Prayer (29 page)

Still crying along, Carina began to nod, too.

~ 19 ~

John leaned against the fender of his truck and looked up at the completed building—a bed and breakfast that had gone through the hyper-rigorous approval process of the Quiet Cove Historical Legacy Preservation and Appreciation Society. Everybody called them “the Historical Society,” or just “the Society,” but their new president, Matilda Duffey, wanted it known by its full and official name.

Madame Duffey was going through the building now, with her posse of inspectors and snoots, and John had had to get the fuck out before he said something rude. She was a persnickety old blue-haired bat whose family, she often reminded those in her proximity, had been among the first settlers of Quiet Cove, before the ‘dagos’ overran the place. He supposed it was possible that she was too old to realize how fucking offensive that was, but John didn’t much like her broad, bigoted ass.

Worse on this day was her tendency to nitpick and criticize everything, whether it was within the Society’s purview or not. She sneered at dust and sniffed at a rosebush that hadn’t bloomed yet.

The owner of this property had bought a three-hundred-year-old house, one of the first homes in Quiet Cove, intending to turn it into a B&B with minimal alterations to the structure. That Historical Society inspection process had uncovered the reality that the house had had about two hundred and eighty years of life and had been languishing in the decomposition of its afterlife in the twenty years since. It hadn’t been sold for about thirty years, so no inspections had been done in the interim. They’d had no choice but to raze it.

Pagano & Sons had been brought in for the reconstruction. Carlo’s architecture firm, Pagano-Cabot, had done the redesign—a board-for-board reconstruction of the original property, to every extent possible by modern materials and codes. And Carmen’s landscape design company had worked the job, too. A full family affair; those didn’t come around much.

It was good work. Some of the best that Pagano & Sons had done in John’s career there. He’d had a chance to get his hands dirty, too, designing and laying the mariner’s star parquet in the foyer and the wave border around the parlor and dining room. The rest of the finish work he’d had to leave to others, but he’d done that, at least.

His phone buzzed, and he pulled it out of his pocket. A text from Luca:
Check your email.
He swiped to his work email and opened it.

A message from Tyler-Orvo, addressed to him and Luca both.

We write with pleasure to inform you that we have accepted your…

John stopped there, checked the sender again. Yep, Tyler-Orvo. He read the first part of the sentence over:
with pleasure…accepted…

Holy shit. Without even bothering to read the rest of the message, he called his brother.

“Dude!” Luca answered.

“Jesus, Luca. This is the real deal?”

It was fucking August; they’d been dancing around this bid for nearly six months. Tyler-Orvo had cancelled the call for bids once; then, after they put it out again, they’d twice sent back bids under consideration, asking for refinement. Their vacillating foretold the kind of difficulties Pagano & Sons would have throughout the project, but the money was too good, and too necessary, to pass up.

They’d waited long enough, though. Almost the whole construction season was over. If they wanted any shot at their projected May opening, they’d need to get their asses moving so they’d have a couple of months to get a good start this season. This was no small job.

Tyler-Orvo was a commercial developer. The national company had increased its profile in Rhode Island over the past ten years to become a major player. The job was a “market square” development—in other words, the high-end version of a strip mall—just outside the Quiet Cove town limits. Things were really building up just outside the town limits. Inside the town limits, Madame Matilda Duffey stood guard.

John didn’t mind that. Workwise, it was often a pain in their ass, dealing with the rules and restrictions for construction work in Quiet Cove, but the place had stayed quaint and cozy because of the Historical Society.

“You didn’t read the email? They want to meet tomorrow here at the office to sign the papers and get the plan moving. We are going to be wicked swamped getting it all going. I’ve already got Joey on the job order for Constructemp.”

“You want temps on a job like this?” They almost never used temp workers except in dire circumstances, and they never used freelance day labor at all.

“No, I do not. We’ve got three of the five going jobs winding up in the next week and the other two finishing by mid-September. We can put the temps on the wrap-up and clean-up. Speaking of which, how’s Bluebitch doing?”

“Marty’s in there with her. I had to take a break. She was lecturing her posse on the Crisis of Italian Immigration. It’s like she has no idea that she’s personally insulting three of the people she’s talking to.”

“Oh, she has an idea. She hides behind those trifocals like being old gives her permission. I miss Henry.”

Luca meant Henry Nesbitt, the previous president, who had been ousted in a scandal regarding the misappropriation of original brasswork. John laughed. “Henry was at least as snooty. He just had a different feeling about the Paganos than she does.”

“And a brandy habit we could exploit. You coming in?”

Marty, the job site foreman, and Mrs. Duffey and her court were all descending the porch steps. “Yeah. Let me take my heap of derision from Duffey, and I’ll be in.”

“Anything to worry about with the inspection?”

“No, man. This job is fucking perfect. Best one I’ve ever worked on. She has another story, I’ll fight her.”

Luca laughed. “The scene that’s now playing in my head is the stuff of nightmares, little bro.”

“Fuck you, Luc,” John chuckled. “You sick fuck. I’ll be in.”

~oOo~

Mrs. Duffey had some niggling, nitpicky complaints, but by the time John held her car door for her while she creaked her way into the driver’s seat, she had signed off on the Society’s approval. After she and her posse were away, he called the owner with the good news. Luca called and told him that the family was meeting for dinner at the house to celebrate their big win.

Then he called Katrynn.

“Hey, you,” she purred when he answered the phone. “How’s your day?”

“My day is wicked great, and now it’s even better because I’m talking to you.”

She laughed. “Sap. You just saw me like four hours ago.”

“A lifetime. You at the shop yet?” She was going in late today, so he’d left her naked in her bed at dawn. Usually, she got up with him, even though he started work earlier. Leaving her in bed was not easy. All that bare, soft skin. And he loved morning sex, when she was all languid and relaxed, and…

He shifted his cock in his jeans.

“Just got here,” she answered. “Why’s your day so good?”

“Got clearance from the Society on the B&B job,
and
we heard from Tyler-Orvo. We won the bid. Job’s ours.”

“That’s great! Oh, John! Yay!”

She had no idea how great it really was. There was a better than even chance that getting this one job had saved Pagano & Sons. “Yeah. It’s excellent. Means a lot of work, but that’s a good thing. Hey—we’re all going over to the house for dinner. The family wants to celebrate.”

“I’ve got the Coven tonight, remember? That’s why I went in late—they’ll be here till nine.”

“Oh, shit. Right.” The Cove Coven, the longest-standing book club that Cover to Cover hosted. Katrynn treated the book clubs like Fight Club, with the same first two rules, so she never gossiped about the ladies who spent three hours, two nights a month, in the shop after closing, noshing snacks and sipping wine, discussing some steamy book they’d all read. John thought Katrynn was missing out on a great bet; he’d seen the women going in on Coven nights, and there were some town high-and-mighties reading about gay vampires and bondage werewolves. Or whatever it was they read. He’d have given his left nut for some good scoop on those old biddies.

“Can you come over after? There’s bound to be good leftovers, and I figure we’ll be hanging out for a while.”

“It’s going to be late, and I’ll be fried. You can’t just come home after dinner?”

“Which home, baby?”

He was digging at her, and he cursed himself for it. He’d put a ring on her finger, but she wouldn’t move in with him. She said she didn’t want to move until they were married. John was fairly sure she didn’t want to move into the beach house at all. He was trying to figure out how he’d feel about that. He loved that house, and it was home base on the beach for the whole family. Carmen and Theo lived on the beach, too, but farther down. His house was in the thick of things.

But it wasn’t a house to raise a family in, and he wanted to get on that soon, so…he needed to figure some things out. But he was pretty sure Katrynn didn’t like the house.

“John…”

Except for not telling him flat out that she didn’t like the house he loved, she now was consistently being open and honest with him about her feelings, and it wasn’t fair of him to poke at her. She didn’t want to move in together until after the wedding. They’d set a date early in December, which was a little more than three months away. The Pagano women were in full-speed wedding mode. He should chill out; there was no real point in moving in together until they’d figured out where they’d live, and he had to figure some things out before he could have that conversation, so he shouldn’t be pushing her at all. But bouncing back and forth was getting old. He wanted to settle, and he knew damn well that she did, too.

He dropped that problem and addressed the more current issue. “I know. I’m sorry. Katrynn, I want you to come to the house. Things like this, they’re family things. Pop built Pagano & Sons. He wants to celebrate, too, and he can’t go out and light up the town. You’re part of us, so you should be there.”

“Okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

~oOo~

The family was too big these days for even the huge table in the dining room to accommodate all the siblings and their kids, so they fed the kids at the kitchen table. Only Trey, about to turn fourteen, was deemed old enough to eat with the grownups. After the kids were finished and had been sent to the cellar and set up with a Pixar movie, dinner was set out for the adults—beautiful steaks, gnocchi, asparagus, bread. Everybody dug in.

Except their father, who glared at the dishes on the table and ignored the salad and small salmon cutlet on his plate. He’d been out of sorts since he’d come over from next door. The news they had about the company was great, celebratory news. They hadn’t told their father how bad things had gotten, but even in the best of times, a job like Tyler-Orvo was big news. But he’d done little more than smile. He hadn’t even asked any probing, passively critical questions.

“Pop? You okay?”

He grunted. Adele answered, “Your pop’s just cranky today. It’s fine.”

Pop shifted his glare to his wife. Come to think of it, Adele was off her game, too. Before John or anyone else could push that point any further, Trey asked, “Can I help, Uncle Luca?”

Luca had been talking about the hiring they’d need to do to keep up with the job.

“You mean work? I don’t know, bud. You’re pretty young for a job.”

“Just, I don’t know…helping out in the office, maybe? After school?”

Luca grinned. “You need some spending money? Got your eye on something sweet?” As Trey blushed, Luca turned to Joey. “What do you think, Joe? Could you put him to work in the office?”