ChapterThree
Archer
I pinched the bridge of my nose, angry with myself for getting into this situation. My body hurt, my head ached, and the paperwork in front of me just wasn’t going away anytime soon.
I had been putting off a lot of paperwork that my sister needed for the past month or so. It wasn’t that I wasn’t good at the paperwork. I was. I just hadn’t been in the mood. That was something very much unlike me, but now I didn’t have a choice. Paige needed these final invoices and any labor that I had used. In addition, I needed to work on the initial receipts and project plans for the house up on the mountain.
My sister was our administrative assistant, although really, she was the one who ran the whole place so we could all focus.
We couldn’t run this business without her because she was our boss, just without the title. Although I often called her boss to her face, and she enjoyed it. Along with our accountant, she worked things so that I didn’t have to worry about the management aspects of this job most of the time. I could be a plumber, do the planning on all of the pipes and layouts for the new houses—and renovations, as was the case of the cabin in the woods.
Beckett would come eventually and help me with the general contracting because that’s what he was good at, and anything I couldn’t do myself, he or his team would do. I just wanted to see how much of it I could do myself first. Because it felt like this was mine, even though it wasn’t on the market yet, and I hadn’t put in an offer. Not that I would put in an offer. Because it was far away, and that would be silly. Wouldn’t it?
Benjamin was our landscape architect and had even won awards recently. He had waved them off, calling it silly, but he was brilliant at what he did.
I was just grateful that he would help with whatever I couldn’t do later.
Annabelle had already done a lot of work to design the new elements. The team and I were going to incorporate as much as we could, so that way this place felt a little bit like mine, and saying goodbye to it after I was done was going to suck.
I was getting better at saying goodbye, wasn’t I?
At that thought, I rolled my eyes, annoyed with myself for being so damn emotional and whiny. Just because I was divorced, slightly unhappy, and living alone as the rest of my family got married and had kids and moved on without me didn’t make me a sad case. I needed to remember what I cherished in life. What I had that was good. I just wanted to be a little whiny today.
“Are you coming to Riggs’ tonight?” Paige asked as she walked in, her hair in a perfect updo on the top of her head, her bright blue eyes slightly full of worry, because everyone was worried about me.
Odd to think, since I used to be the one worried about Paige. However, my baby sister was all grown up, a mother herself, and didn’t have the issues that she once had.
I was the one messing up even when I wasn’t trying.
“I don’t know if I want to go to Riggs’,” I said after a moment.
Paige’s brows shot up, and I held back a curse. “You’re not going to come with us tonight?”
Riggs’ was our favorite bar and grill that also happened to have a dancing hall. It was slightly Western, slightly contemporary, and just fun.
It was also owned by a friend of ours, Riggs, and his husband Clay. Clay worked for us and had once been Beckett’s trainee and assistant project manager, but now was a construction lead all on his own. He ran crews under Beckett, but only because Beckett was the main boss. After a few years of working hard, Clay now could own his own company if he wanted to. He liked working with the Montgomerys, and we enjoyed having him here. Our family was growing, as was our business. And that meant we had people without the Montgomery name in lead positions. A far cry from our parents, but I liked it. Clay was practically part of the family. His three kids called my parents grandma and grandpa at this point.
The bar that Riggs owned, and now Clay too thanks to their marriage, was our local watering hole. We used to go there once a week, usually on Thursdays, since it wouldn’t be as busy, and we would hang out, dance, maybe have a drink or two, and just enjoy ourselves as a family.
Then, one by one, everybody started getting married—including me. All of us got married, and the others began having kids. So even though sometimes they went while pregnant or left the babies at home, the once-a-week dinners at Riggs’ turned into twice a month. Sometimes it was once a month if we were busy. Because, in addition to our time at Riggs’, we also had family dinners that we alternated around each of the families’ homes.
Not mine in a while, though, because it had never worked out. Marc usually had to work at his high-powered job and it had always been weird hosting a dinner when my husband couldn’t be there. And, frankly, we were loud. All of us Montgomerys in one place made a lot of noise and scared people away.
So we tended to be at everybody else’s homes, including my parents. Now though, while I didn’t have Marc saying no, I also didn’t have the space. I lived in a small apartment, trying to figure out what house I would move into. Because I had sold the home I had bought on my own when I had married Marc. Marc’s had been closer to the middle between both of our workplaces, so it made sense, and I had liked Marc’s contemporary home. It was gorgeous, with clean lines, an architectural masterpiece. One not built by a Montgomery, but it’d been amazing. But now I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I needed to either buy a condo, build a house here, buy a house we’d already built, or maybe, do something a little different. Drastic.
Like move to the mountains, and figure out what to do. But over an hour of driving back and forth just to work seemed like an idiotic thing to do.
Unless we were serious about opening up the Boulder branch.
I pushed that thought out of my head. “I’ve just had a long day. I’m tired,” I said, not lying to my sister.
She studied my face and sighed. “I just don’t know when we’re going to be able to go to Riggs’ again with all of us. I know you and the guys tend to try to do things together. I thought it would be nice to have all of us.”
“Okay.” I knew she was guilting me, but not on purpose. I wanted to spend time with my family, but I still felt off.
“Now I feel horrible,” she said after a minute, and I blinked.
“You feel horrible that I’m going?” I asked, laughing.