She looked up from the hinge she was trying to secure. “Wha?” she said around the two screws between her lips.

“Want a beer?” he offered, giving the cooler a jiggle. “First-day tradition.”

She considered for a beat and then dropped the drill and screws and stepped off the porch. “Why not?”

He felt something like hot chocolate in his belly as she walked toward him. Silas was a fan of things that made him feel. He chased deep, complicated feelings and wrung every ounce of pleasure out of them.

Leading the way around the side of the house, he found his crew lounging under the new leaves of a maple.

They pounced on the cooler when he set it down. He managed to fish out two beers in the melee. Twisting off the tops, he handed one to Maggie.

“Some place you got here, Ms. Nichols,” Travis said. The kid was taking a gap year between high school and college. Judging from the moony eyes the kid was shooting in her direction, he’d already developed a crush on the boss.

Silas couldn’t blame him.

They sprawled in the shade, half a dozen of them sitting on coolers or the ground. Maggie—at home with a crew of dirty, sweaty men and women proud of what they had accomplished—stretched those long legs of hers out in the grass and lifted her face to the sun.

The conversation ebbed and flowed, crisscrossing back and forth across their little circle. She wasn’t quiet, but she wasn’t a talker either, he noted. She asked more questions than she answered.

The more he saw of Maggie Nichols, the more he liked the whole package.

There had been clients who treated his crew like faceless labor, like the people doing the sweating and the work they’d been paid to do were somehow less than those opening their wallets. Those clients didn’t earn new slots in Bitterroot’s schedule when they called back for more work.

There was nothing shameful about physical labor. Maggie seemed to get that. She was someone who understood the satisfaction of a long day of damn hard work and appreciated others who did the same.

“I might not be able to move tomorrow,” Marta groaned. She was lying on her back in the grass, icing her fresh blisters with the beer bottle. She was also smiling.

“You better be able to move,” Silas teased. “We’re just getting started.”

“I’m old. I get second-day soreness after a good workout at the gym. Two days from now, you guys are going to have to help me off the toilet.”

“My knees were knocking so bad up there I lost feeling from the waist down,” Billy quipped. He’d lost the green pallor after managing to finally find his footing on the sunporch roof. They’d make a roofer out of him yet, Silas bet.

The remedies flew fast and furious.