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when she was sure she wasn’t going to bleed all over the dress, she told herself to concentrate as she got back to work on the beading. It was proving trickier than expected, because too much force would tear the silk, while not enough wouldn’t get the stitches out.
    Anne squinted close as she worked, trying not to think about Gareth, or the case, or…
    A snag.
    Somehow, she’d snagged the dress. If she wasn’t even more careful now, it could turn into a full-fledged rip.
    Finally accepting that she was all thumbs today, right when she couldn’t afford to be, she put aside her mother’s dress carefully, determined not to do any more damage.
    What was wrong with her?
    But as she glanced at her watch, the answer was painfully obvious. The mediation was going to start in fifteen minutes.
    She’d been trying to ignore it all morning, thinking about her parents, the dress, talking to Rose…anything but the thought of sitting opposite a woman claiming to be her sister and trying to be polite while a stranger made accusations about her father.
    Yet Gareth had been clear that he thought this was the only way to get the whole crazy mess straightened out before it went any further. And she’d promised him that she would go.
    Anne found her first real smile of the day as she thought about seeing Gareth again. He’d said that he wouldn’t go inside the meeting room itself, but she could imagine him standing outside, waiting for them to sort this whole mess out.
    He did look so good standing outside places, after all.
    And afterward, when the nonsense about her father was resolved…well, Anne could easily imagine laughing with him over it all, and then maybe, just maybe, they could revisit the moment they’d had yesterday. Only without the pulling-away-at-the-last-minute part, of course. And then, once everything was neatly back into place in her life, she would come home and restore her mother’s wedding dress to its original glory.

Chapter Nine
     
    Anne had expected a courtroom, or at least a judge presiding over it, not a small conference room in the courthouse with Gareth standing outside. He looked wonderful in another of those oh-so-formal suits of his that made her want to greet him with a hug just to rumple him a little bit.
    A young woman stood beside him, presumably Jasmine Turner. She was blonde with blue eyes, but as far as Anne was concerned their similarities stopped there. Especially if you looked into Jasmine’s eyes, which had a hard glint to them that Anne had never seen when looking into her mirror.
    Still, Anne was going to do her best to look for the good in Jasmine Turner. After all, disliking someone at first sight just wasn’t her . People almost always turned out to be nicer than you might think when you gave them a chance.
    “Hello, Anne,” Gareth said. “This is Jasmine and Richard Wells, Jasmine’s lawyer.”
    “She’s late,” Jasmine snapped. “The mediator is inside already.”
    “Actually, I’m in the middle of a very important project at work, so I’d like to know how long this will take,” Anne said. “I have to rework the beading on an entire dress and—”
    “It will go quicker if you stop talking about dresses,” Jasmine snapped.
    The gray-haired lawyer opened the door to the mediation room. “Why don’t we get started?”
    Anne nodded. The sooner they did this, the sooner she could show everyone just how delusional they all were. “Whenever you’re ready.”
    “That would have been about five minutes ago,” Jasmine immediately replied.
    Gareth interrupted in a conciliatory tone. “Remember, the idea here today is to talk things through to see if you can come to an amicable agreement about what should happen next.”
    Anne wanted to kiss Gareth for reminding them all to be calm and reasonable.
    Instead, the three of them went into the conference room, leaving Gareth behind. A woman wearing a gray business suit peered at them over the rims of her glasses from