LITMIR.BIZ

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on her feet, Allison smoothed her navy-blue velvet tunic over colourful patterned leggings. ‘It took me six months to assemble the collection and eight days for it to be gone. Clearly not junk, Dad. Accessories.’

      Jimmy imitated his younger sister. ‘Daddy, they’re bags, scarves, jewellery! Essentials of life. All handmade by desperate housewives who serve as slaves for me, the Entrepreneur Jones.’

      ‘They’re hardly slaves,’ Allison said. ‘They’re stay-at-home moms and every one of them is a graduate of a design programme!’

      Allison tried to look annoyed but she just couldn’t pull it off. Laughing with delight, she pulled them both into a joyous family hug. ‘Thanks for all your help getting the shop set up. I don’t know what I’d have done without you. Or, for that matter, what I do now. I sold everything but once I pay the overheads, I’ll have barely enough left to buy supplies to make more.’

      Detective Jones inspected the shop like it was a crime scene. A couple of scarves, a few pairs of earrings, a purse made of faux fur. Other than that, the place was empty. He held the fur handbag like it was a piece of roadkill. ‘Did you really think this thing up?’

      ‘All by myself,’ Allison said. ‘We made ten, sold nine. I kept this one for a pattern.’

      Riley looked at the label on the bag: LYDIA’S CLOSET. ‘Amazing what people will spend money on,’ Detective Jones said gruffly, walking away.

      The fact that his daughter had named her shop after his beloved wife never failed to move him. He put the bag back on the shelf and barked at his son. ‘Let’s get some supper and figure out how your sister is going to support herself and all those stay-at-home moms with nothing to sell. And a ridiculous rent to pay every month.’

      ‘I could always get a push cart,’ Allison said, fully aware of her father’s struggle to keep his emotions in check. ‘Or drive around SoHo selling things out of my car.’

      ‘First of all, you don’t have a car,’ Jimmy shot back. ‘And secondly, I’ve already figured out what you’re going to do.’

      ‘And what might that be, Lieutenant Jones?’ Although Allison and her brother delighted in their verbal battles, the baby of the family always bristled at being told what to do.

      ‘It’s not a what, it’s a who. Mike Dennison.’

      ‘Not him again.’ It was a defect of character, she knew, but her lifelong struggle for independence had made her balk at even the smallest suggestion from her big family of men. ‘Nice try, but no way!’

      ‘Who’s Mike Dennison?’ Riley demanded.

      ‘Some guy Jimmy’s been trying to fix me up with for the past six months. If my brother is willing to allow me to go out with a guy, he’s probably a Sunday School teacher who reads self-help books and bakes his own bread.’

      ‘Hardly,’ Jimmy said. He was checking the windows Allison had just locked to make sure they were really locked.

      Allison watched, shaking her head. Cops.

      ‘And he’s hardly a bozo,’ Jimmy said. ‘Chopper pilot, two tours in the Middle East, Captain in the National Guard, and in his spare time he’s a copywriter at an ad agency. He wins those awards for funny TV commercials.’

      ‘Clios,’ Allison said. ‘See what I mean, Dad? Sound a little too good to be true? I suppose he’s handsome too.’

      ‘I don’t know what he looks like,’ Jimmy said, satisfied that the windows were locked. ‘I don’t look at guys and think about stuff like that.’

      ‘I knew it,’ Alison said. ‘Homely.’

      ‘I’m telling you, if you want to figure out how to make this business work without all your profit going into rent, Mike’s your guy,’ Jimmy said. ‘He’ll know just what you should do about your business.’

      Allison turned off the last light, plunging the shop into darkness. ‘You said it yourself. It’s my business. I’ll figure out what to do. Now, get out of here, both of you, before I call the cops!’

      Allison stood up from her stool and stretched. She had been working on new designs at the big work table overlooking Jamaica Bay since her dad and Jimmy had left for work at precisely five forty-five this morning.

      They had the route to Manhattan South Precinct timed to the second. Fifty-eight minutes, door to door. Leave later, they’d hit traffic and be too late to grab coffee and two doughnuts each from Manny’s food truck before roll call. Leave earlier, Manny wouldn’t be there yet. It was all about the doughnuts.

      There was another part of their routine that Allison pretended to hate, but secretly cherished. Even though she was twenty-six years old, trained in self-defence by a family of police officers, every morning before they left for work, one of them would check her room, to make certain she had made it through the night unharmed.

      This vigilance, the watchfulness, had begun after her mother was killed twelve years ago, when Allison was thirteen. Since that day, their primary focus had been making sure Allison was happy and safe. But most of all, safe.

      That morning, like all mornings since she realised why they were checking on her, she had pretended to be asleep. Prickly as she was about any challenge to her ability to take care of herself, in this one matter she acquiesced. She wouldn’t embarrass them by acknowledging she was aware that these two big tough cops were marshmallows when it came to her.

      That’s why she always let them know where she was and what time she’d be home. That’s why she agreed to let them build her a private apartment atop the family home, rather than moving out to live in a loft in SoHo. She had been dreaming of doing that since her mom began taking her prowling through the quirky boutiques that were tucked away in that neighbourhood.

      Not that she would ever be able to afford such a luxury, if she couldn’t figure out how to sell her designs without putting all the profits into overheads. She had taken a risk when she quit her job as junior designer at a SoHo chic fashion house. But she had big ideas. Selling out in eight days told her she was on the right track with the designs.

      But if her ideas were a ten, her business plan was a two.

      Allison did what she always did when she needed to think something through. She grabbed a jacket and headed for the beach.

      Breezy Point in Queens, New York, was known as the place where cops lived. The peninsula was between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean with a population of about twenty-eight thousand. Over sixty per cent of the residents were Irish-American, a whole lot of them police officers and firefighters. With a private security force and no easy access in or out, it has been said there was no safer place to live in any of New York City’s Five Boroughs.

      It was no coincidence that Breezy Point was where Riley Jones moved his family after his wife was killed.

      It was April, but with the wind coming off the water from two directions, it felt like November. Allison put her head down and took the path towards the ocean. Four o’clock was the time the residents started getting home from their shifts at the precinct or firehouse, so there was activity on the usually quiet streets. She waved at everyone she knew and she knew almost everyone.

      But her mind was on her fledgling company now in trouble and her social life obviously on life-support. Since the day she broke up with Brad, she had been on a ‘man-fast’.

      She had been involved with Brad Dolan for eight months but it wasn’t until the seventh month that she had risked taking him home to meet the family. The results were disastrous, as somewhere deep inside she knew they would be. Which was probably why she had waited so long.

      It wasn’t that her family ever did or said anything. They were polite, solicitous even. But they were also mirrors that revealed the truth. They had listened and nodded while Brad talked on and on about his accomplishments, his ideas, his life plan. In other words, talked exclusively about himself.

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