When Lightning Strikes Twice Read Free Page B

it’ll be huge enough, but Matt and I both want some of our best friends to be bridesmaids and groomsmen, too.”
    Quint’s eyes had a tendency to glaze over when Sarah started talking about her wedding plans, which was scheduled for next May, a year away. He knew he would be hearing a lot more about it and ought to work on perfecting a feigned expression of interest.
    “So that was ancient Mr. Tilden’s slutty wife, huh?” Sarah asked, dropping the wedding talk much sooner than he’d expected. “Yikes! What a vision!”
    “Sarah, please. Misty is a client,” he scolded with mock severity. “Her checks for legal services rendered pay a lot of bills, and included among them is your salary. Now repeat after me—she is the lovely and charming widow of the late Mr. Tilden Senior.”
    “Dana told me about some of the outfits the lovely and charming widow’s worn to your office,” Sarah chatteredon, undaunted. “But this was my very first Misty sighting. A forty-six double-D cup for sure. Poured into a skintight black crushed velvet jumpsuit and the spikiest heels I’ve ever seen. Color me amazed. Just think, Brady and me are wearing bathing suits today and she’s running around in crushed velvet!”
    “Maybe she’s a stickler for fashion etiquette and doesn’t don her summer wardrobe till after Memorial Day,” Quint replied dryly. “That would give her another week.”
    “But it’s eighty degrees today! Of course, her jumpsuit was unbuttoned almost the whole way to her navel. I guess that’s one way to keep cool. Dana says all Misty’s clothes look like they’re right out of a Hookers ‘R’ Us catalog.”
    Quint arched his brows. “Tell your sister to stop gossiping about the clients or I’ll have a talk with her myself.”
    Twenty-six-year-old Dana Sheely was the paralegal he’d hired when he had arrived in Lakeview to take over the faltering—no, in truth it was almost moribund—law practice his father had begun ten years earlier. Quint couldn’t remember if he’d hired Dana first and she had recommended her sister Sarah as a nanny or if he had hired Sarah first and she’d suggested her sister Dana as a paralegal.
    Both sisters had offered their brother Shawn—whose place in the Sheely birth order fell somewhere between them—for whatever yard work needed to be done. Quint knew that another Sheely sister—the one Sarah referred to as “the family flake”—was currently working as a receptionist at Saxon Associates. Quint enjoyed a silent chuckle every time he thought of the Saxons hiring the lone Sheely airhead.
    Sarah climbed into the small pool and sat down beside Brady, handing him a plastic cup. He filled it with water, then poured the contents over Sarah’s head. She laughed good-naturedly and did the same to him. Brady squealed with delight.
    “Hair wash!” he exclaimed.
    “That’s right, Brady, it’s like when we wash your hair,” Sarah agreed. “Brady is cool,” she observed fondly. “Henever screams during a shampoo like some kids.”
    Quint felt a bittersweet warmth stealing through him. Sarah was very good with Brady. From the moment she’d moved in she had become an invaluable member of their household, but next May she might be gone. She and her husband-to-be weren’t sure of their plans, but they hoped to move to Florida after their wedding. Quint desperately hoped they wouldn’t.
    Still, having Sarah around was a stopgap measure and he knew it. She was a terrific nanny, but she was very young and full of plans for her own life. He wanted his son to have a mother complete with powerful maternal instincts and drives, a woman willing to commit herself to the unending, day-in-and-day-out constancy of raising a child. Instead, poor little Brady had Sharolyn, who acted as a mother only when it suited her own agenda.
    Quint watched Brady line up his fleet of toy ducks, naming the color of each when Sarah asked him. He was a bright little boy, learning new things