A Small-Town Homecoming by Terry McLaughlin Page A

client. The owner. He’d need to meet with her later, to discuss the details and negotiate the financing for the site’s security.
    Still, he supposed he should have called Tess.
    Which only pissed him off again.
    With a curse, he exited his truck. Rue Matson waved as she locked up her tiny gardening shop, and he nodded as he stepped up onto the curb. How someone could make a living selling birdseed and fancy shovels was a mystery. “Evening, Rue.”
    “It’s a pretty one, isn’t it?” She squinted at a faded blue sky dotted with dingy white clouds and then glanced at the flower boxes tucked below Tess’s three-sided office window. “Nearly as pretty as those arrangements. Tess sure knows how to put a planter together. There’s a trick to doing it right, you know.”
    “Is there?”
    “Oh, yes.” Rue rambled on in her friendly shopkeeper voice about color and texture and layers and a bunch of other things Quinn didn’t care about. But he had to admit, as he waved goodbye to Rue, that they were pretty planters. As sassy and colorful as the woman who’d planted them.
    And he had to admit, as he stalked through her door, that Tess had made her office space pretty, too. Not too fussy, not too plain. Not too much emphasis on the business, but enough drawings and models to give a quick impression of competence and skill. Just right, just the way an architect’s office should look. The woman had class.
    She was also sitting too close to Don Gladdings, who had pulled a visitor’s chair to Tess’s side of the desk. Don was taking advantage of his maneuver to lean over her shoulder and peer at something on her computer monitor, while she made her pitch for redrawing a section of his new car dealership. Clever phrases delivered with a subtle appeal to Don’s pride in his business—architectural design as ego gratification.
    Quinn wondered whether Don was enjoying that white-flower smell, too. He cleared his throat in an overly loud cough.
    Tess raised her eyes to Quinn’s, and his temper shifted into a lower gear, somewhere near basic agitation. Hard to stay ticked off at a woman who could aim a scorched-dagger glance while wearing ice-cool pearls.
    “I’ll be with you in a few minutes,” she said.
    Quinn grunted a response and tucked his hands into his pockets as he started a slow turn of the outer office area. It was a waste of energy staying angry about small, stupid things. There were far more important items needing far more of his energy at the moment. Rosie. Security at the job site. Scheduling around the equipment hassles.
    If Tess wanted to drag him down to her turf, to stage a showdown on her own territory, he could shrug it off. After all, it was a smart move. He’d have done the same, in her place.
    He sneaked a glance at her and watched her direct Don’s attention to some detail on her monitor with polish-slicked nails on the ends of long, ringless fingers. The lady had spunk.
    And talent to spare. Quinn paused to study her model of Tidewaters, once again admiring the blend of sleeklines and traditional charm, the clever use of space and the integration with the setting. Why she chose to squander her gifts on projects here in Carnelian Cove, he wasn’t quite sure.
    But he sure was glad she’d decided to stick around for a while.
    The realization rattled him. He waited for his feelings to sort themselves out and settle down inside, worried that this latest complicated thought might mess up the points he intended to make about this morning’s argument. Well, he’d find a way to shrug off this sneaky soft spot, too. When it came to Tess Roussel, he’d be wise keeping his edge.
    Besides, he didn’t know all that much about her. He’d heard she came from money on both sides, but from what he’d observed, she didn’t seem to have much of her own. There were nicer offices available in the Cove. And he knew—because curiosity had driven him past it one night—that she’d settled for one of the