A January Chill. Rachel Lee
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colored faintly. “I don’t have anyplace to put it, Witt. I was just being enthusiastic.”
“You’ll have a place to put it,” he said with a firmness that had her looking strangely at him.
“Okay,” Witt said, looking at the model again, trying to wrap his preconceived ideas around this unexpected model of his future. Hannah liked it, and that was a big plus as far as he was concerned. “It’s got the owner’s apartments and everything?”
“It does,” Jim confirmed.
“And you’re sure this guy is okay?”
“I checked him out. He’s only been in the business solo for five years, but he hasn’t had any problems. His clients seem to be happy. He has a reputation for keeping on schedule and on budget.”
“Sounds good. And the overall price?”
“Smack between the log cabin and the Tudor style.”
“Hmm.” He couldn’t reject it on those grounds, then.
“Witt?” Hannah spoke. “What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?”
“It’s just not what I had in mind. I’m going to have to think about it.”
“What don’t you like?”
“Nothing. Really. It’s just I wasn’t planning on Victorian.” A silly thing to be resistant about, especially when Hannah seemed to like the design.
“Well,” she said, “it has to be your decision.”
Jim spoke. “If you don’t like any of them, Witt, we can put out requests for more bids. Acceptance is contingent on you liking the designs, as well as on the financial side of it.”
“It’s not that I don’t like it,” Witt said again, feeling a little beleaguered. “Maybe it’s the colors. Wouldn’t all white with black shutters look better?”
“More traditional, certainly,” Jim agreed.
“Let’s take a look at the bids, okay?”
Jim nodded and led them back to his office. He’d pulled out the salient parts of all the bid packages and had them ready for Witt to look at without the boilerplate in the way.
Witt read through the first two slowly, making mental notes about the time lines, about the lists of materials, thinking about all the little details these guys had considered, things he might never have thought about if he’d spent a year working on something like this.
The he turned to the final bid, the one for the Victorian. And he saw the name at the top of it.
“Hardy Wingate?” he said, his voice muffled. Beside him, he could feel Hannah stiffen.
Jim looked at him, his brow furrowing. “Is something wrong?”
“Yeah,” said Witt, tossing the papers down on Jim’s desk. “I wouldn’t do business with that jerk if he was the last architect on the planet. I’ll think about the other two, Jim. I’ll call you in a day or two.”
He and Hannah were in the car climbing back into the mountains before he spoke again. “I’m sorry, I forgot I was going to buy you lunch.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He nodded once, briefly, then pounded the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “Goddamn it! How the hell did Hardy get hold of that bid package?”
Hannah spoke uncertainly. “You heard what Jim said. One of the other firms must have passed it along to him.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” But his gut was burning, and he didn’t want to think it was all as simple as that. “Imagine him having the gall to bid!”
Hannah folded her hands in her lap. “He put an awful lot of work into it.”
“And why the hell did he do that? He must’ve known I was going to turn him down.”
“Maybe.”
“There’s no maybe about it.” He glared at her, as if she were somehow at fault, then slapped his hand against the steering wheel once more.
“Witt…”
He hated it when she did that, starting to speak, then checking herself, leaving him wondering what the hell she had decided to say. But he knew from long experience that pressing her wasn’t going to get her to spit it out.
“Damn it,” he said again, and turned off the highway. “I’m getting lunch. Son of a bitch thinks I’m going to hire him to build my lodge after he killed my daughter?”
“Maybe not,” Hannah said quietly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe he doesn’t expect anything at all from you. Maybe he just has dreams, too, Witt.”
“Well, fuck him.”
Neither of them said another word until they stopped at a fast-food place and ordered chicken. Hannah had her usual thigh with coleslaw. Witt, who burned calories faster in the mine than he could sometimes eat them, ordered two breasts, mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits and baked beans.
They took a table in a quiet corner. The place wasn’t busy, probably because it was the middle of the afternoon. Halfway through his first chicken breast, Witt looked up. “He did it just to tweak my nose.”
Hannah, who was nibbling at her coleslaw, merely looked at him.
“Well, what the hell else could he be up to?”
“Maybe,” she said carefully, “he just wants the job. Or maybe it’s an olive branch.”
“Olive branch! Hah! He should never have taken Karen out behind my back.”
“Maybe not. But you need to remember that she was your daughter, and she chose to go with him even when you forbade it.”
“She wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been urging her.”
“Mmm.” Hannah said no more. Instead, she filled her mouth with a spoonful of slaw.
God, Witt thought, he hated it when she went inscrutable on him. That “Mmm” said volumes. She didn’t agree with him but wasn’t going to say so. Ordinarily he could ignore that kind of stuff from her, but today he was itching for a fight so badly he could hardly stand it. And Hardy Wingate was nowhere around to fight with. Which left Hannah. And what did that say about him?
“Sorry,” he grumbled, and attacked his second piece of chicken. The food, which he ordinarily enjoyed, tasted like sawdust today. For a bit, he stared out the window beside him, noticing that dark clouds were gathering over the mountains to the west. Apparently the clear sunny day was about to give way to some more snow. Well, that was fine by him. The way he was feeling, getting snowed in would suit him just fine.
He tried to tell himself he shouldn’t feel so bent, but he felt bent anyway. It wasn’t as if Hardy Wingate had done anything new to him. All the guy had done was set himself up for a major disappointment. Asking to get kicked, really.
So what maggot was gnawing Hardy’s brain, anyway? For all the nasty things Witt had thought about Hardy over the years, he’d never thought the guy was stupid. And this was stupid. Had he thought he was going to slip one by, that maybe Witt wouldn’t notice who the bidder was?
He would have liked to think Hardy was that underhanded, but in his mind’s eye he could still see the pages of the bid, every one clearly marked Hardy Wingate, Architect.
No, he hadn’t been trying to pull a fast one.
“Olive branch?” he said, returning his gaze to Hannah.
She was holding her foam coffee cup in both hands, her lunch barely touched. “Yes,” she said.
He sometimes hated her