LITMIR.BIZ

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a hearty wave. “Hey there, Nick! Good to see you again.”

      Nick nodded slowly. He hadn’t seen Grace and Tommy’s dad in six months before he and Georgia ran into him at the Canal Street Café on Friday night, and now he was over here fixing Georgia’s porch light?

      He realized Georgia was frowning at him. Boy, that was a look he knew and hated, that faint, rare hint of disapproval that pinched her nose and made her eyebrows beetle up. He cleared his throat and said, “Good to see you, too, Mr. Lamb. How are you this morning?”

      Meaning, of course, what the hell are you doing on my mother’s porch?

      He was being stupid, and he knew it even as Mason began to ramble about a free day from the high school, since the whole tenth grade was on a field trip, and the juniors and seniors were taking some kind of standardized test. He’d been a high school history teacher at Franklin High School ever since Nick could remember.

      He was also his best friend’s father, and a man who had been like a dad to him for years. But there was something weird about finding him hanging out with Georgia as if they were old buddies who drank coffee and chatted every morning.

      Of course, they were old friends—they’d known each other since Nick and Tommy were kids, before Nick’s dad had disappeared and Tommy and Grace’s mom had died. But they weren’t really friends, not in Nick’s book. Mason had never gotten over Kay’s death, for one thing. He taught his classes, and he went to Tommy’s football games and Grace’s…well, whatever it was that Grace did that required an audience, but once they were out of the house, Mason spent his time puttering in his basement or watching the History Channel when he wasn’t teaching, according to Tommy.

      And Georgia, well, Georgia had her female friends. Women she’d known forever, right there on the block or down at church, and later at the elementary school where she’d finally gotten a job in the front office.

      As Mason rambled—and his mother looked on fondly, smiling in all the right places—it struck Nick that his mother had never once dated another man since his dad left. He did the math, right there in the sunny front yard of his childhood house, and swallowed hard.

      Twenty-three years ago. And he’d never even thought about it.

      But he was willing to bet, all of a sudden, watching Georgia’s face soften at something Mason was saying, that his mother had.

      “Nick, you’re not paying attention,” she scolded him, and he looked up to find her frowning at him all of a sudden. “Mason asked if you’d seen Grace since the other night.”

      “Um, no sir, I haven’t.” He ran a hand over his forehead. Grace. This was all her fault, as usual. If Grace hadn’t come back, everything would be just the way it had always been, and that had worked pretty well so far, if you asked him. Hell, his sisters were both married, and Georgia’s house was nice and snug, and she was set up doing storytimes at the library, now that she’d retired, and volunteering down at the church.

      Everything was finally all set up. He now had the chance to broaden his horizons a little bit. Sow a few oats, or whatever they called it, work on a police force that dealt with more than the occasional cat up a tree or kids on Mischief Night, damn it.

      He realized Mason was staring at him and found his voice. “Is she doing all right over there at Toby’s?”

      “I suppose so,” Mason said, and lowered himself onto the top porch step. Georgia joined him, not even bothering to brush it off before she sat down. Nick closed his mouth when he felt his jaw hanging open. Their hips were practically touching, for God’s sake.

      “She came over last night because she found some old photos in the shop she thought I might like.” Mason chuckled, and slanted a look sideways at Georgia. “Had a whole story in her head about the family in the pictures and their life at the turn of the century.” He paused, his brow wrinkling as he smiled and shook his head. “She got most of it right, too. I guess she listened to me more often than I thought.”

      Georgia laid a hand on his arm. “Of course she did, Mason. Has she made any headway deciding what she’s going to do?”

      Mason snorted at that. “Not much so far. She did pull out some dead shrubs before she left.”

      Figures, Nick thought. Impulsive, that was Grace. The shrubs were probably fine.

      “Did you need something, dear?” Georgia asked now. Her eyes were wide, all innocent interest, but Nick knew what she was thinking. He’d seen that look often enough as a kid, when she needed a break or wanted a minute by herself. That look meant, “Unless you’re bleeding from the eyes or the house is about to explode, please go away.”

      “Not really, Mom.” Hands in his pockets, he backed toward the patrol car. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Lamb.”

      “Oh, Nick, we’re all adults,” the older man said with an easy laugh. “Call me Mason.”

      “Yes, sir,” Nick said, and practically blushed at the way Mason and Georgia laughed together.

      Adults, huh? He restlessly ran a hand over his head as he turned around and got into the car. He didn’t feel like one at the moment.

      Especially since what he planned to do next was drive over to the antique store and tell Grace that their parents were canoodling on his mother’s front porch.

      Grace was perched on a ladder in the front room of the shop, a giant strip of faded wallpaper in her hands, when the bell over the door jingled. She looked over her shoulder to find Nick planted in the hall, shaking his head.

      “What is it with your family and ladders?” he said.

      She climbed down, tossing the discarded wallpaper onto the pile on the floor. “What are you talking about?”

      “What are you doing?” he said instead of answering her.

      “You’re never going to make detective at this rate, Nick,” she said archly, and bit her bottom lip when he glowered at her. “I’m taking down this awful wallpaper,” she explained. “Can’t you tell?”

      “Of course I can tell,” he grunted. “But the question is why? Especially when”—he counted off on his fingers—“it’s not your store, you shouldn’t be up on a ladder all by yourself, and the front yard looks like a battlefield!”

      “Oh, that.” She sighed, and walked over to the big bay window. She’d dug out either side of the slate walk so she could plant pansies, which she didn’t have yet, and then ripped up half of the pachysandra that was choking the front edge of the lawn. The dead branches of a sickly hot pink azalea were scattered on the grass like crime scene evidence. “I forgot about that.”

      “How do you forget that you ripped up the yard?” he demanded.

      If he wasn’t careful, that throbbing vein in his neck was going to pop, she thought, and shrugged at him. “I was working on ideas for a new career last night, and I wanted to do something this morning. But halfway through, I ran out of potting soil, and then the phone rang, and I was looking at the wallpaper while I was talking to Toby, and it was so awful and dark and dingy that I decided to peel back a piece when I hung up with him, and then…” She trailed off, watching his throat. The vein was pulsing like a strobe light now. She bent down and retrieved a strip of the wallpaper. “See? It’s horrible. No one has flocked wallpaper anymore. And shepherdesses? Honestly.”

      He lifted one dark eyebrow. “Shepherdesses.”

      He was probably an excellent cop, Grace thought as her face heated. His stare was like a bare bulb. If he started interrogating her, she would crumble like a stale cookie.

      He was so much bigger than she remembered, too. So…solid in his khaki uniform. He was all man now. Big, strong man.

      She blinked at him in confusion, painfully aware of the hot blush on her cheeks. He was Nick, for heaven’s sake. And of course he was a man; he was thirty-five years old. What did she expect, the

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