Welcome to Serenity

To her dismay, Maddie halted in her tracks. “What kind of business meeting?”

“Not spa business,” Jeanette told her. She sighed. Might as well spit it out. “Christmas festival business.”

Maddie’s eyes immediately got a wicked gleam, which was exactly why Jeanette hadn’t wanted to tell her. She didn’t need the amusement or the speculation.

“You’re meeting with Tom, aren’t you?” Maddie said gleefully. “Good. Maybe you can make amends for the other night.”

“Don’t you dare make anything out of me seeing him tonight,” Jeanette ordered.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Maggie said, grinning. “You can tell me all about it tomorrow.”

Jeanette glared at her retreating form.

On her way to the patio, she stopped to pick up a couple of teas and the last two scones in the case. If Tom wasn’t on time, she intended to eat both of them.

Fortunately for her dress size, he slipped around the side of the building right on the dot of six. He cast a dramatically wary glance around. “Is it safe? Any wild and naked women out here?”

“You are so not funny,” Jeanette said.

“Well, you have to admit that closing a place to men just invites all sorts of speculation about what goes on here,” he said as he pulled out a chair across from her and sat down. “Is one of those scones for me? Preferably the one that has more than three crumbs left?”

She shoved it ungraciously in his direction. “Traditional scone with real currants, not raisins.”

“Excellent.”

He gave her a slow, lingering appraisal that made her blood heat.

“How was your day?”

“Busy,” she said tersely. Then mindful of Maddie’s admonishments, she asked politely, “And yours?”

“Busy,” he echoed. “Mary Vaughn came to call.”

Despite herself, Jeanette bristled. “Oh? What did she want?”

“Teresa says she’s after my body. What do you think?”

“I wasn’t there. I couldn’t comment,” she said more irritably than she intended. It shouldn’t matter to her one darn bit what Mary Vaughn and Tom did. And hadn’t she thought they’d be a perfect match?

“I thought she was there to try to sell me a house,” he admitted.

“Men!” Jeanette murmured.

He chuckled. “That’s pretty much what Teresa said.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You asked about my day.”

“So, no nefarious reason, like trying to make me jealous?”

“If you’re absolutely certain you don’t want to go out with me, how could I possibly make you jealous?” He actually managed to utter the question with a totally innocent expression.

“You can’t,” she assured him. “That doesn’t mean you won’t keep trying to change my mind.”

“My ego’s far too fragile to keep risking rejection,” he said.

“Ha!”

“Well, it is,” he insisted.

“You swore you were coming here to talk business,” she reminded him. “Talk.”

“I’m not sure I can talk on an empty stomach. Isn’t it time for dinner?”

“I just gave you a scone. That should tide you over for the fifteen minutes you’re going to be here.”

“We’re on a timetable?”

“I am.”

“You are one tough cookie, you know that?”

“I pride myself on it,” she said.

“In that case, let’s get to it.” He snapped open an expensive leather briefcase and shoved a list across the table.

She noticed that his hand was large and just a little callused, not the hand of a man who spent all of his time behind a desk. She could imagine this hand touching her. The thought made her blood heat again.

Oblivious to her reaction, Tom went on, “I found this in a file. It has the names of vendors going back for the past ten years. Any reason not to ask them all back?”

“None I can think of,” she admitted, a little taken aback that he’d actually listened to her and gotten down to business. She forced herself to focus, as well. “Should we put an ad in the area newspapers or send out a press release soliciting some new vendors? Otherwise it may start to seem as if no one else can participate. Plus, it’s always good to have new blood. It helps to shake things up. The more vendors the better, I always say. It gives people a reason to come back year after year to spend their money.”

Not that she was one of them. She hadn’t attended the Christmas festival once during the three years she’d lived in Serenity. Even so, as hard as she tried, it had been impossible to tune out all the chatter about it.

“Good idea about getting some fresh faces in here,” he said approvingly. “We’ll probably have to go the press release route, since I don’t think there’s money for that kind of advertising. We need to spend that budget on promoting the event itself.”

In exactly fourteen minutes, he snapped his briefcase closed and stood up. “Well, my time’s about up. Thanks for meeting with me.”

Jeanette was completely thrown by his abrupt end of the discussion, though she couldn’t imagine why. She was the one who’d put a time limit on the meeting.

“Did we cover everything you wanted to cover?” she asked.

“Pretty much. I’ll keep you posted on the responses. I suppose at some point we’ll have to start thinking about mapping out locations for the vendors to set up, but there’s no hurry on that. Howard would probably prefer it be done tomorrow, but realistically November’s soon enough. We should have all the vendor responses in by Thanksgiving.”

“Okay, then. Have a nice evening.”

“You do the same.” His gaze sought hers and held it. “Oh, hell,” he muttered, then bent down and kissed her, not on the cheek as she’d anticipated, but on the mouth…with feeling.