Remember When

switched the phone to her other ear, scanning her home office and thinking about the very pregnant Jenny dragging chairs and tables into place. "No, but thanks. I'd feel better knowing you and Angie have the shop. There's a shipment coming in this morning, a pretty big one from the auction in Baltimore."
    And, damn it, she wanted to be there, getting her hands on all those lovely things. Admiring them, cataloguing them, arranging them. A good deal of the enjoyment came from setting up new stock in her place, and the rest came from watching it walk out the door again.
    "I need you to log in the new stock, Jen. I've already done the pricing, that's in the file. There's a Clarice Cliff lotus jug, with a tulip design. You want to call Mrs. Gunt and let her know we have it. The price we agreed on is seven hundred, but she'll want to negotiate. Six seventy-five is firm.
    Okay?"
    "Gotcha."
    "Oh, and-"
    "Laine, relax. It's not my first day on the job. I'll take care of things here, and if anything comes up I can't handle, I'll call you."
    "I know." Absently, Laine reached down to pet the dog, who was all but glued to her side. "Too much on my mind."
    "Small wonder. I hate the thought of you handling that mess on your own. You sure you don't want me to come? I could bop over at lunch-time. Angie can handle the shop for an hour. I'll bring you something to eat. Something loaded with fat and wasted calories."
    Angie could handle the shop, Laine considered. She was good and getting better. But Laine knew herself. She'd get more done if she worked alone without conversation or distraction.
    "That's okay. I'll be all right once I get started. I'll probably be in this afternoon."
    "Take a nap instead."
    "Maybe. I'll talk to you later." When she hung up, Laine stuck the little portable phone in the back pocket of her baggy jeans. She knew herself well enough to be sure she'd find half a dozen reasons to call the shop during the day. Might as well keep a phone handy.
    But for now, she needed to focus on the matter at hand.
    "'Hide the pooch,'" she murmured. Since the only pooch she had was Henry, she had to assume Willy had been delirious. Whatever he'd come to tell her, to ask of her, to give her, hadn't been done. He'd thought someone was after him, and unless he'd changed his ways, which was highly unlikely, he'd probably been right.
    A cop, skip tracer, a partner in crime who hadn't liked the cut? Any or all of the above was a possibility. But the state of her house told her the last option was the most likely.
    Now, whoever had been looking for him, was looking at her.
    She could tell Vince... what? Absolutely nothing. Everything she'd built here was dug into the foundation that she was Laine Tavish, a nice, ordinary woman with a nice, ordinary life with nice, ordinary parents who ran a barbecue place in New Mexico.
    Elaine O'Hara, daughter of Big Jack of the charming and wily ways-and yard-long yellow sheet-didn't fit into the pretty, pastoral landscape of Angel's Gap. Nobody was going to come into Elaine O'Hara's place to buy a teapot or a piecrust table.
    Jack O'Hara's daughter couldn't be trusted.
    Hell, she didn't trust Jack O'Hara's daughter herself. Big Jack's daughter was the type who had drinks in a bar with a strange man and ended up knocking said man on his excellent ass with a steamy, soul-deep kiss. Jack's daughter took big, bad chances that had big, bad consequences.
    Laine Tavish lived normal, thought things through and didn't make waves.
    She'd let the O'Hara out for one brief evening, and look what it had gotten her. An exciting, sexy interlude, sure, and a hell of a mess at the end of it.
    "It just goes to show," she murmured to Henry, who demonstrated his accord by thumping his tail.
    Time to put things back in order. She wasn't giving up who she was, what she'd accomplished, what she planned to accomplish, because some second-rate thief believed she had part of his last take.
    Had to be second-rate, she thought as she gathered up the loose stuffing from the once pretty silk throw pillows she'd picked out for the George II daybed. Uncle Willy never traveled in the big leagues. And neither, despite all his talk, all his dreams, had Big Jack.
    So, they'd trashed her place, come up empty and took easily fenced items in lieu.
    That, Laine thought, would be that.
    Of course, they'd probably left prints all over the damn place. She rolled her eyes, sat on the floor and started stacking scattered paperwork. Dim bulbs