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an impatient breath, but relaxed the femme fatale look, which helped Nick relax a little. He didn’t need Hank Marconi coming after him with a shotgun, demanding he do the right thing by one of his precious girls.
    Well, the morning just kept getting better and better. “This is great. And what do I do for coffee?”
    â€œWhat we do,” Sam said as she stepped into the room and stopped between her sisters. She pulled a white painter’s cap off her head and sent a mass of long reddish brown hair tumbling down to her shoulders. Grinning, she held up a tall paper cup with the Leaf and Bean logo. “Go to Stevie’s place.”
    Nick studied first one sister, then the next. The Marconis were so different, you’d never know they were related by looking at them. A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, the Marconi girls were full partners in their father’s construction business. Thankfully for their sakes, they’d taken after their mother—tall, slim, and gorgeous—rather than their father in the looks department.
    The Candellano kids and the Marconis had gone to school together. Hell, he’d even dated Sam once or twice, before hooking up with Stevie—and right this minute, Nick could cheerfully murder all three Marconi women.
    â€œYou’re killing me, you know that, right?”
    â€œSuck it up, football star,” Samantha said, grinning.
    Nick grimaced.
    â€œHey, the place is gonna be great,” Jo told him.
    â€œWhen?” Nick asked.
    Mike, answered, and Nick said the words right along with her. “Three or four weeks.”
    She grinned at him and sent him a slow wink.
    Samantha jabbed her with an elbow to the stomach.
    Nick paid no attention. Three or four weeks. No surprise there. It was the same response he’d been getting from the whole family ever since this remodel had started two weeks ago.
    â€œC’mon, you guys,” he argued. “It’s not that big a house.”
    â€œHell,” Sam countered with a derisive snort and a glare at her youngest sister, “it’s almost not a house. I’d call it more like one step up from a shack.”
    â€œNow,”
Nick argued pointedly.
    â€œHey,” Mike said, abandoning the flirtatious pose long enough to defend her family’s work, “it’s over fifty years old. The pipes and the wiring alone belong in a museum.”
    Nick shot a look at her. “But everything was working until you guys ripped the guts out of it.”
    â€œWorking for how long, though?” Jo asked. “Until you woke up floating downstairs one night ’cause the pipes burst? Or until an electrical fire turned the whole place to ash?”
    â€œFine,” Nick muttered, surrendering to the inevitable. “I give up. I’m going to Stevie’s for coffee.”
    â€œExcellent idea,” Sam said. “Bring us back a few more, huh?”
    He stopped dead, hunched his shoulders, then kept on walking. Perfect. He was three for three. Career. Life. House. All screwed. He opened the car door and glanced up, half-expecting to see a plague of frogs descending on him.
    *   *   *
    Somebody crashed into Jonas from behind, then ran past him, down the crowded hall. He hardly noticed. Heck, the school hallways were always packed. A guy could get run over and then trampled to death and probably nobody’d notice until the bell rang and you could see the body.
    â€œYou hear anything?”
    â€œHuh?”
    Jonas spun around and grinned at his best friend. Alex Medina, clutching one strap of his overloaded backpack, grinned back. “I said, did you hear anything yet?”
    â€œNo.” Jonas slammed his locker door shut, the loud clang rising up and then disappearing in the roar of sound created by several hundred kids. “Nothing. But the lawyer said that it might take a while.”
    Alex shook his head and fell into step beside Jonas as the boy