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for herself with the Kowalski clan.
    Flash. “Say cheese!”
    “Cheese.” Keri smiled at the clothesline she was trying to knot around a tree.
    By her count, it was the eleventh boring picture of her Bobby had taken since Joe’s departure. “Don’t use up your camera on the first day.”
    “You’re pretty.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Aunt Terry said you probably had work done, like Daddy did on his truck at the body shop.”
    She glanced at Terry, who seemed very interested in the knot she was tying across the site. “Nope. No work done.”
    “She said you were probably plastic and Uncle Kevin said he’d give you a feel and let her know and then Uncle Joe punched him in the shoulder and said the only thing he’d feel is his A-S-S getting kicked if he tried.”
    “Robert Joseph Kowalski!” Lisa descended on the boy and started shooing him away. “Put the camera away and hit the playground, short fry.”
    Terry was still intent on her knot, which was kicking her ass if the redness in her face was any indication. Lisa gave Keri a sheepish grin, then went back to her own knot tying.
    Keri probably would have minded the plastic comment a lot more if she wasn’t feeling all warm and fuzzy about Joe’s hitting Kevin for offering to feel her up. He’d been possessive like that in school—without crossing over the line into controlling—and she’d felt like a treasured princess. While she didn’t feel exactly regal right now, standing on a cooler breaking fingernails in the name of clothesline, it was kind of sweet. Not sweet enough to get his butt out of the sling, but enough to give her a little tingle.
    Terry, the overachieving show-off, was done with her share of clothesline hanging, so she popped open a soda and sat on another cooler. “The guys will be back any minute, Lisa. Got your quarters ready?”
    Lisa blushed and Keri was dying to be let in on the inside joke but she couldn’t bring herself to ask Terry what she meant. They’d managed to avoid direct communication for two hours now, and she figured careful planning and pure stubbornness could extend the streak to two weeks.
    Then again, she didn’t want to spend fourteen days with two decades of tension weighing on her, and they weren’t in junior high anymore. Plus, she had two rolls of unexplained quarters in her bag. So she took a deep breath and looked right at Terry. “What are the quarters for?”
    “The bathhouse showers.” For a second Keri thought those terse three words were all she was going to get, but then Terry took a deep breath of her own and seemed to relax. “When the guys ride like that they get…wound up. All that testosterone and grunting, I guess. Anyway, Mike always drags Lisa off to the bathhouse as soon as he gets back.”
    “Tick check,” Lisa muttered, but she was damn near as red as Terry had been a few minutes before.
    “So…who checks Kevin and Joe for ticks in the shower?” Keri asked. Finally her knot seemed secure. She tugged on it and, when it didn’t pull loose for the umpteenth time, jumped off her cooler.
    Terry shrugged, but her dimples—which were never quite as pronounced as Joe’s—made a brief appearance. “I guess they have to take matters into their own hands, so to speak.”
    Keri went from warm and fuzzy to hot and bothered just like that. Back when she and Joe were doing everything but it , he’d shown her how he took matters into his own hands, so to speak, and that wasn’t an image a girl forgot.
    Only now the image morphed into an older Joe, naked and soapy and…
    Holy crap, it was hot again all of a sudden. If she’d known being around Joe would be like suffering from menopause, she might have rethought her career path. Or at least packed some herbal tea or something.
    “Don’t you even think about it, Keri Daniels.”
    Keri could almost see the fork in the road of maturity rising before her. She could take the high road and assure Terry her interest in Joe was strictly