Читать книгу A Small-Town Homecoming - Terry McLaughlin - Страница 11

QUINN 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 bending over 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 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.