burgers at some fast-food chain, I’ll have to get some experience first. The way I figure it, the best way for me to get experience is to work with the best. And that’s why I came to you.”
Grant saw something soften in Paddy’s eyes. He had to hand it to her. Caitlin had a real knack for winding her old man as tightly around her little finger as the chain around the rig’s rotary table.
Paddy ran his hand through his still thick shock of graying hair. “Well, since you put it that way…”
“Don’t forget about the financial benefit to the company. They don’t come any cheaper than me.” The smile Caitlin flashed her father was warm enough to completely melt the last of the ice in Grant’s soda. He knew he had to intervene fast.
“And don’t you forget,” he interrupted in a burst of disgust, “that I’m the one who does the hiring around here. And at the present time I’m not inclined to hire a slip of a girl for any position.”
“Now, now,” Paddy said, taking another draught of his beer. “Let’s not be so hasty, son.”
Son!
The word ricocheted through Caitlin’s brain like a sniper’s bullet. How dare her father use that word with this arrogant jerk! Deep down she suspected that Paddy secretly had always wanted a son. A son to work with side by side. A son to turn the business over to when it became too much for him. A son he could be proud of. All her life Caitlin had tried to make up for her sex by being the best she could at everything she undertook. She couldn’t help wondering whether Paddy would have been so willing to grant full custody to her mother had she been a son instead of a daughter. “How dare you try to tell my father how to run his business?” she snapped at Grant. “If I were him, I’d run you off on the spot for such impudence.”
Still standing, Grant leaned his considerable height over her and answered in a laconic tone, “I dare because I’m not just some lackey you can push around at will. Like it or not, I’m your daddy’s right-hand man, and I have as much at stake here as he does.”
Three
Determined to look Grant eye to eye when she confronted him, Caitlin leapt to her feet. Her chair clattered to the floor behind her.
“Is right-hand man your official title, or is that just a fancy way of saying you’ve wormed your way into a heart too kind for its own good?” She attempted to lessen the difference in their heights by standing on tiptoe and anchoring her hands to her hips for ballast. “Do you expect me to believe that my father simply turned the running of his business over to you because you graciously volunteered to be the son he never had? Let me assure you, mister. I’m not about to stand by and watch you destroy what it’s taken my father an entire lifetime to build.”
“Caitlin, stop it!” Paddy’s voice cut through the air like the crack of a bullwhip. “Stop it right now before you make a bigger fool out of yourself than you already have.”
Tears stung her eyes. Caitlin could count on one hand the times that her father had raised his voice to her. To be thus admonished in front of this outsider was almost more than she could bear.
Accusation laced her voice as she demanded an answer. “How can you just sit there and let your employee treat me with such contempt? The next thing I know he’ll be telling me that you want to make him a full-fledged partner.”
Paddy flinched from the betrayal glistening in his daughter’s eyes.
Grant railed against it.
Was it so unimaginable that he could have procured his boss’s high regard by any but underhanded means? Paddy had promised the entire crew a bonus if they could make this hole pay out before the deadline. He had, in fact, intimated that there would be an extra special something awaiting the man who worked the hardest to prove himself as he went through the ranks. Though no one knew exactly what the prize was, Grant hoped it involved enough money to secure that ranch that he’d been dreaming of for so very long.
Caitlin’s overly emotional reaction to the idea that her father might share the burdens of the business by offering his second in command a chance at a partnership only served to underscore Grant’s opinion of women. Any man unfortunate enough to ever forget that the “fairer” sex was only out for personal gain was destined to be very sorry indeed. All that hype about Caitlin’s coming here just to be close to her daddy was nothing more than a convenient cover to check up on her assets.
The inheritance factor was just one more thing for Grant to hold against her. But then, what could he expect a little princess from the suburbs to understand of earning one’s keep by the sweat of your brow? Of the pride that comes of making something of yourself out of the ashes of defeat? Of loving a man like Paddy Flynn not for the width of the financial security net he could weave beneath you, but instead for his honesty and decency?
“I thought they were supposed to teach you in college to find out the facts before jumping to conclusions,” Grant commented dryly.
A muscle along his jawline throbbed out his frustration as he took full measure of the pretty little thing who’d just called him a con man. Any man with the audacity to make such an accusation would have found himself cheek to cheek with the nearest wall.
Arms up in the air, Paddy jumped into the middle of the fracas. His complexion was even ruddier than usual as he attempted arbitration. “Caitlin, surely you remember my speaking of Keith Davis, my partner from years ago. Grant’s his son.”
A frown creased Caitlin’s brow. Recognition glimmered beneath the surface of her memory like a dark fish rising from the depths.
“Keith Davis… Wasn’t he the man who…”
“The man,” Grant supplied, “who was killed in the explosion that nearly bankrupted this company years ago. The explosion that left second-degree burns over fifty percent of your father’s body.”
Caitlin turned her attention upon her father. “The one that caused you and Mother to—”
Words failed her as she searched Paddy’s stricken eyes for an answer to the question that had obsessed her for years. Growing up, the subject of her parents’ separation had been expressly taboo. When she was younger, Caitlin had found a photograph in her mother’s album of a strange mummy-like creature staring back at her from a hospital bed. Laura Leigh had curtly explained that it was Paddy, shortly before she made up her mind to leave him.
When with typical adolescent candor Caitlin expressed the opinion that it was unbelievably cold of her mother to abandon her father in such a state, Laura Leigh had replied cryptically, “We were both burned in that fire, Caitlin. Someday when you’re older, maybe I’ll try explaining it to you.”
For some reason that day never came. Caitlin hoped that with the passage of time, the truth would finally come out. Unfortunately, Paddy had no more intention of pillaging the past than her mother.
“Let’s leave old times well enough alone except to say that Grant’s father was the best friend I ever had. In fact I never met a better man—until the day his son showed up at one of my rigs. Despite the fact he held me personally responsible for his father’s death, he said he was willing to learn the business from the bottom up. The only thing he asked of me was a paycheck. Promised to earn his keep, and, by God, girl, he has more than done that.”
It was impossible to miss the effect these words had upon Grant. He stood perceptibly taller, and the moisture clouding his eyes was clearly an embarrassment to him.
Coming from a man not easily given to compliments, Caitlin was aware how rare such praise was. What she would have given to hear her father speak so highly of her! Unbidden, a seed of jealousy sprouted in her heart for the man who had somehow managed to usurp her hitherto unshakable position as the apple of her father’s eye.
“Am I to take it then that you somehow feel duty bound to Keith’s son?” Caitlin asked. Unloosed from a throat tight with emotion, her voice sounded high and strained.
“Contractually