Chapter One
Thou, Nina Colette Ceceri Quinn, shall not hire any more unreliable ex-cons.
 Not an easy commandment to say the least, since I really couldn’t tell
who was reliable and who wasn’t until they started working for me.
I frowned. Talk about a Catch 22.
The trick was weeding out the good from the bad. As I looked around my office
conference room, I realized I’d certainly found a few good ones in Kit Pipe,
Deanna Parks, Marty Johnson, and Coby Fowler. And of course Tam Oliver, who sat
in her throne chair in the reception area pretending she wasn’t eavesdropping.
My business, Taken by Surprise, Garden Designs, had thrived over the last
few years because of their hard work. And getting any specialized landscaping
business to thrive in this day and age was notable, but here in small-town Freedom,
Ohio, it was a miracle. This was middle-class country, the heart of the Midwest,
and I charged upper class prices for my day-in, day-out yard makeovers.
It was the bad experiences with my rap-sheeted workers that made me question
my hiring practices. Currently, one worker in particular.
“So, no one’s seen him?” I asked, looking down the long
rectangular table. It was littered with soda cans, coffee cups, and the sad remains
of two dozen Krispy Kremes.
“Not since he left yesterday afternoon.” Deanna twirled a pencil
like a baton. “Said he had an appointment he couldn’t miss. And he
was all dolled up too. I smelled him coming through a closed door.”
The “he” in question was Jean-Claude Reaux, who tended to wear
too much cologne, and who was currently MIA. He’d worked for me three years.
He’d started out as a laborer, but I soon noticed he had an uncanny
instinct for finding unique items and fabrics to go with my designs. He still
did labor—we all did—but now he had a lot more input on these design
meetings.
Like the one we were in now.
Like the one he hadn’t shown up for.
“We can’t wait much longer,” Kit put in. Kit was my right-hand
man.
I found myself staring at him. Not because he was six-foot- five, 250 pounds.
Or that his eyes had been tattooed with dark liner sometime in the late eighties.
It was because I couldn’t get used to the sight of him with hair.
Hair of all things.
This from a man who practically spit-shined the skull tattoo on his bald head.
The tattoo now covered with downy soft-looking brown fuzz.
“Stop staring,” he said.
“I can’t help it.”
He growled. “Try.”
“I kind of like it,” Deanna said.
Lord, was she blushing? I groaned. I didn’t need Deanna having a crush
on Kit. Inter-office romances were somewhat prohibited (I’d been known to
bend the rules), but that wasn’t why. It was because I really didn’t
want to see anything happen to Deanna—Kit’s live-in girlfriend, Daisy,
was the jealous type.
Or so I’d heard. No one had ever seen her. Not even once.
Which certainly piqued my nosiness.
“Me too,” Coby sing-songed and batted his eyelashes.
Kit’s eyes narrowed. In a dangerous whisper, he said, “See what
you did?”
“Me?” I asked. “What did I do?”
“You stared.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake. Sue me.” At Kit’s growl, I
rushed on. “So, where were we?”
“Staring.” Deanna’s cheeks were still rosy.
Kit crushed a Mountain Dew can.
I ignored him and riffled through the papers in the file in front of me. “No,
before that.”
“Jean-Claude,” Marty supplied, reaching for another Krispy Kreme.
“Oh yeah.”
“This isn’t the first time he’s been a no-show,” Kit
reminded.
No, it wasn’t. So far this month, Jean-Claude had come in late twice
and hadn’t bothered to show at all three times. Four if you counted today.
Not a good track record. Especially considering we were only two weeks into
July.
Any sane boss would fire him.
Unfortunately, I’d come to recognize in my twenty-nine years that I
leaned to the right side of normal.
“No one knows what he’s up to?” I asked, looking for some
explanation. “Marty?”
“Me?” he mumbled over a mouth full of glazed donut.
The phone rang in the front room, and I heard Tam answer it. Maybe it was
Jean-Claude? Calling in? With a doozy of an excuse?
Because if he didn’t have a doozy of an excuse, I really would have
to fire him.
Sooner or later.
Sooner probably if Kit’s glare was any indication.
I hated firing people.
Tam stuck her head in the door. “Nina?”
I looked up, hopeful. “Is that Jean-Claude?”
She shook her head, her tight curls not budging. “No. It’s Lindsey
Lockhart. She said she’s running late and won’t be able to make it
until ten. Is that okay?”
My hands immediately turned damp. “Yeah. That’s fine. We’re
running behind here anyway.”
“Okay.” She turned slowly and walked away, her belly leading.
She was due in five weeks, and I didn’t know what I was going to do without
her while she was on maternity leave.
I thought back to my newest commandment and wondered if I should hire a temp
through a reputable agency. Only that might ruffle Ana’s feathers.
She’d live. I’d live too.
Probably. Hopefully.
“Jean-Claude,” Kit reminded when I looked down at my file.
Deanna twirled her pencil baton. “I can take over his workload for tomorrow’s
makeover.”
“I can pitch in, too,” Marty chimed in, picking donut crumbs from
the napkin in front of him with dark fingers.
“Me too,” Coby offered.
I looked at Kit. “It’s a given,” he said.
And it was. I could count on Kit for anything. That’s why I had to be
careful with this newest commandment. I had hired a lot of great people over the
years, criminal records and all.
I still lumped Jean-Claude into that group. For now. Until a month ago, he’d
been a model employee. Sure, he had his dark side, but as long as I didn’t
ask, he didn’t tell. It hadn’t affected his work, and that’s
all I truly cared about.
I was lying.
I tended to do that, which was why I hadn’t made it a commandment yet.
I knew I couldn’t keep it.
I cared about more than Jean-Claude’s work—I cared about him.
Add that to my worrier nature and I knew I was in trouble. What was going on with
him?
“Why is Mrs. Lockhart coming here? Don’t you usually meet clients
at their homes, or rather their yards, for the final walk-through?” Deanna
asked, tossing her pencil up in the air.
That pencil was seriously getting on my nerves.
“Usually, yes, but she requested the meeting here. I didn’t see
why not.” It was just as well. Being here in comfortable surroundings might
make it easier for me to quiz the woman.
She held the answers to some burning questions I had.
“Could be her husband was going to be home.”
Kit had a point. Surprise garden makeovers (surprise being the key word) were
the objective of Taken by Surprise.
“Let’s not dwell on it,” I said. “Jean-Claude was
in charge of the tree and shrub selection for this project, as well as accessories.”
Deanna balanced the pencil on the tip of her index finger. “I think
he said something about an old wishing well he’d found.”
“I saw it out in the shed,” Marty said.
Oooh. A wishing well would be a perfect complement to this project. The older
and more rustic-looking the better.
See, this was why I hated to lose Jean-Claude.
He better have a damn good excuse.
After checking my list, I turned to Deanna. “Azaleas, rhododendrons,
hydrangeas, right?”
“Right. To go with your blue and white theme, I picked up some bellflowers,
belladonna delphiniums, blue balloon flowers, blue chip campanula, and butterfly
blue scabiosa, white dragonflower, white bleeding heart, and Deutschland astilbe,”
she said, actually using the pencil to tick off the list on the pad of paper in
front of her.
“Sounds great.”
“Stanley checked in this morning. The deck is on schedule,” Kit
said.
“And you’ll be helping him with that, right?”
“That and the seating once the excavating work is done.”
“Coby? What’re you doing?”
“Fire pit and lighting.”
That’s right. “Got everything?”
“Yes.”
“Kit, have you checked in with Ignacio? Is he all set?”
Ignacio Martinez was a floater. He and his crew of workers drifted between
different jobs, working where there was money to be had. Sometimes they did landscaping,
other times brick laying or general construction. I hired Ignacio and his crew
for particularly tough yards. They were worth every cent I paid them under the
table.
I scanned my notes. “The sod and topsoil will be arriving at 7 a.m.”
I checked off bullet points in my head. “All right. I think we’re
done here. The excavation work is going to be...”
“Painful?” Deanna cut in.
That worked. The Lockhart yard was one of the most overgrown, weed-infested
yards I’d ever seen. And I’d seen a lot of yards. I’d have turned
the project down flat if I hadn’t had ulterior motives for doing it. “Definitely.
But once that’s done, it should be clear sailing.”
“You did it again,” Tam called out from the reception area.
Aha! I’d known she’d been eavesdropping.
I peeked at her through the open door. She shook her finger at me.
“Is ‘clear sailing’ a cliché?” I asked.
Five heads bobbed.
I had picked up the worst habit of sounding like my mother, using abridged
clichés and trite expressions. Except lately I’d noticed she’d
been using them less and less, and I’d been using them more and more. “Hey!
It wasn’t abbreviated, though! That’s something.”
“It’s hard to abbreviate a two-word cliché,” Tam
said, jotting something down. I imagined she had a notebook filled with my grammar
transgressions.
Hmmph.
The small set of chimes attached to the front door rang out. The door used
to have a cowbell, but the clanging had apparently gotten on Tam’s nerves
because I came in one day to find the bell flatter than a pan—I caught myself
and stopped.
It was flat.
And there’d been a baseball bat nearby, namely in Tam’s hands.
I hadn’t asked questions. The next day the chimes were on the door.
Heads craned to look out the conference room door to see who’d come
in. Four sets of eyes then turned to me when Jean-Claude stumbled into the office.
“What?” I said to them.
“You need to take care of this.” Kit rose.
I looked up, up, up at him. “I will.”
He arched an eyebrow, and I noticed that he didn’t look nearly as scary
with a fuzzy head. It was hard to look scary with baby chicken hair.
I wondered if he knew that.
Didn’t think I should be the one to tell him.
Jean-Claude froze when he spotted us. I think he spotted us, at least. Hard
to say when he wore pitch black Ray Bans.
Everyone remaining at the table stood and scattered, leaving me to deal with
Jean-Claude in private. “Come on in,” I said to him.
“Was the meeting at eight? Thought it was at nine.”
“Seeing as how it’s almost ten, that’s beside the point.”
“You’re mad.”
I was. “Sit.”
He slumped in Deanna’s vacated chair, looking like Riley, my fifteen
year old stepson, when he was in a mood.
In the reflection of his sunglasses, I could see anger had darkened my already
muddy green eyes. I noticed I needed a haircut, too, my hair hanging past my shoulders.
In my head it was easy to hear my sister Maria’s voice telling me to go
blonde like she was, but I was happy to be a brunette. For now.
I picked at the edge of a paper, folding it back and forth until it ripped.
“What’s going on?”
Taking off his sunglasses, he looked at me. I held back a gasp, but could
feel my eyes go wide, my anger dissipating into worry. Dark circles rimmed his
eyes and streaks of red marred the white part around his dark pupils. “Overslept.”
“You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”
“I know. Sorry.”
I jumped right in. “I think maybe it’s time you found another
job, Jean-Claude. Something nocturnal maybe.”
His eyes grew wide, looking more bloodshot than before. “What?”
“I really can’t have you working here anymore. Actually, you haven’t
been working much at all. The others have been covering for you for too long.
And it’s dangerous to have you working when you’re so tired all the
time. Some of the equipment...”
“Nina, please, you can’t fire me.”
My stomach hurt. “I really don’t have a choice.”
“I need the money,” he said, leaning forward, over the table.
“I need you to work for the money.”
“I will. Just give me another chance.”
“Jean-Claude, this is about your hundredth chance.”
“Please, Nina.”
This all went back to me being a sucker for a sob story. I hated turning down
someone in need. “Why do you need the money so badly?”
He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes and rubbed. “Family trouble.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I’d rather not. It’s embarrassing.”
I looked out the conference room door, saw Tam sitting, listing left like
a sinking boat, her ear cocked. She rarely missed much of what went on around
here.
“You’re not doing drugs are you?”
I heard a scraping noise from the wall behind me and had the feeling Kit,
Deanna, Coby, and Marty were listening through the vent.
“What? No! I don’t do that.”
My eyebrow arched.
“Anymore,” he put in.
The chimes on the front door startled me. My head snapped up.
She was here.
I gathered my files, stood up.
Jean-Claude glanced at me with big puppy dog eyes. “Please, Nina?”
Be strong, I told myself. “We’ll talk about this later.”
All right, so I copped out. But I really needed more information before I
could fire him. Right?
Ugh.
I hated firing people.
As I walked out of the conference room, I heard scrambling from next door.
I couldn’t help but smile. At least I wasn’t the only nosy one in
the office.
“Lindsey,” I said, holding out my hand to the tall winsome woman
who’d just come in.
“Hi, Nina. Ready for me?” she asked as we shook.
I nodded as I led her into my office. Lindsey Lockhart.
Leah’s sister.
Leah Quinn. Who happened to be Riley’s mother. My soon-to-be-ex husband
Kevin’s first wife.
The one who mysteriously died.
The one I knew nothing about.
Yet.
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