a long pair of lightweight cargo pants, because while September had arrived, that was still a summer month in Texas.
He always wore steel-toed boots and long pants on a build site, and today he’d removed his shirt and used it to mop up his face as he was framing out the building, as it had no roof or walls yet—and thus, no air conditioning.
The foundation had been poured and cured, and Trap liked this octagonal shape of Cat House Three. He wasn’t in a great place to stop, so he kept working, forgetting that Lila Mae had texted him until his phone rang with her ringtone about a half-hour later.
He cursed under his breath and moved over to where he’d set his phone on a wooden crate, along with his gallon-sized jug of water. He picked that up and then tapped his phone to answer her call.
“Howdy, beautiful.” He uncapped his jug and drank, the cool liquid like manna from heaven as it filled his mouth and slid down his throat.
“There you are,” Lila Mae said, and it was clear from the tone of her voice that she was in boss mode.
He wasn’t sure if she was irritated at him, or just frustrated at the day in general, or something else entirely, so he simply waited for her to keep talking.
“Did you get my text?” she asked.
“Yeah, I heard my phone go off,” he said. “But I was in the middle of the south-southeast wall. Literally.” He chuckled, not encouraged when Lila Mae didn’t join him.
“How close are you to being done?” she asked.
He could’ve made some joke about how he just started Cat House Three, and that it wouldn’t be finished for another week or two, but Trap didn’t think Lila Mae was in the mood for ribbing. So he sighed, turned, and looked at the walls he’d been putting up.
“I’ve got six of the eight done,” he said. “Probably another forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour.”
She sighed too. “Fine,” she said. “Can you meet me in the conference room when you’re done?”
He pulled his phone away from his face and looked at the time. “It’ll be five-thirty by then.”
“I’ll still be here,” she said.
That meant Trap would be working past then too, and while that didn’t enthuse him, he told himself he’d do it for any other demanding client.
“Yeah, I can do that,” he said. “Did you get my message about the Mexican food?”
“Yes,” she said. “No, that doesn’t go there.” She wasn’t talking to him, and Trap simply waited. “Yes, I’ll see you in a little bit.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said crisply, and she hung up the phone.
Trap let his hand fall to his side, and he frowned as he set his phone on the crate. “Thank you?”
He thought he and Lila Mae had done a pretty decent job of getting along at work and in private, but she had literally never treated him like a general contractor and not her cowboy boyfriend—until now.
He told himself that he had no idea what her day had been like, and that he’d known she was stressed or irritated about something from the first moment she’d spoken. It could have been with him, but it could have just as easily been about something else.
Trap got back to work, determined not to read into things until he knew more about the situation. About fifty minutes later, he walked into the converted shed, which Lila Mae planned to use as her community center.
The building blew great air conditioning, and Trap had traded his sweat-stained T-shirt for a fresh one from his truck before entering the building.
He found Lila Mae in the conference room, of course, as that was where they’d been meeting to discuss schematics, floor plans, and other aspects of Feline Friends.
“Hey, baby,” he said.
Lila Mae looked up from a stack of folders in front of her. She wore her pink-honeyed hair in its customary ponytail, and she blinked a couple of times, as if he had caught her in the middle of studying a very difficult financial report.
“Hey,” she said, and she didn’t sound nearly as irritated now as she had on the phone earlier. That gave Trap some hope, and he headed down the length of the table to sit beside her.
“What’s going on?” He looked down at the paperwork in front of her and saw angry red scratches on the back of one of her hands. “Hey, what happened?” He reached out and lightly touched her left hand.
She winced and pulled away. “The perils of working at a cat sanctuary,” she said.
“Who did that?” he asked.
“One of our new rescues,” she said. “He’s in with Thad right now, getting evaluated.”
“Did you put some ointment on it?” he asked.
Lila Mae shook her head and pressed her lips together. “I haven’t had time to go home yet.”
“I thought that was the point of having a medical supply shelf in the closets of every building.” He tilted his head and looked at her, because she’d informed him of the need for a closet in every building the very moment they’d gone out after her tour at Shiloh Ridge.
She raised her eyes to his and glared. “Yes, well, we don’t have that in this building yet, do we?”
Trap blinked at her, sure she hadn’t just spoken to him like that. “What’s wrong?”
Lila Mae sighed, and her shoulders went down. Until that moment, Trap hadn’t even realized how bunched up they’d been.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I can get you doctored up tonight.”
She smiled, nodded, and said, “Thank you, Trap.”
He swallowed, because it still felt like the ground might vanish beneath him at any moment. “So what are we doing here?” he asked, because he might as well rip off this bandage and deal with whatever he found underneath it.
“I’m wondering if it would be too hard to make some modifications to Cat House Three.”
Trap sighed and rolled his eyes. “Lila Mae, you’ve really got to stop making modifications.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because they’re hard to deal with,” he said. “We order supplies, and some of them take weeks to come in. I have sub-contractors scheduled for certain things at certain times. You make modifications, and we have to cancel them. We have to re-order. Modifications slow us way down.”
She frowned and looked back down at her papers. “I just want it to be perfect.”
“Well, it’s not going to be,” Trap said.
She looked up again, fire burning in her eyes. “Why can’t it be perfect?”
“Because it doesn’t need to be,” he said, his own irritation firing up. “And every time you go to a ranch and you see something great doesn’t mean you have to change what you’re doing here.”
She blinked at him, and Trap sighed and reached out his hand. “Show me the paper.”
She put one palm over it. “If you don’t think you can modify it—”
“I don’t know if I can modify it, because you haven’t shown it to me,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s generally difficult to make modifications this far in.”
Lila Mae swallowed, and while a hint of defiance remained in her eyes, she also looked a little bit nervous. “Okay, well, you’ve never held back with me before, so I’m assuming you’ll just tell me the truth.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and Lila Mae released the paper to him.
Trap frowned instantly. “Lila Mae, this isn’t an octagon.”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “I guess I just feel like it might be a little too….” She waved one perfectly manicured hand. “Whimsical.”
He looked up from the paper, because whimsical was a great way to describe Lila Mae. He glanced down at the end of the table as Cleo leapt up onto it and started stalking toward them.
“We’ve poured the foundation, sweetheart,” he said. “I just put up all eight walls today, and now you’re telling me you don’t want it to have eight walls.” He shook his head and let the paper drift to the table. “I’m sorry, we can’t make this modification now.”
Cleo meowed loudly, as if she knew she should protest. Lila Mae simply folded her arms and leaned back in her expensive conference chair.
“We can make this Cat House Four, if you want, but I need to know today, because we’ve got cement coming on Friday, and they’re expecting us to have the area ready.” He pulled out his phone, lifting up on one hip to do it. “Jason’s been building that today, hasn’t he?”
“I don’t know what Jason’s doing,” she said. “He’s your guy.”
Trap glared at her, not quite sure why she was being so snappy with him.
Maybe she’d reverted into the Lila Mae of six months ago, when she’d first called him, when she was still Southern royalty, wearing pencil skirts and heels to ranches in Texas and demanding he meet her somewhere in less than sixty minutes.
“I’m pretty sure Jason was building out your foundation for Cat House Four today,” he said slowly. He tapped on his calendar, and sure enough, the job popped right up. “Yeah, he is. He did. It’s almost six o’clock, Lila.”
“Fine, then it can’t be changed.” She picked up the paper and put it underneath her folder. “It’s fine.”
“It doesn’t seem fine,” Trap said.
“I was hoping for a different outcome,” she said. “But you’re right. We’ve already poured the foundation.”
“It would be expensive and very time-consuming to change.”
“We don’t need to change it.”
Trap very much felt like he was fighting a losing battle, but he nodded. “All right. What else?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You can go.”
He blinked at her, because had she really just dismissed him? He honestly didn’t know how to feel, but he got reverted back to being fourteen and in trouble with his mother.
“Are we having dinner tonight?” he asked, surprised his voice could get past the pinching hurt radiating through his chest. He’d already put the food in the fridge at her tiny house, but she lived close-by, and he could get his sad beef burrito and eat it at home.
“Yeah,” she said. “But I need a little more time here.”
“All right,” Trap said. “Well, I guess I’ll see you at your place then, whenever you’re done.”
“Yeah,” she said, and she picked up a purple notebook and pulled it on top of the stack of folders and opened it, already back to work.
Trap ran his hand over Cleo’s back on his way down the table, his own frustration building within him at how things had been going between him and Lila Mae recently.
“Lord,” he muttered as he left the building. “Give her the courage to make Feline Friends what she wants it to be. She was so excited about the octagonal building before she went to Three Rivers.”
He sighed and looked up into the evening sky and then headed to Lila Mae’s house, washed his hands, and pulled out a bottle of water that he’d put there earlier in the week. He sank onto her couch, wondering how long he’d have to wait for her to finish work and come eat dinner with him.