Claire—who usually epitomized kindness and mercy—scowled. “I hope it was bland and tasteless.”
“I did my best but sometimes my genius comes through anyway. Why are you mad at Frances?”
“Not mad, exactly, but she drives me crazy sometimes! Riley spent two hours at her house replacing a broken showerhead last week because she was too cheap to pay a plumber. And then the next day, she had the nerve to tell me she doesn’t like the way it sprays and wanted exactly the same kind she had before. Ugh!”
“What did you do?”
“I went to four different home improvement places until I found the right one.”
“Of course you did,” Alex said, hiding a smile.
“She’s a lonely old woman and we should have compassion, I guess, but she doesn’t always make it easy.”
Claire had plenty of practice with difficult women, considering her mother was the light beer version of Frances Redmond.
“So I heard a rumor about you,” Claire said, changing the subject.
“That Brazen is going to be named the best new restaurant in Colorado and the Food Channel will notice and pick me to host a new show on regional cuisine and I’ll put out a dozen cookbooks and retire to an island in the tropics, where I’ll spend the rest of my days wearing muumuus and drinking mai tais?”
Claire laughed. “No, I must have missed that one. This one is just as juicy, though. I ran into Frankie Beltran at the grocery store this morning and she asked me about the hot guy you were with last night at the Liz. I had to confess my glaring ignorance, which is rather pathetic considering we had lunch together two days ago with the book club and you never said a word about any guy, hot or otherwise.”
Yeah, only two days ago she hadn’t known Sam Delgado as anything other than a name and the cause of one more delay in opening Brazen.
“Um, you know that contractor Brodie hired to finish the restaurant?”
Claire’s eyes opened wide. “Seriously?”
She had absolutely no reason to feel weird about this. She had never intended her friendly invitation to turn into that hot kiss she couldn’t shake from her mind. Or so she continued to tell herself.
“What’s the big deal? He dropped by the restaurant the other day after everybody left. I thought it would be a nice gesture to show him around, welcome him to town, that sort of thing. We met at the Lizard for a game of pool and then we took a walk so I could point out the highlights of our little corner of paradise. I was strictly doing my civic duty.”
“I’m sure it didn’t hurt that he was, in Frankie’s words, hotter than a firecracker lit on both ends.”
He was all that and more. “He could have looked like a troll and I would still want to make sure he feels comfortable in Hope’s Crossing. He’s building my kitchen.”
It sounded like a lame excuse, even to her, but Claire didn’t blink. One of the things Alex loved best about her was Claire’s particular gift of letting people hang on to their own illusions without calling them out.
“Did you have a good time?” she only asked.
Good time? That was an understatement. She thought of his mouth, firm and determined, those hard, relentless muscles against her.
She sighed, then hoped the sound didn’t come across as wistful to Claire as it did to her own ears.
“I almost beat him at pool. I won one game but we were playing two out of three.”
“Wow! He beat you twice? Impressive. He must be fantastic, since you beat Riley most of the time and he’s the best billiards player I know.”
“Sam is pretty good.”
“A gorgeous pool-playing contractor. We don’t see those around Hope’s Crossing every day. How did Brodie find him?”
“I don’t know all the details but I gather Sam was working on a project at the hospital while Taryn was having some treatment, and the two of them struck up a conversation and have stayed in touch. He’s done a couple other jobs for Brodie. From what I can tell, he does good work. And fast, too.”
“So you had fun?”
Again, with the understatement. “Sure. He was with me when I found Leo here, isn’t that right, bud?”
Leo was currently sniffing noses with Chester but paused long enough to give her a happy look, almost as if he recognized his name. He apparently didn’t mind being used as a diversionary tactic.
Claire probably saw through her effort to change the subject but also didn’t seem to mind. “Evie put the poster up you emailed us and she’s been mentioning it to everyone who comes in. So far she hasn’t found anybody missing a chocolate Lab.”
“Keep looking. He’s too gorgeous not to belong to somebody, somewhere.”