A Small-Town Homecoming by Terry McLaughlin

why she worked so hard, took such care, fussed over the details. Stayed in control. There were fewer mistakes that way.
    She shut her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “I want—I need —to be kept in the loop. I have to be a part of this, each step of it, all the way through. It’s not just the way I want it. It’s my job. And if I’m going to do a good job, I need to be informed about everything—all the progress and all the problems.”
    “I don’t suppose,” Geneva said, “it would do any good to ask you to be civil to Quinn when you discuss this with him.”
    “I can be civil.” Tess slowly sank into her chair. “I can be anything I want to be.”
    “Except punctual.”
    “Except that.” Her smile was faint. “But I’m working on it.”
    “Good. Now,” Geneva said with a brisk change of tone, “I have some unrelated news I think will please you.”
    “About Charlie’s wedding shower?” Tess had left an earlier phone message asking if she could host the party at Chandler House. Tess’s own house was too small for the event she had in mind, and Addie’s apartment was literally a hole in the wall behind her shop.
    “About her wedding,” Geneva said.
    “Her wedding?”
    “I’ve offered Maudie the opportunity to hold Charlie’s wedding here. There’s plenty of space in the garden, near the pergola.”
    “I’m sure she was thrilled. Charlie will be, too.” Tess swiveled in her chair and stared out her windows, seeingwhite chairs in neat lines and pastel ribbons twined with wisteria instead of the pale wisps of late-afternoon fog drifting across Main Street. “And that means the pressure’s on now. Charlie will have to choose a summer date.”
    “That’s what Maudie and I thought, too.”
    “She didn’t have a chance, not with you two plotting against her.” Tess grinned. “Besides, who wouldn’t want a wedding at Chandler House?”
    “My granddaughter, for one.”
    Tess released a silent sigh. They’d had this discussion before. “I never said I didn’t want to get married there.”
    “You never said you wanted to get married.”
    “There are things I need to do before I’m ready to think about it. And one of those things is finding a man I want to marry.”
    “Find one,” Geneva ordered as if she were instructing her gardener where to place a rosebush. “Before I get too old to dance at the reception.”
    Tess grinned. “Yes, Mémère.”

CHAPTER FIVE

    Q UINN GUIDED his pickup to the curb outside Tess’s office door a few minutes before five o’clock and switched off the ignition. He sat in the cab for a moment, banking his temper. It had been a long, frustrating day, and there was plenty of it left—he still had to fix dinner, start a load of laundry and deal with Rosie. But first he had to go another round with the only woman he knew who could scramble his thoughts and senses until he forgot how much he wanted a drink.
    She’d been wearing a dark blue suit today, and something that made her smell like a bucket stuffed with flowers. Fresh, white flowers drooping with early-morning water drops, like those tiny, bell-shaped flowers sprouting up from a mass of fat, grassy green in the shade under Mrs. Brubaker’s maple tree.
    And pearls, for God’s sake. On the site. Dangling from her pretty pink ears and slipping and sliding between her breasts. With the rumble and clang of Trap’s excavator and the diesel stench of Wylie’s bulldozer failing to block the punches she’d landed on his senses.
    She sure knew how to push his buttons—coming to the job in that getup, distracting his crew, arguing with him in public, questioning his judgment. And crawling under his skin, making him so hard he’d had to keep bendingover and peering through the level’s scope as if his life depended on what he could see across the footings.
    Once she’d left and he’d cooled off, he’d had to acknowledge her point. But the fact was, he’d owed Geneva a phone call. She was the