The Baby beneath the Mistletoe

There was no question in Mikky’s mind that Shad and Angelo were men she could certainly work with. There was no macho challenge in their eyes when they looked at her, or worse, a feeling that she was being undressed and dissected. Even in this day and age, it wasn’t an uncommon thing for her to come up against this sort of sexual bias. And, though she had to admit that Tony Marino rankled her down to her very toes, at least he wasn’t guilty of that sort of insulting behavior, either.

The insults, both implied and vocalized, took another form. Tony Marino was blatantly in contempt of her intelligence. To Mikky that was a far greater offense. She’d worked hard to get to where she was, struggled every inch of the way for her schooling and to acquire a position with a prestigious firm. Once she’d gotten there, she’d had no respite. Even in these supposedly enlightened times, there were those who thought she’d slept her way to her position.

It was butting up against that lie that had finally given her the courage to hand in her resignation to Finch, Crown & Ferguson, a company that had been around for nearly eighty years, and begin her own company. The fact that her rendition of the new high school had won out over so many others told her that she had made the right decision in sticking to her guns and to her dreams.

And no sexy-looking, hard-bodied, small-minded construction boss in form-fitting jeans was going to make her believe otherwise, she thought fiercely, her eyes shifting to him now.

If Tony Marino wanted to fight her every step of the way to get “her” building up, well then so be it. She was up to the war. Thrived on it, even. Mikky came from a large family where fighting was as much a part of the day as breakfast.

Shad shook Mikky’s hand in greeting. “To what do we owe this honor?” Behind him, he heard Tony murmur something under his breath. Shad smiled to himself. Any reaction besides passive was a good one.

Mikky drew herself up to her full height, refusing to be intimidated by the fact that when Tony got to his feet, she was surrounded by three men who were almost a foot taller than she was. She felt her determination and talent made up the difference in physical stature.

“I came because I was summoned.” Her eyes shifted to Tony. “What is it now, Marino? I hope this won’t take long. I was getting ready to leave.”

Tony shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “Permanently?”

He’d been trying to get rid of her from the first. “For the weekend.”

“Pity.”

“Make you a deal,” she proposed. “You save your pity, and I’ll save mine.” She saw the blueprint spread out on the floor. Was he using it as a floor mat now? She wouldn’t put it past him. “Now, what’s your problem—other than the obvious?”

Tony squared his shoulders and grabbed the paper from the floor, all but holding it up before her nose. “Unless someone rewrote the laws of physics when I wasn’t looking, you’re still as wrong about this now as you were this morning when I brought it up.”

There was enough electricity crackling in the room to keep an entire city lit up for a year, Shad thought. Catching Angelo’s eye, he nodded ever so slightly. They were in agreement. Time to retreat. Shifting positions with Mikky, he backed up toward the door. Angelo was already there.

“Well, we’ll leave you two to your negotiations,” Shad said more to Mikky than to Tony.

Tony opened his mouth in protest, but never got the chance. Angelo was way ahead of him.

“We’ll see you at dinner on Sunday.” Rather than becoming a thing held only in childhood memories, dinner at his mother’s house was a tradition that had strengthened as the years went by and as their numbers had doubled and continued to increase. “If you’re free,” Angelo couldn’t resist saying to Mikky, “maybe you’d like to come, too. Ma always says there’s room for one more at the table. Tony can give you the address. Can’t you, Tony?”

Stunned at what he felt was an outright act of betrayal, Tony clamped his lips together. Why were his cousins bailing out on him this way, looking so smug about it? Didn’t they see that the last thing he needed now was someone like Mikky Rozanski?

Some family they were.

Mikky waited until Angelo and Shad had left and the door to the trailer was closed before turning toward Tony again.

The invitation from the man’s cousins had made her feel warm. In contrast, any exchange with Tony just made her feel hot. Hot under the collar and braced to go the full fifteen rounds of a championship fight in which she had to be the winner in order to survive in this field. She couldn’t afford to look as if she didn’t know what she was doing. Word spread too fast in the architectural community, and although the number of female architects was growing, there were still not enough to make her feel comfortable and at ease. Sometimes she felt as if she were carrying the standard for all women in the male-dominated field.

God, but the man did look formidable when he was annoyed, she thought, her eyes quickly sweeping over him. She couldn’t help wondering what his face looked like when it was relaxed, or when he was laughing. She had yet to see him even attempt a smile. Something told her that it would not be an unpleasant sight, but she doubted if she’d ever get to witness it firsthand.

It didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to make friends, just a good reputation.

Vowing to keep her own temper in check no matter what, she looked at Tony expectantly. She wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible because she didn’t want to be late for the movie she’d promised to catch with her brother, Johnny. “Well?”

Tony didn’t like her tone. She’d walked in on a meeting he’d had earlier with Mendoza, the foreman, taking him to task for changes she’d discovered he was about to make on her design. She’d had the nerve to all but order him to take another look before he struck out so much as a single line.

He’d been on the phone most of the morning, tracking down a shipment of conduit wiring that had mysteriously gone astray and hadn’t had time to go over their newest bone of contention at length. But he didn’t feel he had to. Right was right, no matter how thoroughly it was examined.

“ ‘Well’ nothing, you know what I have to say.”

He folded the blueprints back so that the design was showing on both sides and indicated the area they were coming at from opposite ends. How could she not see how obvious the problem was?

Talking as if he were explaining it to a slow-witted child, he said, “You can’t have the mezzanine sticking out this far. It jeopardizes the integrity of the floor joist here, not to mention the ridge beam.” Stopping, he began to deliberately point out the long, straight lines below the roof. “That’s this—”

Mikky curbed the urge to swat his hand away from the blueprints. “I know where the ridge beam is.” Mikky had no doubt that if she were a man, Marino wouldn’t have been talking down to her that way.

“Fine. Then you also know that if you eliminate the mezzanine—”

“I am not going to eliminate the mezzanine.” The man was nothing short of a shark, she thought, her temperature rising despite all her promises to herself. With unerring instinct, he was going for an area vital to her style. Mikky had worked hard to incorporate that into her design. The music-and-arts complex was the jewel in the five-building setting.

Blowing out an angry breath, he looked at her. “What do high school students need with a mezzanine?”

Now he was talking nonsense. “What does anyone need with pleasing shapes and sleek lines? Why five buildings? Why not just make everything into a great big ugly box?” Realizing her voice had gone up, Mikky stopped using hand gestures to underscore her words and attempted to rein in her irritation. “Because it’s more aesthetic this way, that’s why.”

Tony had no idea why, when she mentioned pleasing shapes and sleek lines, his eyes had been drawn to Mikky’s own form. They were talking—arguing—about a building. A building that wasn’t going to go up if it had to be according to her design.

There was absolutely no reason for him to notice that when her voice went up an octave, her breasts strained against the plum-colored sweater she was wearing. Who the hell wore colors like that to a construction site, anyway? he thought in irritation. “Aesthetic?” He spat out the word. “They’re there to learn, not philosophize.” He believed in solid, utilitarian construction, not gingerbread and sugar that melted in the first rain. And this kind of design was wasted on the audience it was to have. “Kids that age haven’t got enough in their heads to philosophize about, anyway. All they think about is having fun, nothing else.”

Memories clawing at him, Tony turned away to collect himself. Everything kept going back to that, to the moment his life had been irrevocably shattered.

Mikky watched his back, saw the silent struggle being waged, saw the tension in his shoulders. She knew his story. Had asked around after their first meeting. He’d struck her as a walking ice palace, and she’d wanted to know why. She’d had one of her brothers, an investigative reporter on the staff of the L.A. Times, nose around for her. Johnny had come across a story in the Denver Post. Marino’s wife and three-year-old son had been killed in a car crash, both dying instantly when a teenage driver, drunk and out joyriding with his friends, had slammed into their car. Marino had been away at an engineering conference at the time.

Sympathy was something that came as naturally to Mikky as breathing. Even sympathy for someone who kept biting her head off. She figured he had issues to work out. But she wouldn’t have him do it at her expense.

Her voice softened. “Look, I’m sorry about your wife and little boy—”

His head snapping up, Tony looked at her sharply, his eyes dark and dangerous. She’d jabbed a long, narrow pin deep inside an open wound. She had no business even approaching it.

“Thanks.” The word was covered with so much frost, Mikky thought she was in danger of losing all feeling in her extremities. “But I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention them. This has nothing to do with them.” He looked at the blueprint. “These are teenagers. They’re supposed to be attending school to learn. All they need are classrooms, not mezzanines or enclosed atriums or cascading waterfalls—”

She was trying to be understanding, but he was pushing her to the limit. This was her work he was criticizing so cavalierly. Like a mother coming to her child’s defense, Mikky felt her adrenaline beginning to rise. The whole point of the design was to come up with something that was in keeping with the larger scheme of things within the city. Bedford was on record as a planned community—a place where everything was a celebration of shapes and colors, that strove also for balance and harmony within the community. Was he determined to ruin that just for the sake of argument?

The Southwoed High complex was going to be the first building block to forge her reputation and as such was of tantamount importance to her. This was her first solo baby, and she meant to do right by it. And have it do right by her.

Maybe that made her a tad overprotective of the design. But she’d made absolutely certain she’d been right in her calculations—that there were no faults, no surprises—and she was going to stick to her guns come hell or high water.

Or a man named Tony Marino.

“Then, why don’t we just build a little red schoolhouse and be done with it?” she challenged.

“Don’t get sarcastic with me.”

Far from being intimidated, Mikky fisted her hands on her hips, anger bubbling inside of her at a breathtaking speed. Its very advent took her by surprise. While no one had ever accused her of being easygoing, she’d never been one to overheat quickly, either. But there was something about Marino that lit her fuse. “Then don’t get belligerent with me. I’m just trying to do a job, same as you.”

The hell she was. There was nothing the same about them, and there never would be. Tony felt as if the trailer had somehow grown even more cramped than it already was. “No, what you are trying to do is challenge everything I say.”