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I turned on my heel, popping out a deep
divot from the lawn, and followed her back to the house, where she
apparently had an idea lying in wait.

I was about to step through the French doors
into the air-conditioned house when Mr. Sandler-Ross stepped into
the doorway.

He was tall and handsome and knew it, with a
politic smile and hair gone tastefully gray. He propped one hand on
the doorjamb and flashed me a thousand-watt smile.

“Jane, right?” He emitted an odor of seafood
and gin.

I pressed a smile onto my lips.

“I’m Sandler-Ross.” Another grin. His hand
slid closer. “But you can call me Peter.”

“And you can call me Ms. MacInnee,” I said,
stepping backward and bumping into the rose trellis. Tiny barbed
roses bit me. I had a fleeting urge to rip the trellis out of the
ground and whack him across the side of the head with it, but I
didn’t deface garden displays. Smile and conquer, that was my
way.

“So, how ’bout those Nationals?” I feinted.
“They won last night, huh? That’s four straight.”

He stepped through the door. “You’re talking
to a Yankees man.”

Figured. “Oh.”

He backed me up another step, coming forward
like a linebacker. “My wife’s very pleased with you, Jane.”

I pressed into the trellis. “Speaking of
your wife.”

He took another step forward, smiling that
bright, awful smile.

Mrs— Lovey hurried back onto the hot patio
then, rescuing me by planting an absent kiss on her husband’s cheek
and thrusting a brochure at my chest.

“Tents,” she said with an unsettling
intensity. “What about tents? We can fit more people with tents,
right?”

What kind of rescue was this?

“We can do tents,” I replied cautiously.
“They’re just…tricky.” Bastards. Tents were tricky bastards. Like
Mr. Peter J. “But if you want more people….”

Mrs. Lovey smiled. “I want more people.”

I smiled back. “Tents it is.”

Now, delayed by a discussion on the merits
(few) and pitfalls (many) of tents, I sat adrift in traffic on a
network of detours that went, apparently, nowhere, in a cloud of
construction dust that was sticking to the sweat on my neck and
arms.

Also, the hook on my bra strap was about to
bust off
.

A bead of sweat tickled down my temple.

I leaned forward and narrowed my eyes at
myself in the rearview mirror. If someone didn’t watch out, whoever
had posted all these damned detour signs was going to be very, very
sorry.

Also, my forehead was shining like
glass.

I dug through the briefcases and messenger
bags slouching on the passenger seat beside me, reaching in for the
tissues I took everywhere. You never knew when a client was going
to break down in tears.

Instead, my hand fell on the note I received
last night from another client, Mrs. Richard P. Bass III, a friend
of, and referral from, Mrs. Lovey. The note was penned on creamy
stationary and carried a faintly perfumed odor and bad news.

For opaque reasons, it reminded me that
while the organically raised bourbon-whisky meatballs had been
divine
and the bacon-wrapped scallops
inspired
, there
had
been that small, unfortunate leak in the tent (Curse
Angelo and his Tent-of-All-Trades Rentals, I thought, not for the
last time) directly next to the guest of honor and her endless
updo. And then there’d been all those extra guests who’d shown up,
which would almost make one think I’d
overbooked
, but Mrs.
Bass III would never
dream
of relaying
that
to the
Thompsons, should they inquire about a recommendation for an event
planner for their daughter’s upcoming wedding.

Also, parenthetically, my payment was going
to be delayed. Again.

By a month. Or perhaps two.

The opaque became transparent—she wouldn’t
tell if I wouldn’t.

With juvenile satisfaction, I wiped the note
across my forehead, smearing its swooping black ink. Then I ripped
it away. What if the note were needed as evidence in court?

I snorted. As if I could afford to take
someone to court.

I was successful, so successful I couldn’t
afford to anger anyone. It took hard work to make it in this
business—hard work, a kickass assistant, unrelenting control, and
the ability to
exude
. The fancy shoes, the expensive
clothes, the luxury car (even in a rental)—everything was
constructed to project the right image. Fake it till you make it.
Success breeds success. People love a winner, and a mouthful of
other platitudes that boiled down to the same thing—you were never
what you seemed. It was all a show.

It had to be. My reputation, my career, my
financial security—everything—rested on people’s good opinion of
me. And then sharing that opinion with others.

The smallest thing could change what they
said, or if they said anything at all. Either could spell career
death.

Some days, I felt as though I was walking
down a long hallway balancing a book on my head. Wrapped in
explosives.

But that was about to change. The
Sandler-Ross job was going to catapult me onto radars aimed at an
atmosphere so rarified I could hardly catch my breath. Not the
flashy wealthy, but the quiet wealthy, the blow-your-mind wealthy.
I was going to keep this job if it killed me. Or someone else. For
instance,
Mr
. Peter J.

I smiled briefly.

Because if I handled this job right, I’d
have made it.

I was quiet a moment, then scowled into the
rearview mirror at myself, irritated that this thought hadn’t
encouraged me. It actually made me feel a little…hopeless. A sliver
of cold shot through my body, almost as if….

Almost as if I was having
a chilling
thought
.

I tipped forward and rested my forehead on
the hot steering wheel. I was just tired, that was all. Tomorrow,
I’d get back in the saddle. Tomorrow, I’d redo my makeup and square
my shoulders and smile when hurricanes blew through town.

For what was left of today, though, I was
going to relax a little. Stop worrying.

Take off my bra.

A shiver of excitement tickled over my skin,
cutting through the sweltering heat of the rental car. Nothing
could be done about the pale pink silk blouse I’d been sweating in
since six o’clock this morning. But the bra, that could go.

For now.

A small rebellion, but rebellion
nonetheless.

I leaned forward and peeled it away from my
skin—I could feel the imprint of it on my sweaty back—then slid it
down my belly and out the bottom of my shirt. Then I looked in the
mirror and smiled.

What next?

Maybe I could go have a drink in the hotel
bar.

I raised my eyebrows at myself in the
mirror. Really? I was pathetic. I couldn’t even come up with a good
miniature rebellion.

I slumped back in my seat. A movement out of
the corner of my eye made me turn and look out at the low, battered
red truck parked beside me.

A man sat inside, one tanned arm slung along
the backrest, looking at me from behind dark sunglasses. His hair
was dark, short, his face covered with end-of-day shadow. A thin
blue cotton shirt pressed against the muscles in his arm, slick
with perspiration.

“Hi,” I said, deep in my rebellious
mode.

A slow smile curved up a corner of his
mouth. “Hi.”

A shiver raced through me. That smile, that
voice…. That shiver. I’d know it anywhere.

Finn Dante.

What were the chances? I asked myself. Zero,
I answered. This wasn’t a function of probabilities.

This was voodoo.

A stream of excitement trickled through my
belly.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Finn Dante,”
I said, real slow and cool.

“Janey Mac,” he murmured back.

Another shiver went through me. The good
kind. The kind I’d got when his fingers brushed my wrist at Emily’s
party, the kind when he’d bent his head to mine down by the river,
the kind when he’d looked at me and seen something different than
what anyone else had ever seemed to see.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said.

“Fancy,” he agreed.

It wasn’t fancy at all. It was dangerous.
Because I was at the end of my rope with my bra unhooked, looking
for trouble, and Finn Dante was here, more hot and sexy and
dangerous-looking at thirty than he’d been at nineteen.

I did what I shouldn’t have done. I
smiled.

I leaned my arm out the window. The heat of
the metal almost scalded me, and I yanked it back inside. “So what
are you doing around these parts, Finn?”

“I live here.”

“Wow.” I was a complete idiot.

“You?”

“Work. I have work here.”

“Wow.”

I smiled into his grin. “You haven’t
changed, Mr. Dante. Trouble and charm all the way.”

He arched an eyebrow. “You think I’m
charming?”

I snorted. “I think you’re troubled.”

He laughed, low and rumbly.

Behind his sunglasses, his gaze trailed down
me again. I knew it because I felt shivers across my chest. “So you
got out of Dodge after all,” he said.

I nodded. “I left a week after our...talk.”
Calling it a talk was like calling politicians public servants.
Lies, all lies.

“Right. Our talk.” The low vibration of his
irony rode all the way to my car. “So what kind of work you doing,
Janey? Is there a game in town?”

I shook my head. “I gave up cheering for
sports teams. Now I cheer for rich people. Whip them into
shape.”

“In what capacity?”

“Event planner for the rich and wanna-be
famous.”

He gave a low whistle. “Who’re your
clients?”

“The Sandler-Rosses.”

“Ah.” A little pause. “Nice.”

“It is.” Except when it wasn’t. But I didn’t
talk about that. I smiled more brightly.

“Swanky,” he said.

“That’s my way. Redneck swank.”

A smile creased the five o’clock shadow
covering his jaw. He glanced through his windshield. “Yeah, Dodge
had pretensions it could never achieve.”

“You bet we did. And I helped create them.
What about you? What sort of mayhem do you wreak nowadays?”

His sunglasses came back my direction. “Did
I wreak mayhem?”

“You most certainly did. Girls, vacant
buildings, the county criminal code. Nothing could stand against
you.”

He laughed. “Nowadays I do a little bit of a
lot of things. Buy things, sell things, build things, smash
things.”

“How eclectic of you.”

“Renaissance man.”

I squinted at him. “What kinds of things do
you smash? Hearts? The knees of your boss’s enemies?”

“Buildings mostly. Why, you need something
smashed?”

A brief flash of the Sandler-Rosses’ new
pavilion appeared in my mind. I brushed it away. “I’ll let you
know.”

The sun was going down, shifting the shadows
into long, stretched-out things so I couldn’t see his eyes anymore,
couldn’t see where he was looking. But his head hadn’t turned away
from me.

“So what are you doing tonight?”

I squinted at the glow of him, then, in a
burst of uncharacteristic forthrightness, leaned my arm out the
window, not caring that the metal scorched my skin.

“If you want to know the truth, Finn, it
goes downhill from here. I’m sitting in a puddle of my own sweat,
covered in construction dust, and if I ever find my hotel, I’ll
spend the rest of the night trying to contact various vendors and
alert them to the last-minute changes they’ll have to institute
immediately, including thirty new guests and a new venue, as well
as outdoor service in a setting that, while beautiful, is not
air-conditioned. Or big enough.

“The kitchen contains a single,
household-size oven, and we need to change the menu to items that
don’t require refrigeration. Also, I need tents. And somewhere for
my flair barman to do his stuff. Like a bar. And I don’t know where
to find a portable bar company locally. Also”—I sat back—“I almost
brained my boss’s husband with a garden trellis, so I need to come
up with a plan of action there.”

He let me vent in silence, just like he had
down by the river.

Don’t go there,
I warned myself. Last
time I spilled my guts to Finn, I ended up with my hand down his
pants.

“Pete Sandler is an ass,” he said after a
moment.

I brightened.

“I know someone who has portable bars.”

I narrowed my eyes. “How do you know such a
thing?”

“I know Dan. He owns Extreme Rentals.”

I stretched out my hand into the narrow
space between our vehicles. “You know Dan who owns Extreme
Rentals.”

A smile touched his mouth. “I know Dan.”

“Personally?”

“We play together.”

“Playdates,” I breathed. “What do you
play?”

He grinned. “Music.”

“How much?”

“For what?”

“Access to his personal cell number.” I
squinted at him appraisingly. “Firstborn child? Designer drugs? My
secret recipe for blueberry-pear daiquiris?”

He looked at me a second more, then flipped
his phone open and tapped away at it, then shut it. “I told him to
call me. Had an event-planner emergency that could make him a lot
of money.”

“I owe you.”

This smile was slow and dangerous. “So come
out with me.”

I felt a vibrating cord of, well,
happiness
shimmer through me. That couldn’t be good. I
cleared my throat.

Car engines began firing to life. Far up the
line of traffic, cars began moving forward. I sat back and
swallowed.

“What else are you going to do tonight,
Janey? Worry?”

“I don’t worry. I
consider
. All the
possible catastrophes.”

He smiled faintly and shrugged. “Your
choice.”

Engines revved to life, and the bright red
brake lights of the cars in front of us started to blink out,
little ripples of darkness dotting down the line of cars.