Always Florence by Muriel Jensen Page A

Nate did, too. Hunter had saved his hide more than once in front of clients. He never missed a detail and seemed to have memorized the tax code, complete with current changes.
    Nate felt fractional relief. “You should have been a lawyer rather than an accountant.”
    His colleague laughed lightly. “They don’t have a tax season. Who’d want to miss that? Here’s Jonni.”
    An attractive woman in her mid-fifties wearing a dark skirt and matching jacket ran from a silver compact at the curb to the office door. Nate held it open for her. She was the workplace counterpart of Stella, without whom nothing would function smoothly. She had bright blue eyes, silky blond hair and an easy, efficient manner that had saved him more than once.
    She handed him the bakery box and a tub of cocoa mix with one hand, and took his briefcase with the other. “Go,” she said. “Karen and I’ll bring in the coffee and water. Your committee notes are on your chair at the conference table.”
    “You’re a treasure,” he told her.
    “Yeah, yeah.” She disappeared down the hall toward the kitchen as Nate carried the appeasing doughnuts into the conference room.
    The previous renter, a law firm, had had a nautical bent, and the walls of the room were decorated with ship’s wheels, navigation charts and paintings of ships. The pictures made him think of Bobbie and the bright artwork on her walls. These pieces seemed suddenly pale and staid in comparison.
    The five people around the table greeted him with pointed verbal abuse.
    “Just because you’ve recently adopted two children, don’t think you can keep us waiting.” Sandy Evans, who worked for his attorney and was in charge of developing concepts for the fund-raiser, harassed everyone with equal fervor. “I mean, one of them is ten years old. I have two under five and I was here on time. And I don’t have the luxury of meeting in my office.”
    “Go easy on him.” Jerry Gold was the shop teacher at the high school. He was very tall and reedy and wore a University of Oregon jersey over jeans. His wife had given birth to their first baby in August. “He probably got to sleep in and had trouble getting moving. I mean, I haven’t slept in weeks, so it was easy for me to be on time.”
    “And I came from across the river.” Clarissa Burke had a fashion boutique in Long Beach, Washington, and one in Astoria. She was a white-haired woman who was the epitome of grace and style—even after her husband left her for one of her young sales associates. “And you’ll see that I—”
    Nate put the doughnuts in the middle of the table. “I know. You probably braved pirates to get here in a leaking kayak you had to drag across the river the last mile with a length of rope in your teeth. Right?”
    She cocked an eyebrow. “It was a length of leather,” she corrected, “and I was still here on time.”
    “And remarkably dry.” Mike Wallis owned the building and The Cellar, a wine shop in the basement, under Nate’s office. He was small in stature but big in ideas.
    “I’m just saying,” Clarissa added pointedly, “that punctuality is important in small-town service. There are less of us to do more work, so it’s a good thing if we don’t hold each other up. Your brother understood that.”
    Even Sandy groaned at the comment. “Clarie, he’s a bachelor with two little boys and no parenthood experience. Cut him some slack.”
    Nate gave Sandy a grateful smile. He wanted to shout at Clarissa that he’d had one hell of a morning, and that while he wished more than anything that Ben were still here, he hated the comparisons to him because he’d always felt that he’d never measured up to his older brother. It was Ben who’d made the skills Nate did have work for the business.
    Instead, remembering what he told the boys to do when they’d been misjudged or misunderstood, he fought for patience. He nodded politely to the older woman. “You’re absolutely right. I won’t be