Desire by Design - By Paula Altenburg Page 0,3

a sucker for big brown eyes, too—she didn’t seem the right type. Besides, they had to work together. Then there were his uncle’s warnings: “Watch out for her, Mattie. She’s all about the work, plain and simple. There’s no reasoning with her once she gets an idea in her head. It’s her way or the highway.”

He looked over at her. Okay, she was sending off huge I’m-unavailable-so-don’t-waste-your-time vibes. That answered that. Matt might as well get right down to business.

“I wanted to touch base with you before I start on the new design for City Hall,” he said. “Since we’ll be working closely together, I thought we should meet. I’m the architect,” he added, since she wasn’t acting like she knew who he was.

Which knocked his ego down to size. He’d won major international awards and owned one of the most successful architectural firms in Canada. He couldn’t recall the last time his name wasn’t recognized by someone who worked in the industry.

“I know who you are,” she said. “But I’m afraid I don’t understand why you’re here.” She indicated a gray steel, tubular chair across from her desk, and he took a seat. She then skewered him with a steady, penetrating gaze that brought to mind his third-grade teacher, the one who’d caught him sticking a wad of chewed gum in Missy Parsons’ gym sneaker. “I thought the draftsman who did the preliminaries would be doing the final design.”

“City Council decided they want to hire a professional. Besides,” he said with a shrug, “the final blueprints would need to be stamped by a licensed architect anyway.”

Eve’s pretty brow furrowed in a way that didn’t bode well. Matt made a mental note to thank his uncle for giving him the job of messenger, since it was apparent no one at Sullivan Construction had spoken to her about him yet. He hated being the bearer of bad news, and he was fairly confident that Eve would consider this very bad news, indeed. Even though he was doing it as a favor to his uncle, he couldn’t work for free, and his price tag was going to be a lot higher than some local draftsman’s. That meant she was going to have to redo much of the cost analyses and budget. And the look on her face already indicated her feelings on the matter.

This truly was third grade all over again—except the wad of gum was a set of blueprints, Missy Parsons was an angry project manager, and somehow, Matt doubted that offering to share his granola bar at recess would make an adequate peace offering.

Uncle Bob might want to launch the city into the twenty-first century, but right now Eve Doucette looked ready to launch Matt a little farther.

His words might have been delivered in a foreign language for all the good they did Eve.

She’d spent weeks working on a budget for Sullivan Construction’s proposal, and her plan didn’t allow for hiring someone like Matt Brison. She’d wanted so much to do the design herself. It had been offered to her, even if unofficially. While she understood that preliminary designs were only meant to provide cost estimates on a design/build project, and that the final design often ended up being much different from what was submitted, the one she’d drawn up had been well received. So what on earth was Connor Sullivan thinking, agreeing to this?

It was like hiring Van Gogh to paint a garage, Henry Ford to design a go-cart, or Veronica Tennant to choreograph an elementary school dance recital.

“But I thought…” She tried not to sound hostile. “There must be some mistake. Surely you can see you’re all wrong for this project.”

“Oh?” He edged forward in his chair, suddenly intent, and the tiny trailer got even smaller. “Why do you say that?”

He had very blue eyes that never wavered from hers, as if he were reading her thoughts, which was distracting.

Because her thoughts veered off in an unsettling direction she hadn’t expected…and didn’t want him to know.

That, coupled with deep disappointment, made her speak with even less tact than usual. “Your work is very modern. Abstract, in fact. You use a lot of glass and round edges. While your designs may have their place, I don’t think the downtown district of Halifax is quite ready for them.”

Let him chew on that. Eve hated most of his work, although she acknowledged it wasn’t without merit. The modernist project he’d designed in Brussels had been an excellent example of practicality. She