Blue Dahlia

clock.”
    “Seeing as you are, I’d like you to schedule in a consult. I have a customer who’d like an on-site consultation. She’s here now, so if you could give me a sense of your plans for the day, I could let her know if and when you could meet with her.”
    “Where?”
    She rattled off an address that was twenty minutes away. He glanced around his current job site, calculated. “Two o’clock.”
    “Fine. I’ll tell her. The client’s name is Marsha Fields. Do you need any more information?”
    “No.”
    “Fine.”
    He heard the firm click in his ear and found himself even more annoyed he hadn’t thought to hang up first.

    BY THE TIME LOGAN GOT HOME THAT EVENING, HE was tired, sweaty, and in a better mood. Hard physical work usually did the job for him, and he’d had plenty of it that day. He’d worked in the steam, then through the start of a brief spring storm. He and his crew broke for lunch during the worst of it and sat in his overheated truck, rain lashing at the windows, while they ate cold po’boy sandwiches and drank sweet tea.
    The Fields job had strong possibilities. The woman ran that roost and had very specific ideas. Since he liked and agreed with most of them, he was eager to put some of them on paper, expand or refine them.
    And since it turned out that Marsha’s cousin on her mother’s side was Logan’s second cousin on his father’s, the consult had taken longer than it might have, and had progressed cheerfully.
    It didn’t hurt that she was bound to send more work his way.
    He took the last curve of the road to his house in a pleasant frame of mind, which darkened considerably when he saw Stella’s car parked behind his.
    He didn’t want to see her now. He hadn’t worked things out in his head, and she’d just muck up whatever progress he’d made. He wanted a shower and a beer, a little quiet. Then he wanted to eat his dinner with ESPN in the background and his work spread out on the kitchen table.
    There just wasn’t room in that scenario for a woman.
    He parked, fully intending to shake her off. She wasn’t in the car, or on the porch. He was trying to determine if going to bed with him gave a woman like her the notion that she could waltz into his house when he wasn’t there. Even as he’d decided it wouldn’t, not for Stella, he heard the watery hiss of his own garden hose.
    Shoving his hands in his pockets, he wandered around the side of the house.
    She was on the patio, wearing snug gray pants—the sort that stopped several inches above the ankle—and a loose blue shirt. Her hair was drawn back in a bright, curling tail, which for reasons he couldn’t explain he found desperately sexy. As the sun had burned its way through the clouds, she’d shaded her eyes with gray-tinted glasses.
    She looked neat and tidy, careful to keep her gray canvas shoes out of the wet.
    “It rained today,” he called out.
    She kept on soaking his pots. “Not enough.”
    She finished the job, released the sprayer on the hose, but continued to hold it as she turned to face him. “I realize you have your own style, and your own moods, and that’s your business. But I won’t be spoken to the way you spoke to me today. I won’t be treated like some silly female who calls her boyfriend in the middle of the workday to coo at him, or like some anal business associate who interrupts you to harangue you about details. I’m neither.”
    “Not my girlfriend or not my business associate?”
    He could see, quite clearly, the way her jaw tightened when she clenched her teeth. “If and when I contact you during the workday, it will be for a reason. As it most certainly was this morning.”
    She was right, but he didn’t have to say so. “We got the Fields job.”
    “Hooray.”
    He bit the inside of his cheek to hold back the grin at her sour cheer. “I’ll be working up a design for her, with a bid. You’ll get a copy of both. That suit you?”
    “It does. What doesn’t—”
    “Where are the kids?”
    It threw her off stride. “My father and his wife picked them up from school today. They’re having dinner there, and spending the night, as I have a birthing class with Hayley later.”
    “What time?”
    “What time what?”
    “Is the class?”
    “At eight-thirty. I’m not here for small talk, Logan, or to be placated. I feel very strongly that—” Her eyes widened, then narrowed as she stepped back. He’d stepped forward, and there was no mistaking the tone of