Читать книгу Stay with Me Forever - Farrah Rochon - Страница 10

Chapter 3

Paxton pulled into a slanted parking slot two spaces down from the entrance to the Gauthier Law Firm. She grabbed her briefcase from the passenger seat and exited the car. As she rounded her front bumper, she looked up and down Main Street, and stopped short. The cashmere-silver BMW 750i that she secretly coveted—yeah, she’d looked up the base price; it was way out of her budget even before she’d bought Belinda the bar—was not it its usual parking spot.

Had she actually made it here before Sawyer?

Yes!

She was going to switch those desks. She was getting her window seat today, dammit.

Paxton raced into the law office, waving a quick hello to Carmen before heading down the hallway. She opened the conference room door and halted.

Sawyer, who sat at his desk sipping from a paper cup with the Jazzy Bean’s logo, was scribbling on a notepad. He looked up at her.

“What are you doing here?” Paxton asked, her shoulders falling in defeat as she shuffled over to her desk with much less enthusiasm.

“Good morning to you, too,” he said with a chuckle. “Why are you out of breath? Have you been running?”

“Only from my car to here,” she answered. She set her briefcase on her desk, then walked over to his.

He had on his reading glasses, the bronze wire-rimmed ones that looked so good on him it made her want to scream.

“You’re early,” he said.

It was ten minutes after eight, which meant she was technically late, but since she’d spent the past week coming in after eight-thirty, she was early today.

“Where’s your car?” Paxton asked.

He handed her a cup of coffee. “The mechanic’s shop.”

She hadn’t noticed the second coffee cup on his desk. Her heart performed a ridiculous flip-flop at his sweet gesture.

“Thank you. And good morning,” she added. She took a sip of the slightly cooled coffee. It had just the right amount of cream and sugar, which meant Shayla Kirkland, the owner of the Jazzy Bean, had likely made it herself. Her best friend knew how Paxton preferred her coffee.

“Did you walk here?” she asked him. Paxton made a habit of not listening to gossip—hard to do in this small town, which fed off gossip the way mosquitoes fed off blood—but she’d heard that Sawyer had bought a house on Willow Street, which was less than ten minutes away on foot.

“I could have, but as muggy as it is this morning I was afraid I’d need a shower after I got here. I’m driving my dad’s old Buick for the next few days.” He grimaced.

“The burgundy one?” She couldn’t stop the sharp laugh that escaped. “I don’t know how I missed seeing it parked out there.”

“Yeah, the burgundy one,” Sawyer said. “I hate that car.”

“I can’t believe it’s still running. It has to be over twenty years old.”

Paxton could remember Sawyer driving his dad’s car during their senior year of high school, which was twenty years ago this year. She’d missed the reunion this past summer, purposely filling in for a coworker on a job in Memphis so she’d have an excuse. If given the choice to revisit her high school years or frolic through a minefield, she would choose the minefield.

“It’s twenty-two years old,” Sawyer said. “My dad loved that damn thing. He went through four cars after it, but he refused to get rid of the Buick.”

“You didn’t have a problem with it back in high school,” Paxton pointed out.

“I didn’t have much of a choice,” he said with a laugh.

Sawyer had driven the Buick up until the week following the big state championship game, when his father had surprised him with a brand-new pickup truck as a reward for leading the Lions to victory and being named MVP for the season.

The shiny black truck had been parked in front of the school with a big red bow on the hood. They had all later learned that the truck also counted as Sawyer’s birthday, Christmas and graduation presents that year, but it was still a huge deal. There were not many families in Gauthier who could afford to buy their teens brand-new cars. The lucky ones got their parents’ hand-me-downs, and were more than grateful for it.

Paxton could still feel the envy flowing through her veins as she boarded the school bus while at least a dozen of her classmates piled into the cab and truck bed of Sawyer’s gleaming new ride. She wasn’t jealous of his truck. Belinda didn’t have a car of her own at the time; Paxton knew there was no way on earth she would get a car while still in high school.

No, it was witnessing the camaraderie between the group of friends who had joined Sawyer to celebrate his new truck that got to her that day. She was so envious of the bond they all shared, including Shayla, who, even though she had been Paxton’s best friend, had also been part of the popular crowd.

Until this day Paxton truly believed her greatest feat was convincing everyone that it had not bothered her in the least that she wasn’t included in their number. She’d perfected the unaffected loner facade, the girl who was above the hype of belonging to high school cliques or attending dances or being noticed by the most popular boy in school.

She’d pretended she didn’t care, but if anyone had bothered to look just a little closer, Paxton knew they would have spotted the longing in her eyes.

She shook off those thoughts. She was no longer that girl, the one who pined for Sawyer to notice her. She’d proven three years ago that she’d grown into the kind of woman who could hold his attention for hours on end, until he collapsed in a heap of pleasure-filled exhaustion.

Paxton breathed her way through the full-body shudder that coursed through her, silently cursing herself for even allowing her mind to go there.

She went back to her desk to start on today’s work, welcoming the distraction of pouring over the field inspection notes collected during the Bolt-Myer team’s previous visit to the proposed construction site. She soon settled into what had become a familiar routine over the past week.

She’d been both surprised and relieved at how easily she and Sawyer had fallen into their own little bubbles while working together. He’d spent most of the past week catching up on the project, while she’d focused on the hundreds—literally hundreds—of line items on her master to-do list.

The most important bullet on her list was the preparation for the stakeholders’ information session. Paxton had taken to calling it a town hall meeting when discussing it with residents, hoping that the less formal title would encourage more people to attend. As with every major project, Bolt-Myer was required to inform the members of the community what would take place over the eight months while the first stage of the three-stage flood protection system was being constructed and to answer any questions residents may have.

Paxton had facilitated a number of meetings like this in the past, but she knew this one would be different. It wasn’t as if she had anything to prove to the people in Gauthier, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to show them just what the girl who had been raised by a single mother from the wrong side of the creek had made of herself.

She put in her headphones and turned the volume up on the classical music she preferred to listen to while she worked. She’d become so immersed in reviewing the request for proposals from local subcontractors vying for the various jobs that would have to be filled once construction was under way that she nearly jumped out of her seat when Sawyer tapped her on the shoulder.

“Goodness!” she yelped, clutching a hand to her chest. Paxton jerked the headphones off. “What?”

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “I tried calling out to you, but you have that music so loud that I can hear it even with the speakers over your ears.”

“You should have said something sooner if it was bothering you,” Paxton said.

“It isn’t. That’s not what I wanted to speak to you about.”

Her brow rose.

“I need you to come over to the table,” Sawyer said. “I want to show you something.”

She didn’t like the forbidding she heard in his voice or the frown lines creasing the corners of his mouth. Trepidation skirted along her spine as she rose from her chair and followed him to the other side of the conference room, closer to his desk.

Over the past week the conference table had slowly acquired more and more items. It was now covered with stacks of papers, file folders and blueprints. Several topography maps of the east side of Gauthier, not too far from the elementary and middle school, were stretched across the table, their ends held down with a stapler, the polished rock that usually sat on Sawyer’s desk and two empty coffee mugs.

Sawyer pointed to an area not too far from Mount Zion Baptist Church.

“I hope I’m wrong about this,” he said. “But if I’m right, it can stop this entire project dead in its tracks.”

* * *

Standing at the conference table, Sawyer’s eyes slid shut for a moment as he soaked in the sensation of his body being so close to Paxton’s. Mere inches separated them as they hunched over the topography maps he’d spread across the space. She’d taken off her jacket; the belt cinched at her waist accentuating her small frame. His fingers itched to wrap themselves around her. His gaze traveled up to her delicately curved chin, past her full mouth and those hazel eyes, which were narrowed with determination as she focused on the maps.

Sawyer caught a whiff of the coconut-and-mango lotion she kept on her desk, along with something else he couldn’t identify. That intoxicating scent had tortured him in the most pleasurable way this past week. He smelled her in his sleep, invading his dreams.

It had become a test of his will to fight the urge to call out her name as he lay in bed at night, manually relieving himself of the pent-up sexual tension that flooded his body. He failed each and every night. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop himself from uttering her name in that moment when he found his release.

It didn’t matter that they’d spent only one night together, or that he’d had a wife and two additional casual love affairs since that one explosive evening he and Paxton had shared. When it was time to conjure a fantasy, she was always the star.

Sawyer studied the column of her neck, his eyes moving hungrily up the delicate expanse of skin. His tongue darted out on its own accord, the need for just a quick taste of her nearly overcoming his common sense.

“So, what’s the issue?” she asked, catapulting him out of his fantasy.

Sawyer cleared his throat and took a step back. “What was that?” he asked. Standing this close to her would only lead to trouble.

As if she’d tracked the route his train of thought had taken, she, too, took a step back, putting a bit more distance between them.

“I asked about the issue you’re having with this. I don’t see anything that can put a kink in the project.”

Remembering that he was here to do a job, Sawyer returned his attention to the map. Using a capped pen, he pointed to a spot just left of Landreaux Creek that connected to a bigger tributary of the Pearl River.

“According to this elevation map, this area should be out of the restricted flood zone.” He slid several color printouts out from underneath the binder he’d set there earlier. “However, based on these stats from the aftermath of Tropical Storm Lucy, it saw over two feet of water.”

Paxton’s forehead wrinkled. She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, and the urge to run his tongue along the glistening seam made a comeback. Sawyer started running linear equations in his head, hoping it would distract him. It didn’t.

“Maybe it was just overwhelmed,” Paxton said. “I was already in Little Rock by the time Lucy hit, but, according to everything I’ve heard, it dumped a lot of rain in a very short amount of time. Shayla said she was afraid the Jazzy Bean would get some water, and this part of town never floods.”

“Any area can see heavier standing water than usual if enough rain falls on it in a short time,” Sawyer said. “But Lucy was moving at twelve miles an hour. That’s not fast, but still a reasonably steady clip. This area shouldn’t be vulnerable to that kind of flash flooding, especially with it being this high up.” He shook his head. “Something isn’t right here. I think these maps may be off.”

“These are the maps Bolt-Myer’s project engineers used when developing the initial concept package. Trust me, Sawyer—they’re accurate.”

“How sure are you?”

Her back went ramrod straight. “Excuse me?”

“Look, Paxton, I know as project manager you’ve had your hands in every aspect of this project, but I also know that there are a lot of things you have to pay attention to with a project of this size. You trust your engineers to take care of certain things. Now, I want to know how sure you are that these maps are accurate, because based on these flood totals, something isn’t adding up.”

“I think you’re jumping to conclusions.”

Sawyer crossed his arms over his chest. “How do you explain two feet of water in an area that should see no more than a couple of inches at the most?”

“It’s not just the speed of the storm that you have to take into account,” she argued. “The river was also still high from all the snow that melted from that previous winter and traveled down from the north. Gauthier doesn’t have robust pumping stations like the ones in New Orleans and other big cities, so they’re going to get this type of flooding during the perfect storm, even in places that are not flood prone.”

“That’s the thing,” Sawyer said. “This wasn’t the perfect storm. Not even close.” He rounded the table and moved to a map he’d hung on the wall. He pointed the pen cap at the center of the Gulf of Mexico. “Lucy formed here and lingered over the Gulf for several days before moving north. The eye of the storm followed the Louisiana–Mississippi state line, which means Gauthier wasn’t even on the so-called bad side of the storm. In fact, for the most part, it remained in the lower-left quadrant, which is the best-case scenario.”

“But Lucy was a slow mover,” Paxton countered.

Sawyer shook his head. “That shouldn’t matter. If I’m to believe that the elevation in this area is as high as it is on this map, then Lucy could have lingered for another three days without this part of Gauthier seeing even close to the amount of flooding that it saw.”