desserts from the deli’s kitchen and left the other half for him. He’d already delivered two urns, started the coffee brewing—Guatemalan Antiqua and Ethiopian Yirgacheffe—and from the basket he now unloaded bowls of sugar and sweetener and two small carafes of cream, one plain, one flavored with hazelnut.
“Oh, my gosh, it smells wonderful in here.” Ellie waited for him to turn away from the table, then hugged him. Her body was solid, warm, with a barely noticeable bump from her four-months-along pregnancy. For more than five years, she and Tommy had gotten together, broken up and done it all over again, all because of his desire to get married and have kids and her opposition to both ideas.
Funny how surviving a near-death experience had made her see things in a different light.
It was one thing Joe and Ellie had in common. The near-death experience. Not so much the desire to marry and have kids.
When she stepped back, he gestured toward the table. “Do I need to set out cups and napkins again, or do you have that covered?”
Ellie grinned. “I brought finger food. No need for dishes.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve seen people take their coffee directly from the urn, on their knees, scalding their tongues. It’s not a pretty—”
The door that led from the dining room directly into the kitchen bumped open an inch or two, and black curls appeared briefly before the door received a harder shove. Liz was smiling, saying something over her shoulder and carrying a silver tray loaded with cups and saucers as she came into the room. Speaking of pretty sights…
Damn. He’d thought since he’d made it the rest of the day without so much as a glimpse of her that he might be safe. He would come to the meeting, it would be late when he got home, he would go straight to bed without even thinking about her…
Yeah, right.
“Hi, Joe.”
He automatically reached for the tray, heavier than it should have been. She flashed him a smile, hotter than it should have been. “Thanks,” she said as she began unloading cups and carefully lining them up near the urns. “I wondered why we were using the good china instead of paper plates and foam cups. Guess I have my answer.”
We. How easily she included herself among his friends, his town. She’d been there less than thirty hours, already had an invitation to work on Ellie’s project and had apparently made herself at home. Though, to be fair, Ellie would accept help from any living, breathing body.
And Liz was definitely living…breathing…and what a body. She wore white capris that left her legs bare from the knee down, a black-and-white dotted shirt that clung to her curves and black-and-white dotted sandals. With heels, of course.
Had he mentioned that he liked sexy shoes?
Ellie began stacking the saucers around the dessert plates as she primly said, “I admire Joe’s commitment to the environment and avoiding unnecessary waste.”
“Of course you do, because it means when we do this type of thing, I do the dishes.”
Liz wasn’t fooled. “I saw the state-of-the-art dishwashers in there.”
He shrugged.
“But tell me, doesn’t it take a lot of energy to run the dishwasher, heat the water, dry the dishes—heavens, to manufacture and ship the dishwasher in the first place? How do you know it’s not more environmentally friendly to just use throwaways and be done with it? Not foam, of course. It’s practically indestructible. But paper decomposes.”
Before he could respond, Ellie raised both hands. “Please, no environmental discussions. Tonight’s for my cause.”
Still holding Liz’s gaze, Joe directed his words to Ellie. “I heard you’d decided to use environmentally friendly disposable diapers for the kiddo. And that your remodel includes solar panels and a geothermal heat pump system.”
“That’s our contractor’s idea. Nothing to do with you,” she replied with a wink for Liz’s benefit. She knew Tommy and Russ had discussed it with him before making their choices. “So…I didn’t realize you two had met.”
“I didn’t realize you two had met,” he said.
Liz’s movements were fluid as she took a cup from the table, placed it under the spout of the Antiqua urn and filled it. “A good cup of coffee is the first thing I look for in a new town,” she said breezily.
“I’d’ve thought it would be a familiar face,” Joe said without a hint of breeze.
Ellie’s gaze shifted from one to the other, then she began easing away. “I’m gonna see if everyone’s here. When you hear me talking loudly in the parlor, that’s your cue to come on in. I’d hate for you to miss out on anything.”
Liz stirred sugar into her coffee, then held the spoon to drip. “I think that means she doesn’t want to miss out on anything.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I met Ellie at the deli this morning. Cute names in this town. Ellie’s Deli. A Cuppa Joe.”
“Not my doing,” he reminded her.
She nodded, then sucked the spoon into her mouth. The action was simple, unaffected, and damn near cut his knees out from under him. “Mmm. You know, there really is a difference between instant coffee and this stuff.”
“Yeah.” Was his voice really that hoarse? “Lucky for me, everyone else in the world was quicker than you to figure that out, or I’d be out of business.”
She took a sip and made another, softer mmm sound. “I don’t have time to make real coffee every day.”
“You can’t spare a few minutes? Keeping up with Josh—or tracking him down—must be a full-time job.”
A blink, one blink of those java-dark eyes, was her only response to the mention of his brother, and he tried to read a lot into it. Did she love him? Did she miss him? Did she hate him, need him, want to punish him?
Did she see him every time she looked at Joe?
Being an identical twin had its pluses and minuses. Being hot for a woman who didn’t even have to close her eyes to imagine she was with his brother was right up at the top of the minus column, along with being mistaken for him by a hitman.
Thinking about being hot for his brother’s maybe-ex was the perfect time for an interruption, provided by A. J. Decker. “Come on, Saldana. You’ve got all the coffee a man could need all day long. Do you mind sharing a little of it tonight?”
Joe forced his gaze from Liz. “I don’t know. I’m so used to getting paid for it that it’s kind of hard to give it away free.”
Decker reached into his pocket and pulled out a wrinkled five. “Now will you move?”
Liz set her cup aside and picked up a clean one. “Keep your money, Lieutenant. This one’s on me.” Her slender, elegant fingers gestured toward the engraved plates that hung from each urn. “What’s your pleasure?”
Pleasure? On her? Sweet hell, Joe had to get away. Fast. Saying, “Excuse me,” and sounding more than a little strangled, he escaped the dining room for the broad hallway that divided the house front to back. The air was cooler there, easier to force into his choked lungs, kinder to his hot skin.
Familiar voices came from the parlor across the hall. Ellie and Tommy. The Calloway boys: Russ, Robbie and half-brother Mitch, and their wives, Jamie, Anamaria and Jessica. Sophy from the quilt shop and Officer Pete Petrovski, Joe’s neighbor. KiKi Isaacs, the first female detective in Copper Lake history. Dharma, the temperamental chef at the deli, and Cate Calloway, ER doctor and former cousin by marriage to the Calloway boys. Marnie, the lost-in-another-world crime scene tech who oversaw the CLPD lab. Her people skills mostly applied to the recently dead, but Joe liked her anyway.
He liked all these people. He