“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 workandin 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.”
