Page 6 of Working for the Heiress

"Dad."

"You've met the team."

"I have."

"And?"

There was a small silence in which he was waiting for me to be impressive. There was no version of this sentence I could say that would be impressive enough. I said the version I had practiced.

"The office here seems well managed. Sharon — the office manager — has been here twelve years and runs it well. The fleet is older than I'd like but it's well maintained."

"That's the bar?"

"That's the floor, Dad. Do I have clearance to purchase a new flock of birds?”

"Don't be cute, Lilianne."

"No, sir."

"Twelve months with no incidents. You understand the conditions."

"I understand."

"And the trust releases on the eighteenth of October next year. Not before. Not under any circumstances."

"I understand."

"Don't embarrass us."

"No, sir."

He hung up.

I sat at the desk with my hands flat on the wood and allowed myself one minute to feel self-pity—the maximum amount of time before it became a wallow, and I had no time for that.

I picked the folder back up and opened it to the front again.

C. Holt, Lead Mechanic.

I traced the C with my finger, once, lightly.

Then I started to read.

Conrad

I'd been at the bar twenty minutes when I caught myself looking at the door.

I made myself stop. I drank from my beer and watched the football game on the TV above the bottles and counted the bricks in the back wall behind Kayla the bartender, and after about ninety seconds I looked at the door again anyway.

Since when do I care about who comes in that door or what’s going on outside it?

It was raining out. The kind of cold October rain that meant snow in the higher country by tomorrow and a hard frost down here by the weekend. The Foundry's front window was blurry with the wet. Anyone coming in would shake water off before they did anything else, and I would hear the door, and I would have a beat to compose my face before I had to use it.

I was not waiting for anyone.

It had been eight days since she'd walked into my hangar. A week of her being in the building before I got there in the morning, which was a thing I had never seen another regional manager do. I’d been seeing her at briefings, asking the kind of questions that meant she'd done the reading the night before. The light in her office stayed on after I left at six, and was usually still on when I drove past the lot at seven-thirty to pick up a sandwich, and gone — finally — by the time I came back through at nine for the second drive-by I was not going to admit to anyone I was making.

I’d been seeing her in town, too.