Page 7 of The Worst Possible Plan

Then a woman wearing an apron came running out of the bakery next door, waving both arms above her head like she was trying to stop an airplane from landing. Flour dusted the front of her apron, and her dark hair was escaping from a messy bun while she hurried across the sidewalk. She had the determined expression of a woman who had survived several morning rushes and wasn’t afraid of conflict.

Uh-oh.

“No! Not there!” she yelled. “That’s where my pastry tent goes!”

The driver stopped.

Heat rushed to my face as I pointed to the stretch of grass closest to Town Hall. “Okay. How about over there?”

And just like that, another woman appeared.

When I say appeared, I mean one second she wasn’t there and the next she was standing beside us like she’d materialized magically. Spooky.

She was tall. The kind of tall that made you take a step back just to locate her face. She wore black from head to toe and held a pair of gardening shears in one hand like she knew exactly how to use them. She looked less like a florist and more like someone hired to dispose of problems.

“You can’t put it there,” she snapped. “My flower display goes there.”

“Ah. Okay.” I should have known that. I pointed toward the only patch of grass that hadn’t yet been claimed. “Here?” I instructed the driver.

The florist slowly turned her head and followed my finger. “The petunia arch goes there.”

“Right.” No idea what the hell she was talking about. I was beginning to understand why people drank during event planning. Just enough to take the edge off conversations involving petunia arches.

Ten minutes later the truck was blocking half the street.

And I was sweating through my antiperspirant and my clothes. My pits were practically bathing in sweat. It appeared I was sweating out of every pore on my body.

I was a sweaty, stinking mess.

Wonderful.

Traffic had backed up. A volunteer was asking where to put folding chairs. Someone wanted vendor assignments. A man carrying electrical cables wanted to know where the power hookup was. Another woman was asking where the lemonade stand was supposed to go. Everyone had questions, and for reasons I still didn’t fully understand, I was the person expected to answer them.

I had no idea. Not a single clue.

The worst part? I couldn’t even Google answers because everyone kept talking to me.

“Miss?”

I smiled brightly, like I was one inconvenience away from living in the woods. “Everything is completely under control.”

A deep voice behind me said, “That’s good to hear.”

I straightened and turned around.

Tall. Broad shoulders. Dark hair. Sheriff’s Department polo shirt. The name WALKER was embroidered over one side of his chest in gold letters, which was helpful because otherwise I might have spent the next ten minutes referring to him as Sheriff Hot Guy.

And a pair of brown eyes studied the scene with the exhausted patience of a man who’d seen this exact disaster coming from three towns away.

Sheriff Eric Walker.

For a second, my brain simply stopped working because no sheriff should look like that. Right?

Sheriffs were supposed to be slightly overweight men named Bob who drank too much coffee and complained about paperwork. They weren’t supposed to look like they belonged on the cover of a magazine titled Men Who Can Build You a Deck and Give You a Massage at the Same Time.

He stood with his hands on his hips, calm and steady while madness unfolded around him. The morning sun caught in his dark hair, and there wasn’t a wrinkle anywhere on his shirt.

Damn. That was one hot male specimen.