Page 78 of Ten Beach Road

Twenty-five

They were already breakfasted and out back when their new recruit reported for duty. Nikki watched Giraldi carefully as he strolled toward them and then introduced him as an old friend of the family just as they’d agreed. She’d decided that his past appearances had been brief enough that no one would remember him.

Chase stuck out a hand. “Glad to have you on board, man,” he said. “We can use a little more testosterone on this job.” He cocked his head. “Have we met? You look familiar.”

“Joe Giraldi. I have been on site a few times. I don’t think we were introduced, though.” Giraldi gave everyone a smile. His manner was low key and personable. Somehow he’d dialed down the hard-assed cockiness several notches; he could have been the good-looking guy next door.

“Hey,” Avery said considering him more closely. “I thought you worked for the cable company.”

Deirdre raised an eyebrow. “I thought he was just here on vacation fishing.”

“He was helping Robby yesterday,” Kyra said.

Nicole opened her mouth to explain further, but Giraldi beat her to it.

“I’ve been doing some odd jobs out here on the beach, and I happened to notice Nicole. Her brother’s an old friend of mine. I figured Nikki would be able to help me track him down.”

Nicole kept her lips pressed into a smile in order to stifle her reaction to how close to the truth he’d come. Giraldi gave them all a wink and snaked an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against his side. “I’ve got to tell you, I’ve always had the biggest crush on her.” He tilted his head against hers, playing it to the hilt. “Even when we were kids and she was an ‘older woman.’ ”

Appalled at the past he was inventing, Nikki stepped out from under his arm. “Behave yourself.” She shook a finger at Giraldi. “Or I’ll have to . . . warn my brother about your behavior.”

He shot her a cocky smile that said, “please, be my guest.” Nikki was relieved when a man who looked like Enrico but wasn’t walked out onto the loggia from the house.

“I kind of hate to miss what’s coming next, but Umberto, our plasterer, is here,” Chase said. “Do you need me to get you all started?”

“Um, that would be a no,” Avery said. “I’ll get Joe and Nicole going out here and then I wanted to pull the chandelier down so that Kyra and Maddie can start cleaning the crystals. I’ve got a crude sort of pulley hooked up.”

Kyra groaned, but Maddie barely seemed to be listening, which Nicole found decidedly un-Madeline-like.

Avery turned to Joe. “Nicole and I will be working over there.” She pointed to the two doors already set up in the shade. “I know how men feel about power tools, so we’ll try you out over here on the sander.”

Deirdre went inside to make phone calls, presumably from her air-conditioned bedroom. Avery led Kyra and Maddie into the dining room. Nikki might have been envious of the indoor assignment except that the spot beside the reclinada palm was fabulously shady and the breeze off the Gulf not only lowered the temperature but carried the scent of the stain away with it. And then there was the view. Which got even better about twenty minutes later when Giraldi, who was working smack in the sun, peeled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt and dropped it on the ground.

Two hours later Avery put down her rag and wiped the sweat off her brow. “I think we’re going to have to fire Joe.”

“We’re not paying him. I’m not sure firing is the right word,” Nikki said.

“He’s a distraction.” Avery pointed to Nicole’s door. “You’ve redone that one three times now. You can’t stain uniformly when you’re not even looking at what you’re staining.”

Nikki would have liked to argue or deny the accusation, but Avery was right. Nicole had spent far more of the morning watching the muscles ripple across Agent Giraldi’s broad back and shoulders than she had her own brushstrokes.

“You’re a little behind yourself,” Nicole pointed out.

“I know.” Avery laughed. “And I think Kyra made more trips out here than she needed to. Of course that could have been out of boredom; there’s nothing more tedious than cleaning a chandelier of that size one drop crystal at a time.”

“Or not.”

They smiled at each other, complicit, but Nicole didn’t feel at all good about how often her gaze had stolen over to check Giraldi out. She’d asked him to help partly to torture him and partly to keep an eye on him—not his rippling muscles or near-perfect butt.

During lunch, a make-your-own-sandwich affair that Maddie only halfheartedly supervised, Nikki did her best to stay far enough away from the FBI agent not to be caught staring and close enough to make sure he wasn’t saying anything that might expose her as Malcolm’s sister. For the most part, he talked baseball and boats and other manly topics with Chase and Robby and Umberto, who was apparently Enrico’s cousin. The agent came across just as he’d presented himself, and she had to admit if she hadn’t known he was there to keep her under surveillance, she never would have known. Still she didn’t begin to relax until Giraldi left around two thirty, saying that he had some things he had to take care of. She blew out a breath of air, grateful to see him go with no real damage done.

She was so relieved to be rid of Giraldi that she almost didn’t hear what Chase was saying as he packed up his tools an hour or so later so that he could get to one of his sons’ baseball games. “Robby says the master bath will be functional at some point tomorrow, so if you’ve got the fixtures back it could be usable.”

There was a hushed silence as they all took this in. Then came a group smile, although Maddie’s seemed a bit strained. Nikki heard what might have been a celestial choir singing in her head.

“Figures it would be Deirdre’s bath,” Avery grumbled. “She’ll be the only one here with air-conditioning and her own bathroom.”

“Well, I’ll share it with you,” Deirdre said. “And anyone else who wants in. It’ll give us a chance to get better acquainted.”

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