LITMIR.BIZ

      Sam’s email ended with two winks.

      Oh, for heaven’s sake. Their comments were all in good fun, but Kristi rolled her eyes as she read them. She had given some sketchy background information on their new client when she’d sent the photographs and the proposal to her partners late last night. Sketchy details were all she knew. He was a single dad and a widower who found that one big house and two small girls were more than he could juggle with his demanding career.

      Claire, recently separated and almost certainly headed for divorce court, had declared she was off the market. Besides, Nate wasn’t her type. Her ex was an investment broker with a taste for money and a penchant for keeping up appearances. Kristi had never liked him, had always thought Claire could do better, but her friend was totally type A when it came to organizing her life. Nate’s disorganization would drive her crazy.

      Sam and the love of her life, recently married at a quiet ceremony with a small gathering of family and close friends, wouldn’t give another man a second glance, no matter how hot he happened to be. Kristi had been thrilled to share maid of honor duties with Claire, and they couldn’t be happier that their business partner was happily settled with her husband AJ and their young son, Will.

      Claire’s and Sam’s teasing was strictly for Kristi’s benefit. That they had picked up on her immediate attraction to this man was a testament to how well they knew one another. They also knew she was determined to maintain control of her life, at least until her daughter was grown-up and off to college, and that meant not having a man in it.

      Her deadbeat dad had abandoned her and her mother after he’d lost his job, remortgaged their home and gambled everything away. And then she’d made the same mistake her mother had. Let herself be swept off her feet by a guy who was all talk and no substance. Got pregnant right out of high school. Married the guy because of course that was the right thing to do, and learned too late that he couldn’t hold down a job, didn’t know how to be a husband much less a dad and had no interest in learning.

      Now her mission in life was to set an example for her daughter and break the cycle so Jenna didn’t make the same mistake. Setting a good example meant not getting involved with a man, any man, but especially not another deadbeat, until Jenna was past the age of being impressionable.

      Anyone could see that Nate McTavish was smart, decent, easy on the eyes and about as far from deadbeat as any man could be, but he was still a man. He had a lot going on in his life, including grieving the loss of his wife. Kristi would be the first to admit she had enough baggage of her own. To heck with taking on anyone else’s.

      Once more she scrolled through all the photographs she’d taken, from the living room and dining room with their festive party streamers to the cluttered kitchen where a board game on the table was still surrounded by lunch dishes that hadn’t been cleared away.

      One photo captured the refrigerator and a cluttered counter. Like hundreds of other homes, the front of the fridge was plastered with notes, calendars, kids’ artwork. It was the photo booth strip that leaped out at her, though. She enlarged the photograph and leaned closer to the screen for a better look. Four images of Nate and his girls, snapped in rapid succession, laughing and grinning and making silly faces at the camera. Her chest went tight, the way it had when she’d first seen the pictures yesterday. There had been more strips on a tackboard in the girls’ bedroom, one on Nate’s dresser in the master bedroom and several on the desk in his home office. None of them, at least none that she’d seen, had included the wife and mother this family had lost, but together they created a poignant record of Nate’s daughters as they grew up. Altogether she’d noticed eight or ten of the strips scattered throughout the house, and she felt sure she would encounter more as she drilled down through the layers of clutter.

      Organizing a client’s personal mementos fell well outside the kind of work she usually did, but the mother in her wanted to do something special with those photographs. She wished she had started a tradition like that when Jenna was little. Suggesting it now would yield one of her daughter’s signature eye rolls and a “Mo-om, that’s so lame.”

      Speaking of Jenna…

      Kristi glanced at the clock. Darn. In a futile attempt to keep herself on track, she kept it set five minutes fast. Even deducting those precious minutes, they were running late and it was almost time for her daughter to leave for school.

      She scooted Hercules off her lap and drained her teacup as she shut down her laptop and stuffed it into her bag along with the rest of her things. On her way through the kitchen she deposited her cup in the sink and hauled her bag to the bench by the front door. Now to find her keys.

      “Jenna?” she called up the stairs as she scanned the surface of the small console table inside the front door. “Are you ready?”

      “Almost. Do you know where my iPod is?” Jenna shouted back.

      Kristi put her search for her missing keys on pause. Exactly where you left it, she thought. Ditto for my keys.

      “Haven’t seen it, sweetie.” And she didn’t have time to look. Her daughter could survive for one day without Justin and Selena. She, on the other hand, couldn’t get her day started until she found her keys.

      She should have taken less time going through photos, less time checking email and a lot less time fussing with her hair and makeup. Then she had put on her blue sneakers, realized they were scuffed and grimy from clearing out a previous client’s garage and changed to the pink ones. But her blue T-shirt didn’t go, so she changed to a white one, decided against it and dashed downstairs to retrieve a pink shirt from the dryer. Then she’d let herself get distracted and had folded the rest of the laundry and put it away.

      How she managed to stay on task in a client’s home while being so disorganized in her own was a constant source of frustration for her…and an endless source of amusement for Sam and Claire. And now, because of it, she was going to be late.

      Back in the kitchen she picked up a dish towel to see if her keys were hiding beneath it. They weren’t. This was rapidly turning into one of those mornings when nothing went the way she wanted it to. She quickly folded the towel, hung it on the handle of the oven door, moved on to the dining room table. No keys on the half she used as her office. The other end was Jenna’s homework space, and the two halves met in the middle in a muddle of personal items, assorted junk mail and a pair of hurricane candle lanterns, placed there to create a little ambience after their last cleaning session.

      No sense looking there. Had she put the keys in her bag? Claire, the poster girl for organized efficiency, had suggested attaching a lanyard to the strap of her handbag and clipping her keys to

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