on the cover / By Heidi Walters

A Small-Town Affair

What if, after your project is approved, bad things start happening at the work site?

Well, as in the real world, sometimes you gotta protect your assets. One day, let’s say, the construction crew arrives at the work site to discover somebody’s poured sand in the oil filter of their bulldozer. Damned monkeywrenchers! You and your hot (but annoying!) contractor quarrel about what to do, and then you agree to fence off the entire site.

That doesn’t stop the criminal shenanigans. A scaffolding board snaps suspiciously. Someone cuts a fuel line on a work vehicle, causing hydraulic fluid to spread across the site — a “cleanup that could cost hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars. Guarantee headlines that could turn public opinion against Tidewaters before it opened.” (Can’t have that crap seeping into the bay.) But you know, in your heart, that your project will be built. Hell or high water and vandals and irritating hot contractors notwithstanding.

How do you fend off the weasely reporter who always rattles up to the scene in his junkster just as your life has sprung a nasty leak?

Unfortunately, yes, Carnelian Cove has a weasely reporter. And, incidentally, like any small town, it also has a finite pool of eligible single folks recycling each other’s exes. So, anyway, now let’s say you’re Quinn, the hot contractor who is building that snotty, cute architect’s controversial project on the waterfront. And let’s say you’ve suffered a series of troubling incidents at your worksite — the life-threatening scaffolding accident, the fuel-leak — and you have a messy past. Of course the weasel’s right on it, and trying to pin blame on you.

“Damn,” Quinn muttered when the compact stopped at the curb beyond the fencing. Justin Gregorio, reporter for Channel Six news. No fan of development in general or Tidewaters in particular.

Or Quinn, for that matter. None of the men who’d dated Quinn’s ex-wife before she left town had a very high opinion of him.

Which evened things out, since the lack of esteem was mutual.

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