LITMIR.BIZ

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PULLED INTO Charlie’s drive on Friday evening and parked behind Tess’s sporty car. She jumped from her truck, exercised her temper by slamming the door and marched along the short walk to the front porch.

      “Hi, Addie.” Rosie Quinn, the daughter of Tess’s fiancé, held one end of a chew rope. Charlie’s naughty black Labrador retriever, Hardy, growled and tugged at the other end.

      “Hi, Rosie. Staying for dinner?”

      “Yep. Tess said we could have a girls’ night.” Rosie didn’t bother to hide her delight at being included. “She brought a wedding video.”

      “Does Charlie know?”

      “Not yet.” Rosie worked the rope loose and tossed it across the yard for Hardy to chase. “Tess said we’d get some wine into her before we tie her to her sofa and make her watch.”

      Addie stepped up to the trim front porch and whacked the iron knocker hard against its panel on the Craftsmen-era door. Jack Maguire, Charlie’s handsome fiancé, swung the door open. “Hey, Addie,” he said with his Carolina drawl and megawatt smile. “Glad to see you’re all in one piece.”

      It was hard to resist Jack’s grin, especially when it deepened those grooves on either side of his mouth. His dark blond hair was still damp from a recent shower, and he smelled of a spicy aftershave. His dark blue eyes crinkled at the corners as he looked her up and down, making a show of checking for earthquake damage.

      Addie dredged up a strained smile of her own. “Thanks. I’m fine.”

      “If you say so.” He stepped aside to let her in. “Charlie’s back in the kitchen, watching Tess spoil a perfectly good rock cod with a mess of fancy fixings.”

      He trailed her through the house, and she noted his influence in the bright new paint on the wall behind Charlie’s dull brown sofa and the glossy new finish on her secondhand dining-room table.

      Addie halted in the kitchen doorway, her hands on her hips, and her eyes narrowed to slits as she glared at her so-called friends. “Why didn’t one of you warn me Dev Chandler was back in town?”

      “Because the earthquake sort of knocked that little detail from my mind.” Tess, seated at the kitchen table, sliced through a lemon and picked out a seed. “And because I didn’t think it was that big a deal.”

      “Well, it’s not,” Addie said.

      “Could have fooled me.” Charlie rinsed her hands at the farmhouse sink. Her thick, curly hair had been tamed in a braid hanging between her shoulders, but coppery tendrils escaped to twist and curl at her temples and nape. “Especially since you’re standing there looking like you can’t decide whether to kill us or yourself.”

      Addie tossed up her hands as she moved into the kitchen. “Okay, so I’m upset. Mostly I’m upset that I’m upset.”

      And that was the one basic fact at the heart of her personal storm: she shouldn’t care whether or not Dev Chandler had squandered his gifts and wasted all the advantages he’d been handed. “What’s he doing here, anyway?”

      “Visiting our grandmother is a likely guess,” Tess said, “considering he’s staying in her guest house.”

      “And?”

      “And what?” Tess set the knife aside and arranged lemon slices over a thick, pale fillet in a baking dish.

      “And what other little details might have gotten rattled loose and lost in the excitement over the natural disaster this week?” Addie asked.

      Tess shot her a sympathetic glance. “It appears he’s planning on staying there for a while. Maybe for another month. Or two.”

      “Great.” Addie threw her arms wide, narrowly missing clipping Jack’s jaw as she paced the kitchen. “Wonderful. Fantastic. I’ll have plenty of opportunities to run into him.”

      “And plenty of time to quit being so upset.” Charlie dried her hands and studied Addie with cool gray eyes. “I thought you were over him.”

      “I am. But it’s a heck of a lot easier being over him when he’s living somewhere else.”

      “You have a thing for Dev Chandler?” Jack asked.

      “No,” Addie, Charlie and Tess answered in unison.

      Tess shoved a platter of chips and salsa to the edge of the table. “So. You’re not actually over him. Not really.”

      “The teensiest of technicalities.” Addie plucked one of the chips from the platter and bit into it. “One of several, including the fact that there was never anything to be over in the first place.”

      Jack pulled a jacket from a rack near the rear patio door and cautiously circled Addie to brush a quick kiss across Charlie’s cheek. He headed for the dining room.

      “Where are you off to tonight?” asked Tess.

      Jack froze. Something suspicious crept along the edges of his smile. “Out.”

      “Interesting,” Tess said. She glanced at Charlie. “Where, precisely, is this ‘out’ Jack is headed to?”

      “Don’t be so nosy.” Charlie grabbed a bottle of Chardonnay from a cupboard. “It’s just a friendly poker game. Quinn invited him.”

      “Now I’m twice as nosy.” Tess narrowed her eyes. “Quinn said exactly the same thing when I asked him where he was going tonight. ‘Out.’ He told me Jack had invited him.”

      Addie, Charlie and Tess stared at Jack.

      He shrugged into his jacket. “We kind of invited each other. At the same time. When the subject came up.”

      “How did this subject come up, I wonder?” Tess asked.

      “And where is this poker game taking place?” Charlie asked.

      “At Chandler House.”

      “Dev,” Addie said.

      Jack slid his hands into his pockets. “Yeah, he’ll be there, too.”

      “Convenient.” Tess drummed her nails on the table. “Considering the game’s at his place.”

      “This was all his idea, wasn’t it?” Addie asked.

      “It doesn’t matter whose idea it was.” Charlie filled a goblet with the wine. “They get a guys’ night out. We get a girls’ night in. Works for me.”

      Addie pulled out a chair, dropped into it and reached for more chips. Terrific. Poker games with her friends’ fiancés. Poker games would lead to barbecues, and those would lead to who knew what. An ever-expanding network of people who’d multiply the reasons and occasions for her to run into Dev throughout the long summer months.

      “Here,” Charlie said, handing Addie the glass of Chardonnay. “You look like you could use this.”

      DEV POPPED THE TOP on a beer Friday night and passed it to his old pal Bud Soames. Hard to picture Bud with thinning hair, a job at a bank, a house undergoing remodeling, a wife in real estate and a kid in elementary school. Nearly made Dev feel like an underachiever.

      Each time he’d returned to Carnelian Cove, Dev had found fewer old pals willing to spend a Friday night leaning on the bar at The Shantyman and reminiscing over a few drinks. One by one, the people he’d left behind had moved on to busy lives and expanding responsibilities, building careers and forming families. This time, Dev had decided to skip the lonely bar scene and bring the social hour home.

      He glanced at the others gathered around the guest quarters’ old kitchen table, its wide oak surface heaped with servings of Julia’s layered nachos, crumpled paper napkins, whiskey glasses, beer bottles and poker chips. Jack Maguire and Quinn, owners of their own businesses and both soon to be married. Rusty Wheeler, an expert machinist and builder on Quinn’s construction crew. Although Rusty was

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