Independent Contractor

She's the woman in charge.

Liz has taken on the job of getting a border town construction project on schedule. It's a rough world and the work challenging, but she loves it. Working with the hot guys on her crew lets her enjoy her time off completely.

This time, however, the work is made difficult by an incompetent boss and a resentful secretary who seem to be doing everything they can to undermine her. And while she fancies herself a loner, and she and her new girlfriend Taylor enjoy sampling the variety of studs available, a smoking hor nomadic worker named Tom is challenging her to rethink her vision of herself, her life, and exactly what she wants.

Tom wants her to ride off into the sunset with him on his bike; the lead investor wants her to take on her dream job…

She's going to have to make hard choices.

~~~~~ PG Excerpt ~~~~~

Liz walked across the construction site, trying to take it all in. A factory project was a complex and sprawling creature, but she'd worked on bigger ones. She looked for the threads that linked the pieces together. The only problem with getting a handle on this one was finding any thread at all, any organization to the flow of work.

When she had reviewed the job on paper, in a nice office in Los Angeles, everything had looked good—not great, but fixable. The charts were neat and tidy. Now, watching the men worked, seeing how the job moved in starts and stops, proceeding with more jerks than flow, she wasn't so sure.

By her standards, the project was a mess. Oh, sure, it would get done, but time and energy were being wasted and the work lacked rhyme or reason.

She ran her fingers through her short blonde hair and put her hard hat back on, cursing herself for unconsciously showing how nervous the scene made her.

“So there it is. It isn't quite right.” The man standing next to her wasn't asking a question, just thinking out loud. Although his words echoed her thoughts, she knew he didn't get how bad things really were.

“Seeing this has all the joy of watching a movie in a foreign language when they show it with the wrong subtitle track,” she said to the man, trying to be honest without being too critical.

The man's name was Matt, and he was the site boss. He had brought the project to this sad point.

«Sure, a few things are screwed up. That's why you're here—to fix them. That's why I hired you," Matt said. “You've got a reputation for being able to troubleshoot sites like this.”

Of course, Matt hadn't wanted to hire her—the investors, the people who put up the money to build the project made him bring her in. From the look of things, she was certain that Matt wasn't thrilled to have her there.

She was there to look over his shoulder and correct his mistakes. Who liked that?

Despite that misconception, she didn't correct him. Regardless of whose decision it was, now they were supposed to be on the same team and working toward the goal of getting the project on schedule and on budget. Still, she could see that, from his point of view, she was an intruder. Everything she fixed was a reminder that he'd screwed up.

Inevitably, Matt would resent Liz as a pain in the butt and an extra cost that he incurred simply to calm worried investors who were breathing down his neck.

“You can't control all the elements,” Matt said. “I can't do it all by myself.”

Liz bit her tongue. Doing it all, controlling all the elements, or compensating for elements like weather that screwed you up, was exactly what Matt got paid to do. She knew he'd never understand that. No wonder that even though he was ambitious he'd spent his career in these border jobs that were marginal. He'd never get a high-profile job with his attitude, but that was no concern of hers.

“How do we go ahead?”

His question surprised her. How could Matt have no idea? “Kick things into gear.”

“What exactly is it you are going to do?”

Liz showed him her clipboard. “I'll review the scheduling, your projected timeline, and manpower. I'll identify ways to move us toward being back on schedule. I'll review the crew assignments. Some of these guys might be placed in better slots. I'll look at the material orders and ensure that everything we need to actually do the work is going to arrive in a timely fashion.”