to King when one of us is causing a scene. Who called you, by the way? Never mind, let me guess. It was the mayor, right?”
Sadly, his nemesis lived just around the corner, close enough to keep an eye on everything that Bobby did. Not that Bobby was prone to wild parties or overnight guests in his restored Victorian house facing the Potomac River, but Harvey was always lurking around, probably hoping for something he could use against Bobby. Bobby had actually caught him outside with a ruler measuring the grass one day, checking to see if Bobby was in violation of the town’s overgrown-lot ordinance.
“Harvey did express some concern that you were desecrating the Sabbath, to say nothing of violating several zoning ordinances,” Tucker admitted. “Though he lacked confidence that I’d handle it with deliberate speed.”
“Which is why I’m here,” Walker explained. “Backup, in case your brother doesn’t follow the letter of the law about arresting the people responsible for public nuisances.”
“This is not my damned nuisance,” Bobby retorted. “Oh, forget it. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going inside to put my pants on before Sue and Frannie faint dead away over there.” The two women were fanning their flushed faces ineffectively, their gazes locked on him as if they hadn’t laid eyes on a partially clothed man in decades. The truth was, they probably hadn’t. He waved, clearly flustering them. He’d no doubt have tuna casseroles waiting on his front porch for the next week because of this. They seemed to think a man on his own was likely to starve, despite the fact that Bobby cooked for a living.
“What do you want me to do about this?” Tucker asked, looking none too eager to do a blessed thing.
“Make it go away, ” Bobby said emphatically. He gestured to encompass the entire scene. “All of it.”
“Don’t you even want to know how that horse got here?” Walker asked, clearly overcome with curiosity himself.
Walker probably wanted all the details to relate to Bobby’s sister, who was bound to have a million and one questions. In fact, Bobby was somewhat surprised Daisy hadn’t beat her husband over here.
Bobby was actually pretty sure he knew what the arrival of the horse was all about. Maybe not the specific person who’d sent it over, but that fancy carved horse was clearly part of someone’s bid to get his attention focused on a proposal for the boardwalk development he was planning. He’d had half a dozen unsolicited calls requesting appointments to make presentations since he’d announced a few weeks ago that he had signed the papers to buy the last parcel of riverfront land he needed. In his only public comment on the acquisition, Bobby had made the mistake of mentioning that he intended to get the project started this fall in the hope that it would be completed by the following summer. Eager developers had been crawling out of the woodwork ever since.
“I’ll leave it to you two crack lawmen to figure out who’s behind this. You have my permission to take the person responsible into custody for trespassing. And with all these other people crawling all over my lawn, that ought to help you meet your arrest quota for the month,” he said, throwing it out as an irresistible challenge. Tucker really hated being accused of having quotas of any kind. “Meantime, I’m getting dressed and making coffee. Join me once you’ve solved the mystery and gotten rid of this circus.”
Unfortunately, he had a suspicion that wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d made it sound. Just as well. He’d have plenty of time to whip up a fluffy omelette and some hash browns before the two of them made it inside. Something told him he was going to need a lot of sustenance to get through the rest of a day that had started out this badly.
Jenna Pennington Kennedy was a royal screwup. Ask anyone, especially her father, who was giving her one last chance to prove herself with this boardwalk-development proposal for Trinity Harbor, Virginia.
Okay, he hadn’t exactly given her the chance. She’d read about the prospect in the Baltimore newspaper and come after it on her own, without saying a single word to her domineering father or her brothers. They would have snatched the opportunity right out from under her, either by going after it themselves or simply by squelching her initiative with hoots of derisive laughter.
Unfortunately, though, her sneakiness seemed to have been for naught. The man she’d been told to contact—the one who owned the riverfront property and was looking to develop it—was steadfastly refusing to see her. His secretary claimed he wasn’t seeing anyone yet, but Jenna suspected it was because she was a female. In the development business, she ran across a lot of macho males who ignored anything a woman had to say unless it pertained to sex. Since sex had been nothing but trouble for Jenna, she had no intention of indulging again, at least not in the foreseeable future. Better to concentrate on things she understood, like riverfront development.
Whatever the real story was behind Bobby Spencer’s refusal to see her, this morning she had taken steps to snag his attention. She’d sent the man an extraordinarily rare carousel horse, part of an elaborate 1916 Allan Herschel carousel with a Wurlitzer organ that had cost her every penny of her savings and the entire trust fund her mother had left her. She’d considered it an investment in her future. Given the current state of the stock market, it probably wasn’t as risky a decision as it seemed.
If all else failed, she assumed she could auction off the carousel—currently under lock and key in a Maryland warehouse—and at least get her money back. If she succeeded, it would become the centerpiece of this project, and Bobby Spencer would pay handsomely for it.
Of course, in an attempt to prove to her father that she could be sensible when necessary, she had also sent along a guard to protect the expensive antique from the sticky fingers of curious kids and the remote possibility that a knowledgeable thief would try to make off with it.
The whole plan had been a stroke of genius, if she did say so herself. Too bad she’d had to keep it from her father. He might have been proud of her, for once.
Jenna sat in her car down the block and happily watched the crowd on Spencer’s lawn growing, despite the halfhearted attempts of two policemen to get it to disperse. Heck, if she’d thought to open a concession stand on the block, she could have sold enough lemonade on this hot July morning to pay the guard’s salary.
She’d give it another half hour, let Bobby Spencer begin to see what a draw an old carousel could be for the town, then she’d seize the moment to demand an appointment to make her complete presentation.
Despite years of being regarded as a second-class citizen in her own family’s company, Jenna had complete confidence in her design for the Trinity Harbor boardwalk. In her favor, she had an abiding nostalgia for all the old-fashioned beach towns she’d ever visited. People could get gaudy seaside entertainment in Ocean City. They could find more elaborate amusement parks just down the road from here at Kings Dominion or Busch Gardens. What a quaint little town like Trinity Harbor required was charm, and nobody understood charm better than a woman who’d spent her whole life with a bunch of men who were clueless on the subject.
But despite her self-confidence about the end result, Jenna resented the fact that she’d had to go to such an extreme just to put herself on Spencer’s radar. What kind of businessman ignored the overtures of an expert? His behavior didn’t bode well for their working relationship, but she was desperate. She’d work with the worst CEO in corporate history for this chance.
More dispiriting, though, than being dismissed by a stranger was having to jump through such elaborate hoops to prove to her father that she understood the business as well as he did and that she deserved to be more than decoration for the front office. If she’d been another son, he would have taken these things as a given.
