Chapter Twenty-One
“Live enough for two lifetimes.”
—Blu Johnson, life lesson #100
Jill’s thirtieth birthday had come and gone, Bluebonnet Construction’s schedule was filled to the gills, and Jill had spent countless hours interviewing new hires. Additionally, everyone in town finally seemed to see Jill as more than “that little Sadler girl” who’d always been on the cusp of blowing a gasket if anyone so much as looked at her wrong.
And all of this had taken place in one week.
Another surprise to come out of going on the show was that Bluebonnet now took calls daily from people asking for new builds. That had been the dream from day one. However, after much discussion, they’d put it to a vote. And it had been unanimous.
All new builds would only be she-sheds. They liked their reputation these days.
As such, Jill was on-site for day one of erecting a new retreat. Only, she was the only one on-site.
She pulled out her phone and tried Trenton again.
“Where are you?” she muttered when Trenton’s phone once again went to voice mail.
She tried Heather next. Same deal. Even the owner of the retreat they were due to start on wasn’t home.
“We don’t have time for this,” she mumbled to herself.
She checked her watch as she headed back around front. They were going on twenty minutes late at that point, and with so many jobs lined up, none of them had time to be dillydallying. As she took the corner around the back of the house, she pulled up short at the sight of a black four-wheel-drive truck turning in at the end of the two-hundred-foot drive.
It was Cal’s truck.
Jill’s pulse temporarily blocked sound to her ears as she tried to decide whether to turn and run, or meet the man head-on. She hadn’t laid eyes on him since walking away over a week ago, and she didn’t want to see him now, either. Only . . . she’d apparently forgotten to tell her heart that.
But as the truck made its way closer, her heart went into a different rhythm. That of flatlining. Because it wasn’t Cal in the truck.
She waited where she’d stopped, and when the driver emerged, she forced a smile. “Morning, Pete.” Pete Logan came toward her. “What can I do for you?”
“The better question is, what can I do for you?” Pete held a legal-sized folder stuffed full of papers, which he held out to her. “Seems you’re the boss now.”
Jill didn’t take the folder. “What are you talking about? Are you looking for a job?” She couldn’t imagine this man wanting to be known as a Bluebonnet. “And why do you have Cal’s truck? Where is Cal?”
“Don’t need a job, and I have no idea where Cal is. Probably in his shop.”
Confusion reigned. “What shop?” This was why she liked working with women. They might sometimes talk too much—and flirt when they thought it might get them on TV—but at least they talked. “Why do you have his truck, Pete?”
“Oh, yeah.” Pete reached into his jeans pocket and came out with the keys. “The truck’s yours, too. Cal said to tell you he just had it tuned up for you. He—”
Jill took a giant step back, palms going up, and Pete stopped talking.
“What the—” Jill pressed her mouth closed before she could say more. She didn’t get angry for no reason anymore. This was the new Jill. Except apparently where it involved her ex.
Because what the hell was Cal Reynolds up to now?
“Let’s take a moment and start at the beginning,” she suggested. She held up one finger. “Why are you here?”
“To see where you want me.”
“I didn’t hire you, Pete.”
“Right.” He pulled the first piece of paper out of the folder and held it out to her. This time he presented a smile with the paper. “But I still work for you. You’re also now responsible for all of these jobs.”
She finally took the sheet of paper, and when she looked down at the list, she recognized several projects that she knew for a fact We Nail It had bid on and won. She was a fairly intelligent person, so she was starting to get an idea of what was going on there, but surely her stupid ex hadn’t gone off and done something this drastic without bothering to have a single conversation with her first.
Pete looked at her with a drop of sympathy then, and he leaned in a little closer. “He knows he can be an ass,” Pete told her, as if sharing a secret. “But he’s trying. And he does feel bad about his assiness.”
How dare he?
And then he sends Pete?
“Oh, hell no,” Jill muttered. She tossed the piece of paper to the ground, wanting no part of it, and stomped to her truck. “You’d better move that piece of crap out of my way, Pete Logan,” she yelled at him, “or I’m about to ram into it.”
“But it’s your truck,” Pete yelled back, and Jill whirled on him.
“What the hell has he done?” she screamed.
And then she saw why no one had been on-site that morning. Because they all now stood in the front yard of the house next door, smiles from ear to ear. There were Heather, Trenton, the workers who were supposed to have arrived with Trenton, Aunt Blu, a full camera crew—including Len—and stepping out from behind Len was Cal.
“I changed my mind,” Cal called out, and Jill noticed that he was smart enough to keep his distance.
“No one asked you to,” she yelled back. They were only about fifty feet from each other, so yelling wasn’t really necessary. But it sure felt good.
The man had thrown her love back in her face, so he didn’t get to show up playing hero now.
“That’s not actually accurate,” Cal told her. He made a face, as if he were a kid being chastised, and added, “My granny asked me to.”
And then Irene Reynolds made her way to the front of the crowd, her arm hooked through Aunt Blu’s, and she waved toward Jill. “Hi, Jill. It’s good to see you again. And I actually told him to get his head out of his rear.”
Jill pressed a hand to her mouth. “Hello, Mrs. Reynolds. It’s good to see you again, too.” She wished she’d gone up for visits over the years. “Your grandson does have a habit of putting his head there, doesn’t he?”
Laughter rippled through the group, but no one moved from where they were. Jill and Pete stood in one yard, with everyone else in the other. And cameras and boom mics caught all of it.
“Been working on that one with him for years,” Irene told her, and then Cal took a handful of steps forward, separating him from the group.
“What are you doing, Cal?” Jill asked, this time keeping her voice at a reasonable level. She was too mentally beat up to deal with something like this. She’d missed him terribly over the last week, and she’d fully expected to never speak to him again. And not because of anger this time, but because they were finally over.
And it had decimated her.
Cal lifted his hands out in front of him as if ready to ward off an attack. “I messed up,” he told her.
“You did,” she agreed. “You lost a good thing.”
The smile he’d been trying to force dropped, and he let his arms hang at his sides. “Please, Jilly. You’ve got to hear me out.”
A lump settled in her throat. “I don’t have to do anything.”
She glanced around at everyone watching them. What a jerk thing to do.
“I was wrong,” Cal told her. “I was an idiot. And I don’t deserve to be forgiven.”
She said nothing.
“Come on, Jill.”
“Come on, what? Forgive you?” She bent and snatched the paper off the ground. “Because you . . . what? Handed me your damned company?”
He nodded, the move jerky and almost desperate.
“I didn’t want your company, Cal!” She shook the paper in the air. “Why would you do that?”
“It’s called a grand gesture,” he yelled back. “When you mess up as bad as I did, you have to make a grand gesture to get the woman back.”
“Who told you that?”
All eyes turned to Heather.
“What was I supposed to do?” Heather squeaked out. “He threatened to knock my door down if I didn’t let him in.”
Jill stared at her foster sister. “You have issues.”
Heather smiled then, and the ridiculous dimples that had probably gotten her far too much in her lifetime finally began to ease the pain in Jill’s heart.
“You’re too romantic, Heather.”
“I know. But he loves you, Jilly.”
“Well, he has yet to tell me that.”
Again, all eyes pivoted. This time to Cal. And that time, when he looked at her, he no longer seemed like a man fearful that his grand gesture was five seconds from being rebuked. He stood taller, and he nodded with confidence, and Jill saw in his eyes what she knew was in her heart.
“I love you, Jilly-Bean. And I’ll give you everything if you’ll just give me one more chance. All of me. All that I have.”
“I don’t want all you have. I just want you. I want us.”
“I want that, too, baby.”
She stared at him, wanting to call him over, but did they really have to do this in front of cameras? And then she remembered that Pete stood behind her, and she turned to the other man.
“I know what your first assignment is, Pete.”
“Yeah?” Pete stood at attention. “What can I do for you, boss?”
She nodded toward the other yard. “Get rid of them. All of them.” She looked at Cal. “Except for the idiot.”
“Consider it done.”
Pete jumped into action and, surprisingly, managed to herd everyone but the idiot out of hearing range, and as he did, Cal inched her way. She stood her ground, making him come to her, and when he finally reached her side, she lifted her brows in question.
“Come on, Jill. Are you seriously going to continue arguing with me about this? Haven’t we done enough arguing for one lifetime?”
“Maybe I want two lifetimes.”
A light lit behind his eyes. “I could consider that.” He took a step closer, and dipped his head to meet her eyes. “How’s the anger? Calming down yet?”
“You’re not seriously trying to finagle sex with me right now?”
He angled his head. “Is that an option?”
She blew out a breath, and looked over his shoulder. It was hard to hold on to outrage with the man she loved when he stood before her, begging for her forgiveness.
“Maybe,” she finally muttered, and he broke into a grin.
“Maybe?”
“Stop it.”
He reached for her hands. “I can’t stop it, Jilly. I love you. I want a life with you.”
“Did you really give your company to me?”
He nodded, and she shook her head.
“You can’t do that, Cal. You’ve worked too hard to build it. Plus, I have my own company.”
He inched a half foot closer. “And now you have my company and a third of your company. We’re going to combine them, and you’re going to continue building it.”
“But . . .” What was wrong with the man? And then something else occurred to her. “What about Rodney?” It had been Rodney’s business to begin with. He’d started it. “You can’t just give your company away without talking to your uncle first.”
Cal slid his thumb over her knuckles, and his eyes turned serious. “Rodney is fine with it. I promise you. And I did talk to him. I got to call him the other day, and he’s on board with the change one hundred percent. He’s happy about it, actually. And he’s already coming up with ideas for how he can be on the new show.”
Jill chuckled at Cal’s words, because he sounded exactly like his uncle. “And what about the show?” she asked softly. “They want two cohosts. Remember?”
She didn’t see how this could even work.
“We’re going to give them two hosts,” he told her. “I’ll still be a main part of the show, just in a slightly different format. You’re going to run the company, and I’m going to build custom pieces whenever you need them.”
“Your shop?” she murmured, recalling what Pete had said about Cal being in his shop. She hadn’t even thought about the workshop on his farm.
“Yes. And Heather and Trenton will be a part of things, too,” Cal added before she could ask. “They’re negotiating their contracts now. We’re going to incorporate the ranch into the show, as well. If you’re on board with that. I’m going to have cows and horses.”
She stared at him, unable to speak. He was going to have cows and horses?
“If you’ll have me, that is.” He smiled at her then, and squeezed her hands in his. “What do you say, Jilly? Will you have me? Think you can ever forgive my faults enough to marry me?”
“Marry you?” Everything was happening so fast.
“They’d prefer a married couple for the show,” he explained. And then he grinned at her visible outrage over the thought of that being the reason he’d asked her to marry him. “But I told them that our marriage had to be a part of it,” he assured her. “I brought it up first. They didn’t tell me.”
“It’s a darned good thing.”
“I know. I have learned a thing or two over the years.” He closed the remaining distance, and tilted her face up to his. “Tell me, baby. Tell me you love me. That you’ll do this with me. And that you’ll never ever leave me, no matter how many stupid things I do in the future.”
“I don’t get a stupid limit?”
He shook his head. “I’ve proven I can keep doing the same dumb things over and over, so no. You take the good with the bad.” He touched his lips to hers so lightly that she shouldn’t have even been able to feel it, but though she’d closed her eyes as he’d leaned in, she knew.
Her heart knew.
“Say yes,” he pleaded, and she opened her eyes and finally smiled at the man she loved. This was all she’d ever wanted.
“Yes.”