Page 12 of Falling for a Grumpy Hero
LILA
M onday morning rolled around, and I’d been ultra excited ever since I’d gone to bed last night. Ford had asked me to bring my sketches to the office today and I’d gotten them all ready to show him.
Nerves fluttered in my stomach about having someone like him look at them, but he’d seemed interested enough and I was hoping that he would see something he liked. Maybe if he did, he’d let me take a shot at helping with the Heritage House project for real.
Feeling anxiously optimistic, I went to work, but Ford wasn’t there yet by the time I arrived. Usually, he was an early bird, but I sat down behind my desk and began responding to the emails that had come in over the weekend.
I kept my eyes peeled, ready to jump into action the moment he arrived. Strangely though, he didn’t arrive. The morning came and went, and no one seemed to know where he was. He didn’t call and he hadn’t left word about anything that might’ve taken him out of town for the morning.
With my hopes a little dashed, I tried to make the most of the time I had available to get caught up on everything that wasn’t Heritage House.
If I could get all this done before he arrived, that meant perhaps we would have time to go over my sketches together and then I could explain to him what I’d had in mind for the project.
My computer dinged with a new email and I opened it, seeing a list of queries from a client I’d never heard of before.
As I read through them, I realized that Ford had started working on a restoration for them before I’d been around, and while it seemed everything had been progressing smoothly, they were eager for an update.
Has he received feedback from the historical society about any limitations on using the original building materials? Did he find any evidence of termites? Does he know if the structure will support an additional bedroom on the east wing?
On and on it went. All of these were questions I’d need either Ford or the file to answer, and since he was nowhere to be found, I wheeled my chair back and stood up.
As a safety measure, I knocked before twisting the knob on his office door, but he didn’t answer and I pushed it open slowly, peeking around it first to make sure he wasn’t sleeping in there or something.
He wasn’t, though. The office was empty, but it was terribly disorganized. I felt my eyebrows sliding together as worry crept through me. This wasn’t like him at all. While I didn’t know him very well, there hadn’t been a scrap of paper out of place since I’d started working here.
Today, the office looked like a bomb had hit it sometime over the weekend. If there had been a drawer overturned or something, I would have thought that it had been ransacked, but instead, it just looked like someone had been furiously busy in here.
Picking my way around blueprints, papers, and building plans haphazardly strewn across the floor, I finally made it to his filing cabinet and managed to track down the folder I needed. I flipped through it and the inside was as immaculately organized as I’d come to know him to be.
Satisfied that I could answer the client at least about some of their queries, I carefully navigated around the chaos back to my office and typed out a reply.
I hit send, but I hadn’t shut Ford’s office door on my way out, and that mess was staring at me like it was beckoning to me to come clean it up.
Honestly, it was beyond weird that he’d left the place like that. I got up without even really thinking about it. Knowing how obsessively neat he normally was, I couldn’t help but want to set things right for him again.
At least that way, when he arrived, he wouldn’t be walking into a disaster zone. In the back of my mind, a nagging voice told me that maybe he’d meant to leave it like this. Maybe it was part of his creative process and he’d laid things out the way he wanted them to keep working when he got here.
But as I glanced down at the floor, I could see no rhyme or reason to any of it. Old building codes were mixed in with outdated quotes from contractors and there was even an ad for a builder out in Florida that was faded and appeared to be ancient.
Unable to fight the instinct to help get this place back in tip-top shape, I bent over and started picking up the papers. I organized them into piles first, placing them on his conference table in the corner and then moving on to the overflowing folders on his desk.
As I got into it, I lost myself in the work—and I might’ve lost my head a little bit too—and I ended up not only tidying, but cleaning, completely reorganizing his filing situation, and leaving a trail of color-coded sticky notes behind as a map for Ford for to follow.
It was well after lunch by the time I was done and his once messy office was now beautifully ordered. He still wasn’t here, though. I was starting to wonder if he was coming in at all today, but since I couldn’t ask, I just went back to work.
At my desk, I turned to my computer and pulled up the contracts Ford had to send out to the contractors he was hiring for the Heritage House job.
I edited each one to make sure all the details were complete and correct, and I was about halfway through when the man himself finally made an appearance.
I heard him barking at people from all the way down the hall and my fingers stilled on the keyboard. He was always gruff and abrupt, but it was different today. I could hear that he was in a horrible mood long before I saw him.
When he finally came into view around the corner, his face was arranged into a deep scowl, his eyes narrowed so much that I couldn’t see even a hint of iris. He wasn’t clean shaven either, a five o’clock shadow on his jaw and his hair slightly tousled.
Dressed in one of his customary gray suits, he hadn’t bothered buttoning up his jacket like he usually did and the white shirt under it had an actual wrinkle in it. Just one, but for a guy like Ford, that one little wrinkle was the equivalent of having dressed out of the laundry basket.
My heart clenched in my chest. Whatever was going on with him, he wasn’t happy—not even his version of it, which was stoic indifference. He didn’t look in my direction as he stormed past my office and into his.
“Hey, Ford,” I called, keeping my voice as chipper as it could be. “How was your weekend?”
My heart sank when he ignored me, but it sank to my toes when he suddenly reappeared. If he’d looked like he was in a horrible mood before, he was an actual living, breathing thunderbolt right then.
“Come in my office,” he demanded, his tone colder than ice. “Now.”
I snapped my butt out of my seat and strode around my desk. Hackles raised, I followed him in, jumping a little when he clicked the door firmly shut behind me. “What the hell were you thinking, touching anything in my office? Let alone everything .”
His voice was barely louder than a whisper, but he was obviously furious, breathing hard as he brought his gaze to mine. Those usually stormy blue eyes seemed almost gray today, as if whatever was going on with him was literally sucking the life out of him.
I looked back at him though, not willing to be a doormat when he hadn’t even been here. I whispered back, realizing that it wouldn’t be good if the entire office heard us shouting at each other.
“I wasn’t sure how you could get any work done, let alone locate a pen with a foot of paperwork on your desk.”
“It’s not your job to micromanage my life,” he snapped, seething and seeming so much more dangerous for not yelling than he would’ve been if he’d just shouted at me. “You had no right to come in here and fuck it all up. This is unacceptable.”
I planted my hands on my hips, still not averting my gaze. “It’s literally my job to assist you.”
Chest rising and falling fast, he scoffed, his spine so straight that I was certain he had a broomstick up his ass. “This is an engineering firm. Not a goddamn lemonade stand.”
I tossed that attitude right back at him, a little thrown by his last comment, though. “If you think lesser of me just because I’m happy, you need to take a good, long look in the mirror.”
His head jerked like he was taken aback by what I’d said, but I didn’t stop there. “I do my job and I do it well, and you don’t get to talk to me this way just because you’re miserable.”
And that was the crux of the matter.
On Friday night, he’d barely even bothered to say goodbye. Before that, he’d often been snappy and I’d caught him staring at me a few times like he thought I was crazy.
Now this.
Well, I wasn’t going to take it. A lot of people in my life had underestimated me because I was a nice person. A kind, bubbly person. They thought that meant I would let them walk all over me, but that had never been true and it never would be.
Leaving Ford slack-jawed and looking a little shocked by what had just happened, I spun on my heels and stormed out of his office. I was no pushover. No one got to treat me the way he had and not get a little of their own medicine right back at them—not even my boss.