“It was nice meeting you, Pepper,” he said, and meant it with a sincerity that he hoped sounded casual and suspected didn’t.
“You, too, Jonah.” She picked up her book and settled into the guest chair. “Atlas is a dream.”
So are you, Pepper Broussard.
Swallowing that last thought, he thanked the chef, who nodded without looking up from his laptop, and walked out of the office, down the hall, and into the parking lot, where the heat hit him like a wall and the Honda sat baking.
Atlas didn’t even wake up when he was strapped into the car seat, which was a minor miracle.
Jonah drove home thinking about two things.
First, that he absolutely, urgently, critically needed to find childcare.
Second, that his most important professor’s daughter had freckles and smelled like flowers and had a spicy personality that fit her name.
Oh, and she was completely, unequivocally off limits.
The sound of a power saw greeted Kate and Vivien before they even reached the front door of Tessa and Dusty’s beach house in Miramar Beach.
“It’s not-so-controlled chaos in here—I would enter at your own risk,” Tessa announced when she opened the front door. She held Olive on one hip, brushing something from the little girl’s blond curls. Sawdust?
“That sounds like more than moving furniture and rearranging a duplex into one place,” Kate said.
“So much more,” Tessa said. “Dusty wants the staircase opened up and it’s…loud. And dirty. And there are three men in there…sweating. Profusely.”
On cue, the saw screamed again. Olive clapped her hands and squealed, “Dusting!”
They laughed at the name the toddler had hung on her soon-to-be father.
“He’s making plenty of it,” Tessa muttered, kissing the top of Olive’s head. “Girls, let’s get out of here. Please. I’m dressed. She’s dressed. We’re ready.”
Kate took in the scene behind her sister—tarps over the furniture, the smell of fresh-cut lumber, and the muffled sound of male laughter from somewhere upstairs.
The house had been two separate units when Tessa and Dusty bought it, back when they were just friends sharing a property and pretending they weren’t falling in love. Now that they were married, Dusty had wasted no time converting it into a proper single-family home, which apparently required destroying most of the first floor.
“It looks like a bomb went off,” Vivien observed.
“Two bombs. One upstairs and one down. Dusty promised it would take a weekend. That was five days ago and there’s no end in sight.”
Kate reached for Olive, who wrapped her small arms around Kate’s neck and immediately pressed a sticky hand against her glasses.
“Tess-Tess!” Olive announced, pointing at Tessa as if Kate might not know who she was.
“That’s right, baby girl. That’s Tess-Tess. She’s my sister.”
“Sis-tah.”
“Be warned, she’s a human parrot,” Tessa said, grabbing one of her beloved designer totes, which now looked suspiciously like a diaper bag. “I say Pompano Joe’s because we can walk. Now. Before I commit a crime with a circular saw.”
They took off for the beachfront restaurant, laughing and chatting as they strolled down the water-facing road. There, they found the deck was open and breezy, and scored a table near the railing with a view of the Gulf and a highchair for Olive. She settled in with a sippy cup and started gnawing on a plastic starfish toy as though it were the featured menu item.
“Look at you,” Kate said to Tessa once they’d ordered iced teas and the breeze had swept away the last of the sawdust stress. “Married. A mom. Renovating a house.”
“Just married. Almost a mom—adoption isn’t final for six to eight weeks—and ‘renovating’ is optimistic. More like making it work.” She took a sip of tea and grinned at Vivien. “If you’d have told me back in March when you found me hiding in a guest room at the Summer House, basically homeless and pathetic, that I’d be living in Miramar Beach with a therapist husband and a two-year-old, I would have laughed in your face and called you crazy.”
“You did laugh in my face, and I thought you were the crazy one,” Vivien deadpanned.
“I was,” she said, “but now I’m just crazy about…her. And the man destroying our home with love and determination.” She handed Olive a piece of bread, tearing it into small pieces automatically, wiping a crumb from the little girl’s chin without breaking eye contact with Vivien.
