Red flags or not, Peach wasn’t interested in a relationship. He had learned his lesson soon after the divorce. He’d dated a woman who had checked all the boxes—kind, beautiful, smart—yet she’d failed to hide her resentment of Dorothy, which was a deal killer. Another girlfriend had seemed nice enough, but she wanted kids of her own, and she wanted them right away.

Peach had shied from that. He never, ever wanted Dorothy to think she wasn’t enough for him. In the unlikely event that he ever felt like going down that path again, he planned to take his sweet time doing it.

These days, he was a monk. No drama. No complications. Work and the band and Dorothy kept him busy enough. Natalie Harper was tempting but would only ever be a client.

He didn’t want to add to her stress, but the repairs and restoration on her place were going to take a while, and the project wouldn’t be cheap. He felt bad about how much work would be needed to rescue the venerable old building. She was in good hands with him. He knew what needed to be done, he knew how to do the work, and he wouldn’t overcharge.

Suzzy sometimes chided him for charging reasonable rates here, in the heart of the wealthiest city in America. “Dude,” she would say. “It’s one of the perks of living in San Francisco. You’re surrounded by people who rake in the dough. You should feel free to share in the bounty.”

“Don’t call me dude. Nobody says dude anymore.”

“I do. Some dude gave me a hundred-dollar tip yesterday morning, and all he had was an egg white omelet. And I was like, ‘Thanks, dude.’”

Peach suspected the tip was more about her tight skirt and red cowboy boots and the treble clef tattoo on her dainty collarbone than it was about the omelets she served at Spotters, the buzzy breakfast place where she worked while waiting to be discovered. Suzzy didn’t advertise the fact that she was happily married to Milt, their drummer, because she swore the tips were better that way. She and Peach had even done a song about it—“Color Me Regressive.”

It was pretty clear that Natalie Harper was not going to be the kind of client he often encountered, the kind with more money than sense. He had recently finished a job for a couple who had spent a small fortune importing a set of library doors from London because they matched an antique mantelpiece in their Nob Hill home. Another client had commissioned a glass countertop so big that they had to take out part of a wall in order to get it inside.

Natalie Harper was not that client.