“Well…” She probably didn’t want to dine with him for so many reasons.
“If we dined at Rafferty’s, I could avoid the stairs,” he said, working the pity angle even though he hated every minute of it.
She hesitated for a long, uncertain moment before she finally nodded. “Okay, I guess that’s reasonable. Let’s say six o’clock?”
“I’ll see you then.” But only after he’d left her house did he fully realize the magnitude of what he’d done. He’d just agreed to have dinner at a public restaurant where he’d be stared at.
Chapter Ten
Ashley sat at the weekly meeting of the Jonquil Island Heritage Day Committee drumming her fingers on the tabletop, her mind consumed with Topher and his plans for Lookout Island, and not the upcoming annual commemoration of the hurricane of 1713.
Her attempt to dissuade Jessica Blackwood from continuing with the project had failed. Appealing to the woman’s better angles had been a long shot. After all, Topher could afford to pay her a sizable fee. Unfortunately, Topher had enough money to buy just about anything he wanted. Including a loyal architect.
But not everyone was for sale. She just needed to find the right person to stand in his way. But who that person or entity might be was a mystery.
She stared down at the legal pad sitting in front of Reverend St. Pierre, who sat beside her at the table in the large conference room at City Hall. He didn’t seem to be paying much attention, either, as Councilmember Bauman droned on about the Heritage Day celebration coming up in mid-September. The preacher was doodling, and she found herself studying his strong, competent left hand as it created intricate Irish designs.
Awareness of Micah St. Pierre as a man, not a minister, suddenly seized her. The thought was inappropriate in the extreme and probably would never have happened if she’d been focused on the meeting and not her current problems.
But then again, she was also not entirely dead. So this fluttery feeling in her chest had to be a sign of something. Maybe, after three years of grieving, she was starting to come out of her funk. It would be easy to believe that, except that just the other day she’d been sorting stuff up in the attic and she’d come across the box filled with Adam’s dress uniforms. She’d spent the rest of the day in tears.
“Okay, so everyone knows what they’re responsible for in the next week?” Harry said, jolting Ashley back to the meeting’s proceedings. Everyone around the table looked up and nodded.
“Okay. See everyone next Wednesday.”
People jumped out of their chairs and made separate beelines to the door of the main meeting room at City Hall.
Okay, here it was, her chance to gain a little information. She pushed up from the table and headed right toward Harry.
“Hey,” she said, coming up to him as he was stuffing papers into a battered briefcase. “You got a minute?”
Harry, who was probably pushing eighty, had a head of white hair and a bushy mustache that had been all the style in the 1970s. He looked down at her from behind his wire-rimmed bifocals. “I’ve got just a minute. The Braves are playing the Nationals, and I want to catch the end of the game.”
“Um, well, I was—” She bit off her words as Micah came up behind her. Wow, the man gave off a lot of body heat.
“Yes?” Harry asked, his bushy eyebrows rising a fraction.
“I was just curious. If I wanted to make it difficult for someone to build a house out on Lookout Island, what would I have to do?”
Micah cleared his throat, and heat climbed up Ashley’s cheeks. Was the Rev judging her? Well, so what. She had Topher’s best interests at heart.
Harry stroked his mustache for a moment as he thought. “Well, it seems to me that it would be damn—um, sorry, Rev—darned hard to build a house out on that island no matter what.”
“I know,” Ashley said. “But if I wanted to make sure it couldn’t happen?”
Harry continued to stroke his mustache while Ashley resisted the urge to turn around and glare at her spiritual adviser.
“I suppose you could rile up the lighthouse folks,” Harry said.
“The lighthouse folks?”
“There’s a group working to save the Morris Island lighthouse. They’ve been quite successful in raising money and getting the property transferred to state ownership and control. I’m not sure they’re interested in saving any other lights, but I think the Lookout Island lighthouse