The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [74]
Fallon hooded her eyes with a hand and looked up to find ankles. Calves, knees, a waist shrouded in carved folds of draped fabric, up, up, up. Behind the gigantic figure, wings. At the very top, forty feet up atop the scaffold stood a very familiar body, blocking the head of the statue. He was laden with safety gear and busy with some kind of industrial finishing machine. There were other men too, also at work with sanders and hoses.
“Max!” she screamed. She shut her eyes against the dust and cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted until she was hoarse, useless amid the shrieking machinery and his industrial ear protectors.
Fallon felt a rough yank at her arm and was wrenched away. Indignant hands pulled her struggling back into the sunny yard, her eyes stinging, ears ringing, deaf to the two red-faced men berating her.
“…liability,” she finally made out after a minute of muted vitriol.
“I need to talk to him,” she demanded.
“And just who the fuck are you?” the angry man on the left said. “Are you trying to get us shut down? You trying to get conked by a hunk of rock and put us out of business, you crazy bitch?”
“No! I need to talk to him. To Max Emery.” She rubbed her ears furiously, trying to coax her hearing back. “Please. I used to live here. He’s my friend. I need to talk to him—”
“Well, you have to wait until he takes a break,” the angry man on the right said. “And he don’t take many breaks. Go sit in your car and wait ’til the polisher shuts off and stay the fuck away from the site.” He stabbed a sausagy finger back toward the road.
Fallon narrowed her eyes one last time before stomping to her hatchback. She heard the men exchange a final nasty name in her honor.
Sitting on her hood, she waited, unsure what percentage of her tears could be blamed on the dust. Minutes dragged on. She dug her glasses out of her bag and flicked her ruined contacts onto the grass. After an hour she pulled her phone out. Eight missed calls, all Forrester. She shut herself in the car so she could listen to the three voicemails he’d left. He clearly knew nothing about this—he was as frantic for an explanation as she was. Just as she finished the final message, silence. The machines shut off. She practically fell out of the car, sprinting toward the construction.
One of the chief angry men put a hand up from ten yards away. “You stay back! We’ll send him over.”
Fallon waited some more. She watched the tarp and the scaffolding shake, praying it was Max descending. A minute later he emerged from behind the partitions, following the men’s gestures and striding toward her. He had a welding-style mask flipped up on his head, and he yanked off a pair of safety gloves as he walked, tossing them on the grass.
“Fallon.” He looked perplexed. He looked filthy and sweaty and exhausted. He looked sexy as hell.
“Hello.” She found herself at a sudden loss. “What’s…what’s going on?”
He grinned, so familiar. “Forrester’s statue.”
“I don’t understand. Does he know about this?”
“He knows enough,” Max said, taking her arm and walking them toward the house.
“What does he know?” Fallon stammered.
“He knows I asked to hire a crew. He knows enough so that if he receives a call from a contractor asking how to bill him for construction costs, he’ll go along. He doesn’t know quite how big that bill will be, though. He knows enough to say, ‘Emery