Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Make Your Own Luck
LORNA
Cliff Weston—hazel-eyed, ruggedly fetching with a sketchy past. Eyes always roaming for exits or warning signs, or something else only his mind could see.
Such an interesting case. Lorna lingered over the art history section in Pages Bookstore as she thought about her encounter with Cliff at Pasha’s Fine Jewelry.
She believed Cliff when he said he was an ex-con with a dream over their email exchange.
He wore his intensity and focus like armor and carried himself with a hooded confidence, a survival skill likely learned in prison where the right amount of cockiness would keep you safe, but too much would get your shivved in the shower.
She could also sense that he was a man who loved women.
It was in the way her took her hand and how he looked at her without ogling her.
Good manners handed down from a good mother, she assumed.
Likely his father was the issue at the root of his more rotten branches. He needed a good pruning, it was true.
He was also hiding something. Her guess was that Cliff was intent on reinventing himself, but acting like a newly born person, going through the motions and replicating what you see good, decent people do, is a lot easier than believing you’ve become one.
But she was always up for a project.
Cliff was the first piece of her puzzle and the one who would bring it all together. The table started with him.
She put down a hardcover copy of The Royal Tombs of Ancient Egypt and waved goodbye to the affable, bespectacled bookseller and headed toward the offices of her architect.
She needed the blueprints for the house.
She would set up a meeting with Cliff Weston to analyze them and see if he could put his expertise to work.
All the while ascertaining if he was the man she was looking for.
Judging by her instincts, she already knew he was.
If all went to plan, this Dinner for Six would be a masterpiece. She nearly tripped on a e-scooter that had been haphazardly tossed on the sidewalk like a broken toy when a text from Elaine Cromwell Frisco came in:
My daughter Jamie will be getting her severely neglected nails done at Angel’s Salon in Hermosa Beach tomorrow at 11am. All systems go.
She added the appointment to her calendar and mused that she’d made stranger matches before, but nothing quite like this. Might border on brilliant.
She walked faster, and the rising excitement had her almost at a skip as she talked herself through next steps.
Lorna checked her Rolex, which kept perfect time again after all these years.
Everything was working precisely as it should.