Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay by Babette Jongh (best fantasy books to read TXT) 📕

that he inflates the prices of supplies, he doesn’t pay his workers, and he cheats his clients by invoicing for materials he uses elsewhere. He’s bad news. I hope the folks on city council know that, and if they don’t, I won’t mind educating them.”

Abby looked over at Quinn, and he could see the wheels turning in her mind. He wondered whether she remembered what he’d said when they first met, about his construction business partnership with a friend not working out.

“Edna,” Quinn said, “let me see what I can find out about his plans before we go off half-cocked. You’re right that he’s unethical, but he’s also very persuasive.”

“Wait.” Abby sat forward, her face lit with excitement and curiosity. “You know him?”

“We worked together for a brief time. But I really don’t want to get into it until I know more about what he’s up to.” He knew he’d have to find a way to tell Abby the truth about his business relationship with JP, but not right here, not right now. “I hope you’ll both calm down a notch and let me look into this before you start blabbing to the city council about things you don’t understand.”

Abby drew herself up. “I don’t blab.”

Edna took another sip of her margarita and giggled under her breath. “I do.”

“Please don’t,” Quinn reiterated. “Not until I can get some concrete information to act on.”

And, he didn’t want JP to know that anyone with more than a bleeding-heart objection to the destruction of an old barn and a bayside marshland ecosystem was against him. JP would do anything on this or that side of the law to get his way. “I can ask around, maybe find out what he’s up to. We’ll do better if we don’t say anything until we know everything. So please, let’s focus on something we can do, like getting an avalanche of signatures and letters sent to the city council in favor of Bayside Barn.” At least it would keep Edna and Abby busy while he figured out what to do.

“Hear, hear!” Edna held her glass up for a toast. Flushed with the success of her speech—and her second frozen margarita—she fanned herself with the orange clipboard and laid out her battle plan. “We’ll get fifty signatures in no time.” She took another sip of her frosty top-shelf drink. “We’ll get a hundred. Two hundred! I’ll print up extra pages and we’ll all go ’round asking for signatures till we’ve asked everyone in Magnolia Bay.”

True, they were well on the way to getting fifty signatures. By the time everyone had filtered out of the courthouse, the petition on Edna’s orange clipboard held almost thirty, and she’d given out blank pages for people to take home to their relatives, friends, and neighbors, along with preaddressed, prestamped envelopes to mail the pages to the city council.

“And you know what else?” Edna added. “We should host an open house at the barn! Make it a big, citywide event. It’d be good PR for Bayside Barn, and we could get even more signatures that way.”

If Quinn ever had to go to war about anything, he wanted Edna to be the general leading the charge. But this particular war might be unwinnable. Both Abby and Edna held starry-eyed views about right winning out over wrong. They were both too innocent to realize that they could get all the signatures in the world and still lose.

Abby held up a hand and she and Edna did a high five. “Hosting an open house is a great idea, Edna. I’ll pick a date and start planning.”

Edna stirred her margarita and took another sip. “I’ll call up all my old students and get them to write letters about what the animals at Bayside Barn meant to them. The folks on the city council will need wheelbarrows to hold all the mail they’ll get between now and next month.”

Abby clinked her glass to Edna’s. “I’m glad you’re on our side, Edna.”

Quinn clinked his glass to theirs, hoping they didn’t notice his lack of enthusiasm. The waiter brought their food, and Quinn dug into his steak fajita dinner, hoping that Abby and Edna would eat quickly so they could get out of here. He knew that Abby planned to call Reva once they got home. Knowing that she’d be sitting all comfy and staying off her foot till he got back, Quinn would go to the pool house and call Delia. And this time, if she didn’t answer, he’d have to make some excuse and go to her house so she’d have to talk to him.

He sipped his drink—just one, knowing he’d be driving Edna and Abby home after dinner—and hoped to God that his complaint to Delia hadn’t alerted JP to an opportunity he wouldn’t have known about otherwise. If JP had gotten a whiff of it, it must have come from Delia, and she only knew about JP because of Quinn’s pillow talk about his failed construction business back in NOLA.

The top-shelf tequila burned in his stomach, because he had a bad feeling that he had set this downward spiral into motion.

Chapter 20

After Quinn dropped off Edna at her house, Abby relaxed in the passenger seat of Reva’s car and indulged in a tequila-induced rose-colored-glasses glow. She knew she’d probably wake up at 2:00 a.m. and lie there till dawn worrying, but for now, everything was fine. Tomorrow, she’d get busy planning the open house. Quinn would dig into Miami Vice Ken’s motives, and Edna would gather enough signatures and solicit enough letters to bury the city council in an avalanche of public opinion.

At this moment, with her body sinking into the soft leather seat and her face and lips tingly and numb from one more margarita than was strictly necessary, Abby knew everything would turn out all right.

“You okay over there?” Quinn asked.

“Mmmm.” Better than okay, but she didn’t want to make her mouth work too hard to form those words just now. She