"Of course he didn't!"
"Why do you always accuse me of having the worst intentions towards you?" Hunter snarled, half rising out of his seat. Meg didn't back down.
"Oh, I don't know. Because you're a filthy, self-serving liar," she said.
"That doesn’t mean I would poison your coffee!" Hunter shouted.
Garrett quickly moved behind him and grabbed him by the shoulder.
"Hunter was just trying to be nice. Extend an olive branch and all that," Garrett said, twisting his grip on Hunter's shoulder.
Meg sniffed the coffee.
"It's good," I said. "I drink a lot of those. It has the caramel drizzle."
"Unfortunately it has a ton of calories," Meg said.
"Calories schmalories," I cried. "It's the Northeast. Our people need some padding against the harsh winters."
Meg took a sip. Garrett relaxed his grip on Hunter.
"Don't ever touch me again," Hunter snarled to him.
"If we could talk about the land deal," Greg said, clapping his hands together.
"Yes, let's talk about that," Meg said. "You all want to put yet more offices and more light industrial space in the downtown. Eventually this place is going to be one big campus for the Svenssons."
"That’s hardly—" Greg began.
Meg held up a hand. "I understand you all contribute a lot of money to the community, but there are some residents that don't think all that abstractly. They need to see a direct correlation to the development and their benefit. The city can't just railroad your developments through."
"So what do you want?" Parker asked. "A park, restaurants, a brewery?"
"Jobs," Meg said. "Personally, I would have said a clinic, but apparently there are people worried that it would attract the wrong sort."
I snorted.
"Yes, I know," Meg said with a sigh, "but something job related so that it seems like you're trying to help the larger Harrogate population would be nice. Don't you have some sort of small product you could make in a minimal amount of space? There are a number of the elderly who have failure-to-launch grandsons living in their basements who I'm sure would like to have somewhere to send them to learn some basic skills and develop a work ethic."
"We will look into that," Garrett assured her.
Meg stood up. "Thanks for the cookie. Oh, and those straws you were having someone smuggle into Harrogate? We confiscated them. Have a good afternoon, boys."
44
Garrett
"That went surprisingly well," Greg said.
"It did?" Penny asked.
"No, it didn't. She took my straws!" I fumed.
"You went to high school with Hazel, right?" Mace asked Penny. "Any info or insight on Meg you could share?"
She shrugged. "My impression of her was that she was a very straitlaced, by-the-book type of person. But I'll think more about it. I think all the Loring girls are foodies, so bribing her with food seems like a good start. But Garrett seems to have that covered."
"Do you need my help for anything else, Garrett?" Bronwyn asked, batting her eyelashes at me.
