“What stiff?” Ava demanded over the raised voices of the crowd around them.
“Poppy!” Arriving at the table almost on her heels, Jane gave her an incredulous look. “You beat me here. How did that happen? You’re never on time.”
“She’s mad at some stiff,” Ava said. “It must have motivated her.”
“Yeah, I gathered as much when you called.” Jane hooked her bag over the chair rail and sat down, giving Poppy a concerned once-over. “That you’re seriously hacked off, that is. What gives?”
At the thought of what—or rather who—”gave,” her heart sped up and her hands wanted to clench. She flattened them against the wooden tabletop. “Guess who’s on the committee with me?”
Ava leaned into the table. “What committee?”
“The one to do with those kids who were caught tagging the businesses she designs boards for,” Jane reminded her.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. You’ve got so many irons in the fire these days that I forgot about that for a sec. How did it go? Not great, I’m guessing.”
“Not great.” Her involuntary laugh tasted bitter and her fingers curled in toward her palms. “Oh, trust me, it was a tad worse than not great. It was a damn cluster f—”
The waitress, who’d had to weave her way through the throng of power-hour drinkers to reach their table, arrived just as she was about to cut loose with a truly grand-scale vent. “Get you ladies a drink?”
“I’d like the Leavenworth Blind Pig Dunkel-thing,” Ava said.
“Weizen,” the waitress supplied. “Dunkelweizen.”
“Yes. Thank you. One of those.”
“I’ll take a Fuller’s.” Poppy drew a deep breath and blew it out, but she was still so irate she barely glanced up from her hands, which were once again firmly splayed against the tabletop, her fingertips white from her effort not to make a fist. “And a large pomme frites with the pesto aioli.”
“Ooh. We’re eating, too?” Ava wiggled with pleasure. “I’ll have the Lembeck salad.”
“I’ll just have a Diet Coke with a lime, please,” Jane said.
Ava’s head whipped around to stare at her friend. “That’s it?” she demanded as the waitress nodded and moved on to the next table. “Please tell me your skinny butt’s not on a diet.”
“My skinny butt is not on a diet,” Jane obediently parroted. Then she grinned, her face radiant with newly-wed happiness. “In fact it’s spuds-and-sausage night at Dev’s folks and Mama K. hates it when I don’t eat enough to burst. I’m just reserving all the stomach room I can.”
That jerked Poppy out of her dilemma, and she grimaced at her own self-absorption. “You have dinner plans with your in-laws and you showed up for me?”
“Well…sure. We’re the Sisterhood, aren’t we?” Scooping her shiny brown hair behind her ears, she laughed. “Besides, this isn’t exactly altruism at its finest. The Kavanaghs never eat until around seven anyway, and Devlin’s riding over with his brother.”
“Which one? Bren? How’s he doing?” Jane’s husband, Dev, had returned from the Continent last year to pitch in at Kavanagh Construction, the family business, when his oldest brother’s cancer treatment called for chemotherapy. Jane and he had met when he’d headed the Wolcott mansion remodel, a project so huge it was still ongoing several months later. They’d had a rocky beginning and Poppy loved seeing her so flat-out happy.
“No, Finn, actually. But Bren is doing great. He’s finally done with chemo, his oncologist is very optimistic they got all the cancer and his hair’s even starting to grow back in.”
“That’s excellent news.”
Ava flashed a smile. “I saw him the other day and he’s got downy fuzz all over his head. If he wasn’t such a big guy, he’d look like a newborn chick.” Then she pushed back from the table. “I’ve gotta use the ladies’.” She leveled a stern look on Poppy. “Don’t you dare spill a single juicy detail until I get back.”
“There are no juicy details,” she muttered to her friend’s departing back. Her thoughts turned inward to the day’s earlier events, however, and she wasn’t even aware of watching Ava cross the room. Only in the most absentminded way did she track the redhead’s progress by all the male heads that swiveled to watch her go by.
“I never get tired of seeing that,” Jane said.
“What?” she asked. Then realizing what she was staring at, she nodded. “Oh. That. Yeah, I know.” They grinned at each other. Because fueled by eat-your-heart-out, revenge-inspired determination after being the butt of a humiliating bet when she was eighteen, Ava had changed a lifetime of bad eating habits. She’d refused to call it a diet, though, and she hadn’t made the mistake so many full-figured women did of trying to whittle herself down to a toothpick-thinness unsuited to her bigger-boned frame. She’d stopped actively losing weight once she’d reached a size twelve—or what would be a fourteen, they liked to tease her, if she bought her clothing in the less pricey shops that the rest of them patronized.
But the actual size wasn’t the point. Ava had curves, she wasn’t afraid to accent them and men all but tripped over their tongues whenever she went by.
Apparently she didn’t believe in wasting time when there was potential gossip in the offing, either. Back in under five minutes, she demanded even as she took her seat, “So let’s hear it. Who’s the stiff? And what on earth did he do to get you so bent out of shape? This is not like you.”
“Yes, well, you can thank Jason de Sanges for my mood,” Poppy said through her teeth. “That rat bastard wrecked—”
“Detective Sheik?” Jane snapped upright. “That’s who’s on your committee?”
“Oh, no. Not now.” Her eyes slitted. “Thanks to him, the committee is no longer necessary. He torpedoed my wonderful plan.” She explained how he’d slanted the information he’d given the committee to make the three teens sound like hardened criminals.
The waitress brought their drinks. After several sips of her British ale, Poppy felt the tension that had her neck muscles in knots start to loosen. She could thank Ava and Jane for that, because by allowing her, in the way of true friends, to unload on them they’d helped her shed a large portion of the stress she’d been carrying around. “I suppose I really shouldn’t let it get me so bent out of shape,” she admitted. “It’s not like I’m overwhelmed with free time anyway. Between my work with the kids, and doing the boards and figuring out what the hell I want to do with the rooms the Kavanaghs have finished, I would’ve had to scramble to fit this project in. It’s just…”
“It was a good plan,” Ava said.
“Yes! Not perfect, I know, but a lot better than dumping three kids into the system for a first offense. Maybe I could have made a difference in their lives.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. But I sure would have liked the chance to find out. Now I’ll never know.”
“You still have a crack at them during the cleanup project, though, right?” Jane asked.
“Yeah, but we all know that’s not going to thrill them. It was the opportunity to paint some honest-to-God community-sanctioned art that might have opened up a chink in their armor.”
Ava’s auburn brows pleated. “You know what? Detective Sheik may have done a lot more last fall than we first believed—but he’s still a pig.”
“Yeah,” Jane agreed. “And from now on he’s just plain Detective de Sanges. He doesn’t deserve to be called the Sheik.”
“No fooling.” Poppy took another sip of her ale, pushed back her pint glass to make room for the