It's a Wonderful Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

hang around and ask to see the plans, considering everyone—Stanley included—had been worried about Miss Glace, Jesse had waited only long enough to learn she hadn’t run down to the pier and jumped in the ocean. Her response to Beatrice’s text message asking where she was had said she was fine and wished to be alone. A second text had arrived after Beatrice had asked if she would like a ride home, in which Miss Glace had reiterated she was fine and promised to call tomorrow. A third text had said she was shutting off her phone.
    Cadi was a levelheaded woman, Beatrice had assured Jesse as they’d stood on the sidewalk watching the silent exodus of shocked townsfolk, and she wasn’t at all worried her friend would do anything crazy. The petite, sixtyish owner of the gift shop/hardware/feed store had also apologized for causing his models to be destroyed and promised she’d apologize to Cadi the moment she saw her. She’d then glared at the upstairs windows and gone on to assure Jesse that everyone in town would help Cadi through this ordeal, just as they had fourteen months ago when the poor girl had walked into the office one morning to find her father slumped over his drafting table, his body long cold.
    Yeah, well, her friends might not think she’d do anything crazy, but Jesse figured Miss Glace wouldn’t be in any hurry to call 911 if Glace & Kerr Architecture were to suddenly catch fire, either. Hell, considering it had been the scene of two recent heartbreaks, he wouldn’t be surprised to hear the woman had set a match to the building, opened all the windows, and walked away just like she had her car.
    Damn. Did Stanley keep copies of works in progress at home, or at least backup his computer to a cloud or off-site storage device? For that matter, did he even use a computer for drafting? Wait; maybe Miss Glace had a set of his plans. She’d brought clay with her today, which implied she fabricated the models at home.
    The same home she shared with Stanley and would be in no hurry to return to?
    Jesse pulled the key out of the ignition, grabbed the folded piece of paper out of the cubby on the dash, and got out of the truck, deciding he must be more tired than he realized to be letting his imagination run wild. A levelheaded woman did not torch a building simply because she’d walked in on her fiancé carrying on like a “godless heathen.”
    Apparently Whistler’s Landing didn’t have many opera enthusiasts; not if they thought Stanley was painstakingly drafting detailed house plans whenever he locked the door and played Wagner’s decidedly rapturous
Tannhäuser
. And they truly must spend their time listening to police scanners instead of watching television, considering how long it had taken them—well, at least the women—to guess what had been going on upstairs. Although to be fair, it hadn’t been until he’d heard all the footsteps that Jesse had realized it was a full-blown orgy.
    He walked down the length of the camper, momentarily stopping to inspect the tires, then continued around the back and up the other side, making sure none of the thousand potholes he hadn’t been able to avoid had done any damage. Seeing nothing more than a good amount of road dust on the ditch-side tires, he unfolded the paper and scanned the grocery list his cook had handed him before he’d left Rosebriar.
    He couldn’t help but grin, remembering Sonya packing boxes with dishes and various cooking paraphernalia for the camper while giving him a lecture on eating nutritious meals, which she’d ended by threatening to have Peg—Rosebriar’s former cook, who had followed Sam to Keelstone Cove and subsequently opened her own restaurant—drive over an hour down the coast to make sure Jesse’s cupboards weren’t filled with junk food.
    He’d told the motherly woman he hoped Peg brought along a boat.
    Jesse