With her phone in the oven, Ariana raced back to the bathroom, wrapped herself in her bathrobe and wiped up the trail of water from the bathroom to the kitchen before she fell and hurt herself.
When she got back to the kitchen, she pulled the phone out of the oven and tried it again. The damned thing wouldn’t even boot.
Ariana stared at the clock on the microwave. It was ten-thirty at night. Would Leslie still be awake? If she was, what could she do? Ariana needed a new phone and soon. Her match would be expecting her to answer his text, in the morning at the latest.
Now, she was beginning to rethink her decision to disconnect her land line. With no phone to make any calls, she couldn’t call Leslie, even if she wanted. Nor could she call Emma to ask if one of her brothers was named Dillon.
What about her computer? She could get on social media and look for Dillon Jacobs.
She hurried to her laptop and flipped it open. The battery was dead. Ariana ran with it to her office and plugged it into the charger.
Minutes later, she brought up the logon screen, keyed in her password and googled Dillon Jacobs.
As the screen was coming up, her laptop blinked out, the screen going completely blank.
Ariana squealed. “What the ever-lovin’ fuck!” Everything she touched seemed to be blitzing out on her. She didn’t have a desktop, having gotten rid of it in her effort to be more minimalistic. With no computer and no phone, she was out of luck. She couldn’t even consider calling Leslie for the phone number of the man who’d walked her out of the BODS offices.
Trudging back to her bedroom, Ariana dressed in her night clothes and lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling. Hell, she was afraid to touch the remote for the television. It might break as well.
For a long time, she stared at the texture on the walls, imagining stairwell guy with a quirky smile on his face, laughing at her stress-reducing techniques. Where were they now? They sure as hell hadn’t worked when everything had blown way out of her control.
Ariana reminded herself that some things were worth worrying about. Others…well…it just wasn’t that important. In the scheme of things, not being able to respond to a text for one night wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t cancer. She’d live through the disappointment and frustration.
After a while, her eyelids drifted closed. Her last thought was not of the text she needed to reply to, but of the big guy she’d met at BODS. What was he doing at the moment? Was he thinking about her at all?
Chapter 4
Dillon laid awake half the night with his cellphone beside him on the pillow, waiting for a response from his BODS match.
By morning, he still hadn’t slept worth a damn, so he rose before his alarm, dressed in shorts and running shoes and went for a run. When he got back, he still hadn’t received a return text in response to asking Ariana out.
He opened the app and checked her profile. Still no photograph of the woman he hoped to meet that day. He thought about the redhead. Hell, he’d thought more about her than this Ariana woman. He wished he could get on with the BODS date so he could prove they weren’t going to fall for each other. Then he would ask the redhead out.
With a construction site to run in downtown Austin, he didn’t have time to watch his cellphone for a text. He showered quickly, dressed in jeans and boots and grabbed his hard hat before leaving his downtown condo for the job site.
Though it was Saturday, he expected to see a busy crew working by the time he arrived at eight o’clock in the morning. He’d been paying overtime for the men to show up to work on weekends for over a month now. It was biting into his profits, but he refused to miss the deadline. His reputation as a contractor had been built on his ability to get jobs done on time and within budget. He had contingency funds built in to pay the overtime, so he wasn’t too worried about funds, but the timeline was tight, and he wasn’t sure how he’d bring it in on the due date.
As he pulled up to the site, he swore beneath his breath.
His crew was sitting around, doing nothing. Only half the people he’d expected had shown up.
He met the foreman, Patrick Sutton, in the portable trailer.
Pat stood with a phone to his ear when Dillon entered. He raised a finger to tell him he’d be a minute. “Okay. But be here as soon as you can make it. We have guys waiting on your work.” He ended the call and gave Dillon a tight-lipped look. “Joe Felton didn’t show up this morning.”
Dillon swore. “What’s his excuse now?”
“He spent the night in the ER with his son.”
Dillon frowned. “Is the kid all right?”
Pat nodded. “He has an acute ear infection. He was screaming bloody murder while I was on the phone with Joe.”
“Why can’t his wife take care of the boy?” Dillon asked, irritated that nothing seemed to be going right.
“His wife is expecting their third child. She stayed home with the five year old.” The foreman planted his fists on his hips. “They’re doing the best they can.”
Dillon looked at the ceiling for a second, trying to think. “We need backup. Is there anyone else who can fill in for Joe?”
Pat shook his head. “He’s the only one who knows where he left off laying in the plumbing throughout the building. We have to wait for him before we can start closing in walls.”
Again, Dillon swore. “What do I have to do to speed up the timeline?”
Pat shrugged. “We’re doing all we can. Every construction
