Marie Ferrarella - The Baby beneath the Mistletoe

He needed to feel his blood rushing in his veins again, not have it all but congeal there.

Mixed signals assaulted Mikky the moment she stepped into the trailer. From the partners of the company, she felt an aura of genial accord. That, she had to admit, was a fairly new sensation. Accustomed to having to wage what amounted, at times, to a fierce battle to win respect on every project she undertook, she was surprised and pleased at Angelo’s and Shad’s reactions to her. But then, she’d heard they were fair men who knew their stuff. It didn’t hurt that the third member of their firm was a woman, either.

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—”