Sophie Dempsey wants to help her sister film a video and then get out of Temptation, Ohio. Mayor Phin Tucker wants to play pool with the police chief and keep things peaceful. But when Sophie and Phin meet, they both get more than they want. Gossip, blackmail, adultery, murder, vehicular abuse of a corpse, and slightly perverse but excellent sex: all hell breaks loose in Temptation as Sophie and Phin fall deeper and deeper in trouble… and in love.

Excerpt:

Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.

Half an hour earlier, Sophie’s sister Amy had been happily driving too fast down Highway 32, her bright hair ruffling in the wind as she sang “In the Middle of Nowhere” with Dusty Springfield on the tape deck. Maple trees had waved cheerfully in the warm breeze, cotton clouds had bounced across the blue, blue sky, and the late-August sun had blasted everything in sight.

And Sophie had felt a chill, courtesy, she was sure, of the sixth sense that had kept generations of Dempseys out of jail most of the time.

“Slow down,” she told Amy. “There’s no need to rush.” She stared out the window as she twisted the rings on her middle fingers. More riotously happy, southern Ohio landscape. That couldn’t be good.

“Oh, relax.” Amy peered at Sophie over the top of her cat’s-eye sunglasses. “It’s a video shoot, not a bank heist. What could go wrong?”

“Don’t say that.” Sophie sank lower in her seat. “Anytime anybody in a movie says, ‘What could go wrong?’ something goes wrong.”

A green sign that read Temptation 1⁄4 Mile loomed ahead, and Sophie reviewed her situation for the eleventh time that hour. She was going to a small town to make an unscripted video for a washed-up actress she didn’t trust. There were going to be problems. They’d show up at any minute, like bats,
dive-bombing them from out of nowhere. A strand of her dark curly hair blew across her eyes, and she jammed it back into the knot on top of her head with one finger. “Bats,” she said out loud, and Amy said, “What?”

Sophie let her head fall back against the seat. “ ‘We can’t stop here. This is bat country.’ ”

“Johnny Depp,” Amy said. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Stop quoting. There’s nothing to be nervous about, you’re just overreacting.” She turned off the highway and onto the old road that led into Temptation. The exit was marked by a shiny new gas station and a less shiny but still-plastic Larry’s Motel.

“Colorful,” Amy said.

“Trouble,” Sophie said.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Amy said. “It’s not the Bates Motel.”

“You have no idea how dangerous small towns are.” Sophie scowled out the window. “You were only ten when we moved to the city. You can’t remember what hell all those little places we lived in were.”

“Sophie.”

“And it’s not as if we have a plan.” Sophie stared with deep suspicion as they passed a blackened, log-built bar that sported a rusting neon sign: Temptation Tavern. Beer. Music. “It’s all very well for Clea to say, ‘We’ll improvise,’ but even if this is just an audition video, I need more of a script than, ‘Clea goes back to her creepy hometown and meets her long-lost love, Fred.’ ”

“Frank.” Amy shook her head. “I don’t believe you. We’re finally filming something besides a wedding, and all you can say is, ‘Trouble ahead,’ and, ‘Why can’t we stay in Cincinnati?’ and, ‘I don’t trust Clea.’ Face it, the only reason you don’t like Clea is because she dumped Davy to marry a TV anchorman. That’s very sisterly of you, but it’s time to get over it.”

“That’s not it,” Sophie said. “I don’t know what it is, it’s just—”

“Come on, Sophie. This is good for you. It gets you away from Brandon.”

Oh, yeah, sure this is good for me, Sophie thought, but Amy couldn’t help it. It was in her blood to turn everything into a con.

“Why you’re dating your therapist is beyond me,” Amy was saying. “Your health insurance covered his fees.”

“My ex-therapist.” Sophie squinted at the deserted treelined road before them. Ominous. “It saved a lot of time. You don’t know what a relief it was not to have to explain the family to him.”

“You know, sometimes I think it’s just our destiny to be bad.” Amy took her eyes off the road to smile at Sophie. “What do you say we quit making wedding videos and fall like the rest of the Dempseys?”

“No,” Sophie said. “The fall will kill us.”

She waited for an argument, but Amy was already distracted.

“Oh, wow.” She leaned forward and slowed the car. “Gotta love these road signs.”

Sophie read the battered white-and-black signs: Temptation Rotary Club, First Lutheran Church of Temptation, Temptation Ladies’ Club, Temptation Nighttime Theater. The last one was a corroded green-and-cream metal sign that said, Welcome to Temptation. Under it a smaller sign
in the same rusted antique green said, Phineas T. Tucker, Mayor. And under that, a newer but still battered sign said, We Believe in Family Values.

“Get me out of here,” Sophie said.

“Can you imagine how old Phineas T. must be if the sign is that rusted?” Amy said. “Older than God. Hasn’t had sex since the Bicentennial. Do you think the Church of Temptation is like the Church of Baseball?”

“Not if it’s Lutheran,” Sophie said.

Then they crested the hill and there was Temptation.

“Pleasantville,” Amy said, taking off her sunglasses.

“Amityville,” Sophie said.

The town proper was on the other side of a muddy river that streamed sullenly under a gunmetal bridge at the bottom of the hill. Beyond the bridge, the land rose up green and lush behind smug little brick-and-frame houses, and as the hills rose, the houses got bigger, much bigger. Sophie knew the kind of people who lived in houses like that. Not Her Kind.

“ ‘It’s quiet,’ ” she told Amy as they started down the hill. “ ‘Too quiet.’ ” But Amy was gaping at something in the distance.

“Oh my God!” Amy pulled off the road. “Look at that water tower!”

“What?” Sophie leaned forward to look.

The flesh-colored, bullet-shaped tower thrust through the trees at the top of the hill, so aggressively phallic that Sophie forgot to fidget with her rings as she stared at it. “Hello. Do you suppose they did that on purpose? I mean, you couldn’t accidentally paint it to look like that, could you?”

“Maybe Phineas T. is compensating. I don’t care. I love this town.” Amy handed Sophie her sunglasses, yanked her orange tube top into place, and reached between the seats for her camera. “My God, the visual opportunities. Change places with me.”

“Why?” Sophie said, but she climbed over the stick shift and into the driver’s seat as Amy got out of the car. “Okay, the water tower is cute, but ‘I bet the Chinese food here is terrible.’ ”

When Amy gave her a dirty look, she said, “I’m not whining, it’s a line. My Cousin Vinny.” Sophie squinted out at the road.

“I will bet they don’t have a decent pool table. Probably outlawed them. Where are we going now?”

“Back to the beginning.” Amy got in the passenger- side door. “I have to get all of this. The Church of Temptation, Phineas T. Tucker, and that big hard-on of a water tower. This is our opening-credits crawl.”

“Can we film in public without a permit?” Sophie put on Amy’s sunglasses with only a brief thought as to how pink plastic and rhinestones would look with her plain white blouse and khaki shorts. She double-checked the road and then pulled out and made a U-turn. “Because breaking the law is out.”

“They’ll never know,” Amy said, sounding way too much like their father. She braced the camera on the window and added, “I’ll keep watch this way and you keep an eye on the rearview in case somebody comes up behind us. Go about five miles an hour. I want to get all of this.”

Sophie drove back to where the signs began and turned around, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror as Amy filmed.

All they needed was to get rear-ended by some irate Citizen of Temptation—

Then, as they reached the crest of the hill, the beige Caddy zoomed out of a side road that Sophie hadn’t even seen and smashed into their front fender.

Sophie hit the brakes as she felt the impact, and the sound of crunching metal tore through her head at the same time

Amy’s sunglasses flew off her nose and hit the dashboard. She tasted blood as she bit her lip, gagged once as the seatbelt cut
into her stomach, and then it was over, and they were sitting in the wrong lane with Dusty singing “I’ll Try Anything” as if nothing had happened.

There was no one coming the other way, so Sophie breathed deep, licked her bleeding lip, let go of the steering wheel, and turned to deal with the situation.

Amy was bent over, her head at a funny angle under the dashboard.

“Amy!”

Amy straightened, holding the video camera. “It’s okay. I dropped it but it’s fine.” She scowled at the dash and picked up her glasses, and the broken lenses fell out. “But my sunglasses are history, damn it.”

Sophie swallowed her panic and tried to stop shaking.

“Oh. Good. Good. The camera’s okay. Good. Sorry about the glasses.” She turned Dusty off in the middle of “Playing it safe is just for fools,” and said “How are you?”

“Me?” Amy scowled out the window. “I’m pissed as hell at the asshole who hit us.”

Sophie peered through the window at the asshole. A bulky, white-haired, fifty-something Pillar of the Community stalked around their right front fender, thick with righ teousness. “Oh, no, I hate these guys. He’s going to try to make this our fault.”

She fumbled in her purse for her insurance card, thanking God it wasn’t their fault since Amy’s previous disregard for the laws of the road had already hiked their premium. “You keep quiet. I’ll get us out of here, and the insurance people can handle everyth—”

“Well, actually, it is our fault.” Amy dropped her sunglasses back on the dash. “We sort of ran a stop sign.”

Sophie froze, clutching her insurance card. “We did what?”

“If I’d told you, you would have stopped,” Amy said reasonably.  “I was panning.”

“Terrific.” Sophie took a deep breath as the Pillar showed up at her window. She got out, making him step back as she did so.

“That was extremely reckless driving, young lady.” The Pillar drew himself up to his full, blue-suited, stern-jawed height which, since Sophie met him eye-to-eye, was about five-seven.

“You were speeding. Do you have insurance?” His hands were shaking, Sophie noticed, but before she could ask if he was all right, Amy stuck her head out Sophie’s window.

“No way in hell were we speeding. We weren’t going any faster than five miles an hour, tops. This is your fault, Grandpa.”

“Shut up, Amy,” Sophie said, thrusting the insurance card at her. “Copy that information down and do not say anything else.” Then she turned back to the Pillar, determined to escape without giving him anything. “I’m so sorry,” she said to him, flashing her family’s stock-in-trade gotta-love-me-give-me-what-I-want smile.

The Pillar stopped glaring at Amy and turned back to Sophie.

Amy said, “Hey—” but shut up when Sophie held up one finger behind her back. One: Make the mark smile.

“Someday my sister’s brain will catch up with her mouth,” Sophie said, “but until then I apologize for her.” She deepened her smile and looked at the Pillar through her lashes.

“Well, I don’t know,” the Pillar said, and his scowl faded a little.

Sophie held up two fingers behind her back. Two: Get the mark to agree with you. “We’re new here so we don’t know the roads,” Sophie went on. “You know how confusing it can be driving in a new place.”

“Well, yes,” the Pillar said. “But that doesn’t—”

Three: Make the mark feel superior. “Of course, you’re probably never confused.” Sophie smiled up at him, no mean trick since they were the same height. She widened her eyes. “I bet you always know where you’re going.”

“Well, of course,” the Pillar said, relaxing now. “However—”

“And now we’ve stopped you in the middle of all this heat,” Sophie went on, apology thick in her voice. She nodded to the Pillar’s trembling hands. “And we’ve upset you.”

Four: Give the mark something. “We really should let you go on. Standing here waiting for the police isn’t going to do any of us any good.” She smiled again at the Pillar, who began to smile back, looking a little confused.

“Well, that’s true,” he said. “It could be hours before Wes or Duane comes by.”

Great. He knew the cops by their first names. Sophie kept her smile in place. Five: Get what you want and get out. “Amy, do you have the insurance information?”

The Pillar looked past her to Amy, and his face darkened.  “What is that?”

Sophie turned around to see Amy checking the camera.

“That’s a video camera,” the Pillar said, sputtering. “What are you doing?”

“Making a movie, obviously.” Amy looked at him with patent scorn. “And I’m telling you, you better have insurance because this is a classic car and it’s not gonna be cheap to restore.”

The Pillar flushed in fury, and Sophie thought, Oh, thanks, Ame. She moved to block Amy and sidetrack any debate over the classic status of an ’86 Civic. “So we’ll just—”

“This is outrageous.” The Pillar expanded as he blustered.

“You ran a stop sign. My wife is very upset. What kind of movie are you making? You can’t do that here.”

“Your wife?” Sophie abandoned the con for the time being and looked past him to see a faded-blonde woman leaning against the back fender of the other car, her chubby face a pasty white. “What are you doing over here if she looks like that?” Sophie turned her back on him and pointed her finger
at Amy. “Do not talk to this man. Hand him the information, roll up that window, get the car off the road, and wait for me.”

“Your lip’s bleeding,” Amy said, and handed her a Kleenex.

Sophie took it and blotted her lip as she walked around the still-protesting Pillar and crossed the road. The poor woman had made her way to the Caddy’s passenger door, and Sophie bent to look in her eyes. “Are you hurt?”

“Oh.” The woman seemed dazed, her pale blue eyes blinking up at Sophie in the sun as she plucked at the collar of her Pepto-Bismol pink suit, but her pupils looked all right. And there wasn’t a hair on her head out of place, although that might have been the hairspray.

Sophie took her arm anyway. “You’d better sit down.” She opened the passenger door, and the woman got in obediently.

“Put your head between your knees.” Sophie blotted her lip again. “Take some deep breaths.”

The woman put her forehead on her plump knees, which she kept clamped together, and began to gasp.

“Not that deep,” Sophie said, before she hyperventilated.

“If you spread your knees apart, you can get your head lower.”

“Virginia, what are you doing?”

Virginia straightened with a jerk, and Sophie turned on the Pillar in exasperation. “She’s trying to get some blood back to her head.” If I was married to you, I’d keep my knees together, too.

“Did my sister give you the insurance information?” she asked, and then saw the paper trembling in his hand. “Fine. I understand that you want to get your wife home, and that’s no problem for us.” He started to protest, and she added, “We’ll be at the Whipple farm until Sunday. After that we’ll be back in Cincinnati.”

“Your insurance agent—” the Pillar began, but this time his wife interrupted him.

“Are you friends of Clea Whipple’s?” Virginia said from the front seat, her color returning. “Is she home again? Oh, Stephen, did you hear that? We haven’t seen Clea for over twenty years. Except in the movies, of course.”

Movie, Sophie wanted to say, since Clea had only made one, but the last thing she wanted was more conversation with the Pillars. She began to back away. “She’s home, but only until Sunday. Now, please, don’t let me keep you.”

“Well, that’s so exciting.” Virginia trilled. “Is she still married to that handsome Zane Black? We watch him every night on the news.” Sophie turned to make her escape, and Virginia raised her voice to compensate. “You tell her Virginia Garvey said hi!”

“They’ve got movie equipment,” Stephen bellowed. “And they’re filming on public land which is clearly illegal.”

“A movie?” Virginia’s face lit up and her voice rose to a shout. “Oh, wait, tell me—”

Sophie reached the other side of the road, pretending not to hear. Ahead of her, a torn and faded campaign poster fluttered on a tree: Tucker for Mayor: More of the Same.

“Dear God, I hope not,” she said under her breath. She got in the car and maneuvered it back on the road while Stephen

Garvey glared at her and Virginia fluttered her hand. The front fender scraped against the tire as she searched for the lane to the farm, touching her lip with the Kleenex to see if the bleeding had stopped.

“What a butthead that guy was,” Amy said. “Are you all right?”

“No.” Sophie looked for the Whipple mailbox. “I’ve got a smashed car, a moving violation, a sister who screws up my getaway, and a dead white male telling the whole damn town we’re making a movie.” She slowed as the bridge loomed ahead, and scowled over the steering wheel. “And we must have
missed the turnoff for the farm because we’re almost in town now.”

“No, there’s the mailbox.” Amy pointed with her broken sunglasses. “Turn left.”

Sophie turned down the farm lane Clea had promised them was a good half-mile long. “This place gives me the creeps. . . .”

Her voice trailed off as the dusty yard of a dilapidated farmhouse came into view. “Didn’t Clea say the farm house was a long way off the road?”

“Maybe they moved the road,” Amy said as they pulled up in front of the house. “It’s been twenty-four years since she’s been back.” She peered through the windshield at the farmhouse.

“Understandably.”

Sophie tried to be fair as she turned off the ignition. The paint was peeling in dingy white strips from the side of the clapboards, and the gutter hung loose across the front of the peaked roof, but the house wasn’t a complete loss. There was a wide front porch across the entire front with a swing.

And there was . . .

Sophie looked around the dusty, barren yard. Nope, the porch was about it. “Great place to film. Yeah, we can trust Clea. I smell trouble.”

Amy sniffed the air. “That’s dead fish. Must be the river.”

She opened her car door as the screen door banged, and Clea Whipple came out onto her porch, her lush body straining at her bright blue sundress, her white-blonde hair almost incandescent in the sun. She shaded her cameo- perfect face with her hand and called, “You’re late.”

“And hello to you, too,” Sophie said, and got out of the car to unload their supplies, starting with their cooler. It was full of Dempsey life essentials— lemonade and Dove Bars—and she was in need of immediate essential comfort.

Amy went toward the house with the camera. “Isn’t this going to be wonderful?”

Sophie looked at Clea, the most self-absorbed woman in the universe, staring blankly back at her from the derelict front porch. “Oh, yeah,” she said as she hauled the cooler out of the car.

Nothing but good times ahead.

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1. Jennifer Crusie

Chapter 1

Sydney Zamora decided she’d had enough. She tossed her crumpled napkin on the table and pushed her chair back as her confused date watched in disbelief. “Where . . .” he stammered. “Where are you going?”

“Home.” She slipped into her coat and flashed a tight, angry smile.

“Peace.”

She was furious at him, at herself, at the world, really, but Quo was no place to make a scene. It was the über hip restaurant of the moment, the kind of New York it spot that had an unlisted phone number and a menu people called “creative.” All the senior editors at Cachet had been raving that the Thai fusion fare was a-maaaaaaaaaazing, hype Sydney was disinclined to believe. It was never about the food at these places. It was about being seen. And that was exactly what she didn’t want now. Beating a hasty retreat through the dimly lit, ridiculously pretentious subterranean diningroom, Sydney flipped up the collar of her trench and donned her plaid newsboy cap, tuggingthe brim down low. With her healthy five- foot- nine- inch frame, bronzed skin, and chocolate waves of hair falling just past her shoulders, she stood out like a penny in the snow at these trendy hangouts where most of the women were white, blond, and thinner than Darfur refugees. Her honey- brown eyes flicked about the room, on the lookout for Omnimedia employees. The last thing she needed was for this to get back to the office.

Those catty bitches (male andfemale) gossiped about her enough. She didn’t see any of her colleagues, but Sydney knew nothing guaranteed safety in this stratum of the New York world. If someone on the waitstaff figured where she worked, it was very likely that tonight’s embarrassing debacle would be tomorrow’s “Page Six” headline. On her own, she wasn’t “Page Six”– worthy (thank God), but working for Conrad Drake, Cachet’s celebrated editor in chief, made everyone at the magazine targets by association. It would be his name in boldface, not hers. That was just one of the negative outcomes that could arise from this rash act, and as she hurried toward the exit, a little voice whispered, Go back. But Sydney Zamora rarely took unsolicited advice, not even from her own psyche, so it was a call that went unheeded. Instead, she powered forward.

She had already been pilloried by the New York Post once in her life, and the potential threat of having them publicly humiliate her again only strengthened her resolve. Feeling like the odds were stacked against her, whether this was really the case or just her own interpretation of events, always brought out the fight in her. She was, in her own mind, a crusader, an avenger of justice, a voice for the disenfranchised. A childless, more tastefully dressed Erin Brockovich, if you will. Her biggest regret was that she had not followed in her late father’s footsteps and become a civil rights attorney. It was a regret shared by many because with no class- action suits to fight, Sydney managed to turn everyone— her family, her coworkers, customer service reps at Verizon Wireless— into Goliaths against whom she felt compelled to wage battle.

So there would be no turning back now. Oh, no. If storming out of New York’s trendiest boîte resulted in an embarrassing item on “Page Six,” so be it. To teach Kyle (and every useless man he represented) a lesson, she was willing to martyr herself. She nevertheless made an emergency detour when she saw their waiter standing directly in her path and practically sprinted the last few steps to the staircase as if she were a paparazzi- hounded celebrity trying to make her way out of the Ivy to a waiting SUV.

She still had one last leg to go before she was out of the restaurant and in the clear, but once inside the stairwell, she grabbed the railing and rested against the velvet- covered wall, suddenly overcome with fatigue.

Lately, she had been feeling so drained. Some days she could barely drag herself out of bed before ten. She knew her emotional exhaustion wasn’tabout Kyle or her meaningless, soul- suckingjob. It was about everything.

And nothing.

She grew up believing she’d have it all. A Career with a capital C. A husband. Babies! She’d be the Enjoli woman, bringing home the bacon, fryingit up in a pan, never never letting him forget he was a man! Who would’veguessed the whole thing would turn out to be a scam, a cultural Ponzi scheme that would dupe every middle- class woman of her generation?

FUCK YOU, GLORIA STEINEM!

The only part of The Plan that had remotely worked out was that Sydney had (what some would consider) an enviable Career writing for Cachet, the glossiest of celebrity glossies. It was a soulless pursuit, but Sydney couldn’t complain because it paid well (as most soulless pursuits did). She had always expected, even relished the idea, that she’d have to muscle her way to professional success, while assuming Fate would take care of her love life, but exactly the opposite had happened. The cushy Cachet job had fallen right into her lap through a bizarre confluence of events, and finding Mr. Right was turned into a punishing exercise that had pushed her to the brink of total exhaustion.

This extended fl ing with Kyle was pointless, but that was the point. Now that most of her friends were married and breeding, she needed something someone to do to pass the time. Kyle was a fuck buddy and, as such, not an impediment to her finding a real relationship and a breeder of her own. If, at any time, she met a serious prospect, she would drop Kyle without a second thought.

Trouble was, the guys she liked weren’t husband material, and the men who were repulsed her. And she didn’t subscribe to the “Givehim a chance, he might grow on you” theory of dating either. Within five minutes of meeting a man she could tell if he was dateable or simply doable. Most of them were neither.

Now that her clock was officially ticking, dateable didn’t even cut it anymore. She needed to fi nd a meaningful relationship, a marriageable mate, a genetically healthy provider with motile sperm. It was a complete fucking drag.

She’d been tellingherself she had time, plenty of time. As late as thirty one, marriage and motherhood still seemed as far away as the moon, abstract concepts like IRAs or epidurals that she imagined she’d figure out when the time came. Well, she was thirty- three years old. The future was now. The real kick in the ass was that she had spent her whole life striving to be independent! To not need a man, emotionally or financially, to make her whole. To never give her power away. All that Oprah shit. But if she wanted to have children the traditional way, she did need a man, didn’t she? And soon. Reproductively, she was on orange alert.

That was the sick cosmic joke of it all.

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I am nearly five hundred years old. My skin is flawless, my butt is tight, and my tits don’t need help staying up. Unless you impale me, dismember me, decapitate or drown me, you can’t do me much damage.

I’ve been stabbed, scalded, and stretched on the rack, and I have survived. I’ve been burned, flayed, and shot, and I have survived. I’ve lived through the Thirty Years’ War, the French Revolution, and the Spanish Inquisition. The Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, two world wars, and a couple of scathing movie reviews from the L.A. Times. And two weeks ago, with a little help from my personal assistant and a hunky Beverly Hills cop, I managed to do away with the mother of all evil, leaving me the most powerful vampyre in North America. I’m not saying I’m invincible, but I’ve got a pretty good track record when it comes to dealing with danger.

So why was I so terrified to drive over the hill to Studio City to have Christmas Eve dinner with the parents of a man I barely know?

He looks like a cross between Springsteen and the model they use in all those paintings of Christ. Melt-in-your-mouth attractive.

Water-in-the-desert attractive. Good-looking enough to get me going just staring at him, and that doesn’t happen very often, believe me. The last time was Nureyev, in the sixties. It’s the cheekbones. I like the ones you can cut paper on.

His name is Peter King, and he’s a detective with the Beverly Hills Police. Early forties. Divorced. We met two weeks ago when he was assigned by his Captain to investigate the murders of my business partner, three of my stars, and an employee of my film company, Anticipation Studios. Yes, five murders, all connected to me. I am Ovsanna Moore, writer, producer, and star of seventeen blockbuster horror films, several less than successful ones, and a few that went straight to DVD. In the film business, I’m known as a Scream Queen. In my private life—my very private life—I’m known as
Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian, Chatelaine of the Clan Dakhanavar of the First Bloodline. A vampyre.

A fairly powerful vampyre, when you consider my clan includes most of the A-list Hollywood stars, past and present.

Peter King knows what I am. And he’d asked me out just hours after he’d discovered my secret. I found that intriguing. I like a man who’s not put off by an extra set of teeth. I was intrigued enough to accept his invitation.

So there I was, standing in my dressing room on Christmas Eve, throwing clothes on the floor as fast as I could try them on and get them off again. I’d already eliminated a Costume National suit and my Diesel jeans. What should I wear to meet the family of a man I’d already fed on but barely knew? I was so nervous, if I’d had a gag reflex, I’d have been on my knees in front of the toilet.

Meeting his parents, for God’s sake? On Christmas Eve?

I’d just taken my Carolina Herrera smoke suede pants off the hanger when the fowl started honking.

Someone was in my yard.

I rely on a gaggle of geese to sound an alarm. It’s an idea I borrowed from Louis XVI, and I swear it’s more eff ective than my high-tech security system. Like Louis, geese are territorial, and when they’re upset, they’re loud.

This time they were making a hell of a racket.

I let my senses sharpen. I am of the Dakhanavar clan—vampyre elite—with extremely honed sight, smell, and hearing. When I choose to, I can hear conversations taking place half a mile away. I stood still and listened.

I heard the geese.

I heard the koi in the pond. The waterfall hitting the stream.

The neighbor’s cat cleaning herself out on the street. And more fucking geese.

But I couldn’t hear the intruder.

Maybe I had Marcel Marceau in my yard?

I couldn’t smell him, either, which meant he wasn’t human.

Humans give off a distinctive scent specific to their tribe. What I did smell, over the goose shit and honeysuckle, was something pungent and feral.

I dropped the hanger and the pants on the floor and moved through my bedroom into my office. Whoever it was had had to scale the two-foot-wide, twelve-foot-tall stucco wall that surrounds my property—he wasn’t there by accident. I unsheathed my fangs but kept my claws in so I could use the computer to bring up the security cameras trained on the grounds.

I hit the keyboard and my forty-five-inch monitor split into eight screens, giving me a 360-degree view of my property. I could see the guest cottage, the pool, the squash court, the front drive—nothing there save honking fowl. They had spread all over the yard, which they didn’t usually do, and had completely abandoned their resting place by the waterfall. Which was where I finally saw movement: behind the thick bougainvillea on the far side of the stream.

You remember those scenes in Angel where David Boreanaz was standing on one side of the room and suddenly, without being seen, he was somewhere else? That’s what vampyres do. We transport ourselves so quickly that we become momentarily invisible. Something having to do with the speed of light. In the movies we call it “spaceshifting.”

I don’t do it very often; I don’t have the need. My lack of practice was evident in the several seconds it took me to get to my yard. I’ve got to get back in shape.

The smell near the water was overpowering, like burning manure, and I knew for certain what ever was there wasn’t human. Or female. No bitch on earth gives off that kind of stench. I dropped my fangs, let out my claws, and studied the ground as everything took on the glowing clarity of my vampyre vision.

The sound of his claws pushing off the cliff fifteen feet above me brought my head up, just in time to see him hurtling down on me from the waterfall.

I threw out my arms to defl ect him, and my nails sank into his fur. He was some sort of wolf, three times the size of a Grey, with rabid orange eyes and a coat so black that it disappeared against the darkening sky. I could feel it, though. A coarse, grimy undercoat, thick enough to act like armor, and then the outer pelage, as sharp as porcupine quills with razorlike edges. His muzzle was wide and long, overfilled with an extra set of yellow fangs that peeled his lips into a Jack Nicholson rictus and sprayed me with white foam. A Tom Savini wet dream. With foul breath.

I met him in midlaunch, and we went down in the water. He had me pinned beneath him with all four paws. The stream was only inches deep. I’d spent thousands of dollars lining it with broken tourmaline granite. The fucking rocks were making mincemeat of my back. If I’d known I’d be playing Little Red Riding Hood, I’d have bought moss. At least I was nude; having to bleach my own blood out of my suede pants would have left me doubly pissed.

He shifted his weight to his front paws, pressing my shoulders deeper into the rocks, and tried going for my neck with his fangs. I couldn’t throw him off . He must have weighed 250 pounds. I held him back with both hands, my claws slicing through his pelt into his flesh. His muzzle was inches from my face, snarling and slashing from side to side. His breath was rancid, infected, like the stench of a sewer. I couldn’t get close enough to get my mouth on him. Feral saliva dripped like acid in my eyes. I wedged a leg under his belly and gashed it with my claws. I tried again for his bowels, but he
trapped my leg with his hind paw. Blood from his belly poured down on my breasts, pooling between them and sliming down through my legs into the water.

We struggled like that for minutes, holding each other at bay in a thrashing embrace. I was snarling; he was growling; the geese were honking. He was stronger than I was, in that position, anyway, and if I couldn’t do something to get out from under him soon, the only Peter I was going to be spending Christmas with was a guy in a robe with the key to a gate.

In the distance, I heard a siren and realized the silent perimeter alarms had been tripped. The security company I pay an arm and a leg to was sending its armed guards. I wasn’t sure how much help they’d be. If I couldn’t kill this thing, I doubted anyone else could.

The beast heard the siren seconds after I did, just as the car’s flashing lights turned the sky red outside my gates. There was a screech of brakes and voices shouting, and then the thing was off me, racing to the wall, scrabbling up and over, taking the twelve feet like it was a bunny hop. He disappeared into the wilds of Bel Air.

I closed my eyes and retracted my claws. My fangs slipped back inside their sheaths. I wasn’t worried about the security guards finding
me naked; in all the trips they’ve made to the house over the years, they’ve never managed to have the right password with them or the right set of keys. It would probably take them half an hour to get in. By that time, I’d be presentable and apologizing profusely for the false alarm.

So I lay there in the water for a moment, watching my flesh mend itself in the lowering light, and thought about what had just
attacked me.

It was a wolf, all right, but not your North American garden variety. He wasn’t a timber or a Grey. He was a were, and as soon as I’d touched him, I’d known what kind.

Werewolves come in several varieties. You’ve got humans who like using magic or a talisman (most often a wolf pelt) to shape-shift at will. They’re called boxenwolves or hexenwolves. I’ve seen a couple wearing their talismans around their necks, hanging out at the Magic Castle. That’s the landmark mansion on Franklin where you can have dinner and watch magicians entertain. The last time I went, Phyllis Diller was doing jokes about her husband, Fang, and the boxenwolves in the audience were eating it up. But they never let on that’s what they are, and nobody would believe them anyway.

Then there are humans who don’t have any control over their shape-shifting; they’ve been cursed by a devil or a demon, and when the full moon comes up, they’re possessed. The French call them loup-garoux; online they’re beta-wolves. Remember Joan Crawford?

And then there are humans who think they’re wolves and act like wolves and sometimes have the ferocity of wolves without doing any shape-shifting at all: lycanthropes. Like Joe Eszterhas. This werewolf had never been human. He might be able to shift to human shape, but that was where the similarity ended. He wasn’t a boxenwolf or loup-garou or lycanthrope. This beast was a true were.

Werecreatures come in almost as many varieties as vampyres.

They are vampyres, actually, although not purebred. The nogitsone in Japan, werefoxes in China, the boudas—hyena people—in Morocco, apemen in Sumatra, santu sakai in Malaysia. You think about an animal and somewhere on earth there’s probably a werecreature inhabiting that form. Weres are a breed born from the coupling of Lilith—the Night Hag—and an ancient Akhkharu serpent. They’re a vampyre hybrid that can only change into a specific beast shape, and they’re nothing but evil.

Who, I wondered, was this were, and why had he just tried to finish me off?

Related posts:

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3. Un-Nappily In Love- Excerpt

Excerpt:

Prologue

Market Restaurant, Manhattan

Wes Murphy stared down into the huge stainless steel stockpot and watched a single golden bubble pop to the surface of the soup. Time to add the vegetables.

The chaos of preparations for the evening’s dinner service whirled around him, chefs shouting to each other, cackling jokes about what they got up to at the bar after service last night, calling requests for help with one dish or another, but Wes’s corner of the kitchen was quiet.

A little apart from the crowd, as always.

Wes didn’t care. He was finding it hard to care about much, these days.

Thank God for Market, he mused, sweeping a wooden spoon through the simmering broth. Cooking might be all I’ve got left, but at least it’s something I can throw myself into.

A sweet, lightly accented voice floated through his mind.

When you cook, it is chance to draw out from yourself everything you are feeling. Yes? Add it to the food. Stir in a pinch of sadness and a spoonful of fear and what do you think! Something magical happens.

Wes felt one corner of his mouth kick up at the memory of Deidre Nickoloff’s soft, round face. Mrs. N. was the one who taught him to cook, sure, but she’d done more than that. She taught Wes about the kind of person he wanted to become.

He scooped up his diced butternut squash. The perfection of the cuts, each piece uniform and pristine, soothed something inside him. And as he added the squash to the broth, already rich with white wine and shredded chicken, Wes closed his eyes and remembered Mrs. N.’s cooking philosophy.

Shit. He hoped his painful regrets didn’t make the soup taste bitter.

Half an hour later, Wes was checking under the salamander broiler to make sure the crusty bread he’d spread with tangy herbed butter and parmesan cheese came to a nice golden toast color when a determinedly cheerful voice startled him out of his culinary haze.

“Hey, need any help with plating?”

Wes grinned up at the one guy who’d gone out of his way to be friendly since Wes showed up for this externship from the Academy of Culinary Arts.

Jess Wake smiled back, crisp and neat in his black and green server duds. The way he combed his dark auburn hair back before service made the kid seem older, somehow—or maybe that was the familiar ache of loss in his eyes.

Wes knew that look intimately. He’d surprised it on his own face more than once in the last six months.

“You’re a super trooper, man. Thanks.” Wes was extra grateful, considering Jess had been treating the kitchen like a quarantined zone ever since Market’s sous chef, Frankie Boyd, dropped him like a bad habit.

They dipped up the bowls of fragrant, steaming soup in silence, neither of them paying much attention to the kitchen hubbub. It was clearing out, anyway—the guys on the line had a sixth sense about when family meal was nearly ready, and they tended to congregate around the bar out in the dining room, like a pack of hungry wolves circling a lame sheep or something.

When the kitchen was empty, Wes felt some of the tension leave his friend’s slim frame.

“You don’t need to help me take it out to them,” Wes offered, taking pity on the guy. “I got it.”

“No, it’s fine.” Jess had his Brave Little Toaster face on, all straight shoulders and chin up.

Wes shrugged. If Jess wanted to torture himself, it was his prerogative. Not like Wes had a leg to stand on in the Making Healthy Choices department, anyway.

That’s probably why they’d fallen into this friendship, Wes reflected as they loaded the bowls onto two trays. They weren’t that close in age, and their childhoods couldn’t have been more different—but he and Jess were both Love’s suckers.

And they were both pretty good at acting like everything was fine. Wes was impressed with the matter-of-fact way the kid hefted one of the trays and carried it out of the kitchen, head held high and a grim smile on his face.

Wes followed him, ready to jump in and defend Jess if the wolves were ravening harder than usual—as a server, Jess was used to the more sedate, polite responses of restaurant guests to the arrival of food; he might not realize that if he was too slow handing off a bowl of soup to one of Market’s hungry line cooks, he was liable to draw back a bloody stump instead of a hand.

But by the time Wes joined him in passing around the goods, Jess had already emptied his tray and was turning to head back to the kitchen.

“Not going to stay and eat with us, then?”

Sous chef Frankie Boyd, resident Brit punk badass and Breaker of Young, Innocent Hearts, looked up from his ungainly sprawl against the bar. An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips, bobbing as he thinned his lips.

“Not hungry,” Jess replied without looking around, so he didn’t see the expression that flashed over Frankie’s face. Wes did, though, and it was intimate enough, real enough, to make him look down and away, almost embarrassed to have witnessed such a private moment.

For a minute, the only sounds in the dining room were the bang of the kitchen door behind Jess and the noise of Wes’s kitchen comrades sucking down soup. The happy slurping was punctuated by occasional moans of pleasure.

Guess the soup wasn’t too bitter after all. Huh.

And as Wes watched the savory steam curl up from the bowls, he thought again of Mrs. N., her plump cheeks flushed pink with the heat of the ancient stovetop in the tiny, functional kitchen of Heartway House.

Those bad feelings, you put them in the pot and the cooking transforms them into nourishment for the body. And the parts that cannot be transformed, those escape into the air as smoke and mist, gone from the body forever.

Gathering up his empty tray, Wes followed his friend out of the dining room.

Jess looked up, surprised, when he swung open the door. “You’re not having dinner with the crew?”

Wes balanced the tray on an empty corner of counter. “Lost my appetite.”

“Hmm.” Jess’s blue gaze was entirely too sharp as he surveyed Wes. “I know why I don’t want to break bread and shoot the shit with the cooks. What’s up with you?”

Wes tensed the way he’d been taught, under his skin, deep down where it wouldn’t show. He could lie to Jess, easy as breathing. He could say something partially true—always the most convincing sort of story—such as how he didn’t feel totally accepted by the other cooks, how they were suspicious of externs after what happened with the last wacko culinary student to invade their kitchen. He could even give up a real truth, like the master of misdirection he’d been trained to be, and say he was worried about what would happen once his externship was over and he had to leave Market.

But as Wes stood at his station and stared at the closest friend he’d ever managed to keep, he knew he didn’t want to lie to Jess.

Sucking in air heavy with the scents of seared meat and roasting vegetables, Wes said, “I told you before about the woman I left behind at the Academy.”

“One of your professors.” Jess nodded, no judgment showing anywhere on his earnest, young face. “I know you miss her. Hey, at least once the externship is up, you can go back and see her again.”

Wes’s lips twisted. “Yeah. What I didn’t tell you was . . . well. The way I left?” He shook his head, heart thudding hard and achy in his throat. “I can pretty much guarantee she’s not going to want me anywhere near her.”

“What? Why? I thought you had this hot and heavy thing.”

Hot and heavy didn’t really cover it. “We did. And now she hates me.” He laughed, but it hurt, so he stopped. “The worst part is, I can’t even blame her because I did it on purpose. I made her hate me. And then I ditched her.”

Wes crossed his arms over his chest and waited for Jess’s condemnation. After all, what Frankie did to Jess was pretty similar to what Wes had done to Rosemary, now that he thought about it.

Love ’em and leave ’em—easier said than done, he thought wearily. Who’s the Breaker of Young, Innocent Hearts, again?

But all Jess said was, “I think you’d better start at the beginning. The real story, this time, Wes.”

So Wes told him. All of it. And hoped that when he ran out of words, he’d still have a friend.

The worst of it was, Wes knew that if it came right down to it and he had to choose again—between his happiness and protecting Rosemary—he’d make the exact same decision.

Even if it meant hurting both of them in the short run. Because in the long run? She was definitely better off without him.

Sorry, Mrs. N., but there ain’t enough soup in the world to transform all the crap inside me into anything good.

Chapter 1

Six Months Earlier . . .

“I came here instead of Dartmouth specifically to avoid classes like this one. The horror. The humanity! Where did I go wrong?”

Wes shook his head at the plaintive tone. He thought about laughing, but he didn’t want to throw fuel on the fire. Once Nathaniel Goodwin started bitching, it took an act of Congress to get him to stop.

True to form, Nate was undeterred by the lack of response. “No, seriously. I’d rather be in a class on serving techniques or whatever, front-of-the-house waiting tables type stuff,” he said, naming every culinary student’s least favorite learning track. “I’d be all over it. I’d be down. But no.” He shuddered theatrically. “It’s chemistry. My dad always wanted me to be a doctor. Dude, I could be pre-med right now if I wanted to take a bunch of chemistry classes.”

Wes stuck his tongue in his cheek to keep from saying what his dad wanted him to be. Also to keep from popping the snot-nosed kid a good one.

Sometimes it royally sucked to be the oldest guy in every classroom. Most of these kids were here at the Academy of Culinary Arts fresh out of college. Some were even younger. The only school Wes had ever attended regularly was Hard Knocks U, or as his father liked to call it, the School of Experience.

Trust a con man to put a good spin on a life of petty crime and ignorance.

“At least you’re not failing,” Wes said, wincing at the memory of his last exam score. He didn’t know why he couldn’t seem to grasp these concepts; it was as if his brain simply refused to see food as a collection of molecules. “Quit whining, princess. You just have to get through it and ace the final in a few weeks. Then you can ditch this popsicle stand for the bright lights of Atlantic City and your choice externship gig.”

“Externship,” Nathaniel breathed, in tones normally reserved for spiritual revelation. “God, that’s going to rock.”

Wes scowled. “I can’t believe we’re on different rotations. You get to leave in three weeks, you scumbag. I have to wait another six!”

The Academy of Culinary Arts schedule wasn’t structured like an ordinary university; students entered on staggered rotations all through the year. Every student completed two full years of study, eighteen months of academics with six months of externship sandwiched in between, but there was a new crop of graduates and a new batch of incoming newbies every three weeks.

“That’s right,” Nathaniel crowed. “I’ll be working in a real restaurant, learning from the best, while you slave away here writing book reports and stuff. Suck it, bee-yotch!”

“It’s not fair. They ought to schedule it by age—old timers like me should get first dibs, since young’uns like you are barely mature enough to handle doing your own laundry for the first time.”

“Half a year in a top restaurant,” Nathaniel mused, focusing in on the fun part of the conversation with his usual laser precision. “Hot damn, I’m glad I’m gonna be a chef. This beats med school all to hell.”

“Come to think of it, the externship’s not all that different from a med student’s residency, except without the hospital. Unless you slice off a finger or something, which I wouldn’t be surprised if you did. Klutz.”

“Speaking of which, have you heard back from any of the restaurants you applied to?”

Externship slots at top restaurants were few and therefore were fiercely coveted. The Ivy Leaguers had nothing on culinary school kids when it came to fighting and backstabbing for a chance to scrub floors in the kitchens of the greats. Wes had thrown his hat in the ring for Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, and Devon Sparks.

“Nothing yet.” Wes shrugged, tried to act casual. “I’m not worried, something will come through. Maybe not my top choices, but I’d be happy anywhere in New York City, really.”

“Dude, you should totally apply in A.C.! Then we could hang after dinner service.”

Wes suppressed a wince. Nate was a nice enough kid, but, unlike him, Wes had more on his mind than having a good time and pissing off his old man.

That second part was more in the nature of a perk, as far as Wes was concerned. Mostly, he wanted a real life as a real chef, and he was willing to do whatever it took to get there.

Including Food Chemistry 101. The bane of his existence.

“What’s up, bitches?”

Nathaniel’s face lit up like he just got parole. “Hey, Sloane’s here!”

The lanky brunette rolled her eyes and slid onto the stool next to Nathaniel. She immediately started giving him a hard time, which he grinned at and ate up like she was doing dirty talk or something.

Wes tolerated their schoolyardish brand of flirtation for about half a minute before he was forced to tune it out in self-defense.

“Hey, did either of you ladies hear anything about the new prof?” she was asking.

Wes and Nate exchanged clueless looks. “What happened to Prentiss?”

“Gone,” Sloane said. “Some kind of medical emergency or something.”

“Wow.” Wes blinked. The implications swirled around his head. “Who the hell did they find to replace him on such short notice?”

“Our illustrious president didn’t have time to search around much, that’s for sure,” Sloane said. “God only knows who we’re going to end up with this late in the term. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Todd the Janitor up there talking about carbohydrates and lipids.”

“Awesome,” said Nate. “Bet Todd won’t give us any homework.”

Wes hooked his long legs around the bottom rung of his stool and frowned. He was already not doing so great in this class—would a new instructor make his life harder or easier?

Wes wasn’t used to getting bad grades at the Academy. He worked hard, he excelled, he went above and beyond. He was at the top of his rotation.

Food Chem might change that. If he didn’t bring up his grades in this class, he was looking at the number two slot, which could affect whether or not he got one of his top choices for the externship.

It was the subject, he mused. Food Chemistry . . . such a cold, distant way to look at something as vibrant and full of life as the magic that happened in a kitchen.

He shrugged to himself. Didn’t seem likely that a new instructor was going to make much of a difference, one way or the other. Wes would just have to work that much harder.

He leaned his elbows on the high table to watch the rest of the students trickle in, yawning and slouching. Food Chem wasn’t held in the lecture hall, with its auditorium seating and cooking demo capabilities, nor was it in one of the class kitchens lined with cook tops and ovens, sinks and racks and counter space.

It was just a room, with windows along one wall that looked out over the tranquil lawn rolling down from the academy’s front doors. Four long metal tables were set up facing an honest-to-God chalkboard. It was like being back in high school.

What Wes could remember of his sporadic public school attendance, anyway. Which wasn’t much.

He and Pops hadn’t really stayed in one place long enough to formulate what you might call good study habits.

Wes frowned, thinking about his dad. He tried to calculate how long it had been since he’d heard from the old man—at least a year. Which meant it wouldn’t be too much longer before Pops popped up again to try and pull Wes back into the life with a well planned investment fraud or a watertight piece of identity theft. He sighed. Or maybe just a request for a little ready cash to tide him over until the next big score.

The past few years, their interactions were a lot closer to loan applicant and bank officer than father and son.

It was always feast or famine with Pops and money. The man was damn good at swindling it out of people—but holding onto it? Not so much.

The classroom door opened, jarring Wes from his thoughts, and admitting a young woman Wes didn’t recognize. He frowned. Most of the students in his section had been in overlapping rotations together, through the thicks and thins of the grueling culinary arts program, for the past eight months. They’d wrestled with pasta dough together, learned basic hygiene and kitchen safety together, broken down flocks of chicken and fabricated countless fish and brewed up gallons of stock together.

He knew most of their secrets, their histories and their hopes, even if none of them knew Wes’s. Gathering potentially useful info like that was an early survival tactic that he’d never quite lost.

But this chick? Was so brand new she practically squeaked.

Or wait. That was her shoes.

Wes stared at her feet, realizing all at once what was so strange and different about her.

She was out of uniform.

The Academy of Culinary Arts had a strict dress code. The place was famously well run and hyper regulated; there were severe consequences for breaking any of the myriad rules and regulations set forth by the Academy’s president. Some of the worst penalties came from code of dress infractions.

Everyone at the Academy wore black pants, a white chef’s jacket, and regulation black leather kitchen clogs. Every single person, from the chef instructors to the students on up to President Cornell. No exceptions.

Except, apparently, New Girl.

Who was clad in what looked like regulation geek-wear. Baggy khakis that made her appear even shorter than she was, topped with a beige t-shirt featuring . . .Wes’s feet slipped off the rung of his stool.

Whoa. Is that a freaking Wookie?

And on her feet, squeaking against the sterile tile floor with a noise like she was wearing Styrofoam panties, were black Converse sneakers.

Wes stared in silence. In fact, the whole classroom went dead quiet, as one by one, the sleepy culinary students registered the stranger in their midst.

New Girl didn’t appear to notice, at first. Clutching a stack of notepads and papers to her chest, she shuffled quickly, head down and shoulders hunched, up to the front of the classroom. But instead of taking a seat at one of the student tables, she kept going.

Wes watched, fascinated by this tiny stick figure of a person, all jerky movements and shiny blond hair twisted into two messy braids down her back.

Until she reached the podium next to the chalkboard, where she paused, appeared to take a deep breath in, and turned to face the class.

And Wes got his first good look at her face.

Wide-set, blue-gray eyes. Her bottom lip was plumper than the top, giving her a permanent pout. And her nose . . . damn it. Wes had to swallow hard. Her nose was interesting rather than perfect, and it was enough to take her face from merely pretty to knockout striking.

Crap. She looked like the beautiful starlet they cast to play the smart girl; the one who transforms by the end into the gorgeous woman she always was, with the help of contact lenses and pants that fit.

And obviously, she was the newest addition to the teaching staff.

Wes stared. Food Chem had just became his favorite class.

“Oh,” she said, her wide eyes going even wider at the sight of the class sitting there, silently watching. It was as if she was surprised to see them. “Um. Hello. My name is Dr. Rosemary Wilkins.”

She paused, glanced at the chalkboard.

Wes knit his brows. Surely she wouldn’t . . . okay, maybe she would.

Dr. Rosemary Wilkins stepped to the board, grabbed a piece of chalk, and wrote her name in careful, looping script.

Dusting off her hands, she turned back to the class and continued. “I have a bachelor’s degree in Organic Chemistry from Yale, a PhD in Physical and Analytical Chemistry from the University of Virginia, and a PhD in Biological Chemistry from Bryn Mawr. I’m here at the academy to study food. By which I mean, of course, the chemical processes and interactions between ingredients under controlled conditions. The ACA has unparalleled facilities for the kind of research I’m interested in conducting . . . ”

She trailed off, mumbling something down at her notes. Wes was pretty sure he caught the words “wish I were there right now . . .”

Visibly bracing herself, Dr. Hot Stuff’s vague gaze found the class again. “At any rate, your previous professor had to leave unexpectedly, so I’m stepping in. To teach you. Somewhat . . . unexpectedly, as I said before.” She cleared her throat, eyes darting left and right. “So. What do you want to know?”

Wes looked around the room. He could practically hear the crickets chirping.

A wash of red suffused her cheeks, but she pressed onward. “I mean, here you are. At one of the premier culinary schools in the United States. From that, I infer that you all want to make good food. Don’t you want to know the reasons behind what works and what doesn’t? Unless . . .” She paused, looking uncertain. “Oh dear. You don’t think of cooking as a creative endeavor, as ‘art,’ do you?”

Wes propped his head on his hand and watched her wring her hands. He couldn’t understand why the combination of her nervous speech and jerky gestures was hitting him right in the libido.

Out of simple reflex, his brain started cataloguing what he knew about her, sizing her up.

She looked about Wes’s age, maybe even a little younger. She certainly wasn’t older. Which meant she must’ve been in her teens when she got that first degree.

Dude. Prodigy alert.

One of the students, Bess, a plump blonde who’d proven multiple times over the coarse of this class that she was categorically not a prodigy, said haltingly, “Are you really a teacher?”

Wes winced. Well, at least she hadn’t asked if Wilkins was a real doctor.

“No.” Dr. Wilkins looked bewildered at the very idea. “I’m a scientist. I thought I already said . . .at any rate, this may be my first time in front of a class of real live students, but at least you won’t be stuck with me for very long, since this rotation is almost over.”

Another long silence. Wes watched their new teacher shift her weight from side to side, fingers gripping the podium so tightly they went white at the tips.

Wes studied her. He noted the curve of her pink cheek, the quickness of her breath. She was short, he decided, but perfectly proportioned. Her skin was like the porcelain tableware they used at La Culinaire, the academy’s student-staffed restaurant, creamy white and so fine it was almost translucent.

Not that Wes was any kind of expert on school, but even he could tell that little Miss First Time Teacher was bombing this class in a big, bad way. It was actually sort of painful to watch her try to untangle her tongue enough to get to the actual sharing of information, and his classmates’ deep and abiding silence wasn’t helping.

One good question would probably get her going, Wes thought. But when he sat up and raised his hand, he knew deep down that he didn’t deserve the grateful look she shot him.

As much as he wanted to tell himself he was heroically stepping in to save her from the humiliation brought on by her absent-minded professor routine, he couldn’t.

Because Wes had never been very good at lying to himself. And when he looked into his delectable new teacher’s blue eyes, he saw more than a brilliant, beautiful, painfully awkward woman.

He saw someone who held his grade—his future—in the palm of her little hand.

Shit, Wes, what are you doing? Don’t be that guy.

He dropped his arm hastily back to his side, but it was too late. She’d already zeroed in on him.

“You have a question?” she asked eagerly.

“Yeah,” Wes said, licking his lips. “Sure. What I wanted to know was what you meant by what you said earlier. About not seeing cooking as an art form?”

“Oh!” She looked surprised. “I’m not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate, Mr. . .?”

“Murphy,” Wes supplied, adrenaline buzzing up his spine. It was weirdly intoxicating to have her full attention. “I was interested because it seems like you don’t think there’s anything creative about cooking.”

“Well, wouldn’t you agree that the process you know as cooking is truly little more than the chemical reaction of ingredients to each other, to heat, etc.?”

“Sure, but there’s more to it than that.”

She frowned. “What did you say your name was?”

“Murphy. Wes. And I mean, I couldn’t tell you the chemical reasons behind it, but cooking is more than boring, set formulas playing out in some predictable pattern.”

“Chemistry isn’t boring.” She bristled, clearly stung. “Only an idiot would dismiss the importance of the fundamental building blocks of our world.”

Wes sat up straighter. “Hey, I’m not insulting the field of chemistry! I just meant—there’s more than the ingredients in the kitchen. There’s the chef, too, and that random human element messes up your clean chemical equations every time.”

The annoyance cleared from her expression like storm clouds scudding out over the ocean. “That actually brings up an interesting point . . .”

And she was off and running, spouting statistics about human error in experimentation and the degree to which every experiment was compromised by the simple fact of having been thought up by a human scientist.

After the initial scramble to haul out notebooks and pencils, the only noise from the students was the furious scratch of lead against paper as they struggled to keep up with the volume of information spewing nonstop from Dr. Wilkins.

Wes took notes in the shorthand he’d developed years ago and tried to ignore the eat-shit-and-die glares he was getting from his fellow students. So his question got her onto this topic—it’s not like sitting there in an embarrassed silence was that much more entertaining.

He did take a break occasionally to crack his knuckles and look up at the front of the classroom where Dr. Rosemary Wilkins paced slowly from one end of the blackboard to the other.

Beside him, Nathaniel was scribbling so hard he snapped his pencil point. “Shit! How many days are left in this term, again?”

Wilkins flipped one loose, golden braid over her shoulder and put her hands on her hips, shaping them into sweet curves beneath the concealing cloth of her cargo pants.

“Not enough, man,” Wes said, eyes eating up every motion of her pretty little body. “Not near enough.”

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2. Can’t Stand the Heat Excerpt

From New York Times bestselling author MaryJanice Davidson comes an outrageously funny novel about a highly unconventional FBI agent, a rather odd serial killer, a best friend on the edge, a gorgeous baker. . .and oh, yeah, love.

Sweet and innocent with a twist of girl-next-door, Cadence Jones is not your typical girl and certainly not your typical FBI agent.  Just ask her sisters, Shiro and Adrienne.  (Wait. . .best if you don’t ask Adrienne anything.) But it’s her special “talent” which makes Cadence so valuable to the FBI and it never comes in more handy than when she and her partner, George, get tagged to bring down the Threefer Killer.  A serial killer who inexplicably likes to kill in threes, leave behind inexplicable newspaper clippings, and not one shred of decent forensic evidence, soon starts leaving messages that seem to be just for Cadence and her sisters.  Could it be that this killer knows all about Cadence’s special “talent”?  In the meantime, love blooms in the most unexpected place when Cadence meets her best friend’s gorgeous brother who is in town visiting—and she discovers that he knows her secret too!  When attraction burns hot between them her best friend isn’t thrilled with the romantic development and this time Cadence just might agree!

Suddenly Cadence finds her unbalanced life turned even more upside down as she tries to date a baker who wants to get in her heart and in her bed, dodge a pesky psychiatrist, keep a leash on her sociopath partner, while trying to catch a serial killer who’s now fixated on her.

Some days it’s not even worth getting up in the morning. . .

Are you a Cadence, a Shiro, or an Adrienne?

Take our we-stole-the-idea-from-Cosmo quiz and find out!

And don’t miss the book that inspired the quiz:

ME, MYSELF & WHY? by MaryJanice Davidson.

1) You’ve got a ten dollar gift card to spend at an online bookstore.  You buy:

a)     HOW TO CONQUER THE NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD PUZZLE, by Amy Reynaldo

b)     A Kindle version of THE ART OF WAR

c)      101 USES FOR A DEAD CAT, by Simon Bond

2) You’ve decided to take a cooking class through Community Ed.  You want to learn how to make:

a) Eggs, sunny-side up (the Perkins chain makes it look so easy!)

b) Nigiri, a sensible and delicious snack

c) Deep fried meatballs on a stick

3)  Your favorite super hero is:

a)     Wonder Woman…I love when she twirls around.

b)     The Beast.  Brilliance, and blue fur.  Outstanding.

c)      Ronald McDonald

4) If you were a beautiful and delicate flower, you’d be:

a) a daisy

b) a Japanese quince

c) a marijuana plant

5)  Your ideal pet would be:

a) a kitten

b) a an Akita

c) a banana peel

6)  Your favorite movie is:

a) Miss Congeniality

b) Tora! Tora! Tora!

c) Signal 30 (the incredibly gory driver safety film seen by millions of teenagers)

7)       If you could take a trip anywhere in the world, you’d go to:

a) Amish country—for the wonderful hats!

b) Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

c) Deadwood, SD

8)  Your ideal birthday gift would be:

a) Whatever that person wants to get me…it really is the thought that counts!

b) A dozen shurikens

c) A thousand empty Coke cans, pressed into one gigantic Coke can

9) You would love to name your first born:

a) Pat!  It’s perfect for a boy or a girl.

b) Emperor Hirohito

c) Number Six

10) Your favorite way to exercise is:

a) 30 min. on the Stairmaster…exercise your biggest muscles & it’s so good for you!

b) Gun fu

c) Illegally parking in a tow zone, then beating the shit out of the tow truck driver

11) Your ideal man is:

a) The strong silent type, who is kind and a great cook

b) A woman

c) Whoever’s in the Big Bird costume

12) Your ideal vehicle is:

a) A Toyota Prius, in blue ribbon metallic…blue is a very soothing color!

b) My own two feet…dependence upon machines denotes weakness

c) Robert Downey Jr.

Time to add up your score!

Give yourself five points for every A, ten for every B, and seventy-two for every C.

If your score is between 5 and 60, you are a Cadence.

Cadence: You love puzzles almost as much as holding doors open for the elderly, giving your seat on a bus, & making salads for potluck dinners. You are polite & almost pathologically cheerful.  You are unable to see the bad in anyone.  Ever.  At any time.

If your score is between 60 and 120, you are a Shiro.

Shiro: You thrive on physical and mental challenges.  You’ve held two black belts since you were ten.  You wouldn’t make a salad for a pot luck dinner if someone stuck a gun in your ear.  You would, however, disarm them.  A lot.

If your score is 72 or over, God help you, you are an Adrienne.

Adrienne: You are batshit crazy.  That’s all there is to it.  We’re very sorry.

To learn more about Cadence, Shiro or Adrienne, figure out the adult beverage that matches your character or to learn more about the book ME, MYSELF & WHY, please visit http://us.macmillan.com/memyselfandwhy .

Excerpt:

Author’s Note

In the real world, the FBI tends to screen out mentally dis­turbed applicants (at least, that’s their official stance). Also, there aren’t nearly as many serial killers out there as the mov­ies (and perhaps this book) would have you believe.

Also, the psychiatric community, as well as its bible, the Di­agnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV (aka the DSMMD-IV—nothing like a catchy, yet puzzling, acronym), has reclassified multiple personality disorder as dissociative identity disorder. I use the former wording for its familiarity to most readers.

A few things in this book remain true, however. Grown women do occasionally lick mirrors to turn on their partners, partners who work together can begin to resemble each other, rushed federal agents park government-issue sedans on public sidewalks, baking is lucrative, and it’s possible to wake up on a Monday morning with no memory of Sunday night.

So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Prologue:

First comes the blood
And then comes the
First comes the blood
And then comes the
Screams, then comes the screams,
then comes the screams, and
The wheels on the bus go round and round,
Round and round,
It’s so loud.
I just want to sleep, and the screams come around,
Alllll the daaaaay looooooong.
And I just want to leave, and disappear,
Disappear
Disappear
I just want to leave
And third comes the geese, alllll daaay loooong.
Are the geese really third, did they come third,
Really come third,
Or were they fi rst?
I just want to leave, and disappear,
Alllllll geeeeeeese loooooong.
The screams won’t fi nd me, round and round,
Never will, round and round,
No they won’t they never will,
Say goooood- byyyyyye.

[Chapter One]

The lilting strains of thrash metal crashed through my skull and I sat bolt upright in bed, clutching my ears. Someone—probably my psycho sister—had set my alarm to WROX and cranked it. It was a lot like being awakened on an airport runway by an approaching DC-10.

I clawed for the snooze button, missed, swiped again, knocked the radio to the carpet, slithered off the bed, fell on top of the snooze button, and mercifully, the Sweet Jerkoffs’ new release, Raining Hell on Your Stupid Face, stopped.

Don’t ask me how I knew the song and the band. I won’t tell.

“Too early,” came a sonorous voice from the bed above.  What the—? “Sleep more.”

I cautiously peeked over the edge of the bed. A strange, nude man was tangled up in my Laura Ashley sheets. His long dark hair covered half his face and fluttered as he resumed snoring. He had a tattoo of Donald Duck performing a sexual act on Daisy; it was almost four inches across!

And—what the—?—I was naked, too.

Over his slurred protests (he smelled like he’d fallen into a tequila vat on the way to my apartment), I pulled him out of bed as efficiently and politely as I could. I found his jeans under the bed, his shirt hanging over my bedside lamp, his boxer briefs on top of the heating vent, one of his shoes in the bathroom, and the other in my kitchen sink. It was tough work getting him dressed while not looking at his penis, but I managed.

Don’t ask me how; I won’t tell.

After the stranger was gone, I set about cleaning up the empty tequila bottles, the gnawed lemon slices (one was nestled beside my toothbrush like a bedraggled yellow comma), the spilled salt shakers (my moo cow shaker! in the toilet! darn it all!), and something that looked like a small purple whale.

I was studying it, hoping it wasn’t what I knew it was, when it started to buzz in my hand and I dropped it. What was that doing in the fridge?

Never mind. Never mind. I—I had to get to work. Mustn’t be late! Mustn’t be late!

I kicked the vibrator across the kitchen floor until it was close to the garbage, then darted into the bathroom. I took a quick shower, dried at light speed (my blond hair looked all right, but my eyes were bloodshot—what had my sister been—never mind, never mind), and dressed in my best conservative navy suit.

Then I grabbed a breakfast Hot Pocket (ham ’n’cheese) and headed out the front door. I had a splitting headache, but some iced coffee ought to fix that nicely . . . along with about ten Advils. No time for makeup, but I twisted my hair up into a large barrette.

“Morning, Ms. Jones,” Ben, the doorman, said on my way out. “Late night, huh?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, as my last memory was of walking down Lake Street at 5:30 p.m. the day before (a peek at the newspaper assured me of the date), but nodded and waved my Hot Pocket at him.

It took ten minutes to find my Mitsubishi Eclipse—I was thankful it hadn’t been towed again, intruding crookedly on the sidewalk as it was— and another twenty-five to drive (a bit more quickly than usual) to BOFFO headquarters, located on Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis. It looked like an office building, maybe the corporate headquarters for Target or one of those financial-adviser firms that did so well until 2008. But this was no office.

Well, it was in that there were printers and desks and things, but it was actually a branch of the FBI, the Bureau of False Flag Ops.

After I parked, I took the elevator to the correct floor, slid my key card through the slot, waited for the retinal scan, then popped in. Five minutes early!

Victory was mine.

As always, I was greeted by Opus, the custodian for my floor.

“Hi . . . Cadence.”

“Hi, big guy. Have a nice night?”

Opus gave the question careful thought before answering.

“Yes.” Opus didn’t understand the concept of small talk—he had savant syndrome (never, never use the phrase “idiot savant”; soooo twentieth century!)—but he could do incredible things with numbers, even if he couldn’t write out a grocery list. He was a shambling bear of a man—well over six feet tall, with shaggy brown hair, bushy eyebrows, mud- colored eyes, and thick forearms. His two- piece brown uniform made him look not unlike a grizzly bear. With a mop.

I’ll admit, I had a soft spot for the man. I’d had to defend him from occasional taunts from some of my less sensitive co-workers, “rain man” being a popular insult.

It was almost funny that anybody who worked for BOFFO would have the nerve to insult anyone else who worked for BOFFO. After all, we all had—

“Cadence!” George Pinkman was actually dancing from one foot to the other. “I got the new Halo! You should come over and help me blow shit up.”

“Some other time,” I replied sweetly. George gave me the creeps. A textbook sociopath, he didn’t think anything was real except the world of violent video games. Why BOFFO needed him I would never understand, but I was certainly in no position to complain or judge. I mean, jeepers! I was a federal cop, not King Solomon. “But thanks.”

“Maybe your sister, then.”

I shivered and moved past him to my desk. He really was crazy. Well, sure. He had a BOFFO ID card, didn’t he? And he’d fooled a lot of people with those big green eyes, aquiline nose, and firm jaw. His eyebrows were slashing commas across his forehead, and although he had a slim build, he
held no fewer than three black belts. He often dressed and talked effeminately to provoke the local rednecks. Then he’d lure them out into the parking lot and break various bones.

All in the name of self- defense, of course, while sporting one of his huge collection of incredibly garish and tasteless neckties.

The one he wore now featured a single cartoon puppy in a dead- Christ pose, against a background of rainbows.

I scanned the morning faxes, checked arrest reports, did some work on the computer, and heated up my Hot Pocket, which I gobbled in six bites (so hungry!). I got a Frappuccino from the vending machine, balanced it on my Hello Kitty mouse pad, and began gulping it with a few Advils. This would,
I hoped, take care of my hangover.

“Cadence Jones!”

I swung around in my chair, nearly spilling my drink. My supervisor, Michaela, was framed in the doorway of Da Pitt (where all her field agents congregated to fi ght crime and work on their Secret Santa drawings). She was a fifty-something woman with silver, straight chin-length hair and amazing green eyes. Pure green, not hazel. Like leaves! Hair the color of precious metal, eyes the color of wet leaves—she’d have been gorgeous if she hadn’t been so scarily efficient and surrounded by cubicles and printers and mail carts. And today, as usual, she was dressed in Ann Taylor.

I squashed the urge to shake the ringing out of my ears—boss lady had the volume and pitch of a steamer whistle.

“Weren’t we going to work on our inside voice?”

“Debriefing! Thirty minutes!”

“I know, I saw the e-mail.” I pointed at my computer screen.

“But thanks for assuming I hadn’t learned to read in the first grade.”

“Leave the mouth at your desk!” Thankfully, she vanished through another doorway.

Now how was I supposed to do that? Physically, it was impossible.

Figuratively, it didn’t make any sense, since my mouth was essentially what made me valuable to BOFFO. Maybe Michaela was coming off an odd night, too.  George shoved, hard, and his chair shot over to my desk.

“It’s Miller time!” he chortled, pounding his fists on his thighs.

It was a bad joke, of course. Carrie Miller, who had poisoned four of her five children in seven years (Why did she let the oldest live? What was it about the others? Why why why did she) was being remanded for trial this morning; George and I were to babysit her until the local cops came. It was essentially some last- minute paperwork before transfer. Strictly custodial. Mornings like this reminded me that for fearless minions of the federal government, an awful lot of what we did was cleanup. For which we received full medical and dental, so it wasn’t all bad.

Connie Miller creeped me out as much as George did, but for entirely different reasons. Call me old-fashioned, but it was against the laws of nature when moms killed their kids.

And Munchausen by proxy? Getting off on the attention you got when your kids got sick (by your own hand) and died?

Weird. Repulsive. Horrifying. I was super glad my sister had helped make the collar; there was no way I could have taken her on my own.

It had become a matter for BOFFO when Miller moved from California to Minnesota. George and my sister had managed to track and nail her. Now the only thing left for BOFFO was routine paperwork, and putting the dead babies out of our minds. Two of the babies she had killed she’d conceived
only after spending a great deal of time and money on fertility treatments.

Baffling.

We moved through various secure areas, slipping key cards through scanner after scanner. There were very few security guards at BOFFO: too many of us were paranoid and would begin acting like inmates. (Some of us, I suspected, had been in the past.) So what ever security could be automated, was.

Connie Miller was sitting quietly in an interrogation room, dressed in a lime jumpsuit with BOFFO printed in black letters on the back and sleeves. She was handcuffed in front, as she was deemed docile, cooperative, and even oddly friendly, not to mention in her early forties and overweight.

“Ms. Miller!” George called. “Ready for your day in court?”

“I can’t wait,” she replied, twinkling up at George. Her blue eyes (almost, I hated to admit, the exact same shade as mine) were wide and practically glowing. “The jury will believe me, once I explain everything.”

“Don’t forget to mention how you used peach puree to cover up the acidic taste of the poison,” George suggested amiably.

He yawned and scrubbed his face with his palms; he’d been up until the wee hours playing computer games, no doubt. “The jury will eat it up. Get it? Eat it up? Heh. You do realize your poor dead babies are going to be waiting for you in hell, right?”

I resisted the urge to kick him in the ankle. For one thing, George was an atheist. Rather, he did believe in God, and he believed he was that God. For another, he wouldn’t have minded if Miller had killed twenty babies. George, like all sociopaths, lived for fun, passion, and challenges. Morality wasn’t just an alien concept for him, it was utterly unknown.

No, he was just fucking with her. It was cruel, even for someone like her. What ever we were, we were professionals.

I forced a smile, ignoring the throbbing in my temples. “If you could just sign here. And here. And initial here.” It was a little like accepting a package from FedEx. “And sign here.”

Connie obediently scribbled with the soft- felt- tip pen I’d handed her.

George sprawled himself in a chair opposite her and stroked his dead-rainbow-Jesus-dog tie. “Your problem is, you got greedy. One baby, okay. Two?  Prob’ly would’ve worked. But four? And you crossed state lines? And let every hospital have your chart?”

“I can explain everything,” she muttered, her red hair falling into her eyes as she huddled over the paperwork I was handing across the table.

“Tell it to the judge, sweetie.” Like many sociopaths, George was charismatic and could make an insult sound like a flirtation.

He was even leering at her, which would only confuse the poor woman.

It wasn’t the first time I’d questioned Michaela’s judgment in putting a pure sociopath on the team. They were just so darned unpredictable, not to mention unreliable when it came to pulling their weight at the Secret Santa party.

“You can’t talk to me like that,” the killer said primly. “The Lord has blessed me with many babies and many challenges.”

“Challenges!” George hooted.

“Stop it,” I pleaded. What was his point, other than to upset her? She had been caught. The jury would put her away. She’d spend the next thirty years in Shakopee. There was no point to this and it was upsetting the prisoner.

And me.

“Yes, stop it!” she shrieked, and lunged over the table at me.

I stepped away from her and

[Chapter Two]

caught her by the wrist, twisted, ignored her howl, and flipped her away from me.

“Ohhhhhh!” someone chortled. “And Shiro sinks a threepointer right before the buzzer!”

George Pinkman. Of course. “Be quiet,” I snapped. Connie Miller came up for me, clawing, shrieking something about how my children were not safe from the whims of the Lord, how she was the Angel of Death, how she would separate the wheat from the yak-yak-yak. The prattling set my teeth on
edge and made it easy to break her arm at the elbow, just so I could hear something different come out of those sweaty, nonsense- mongering lips.

Foolish woman. I could understand her initial mistake, as Cadence was an idiot who could not defend herself against a paper cut, but once I was there, what was the point of pissing me off?

Perhaps she was fooled by my size. Like many Asian Americans, I was a bit short.

It was hard to talk over Miller’s screams, but I managed.

“You have explaining to do, George Pinkman.”

“What?” Being a bully, he was amazed when things went too far, and did not make the connection between his comments and her reaction. “She’s the psycho, not me.” He laughed, a nasty sound and entirely out of place amid the screams of pain.

A single guard raced into the room, trying to look everywhere at once. He secured Ms. Miller’s hands—this time behind her back—and hauled her away, presumably to the infirmary. I did not especially care where they took her, so long as I did not have to listen to the wailing.

On his way out the door, he turned. “You’re all right, Cadence?”

“That’s not Cadence,” George the everlasting blabbermouth said. “That’s Shiro.”

As always, I was amazed to be confused with my sister. We looked, spoke, and acted nothing alike. Could this guard not see that? He was trained security, one of the few we had! Maybe we needed to go full automation. . . .

Maybe there was something in the nose. . . .

“Special Agent Jones, then,” the guard corrected himself, unruffled.

“I am fine. She was unable to injure me.” What a pity I could not say the same about George. Every time he opened his mouth he injured me. What a terrible man! But I knew perfectly well why Michaela partnered him with me. . . . I was the balance to his checks. It showcased her wisdom and
bureaucratic ruthlessness.

George watched the guard take Miller away. “Yeah, you know there’s gonna be more paperwork, right? I don’t mean a little more, a Post-it more, I mean reams.”

I stifl ed a sigh. Sadly, he was right. Everlasting paperwork, the bane of law enforcement. A thirty-second incident would require three hours of documentation.

“I know.”

“You can do it,” he told me, as if I took orders from any man.

“You’re the one who broke her damn arm. They probably heard the snap all the way down Nicollet Avenue.”

I eyed him and thought about breaking his arm. But more paperwork I did not need. Also, such an action would result in even more sessions with the idiotic Dr. Nessman.

I checked my watch. “We have a debriefing. The paperwork will wait.”

With George trotting at my heels and my identity card flashing through all the right automated checkpoints, we made it to Da Pitt in less than five minutes. The other agents and Michaela were already seated. We took the last two empty chairs.

Almost the entire Minneapolis staff was here—like most federal bureaucracies, we were a small field office that reported to a much larger office in D.C. Sometimes I shuddered to think about the lunatics that must be running around that building.

They probably recruited straight from the Clinton and Bush administrations.

“Thanks for joining us, Cadence,” my supervisor said in the only tone she knew—sarcastic.

“Wrong,” I replied in the tone only I could get away with when speaking with Michaela.

Michaela blinked. “Oh. Sorry, Shiro. Didn’t recognize you right away.”

“Wait till you hear— aagghhh!” George lifted his foot up and cradled it like a baby. Like all sociopaths, he could handle anyone’s pain but his own.

Everyone else around the table looked startled, but no one dared to chastise me for the heel shot.  Like the rest of BOFFO, we ignored his shriek. A day without a sociopath’s agony is a day without sunshine.

“Hey, hi, Shiro, no offense, but do you think Cadence could come back?” Tina McNamara said, indulging in her tic—she was snapping her fingers in a rapid, complicated tattoo. “I’m having a house warming party on the fifth and I was hoping to invite her.” Snap- snap, snappity snap-snap-snap. “It’s always so much more a good time if she comes. Everyone just loves her to death.”

“A . . . party?” I managed not to choke on the word.

“Maybe you could leave her a note. Oh, and tell her to bring a side dish. Maybe that pasta salad she learned off Rachael Ray?”

I loathed Rachael Ray.

“With the chicken and the tomatoes?”

Almost as much as I loathed tomatoes. I eyed Tina with real distaste and

[Chapter Three]

found myself in the briefing room. Which was megaweird, since the last thing I remembered was Connie Miller lunging at me. I sneaked a peek at my watch. Nine minutes, gone. Long gone. And George, for some strange reason, was holding his foot and groaning.

“What?” I asked, assuming someone had been talking to me.

“Oh, good, you’re back,” cute little Tina McNamara said.

She was a teeny brunette with brown eyes and quick hands.

Unbeatable on the firing range (except for my sister) and (so it was said) in the bedroom (except for my other sister), she threw a wonderful party.

“Can you come to my house warming on the fifth?”

“Really?” Ooooh, I loved parties! “I’d love to! Can I bring anything?”

“Rachael fucking Ray’s fucking pasta salad,” George hissed, massaging the top of his foot.

“Jeepers, are you okay?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“If everyone is fi nished,” Michaela said calmly, “perhaps we can get some work done?”

And so the debriefing on the ThreeFer Killer began.

No related posts.

OLIVIA DRAKE is a New York Times bestselling author who lives in Texas. Her novels have won critical acclaim and numerous industry awards including the prestigious RITA. She invites you to visit www.oliviadrake.com.

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Chapter 1

Females were nothing but trouble.

Handing the reins of his mount to a groom, Thane Pallister, the Earl of Mansfield, braced himself for the inevitable scene to come. He’d had plenty of time on the long ride from London to Oxfordshire to contrive an explanation for his uncle about his current predicament with the fairer sex.

Twelve years had passed since Thane had returned to the manor house where he had spent his youth. When he’d left here for good at the age of eighteen, he had come to despise this old pile with every fiber of his being. It had been more a prison than a home to him.

Yet, as he peeled off his riding gloves, he was surprised by a pang of nostalgia. On this unseasonably sunny March day, the place looked so … ordinary.
Neatly manicured boxwoods framed the front of the Elizabethan house. The tall ediface was fashioned of brick and timbers with mullioned windows that reflected the blue sky. As his gaze traveled upward, the steep roof with its myriad chimneys sparked a flash of memory.

A long time ago, he had clambered over those slate tiles while his cousin Edward had cowered by the stairs leading down to the servants’ attic. On a whim, Thane had lowered himself feet-first into one of the chimneys. He must have had some vague notion of bracing himself on the sides and then popping back out to frighten his cousin. Instead, he’d lost his traction, plunged down the dark shaft, and landed in the library, covered from head to toe in soot.

Luckily, it had been summer and no fire had blazed in the grate. But he had startled Uncle Hugo at his reading, and the prank had earned Thane a thrashing with the dreaded willow switch.

Back then, he’d had a knack for getting into trouble. He had been too fidgety to focus on his schoolwork, too keen on escaping the confines of four walls, too ready to commit any act of willfulness in order to break the boredom of routine. Thank God, maturity and military discipline had granted him the ability to control his impulses.
At least most of the time.

Stuffing his leather gloves into the pockets of his greatcoat, he headed up the granite steps. The double oak doors, carved with matching crosses, had once graced the chapel of a monastery. It felt odd to approach the house as a visitor when, as a lad, he had been forbidden use of the front entrance.

A footman in dark green livery answered his knock. Thane didn’t recognize the smooth, impassive features beneath the formal white wig. He wondered what had happened to Sewell, the old butler with the hatchet face, who had borne Thane’s tomfoolery with stoic fortitude.

The footman took in his fine garb at a glance and stepped back to allow him entry. “Welcome to Waverly Park.”

“Is my uncle at home?” Thane asked, stepping into the dim-lit great hall. “Tell him Mansfield has come to call.”

The footman’s blue eyes bugged slightly in recognition, for he would have heard of the master’s renegade nephew. “Yes, my lord. If you’ll be so good as to wait in the antechamber.”

The servant indicated a room to the right, then hastened down the long corridor that led to the back of the house. Apparently, Uncle Hugo still spent his days ensconced in the library. Old habits died hard.

Thane stripped off his greatcoat and tossed it over a chair. After being confined to the saddle since the crack of dawn, he had no intention of sitting like a stodgy squire in a room that had last been decorated during the reign of Queen Anne. He had too much on his mind, and a pressing need to return to London as soon as he was done here.

A feeling of restiveness crept over him. He had sworn never to return to this house. Only a sense of obligation and a summons from his uncle had lured him back. Whatever their differences in the past, he owed Uncle Hugo the courtesy of an explanation. It would have been the act of a coward to do so by letter.

Thane took a measured stroll around the entrance hall. Little had changed here. The oak paneled walls still displayed medieval shields and paintings so darkened with soot and age, it was difficult to discern the subject matter. A suit of armor stood on a dais beneath the curve of the staircase.

He walked closer to the display. There was a dent in the breastplate exactly where he remembered it. A long time ago, he had stood on a stool, plucked off the helmet and stuck it on his head, and then chased Edward around the hall. Unfortunately, the narrow eye slits had impaired Thane’s vision, and he’d crashed into the suit of armor, knocking it down. The deafening clatter had brought the entire household at a run.

A flicker of humor quirked Thane’s mouth. How well he recalled tearing around here like a demon on the rare occasions when his uncle was away from home. It had been sheer joy to slide in his stockinged feet on the marble floor. He had thrived on the danger of being caught. To sit placidly reading had never held any interest to him.

At last the servant returned with the news that the master would see him in the library. Thane headed down the long passageway, his footsteps sharp and decisive. He wanted this interview over with and done, like a dose of bitter medicine that must be swallowed.

Reaching the end of the corridor, he turned left and entered a spacious chamber with orderly rows of leather-bound books filling the floor-to-ceiling shelves. A fire hissed on the hearth. Beside it, his uncle sat in a nut-brown wing chair, his feet propped on a fringed stool and crossed at the ankles.

The shrunken quality to him caught Thane by surprise. The years had not been kind to the Honorable Hugo Pallister, younger twin brother of Thane’s late father. The familiar gray wig sat on Hugo’s head, for he held stubbornly to the fashion of his youth. Deep grooves flanked his downturned mouth, giving him a perpetual sour frown.

He looked up from the book in his lap as Thane approached. No smile of greeting graced his thin lips, nor had Thane expected one. Those pale blue eyes, underscored by baggy skin, had a sunken look, although they were as sharply observant as ever.

If he noticed the disfiguring scar from the saber cut on Thane’s cheek, he gave no indication. Thane didn’t doubt his uncle still harbored resentment at being foisted with the care of his young nephew upon the death of Thane’s parents all those years ago.

Some things never changed.

Thane inclined his head in a slight bow. “Hello, Uncle. It’s been quite a long while since last we met.”

“Indeed.” Hugo clapped the book shut and set it aside. “And whose fault is that? I should not have been obliged to summon you here. You have been back in England for a month now, yet you did not deign to call upon me at once.”

“Five weeks,” Thane corrected. “I returned from Belgium in the middle of February.” And a bitterly cold and uncomfortable journey it had been, burdened as he was with a petulant female in tow.

His uncle waved a gnarled hand. “All the more reason to chastise you. Now, fetch me a whiskey. And I suppose you’ll want refreshment yourself.”

Clenching his jaw, Thane went to the side table and poured two glasses from the decanter. There was a grudging tone to his uncle’s voice, but that was only to be expected. Hugo was a pinchpenny who didn’t part easily with his favorite Scotch malt.

Thane delivered the drink, then took up a stance by the fire, resting his forearm on the oak mantelpiece. He had no wish to turn this into a social visit, yet the politeness drilled into him by a long-ago governess induced him to say, “You’re looking well, Uncle. How have you been?”

“I suffer from gout and rheumatism, as you’d know if ever you’d bothered to send me a note of inquiry. All these years, and nary a word from you. Why, I never had even a notion of where you were garrisoned.”

Surely, Hugo hadn’t expected him to write as if they were loving relatives. The thought startled Thane for a moment before he rejected it as ludicrous.

He took a sip, letting the whiskey burn down his throat. His uncle still wielded complaints like a broadsword. He’d had no real interest in hearing from the nephew who had been a thorn in his side. If Hugo truly had wanted to keep in touch, he could have tracked Thane down through the Home Office.

He’d certainly had no trouble nosing out the news of Thane’s return – and the circumstances surrounding it.

“Do forgive me,” Thane said with a touch of irony. “But I was busy serving the King.”

“It is not the role of a peer to fight wars. You shirked your duties by running off to follow the drum. The proper place for a man of your rank is here in this country, watching over your estates and taking your rightful seat in Parliament.”

The military had been a hard life, surviving cold and mud and limited supplies, enduring the fall of comrades on the battlefield, yet Thane had no regrets. To have chosen the safe, boring existence would have been anathema to his temperament. “I didn’t come today to quarrel about the past. Rather, I felt you deserved an explanation in regard to my ward.”

“Indeed I do. Your behavior has been a disgrace.” Hugo slapped his palm on the arm of the chair. “As head of this family, I must chastise you for harboring an innocent young lady in your household. Have you no sense of decency at all?”

In spite of his resolve to stay calm, Thane felt a hot jab of anger. Since reaching his majority, he was now the head of the family, not his uncle. And after years abroad as the commander of a cavalry brigade, he didn’t appreciate being dressed down like a lowly recruit. “I can assure you, there’s been no hint of impropriety. Miss Jocelyn Nevingford does not reside in my town house, but rather, in the one beside mine.”

“But there is a connecting door.” Malice in his rheumy gaze, Hugo shook a knobby finger at him. “You needn’t try to pull the wool over my eyes. I wrote to Fisk, and she has sent me a full report.”

Mrs. Fisk had once been a nursemaid in this house. When Thane had come here as an orphaned boy of five, the widow had taken him under her wing, crooning him to sleep at bedtime and providing comfort in times of distress. She was one of the few people he trusted, which was why he’d asked her to come out of retirement and take on the role of companion to Jocelyn.

Thane couldn’t blame Fisk for supplying information; she was a kindly old soul who saw only the best in people. And she could scarcely have written of anything indecorous when none had occurred. The nasty details had been supplied solely by his uncle’s caustic imagination.

Gripping his glass, Thane stared down at Hugo. “A full report, do you say?” he said coolly. “Then I’m sure you’ll know Jocelyn is fifteen years of age. That her parents died last autumn when their carriage overturned during a rainstorm near Brussels. That she was riding with them and only by a miracle of God survived the accident herself. I hardly think those facts are the fodder of scandal.”

“It most certainly is a scandal for a bachelor to adopt a girl not of his own family,” his uncle stated. “There must be someone else who can take her in. It’s more fitting she go to a blood relative.”

Jocelyn had one elderly great-aunt in Lancashire who had exhibited such horror at the prospect of taking in a crippled girl that Thane had invented another relative so he wouldn’t be forced to abandon Jocelyn with the inhospitable old woman. Besides, there was the vow he’d made to her father, James, Thane’s best friend. Before the battle of Waterloo, James had wrested Thane’s promise to watch over Jocelyn in the event of his death. Ironically, James had survived a hail of bullets that day, only to lose his life a few months later in a carriage mishap.

His throat thick, Thane finished off his whiskey and set down the glass on a table. “There’s no one,” he said flatly. “Believe me, I’ve searched.”
“Then send her away to a cottage in the country. You’ve the means to hire all manner of servants to watch over the chit. That’s what any decent gentleman would have done.” Hugo’s suspicious gaze raked him up and down. “But since your return, you’ve no doubt become one of the fast crowd, the gamblers and the rakes. It would not surprise me to learn you have wicked designs on her person.”

Thane’s irritation took a sharp upward spike. “For God’s sake, she’s suffered a traumatic injury. Do you think so little of me that I would force myself on a mere girl, let alone a crippled one?”

Uncle Hugo looked unmoved. He nursed his whiskey and glowered over the rim of the glass. “I do, indeed. You were always the wild one, a ne’er-do-well devil just like your father.”

Thane could see the tentacles of envy that had squeezed any benevolence out his uncle’s nature. Nevertheless, those words stirred an echo of the inadequacy he had fought against as a youth.

Abandoning his cool, he snapped, “So you still resent my father for being born three minutes ahead of you. If not for a quirk of fate, you would be the Earl of Mansfield.”

An angry flush darkened Hugo’s face. His fingers tightened around the glass in his hand. “By gad, you’re as disrespectful as ever. I don’t know why you can’t be more like Edward. He’s been married these past eight years. And he has sired two sons.”

Thane hadn’t known. But the news came as no great revelation. His cousin had always been a dull dog who followed convention.

“Then you should rejoice,” Thane said. “If I die without issue, the title will go to you and then to Edward and his eldest. In truth, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that you’d prayed for my demise on the battlefield.”

Something flickered in Uncle Hugo’s eyes, something like shock. One of the logs popped, then fell in a shower of sparks. Thane had the discomfitting sense that he’d stepped over a line.

Hugo gave a disgusted shake of his head. “Think what you will. I summoned you here to warn you not to ruin that girl’s reputation. If you insist upon this foolish course, at least find yourself a wife, someone of suitably high birth who will lend you respectability. For once in your life, boy, do your duty.”

The disappointment in his uncle’s tone stung Thane worse than the blow of a willow switch. It was ridiculous to care what the man thought of him. This conversation had gone on long enough.

He made a stiff bow. “I’ll take your advice under consideration. Good day, Uncle.”

Pivoting, he strode out of the library. Find a wife? He’d sooner roast in Hell than conform to his uncle’s demands. He had far more important tasks to accomplish than to make idle chit-chat with giggly debutantes in the ballrooms of London. Most pressing of all was his appointment with the chief magistrate at Bow Street Station.

Thane turned his mind to his secret mission. If all went as expected, in the coming weeks he would be very busy indeed.

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1. Rogue In My Arms- Excerpt

Listen to an excerpt:

CHAPTER 1

My name is Elizabeth Tucker. I’m Elizabeth to my mother, but for as long as I can remember I’ve been Lizzy to everyone else. And for as long as I can remember I’ve baked cupcakes. I enrolled in the culinary arts program at Johnson & Wales right out of high school, hoping to some day get a job as a pastry chef. I graduated J & W in the top ninety-three percent of my class, and I would have graduated higher, but I flunked gravy. My gravy had lumps in it, and that pretty much sums up my life so far. Not that it’s been all bad, more that it hasn’t been entirely smooth.

When I was in third grade Billy Kruger gave me the nickname Buzzard Beak, and I carried it with me all through grade school. I got my brown eyes and distinctive nose from Grandpa Harry, and while the nose wasn’t great I told myself it could have been worse, because Billy Kruger’s nickname was Poop Pants.

And then when I was in eighth grade, during a moment of misguided curiosity, I made out with Ryan Lukach, and the jerk told everyone I wore a padded bra. I mean give me a break here. I was a late bloomer. Anyway, the truth is my bra was so padded I didn’t know I was getting felt up.

I got engaged to fellow classmate Anthony Muggin while I was at Johnson and Wales. Two weeks after graduation and a week before the wedding Anthony and his Uncle Gordo were caught hijacking a refrigerator truck loaded with sides of beef. It turned out to be a lucky thing because after I visited Anthony in jail and returned the ring, I sobbed myself through a couple tumblers of vodka, fell off the toilet in a drunken stupor, crashed into a sink and broke my nose. When they patched me up I was no longer Buzzard Beak.

So here I am with the cutest nose in town, and I’ve finally grown breasts. They’re not huge, but they’re better than a poke in the eye, and I’ve been told they’re perky. Perky is good, right?

In January, three days after my twenty-eighth birthday, I inherited a house from my eccentric Great Aunt Ophelia. The house is in Marblehead, just north of Boston and southeast of Salem. I emptied my bank account to pay taxes on the house, quit my job at a downtown New York restaurant, and I moved into Ophelia’s money pit. Probably the smart thing would have been to sell the house, but no one could accuse me of always doing the smart thing. Truth is New York wasn’t working for me anyway. The restaurant hours were horrible, the kitchen politics were toxic, and the executive chef hated cupcakes.

For the past five months I’ve been living in my new Marblehead house and working as a pastry chef at Dazzle’s Bakery in Salem. The bakery has been owned and operated by a Dazzle since Puritan times, and is now managed by Clarinda Dazzle. She has an apartment above the bakery, she’s twice divorced, approaching forty, and looks like Cher on Cher’s day off. At 5’5” she’s the same height as I am, but Clara looks taller. I think it’s the hair. Clara’s hair is black and shot with grey. If it were straight it would be shoulder length. As is, Clara’s hair is a huge mass of out of control energy coming to just below her ears, sometimes pulled back into a half-assed knot. She has piercing blue eyes and a nose and mouth said to have come from Wampanoag Indian blood on her mother’s side. I’m not nearly so exotic, having Austrian and Danish ancestors that left me with wimpy blonde hair and a body that looks more athletic than it actually is.

It was Tuesday morning, the June sun was shining bright over Salem, and Clara and I had been baking since 5 a.m. I was in my usual outfit of running shoes, jeans, t-shirt and white chef’s jacket. I had my hair pulled back into a ponytail, tucked up under a Red Sox ball cap, and I was dusted with flour and powdered sugar. Everything was good with the world, except Clara was in a state. It was eight o’clock, time to open for business, and we were missing the counter girl Gloria Binkly.

“For crying out loud,” Clara said. “It’s not like I’m a factory. It’s just you and me and Glo. How are we supposed to finish baking when we have to keep running out to the front to sell a muffin? Where the heck is she?”

We were standing in the large front room that constituted the retail part of the bakery. The floors were wide plank pine and the plaster walls were uneven. All things considered it was in decent shape considering it pre-dated the witch trials. The display cases were old-fashioned glass and dark wood trim, and they were at the moment home to a batch of cinnamon rolls, four different kinds of muffins, almond tarts and apple tarts. The breads were against the wall in wire baskets. The remaining space behind glass was about to be filled with my cupcakes. The cash register was from 1920. The credit card swiper was state of the art.

A sexy, low-slung black car pulled to the curb in front of us and a man got out. He was maybe six foot tall with glossy shoulder length black hair swept back from his face in a wave. His skin was unearthly pale. His eyes were as black as his hair. He was dressed in a perfectly tailored black suit and black dress shirt.

He approached the bakery, and my skin prickled, and a hot flash ran through my chest. “Holy moly,” I said to Clara.

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Chapter 1

I have some family secrets to tell, but first, I need to make one thing crystal clear: With two glaring exceptions, my mother is a true Southern lady of infinite grace and discriminating taste.

The first exception—and by far the least—is the fact that as soon as the four of us girls were safely on our own, Mama moved to a double-wide in Clearwater, Florida, where in short order she married, then buried, two “diamonds in the rough” who smoked cigars. Good men, but phew. Only recently did she find the second great love of her life besides Daddy: retired rabbi David Rabinowitz, who loves her back just as much as our sainted daddy did.

The second, and worst, exception is that Mama (who hated being named Daisy) broke her own vow to give her daughters normal names and succumbed to the centuries-old tradition of christening all female descendants of our direct ancestor Lady Rose Hamilton with floral names. Mama said she wasn’t afraid of the ancient “unlucky in love” curse that’s supposed to fall on nonfloral daughters, but Daddy, romantic that he was, loved the idea of siring his own little bouquet, so Mama finally gave in, sparing herself the infamy of breaking the chain of ages. Her only rebellion was naming me, the firstborn girl, Dahlia instead of Rose.

Frankly, I would have preferred Rose. Weird names like mine made me fair game for the Susans and Patricias and Nancys and Cathys of my era. Not to mention the fact that I still have to spell out Dahlia for everybody.

I was unlucky in love, too, so maybe there’s something to that curse, after all.
Two years after I was born, feisty, colicky Iris arrived. After another two years, we were blessed with precious Violet, an angel-child from her first breath. I was eight before placid baby Rose was born and Mama made her nod to the woman who started the whole tradition back in England.

We’ve forgiven Mama for our names, but Mama hasn’t been able to forgive our grandmother Cissy (short for Narcissus) for her shortcomings, which were many, as you shall see.

My three sisters and I had the privilege of growing up in Atlanta during that golden illusion of domestic innocence between World War II and the sixties. For us, magic was real and had a name: Lake Clare. We didn’t know and didn’t care that the lake was Old Atlanta’s premiere summer watering hole, its rustic homes handed down from generation to generation, among them our great-grandparents’ impressive three-story Hilltop Lodge and Mama’s tiny Cardinal Cottage. We only knew we loved spending our summers in the little log cabin just down the hill from our beloved great grandmother and our black-sheep grandmother Cissy, who was so vain she never let anybody call her anything but her name, even Mama.

We never suspected how much Mama hated it there, or why. All we knew was that there, in the cool beauty of the mountains, we could go barefoot, drink cafe au lait instead of milk with our eggs and bacon, and spend our days swimming and exploring and playing. And in Iris’s and my case, fighting. We were so busy, we never suspected the secrets that hid in the shadows of Hilltop.

Cardinal Cottage, Lake Clare. June, 1960
Nap time was sacred at Lake Clare on weekdays when all the daddies were back working in Atlanta. From one to three every afternoon, everybody took to their beds for two hours of peace and quiet, including the mamas.

When I was ten, there was nothing better in the world than swimming all morning, followed by Great Grandmother’s home-grown tomato sandwiches washed down with cold, creamy Nantahala milk at lunch, then peeling out of my clammy bathing suit to settle naked between warm, age-softened sheets in the top bunk for a good long read. July flies sang our lullabies in the towering poplar above the tin roof of Cardinal Cottage, but in the bottom bunk my six-year-old sister Violet never lasted long enough to hear them. Her straight, silky hair permanently askew with toddler sweat, she fell asleep like a stone the minute she hit the bed, worn out from playing with all her might. Bless her heart, little Vi did everything with all her might, including loving me, from the moment she was born.

My next-younger sister Iris was another matter altogether. She’d come into this world taking everything personally, including me. Don’t ask me why. If anybody should have been upset, it should have been me. After all, I‘d had Mama and Daddy to myself those first two years. But Iris had been a grumpy baby who‘d grown into a grumpy second-grader who considered it her mission in life to get on my nerves and contradict me.

Some people, you just can’t please.

That particular Tuesday afternoon late in June, I was asleep with my copy of The Good Earth on my chest, happily dreaming of O-Lan and Wang Lung’s rise in fortune, when Iris’s voice intruded with, “Wake up. Nap time was over half an hour ago. It’s time to go swimming. I want to play battle.”

She always wanted to pay battle, which gave her the excuse to splash me. She liked any game that gave her a chance to do me bodily harm, like Swing the Statue or tag.

I glared at her through a slitted eye. “Leave me alone. Play with Vi.” If I went right back to sleep, I could recapture my dream. I turned my back to her, poking myself in the chest with the corner of my book. “Ow. Go away.”

“No. Mama said to get you up, or you’d never go to sleep tonight,” Iris ordered, smug as ever at the chance to tell me what to do.

The journey from my dreams to reality had always been a long, hard one. I stretched, letting out a long moan of protest, then opened my eyes to stare at the rough pine beams and decking above me.

Iris poked me, hard. “Come on.”

I swatted her hand. “Stop it.”

“Mama,” Iris called, her expression sly, “Dahlia hit me!”

Fortunately, Mama didn’t respond.

Back home on our street in Collier Hills, Iris had plenty of friends to keep her occupied, but at Lake Clare, the four of us only had each other to play with, and Iris’s idea of fun didn’t exactly mesh with mine. I liked reading and Movie Star and Barbie and Nancy Drew and chess, while Iris’s tastes ran to house and store. Bo-ring.

“I’m just the middle child,” she whined for the thousandth time since she’d overheard Mama talking to Daddy about an article on birth order in The Saturday Evening Post. “Nobody ever pays any attention to me. It’s always Dahlia, the firstborn. Dahlia, the star. Dahlia, Miss Perfect and Brilliant. Everybody ignores me.”

As always, she knew exactly how to push my buttons. “Like it’s my fault?” I responded, compulsively driven to be justified. “Can I help it if I’m good at ballet? I worked very hard to get that way.” I took the usual shot back at her. “Would you be happier if I was lazy and made C’s like you?”

“Mama,” Iris tattled, “Dahlia said I was lazy!”

Lying there, I forced myself to count to ten to keep from smacking her again.

Then I heard the familiar thump, thump, thump of my grandmother’s walking stick approach from the orchard, and I sat up with a happy, “Cissy!”

Cissy never came down from Hilltop without a reason, and the reason always had to do with me. Except for criticizing Iris’s swaybacked posture, she rarely paid any attention to the others—a fact that I probably should have felt guilty about, but didn’t.

It wasn’t easy being a prodigy. I had almost nothing in common with any of the other kids I knew, especially Iris, who hated reading as much as I loved it, and resented my ballet lessons, but didn’t want to dance, herself. The fact was, she didn’t want to work at anything; she just wanted to complain about me.

I leapt out of bed and raced past Iris to meet my grandmother at the door.

I didn’t run out to hug her. Unlike Great Grandmother, Cissy wasn’t the kind of person you could hug. But I knew she loved me, anyway, because she took me seriously and paid attention to me, even if she was gruff about it.
Posture still erect from years of training as a prima ballerina, Cissy glided in without bothering to knock, as usual, as if she was queen of the whole lake, including our house. “Good afternoon, Dahlia,” she said, glancing past me to the living room. “Where’s your mother?”

“Je ne sais pas,” I said with the perfect Parisian accent she’d drilled into me since I was four. “J’ai me jusque levé.” (I don’t know. I just got up.) I topped it off with a perfect pirouette, earning a glimmer of stern approval, which was the only kind of approval anybody ever got from Cissy, making it precious, indeed.

“Daisy?” she trilled dramatically. Cissy always did everything dramatically, which would have been enough to make me love her, even if I hadn’t always been her pet.

Mama came in from the front porch, carrying two-year-old Rose on her hip. Violet followed close behind, wide-eyed, to cling to Mama’s long, full cotton skirt as if Cissy was the big, bad wolf instead of our grandmother. “Yes?” Mama said, her expression guarded.

“I’d like to have Dahlia spend the night,” Cissy told her. “That sweet Lenny Bernstein sent me a cut of the movie they made from his Romeo and Juliet musical, and the Captain’s oiling up the projector. I’ll send her back home after her French and ballet lessons in the morning.”

“West Side Story?” I gasped out. Cissy had always said she knew Leonard Bernstein, but I’d thought she was just exaggerating, as usual.

Everybody in my ballet classes back home had been talking about West Side Story since it had debuted on Broadway, dying for the movie to come out so we could see it. “You really know Leonard Bernstein?” I asked in awe.

“Of course,” Cissy clipped out. “I’ve told you often enough. Didn’t you believe me?”

Monumentally impressed, I stared at her with new respect. “Wow. Leonard Bernstein.” All my friends would be green with envy.

“I helped him get his start,” she went on. “Such a bright young man, even if he does like the boys a bit too much.”

“Cissy!” Mama scolded, shooting a warning glance my way.

“Well, it’s a fact of life in the arts,” Cissy dismissed. “Do you mean for her to be ignorant about such things? She’s going to be a prima ballerina one day. She might as well know the truth.”

“Not now,” Mama scolded. “And not from you.”

Unrepentant, Cissy turned her attention back to me. “Get your things. We can do an art project while the Captain finishes setting up.”

I looked to Mama, knowing better than to accept without permission . “Pleeeze,” I wheedled, worried by the grim set of her mouth.

Mama shifted Rose, who curled into her shoulder for protection from Cissy’s disturbing presence. “Iris might like to see it, too,” she said to Cissy. “Did it even occur to you to invite her?”

“Mama,” I moaned, “Iris hates ballet. And she never can sit still. She’ll ruin everything.”

“Iris,” Mama called across the cabin. “Would you like to spend the night with Cissy and watch West Side Story with Dahlia?”

Iris skulked into the doorway from the screened porch. “What’s West Side Story?”

“It’s a ballet movie,” I told her, praying for the reaction I got.

Iris glowered. “I hate ballet.”

“Well, it’s really more of a musical,” Mama coaxed.
Iris wasn’t persuaded. “I hate musicals.”

I couldn’t conceal my relief. “See? I told you she wouldn’t want to.” I did two pirouettes.

Seeing my delight, Iris went sly. “You know,” she said to Mama, her eyes locked on me with grim satisfaction, “Dahlia stole three cigarettes from your purse, Mama, and smoked them in the woods.”

“Dahlia!” Mama gasped out. “Is this true?”

Damn! I’d be grounded for life!

Blindsided by such unprovoked—and accurate—treason, I launched at Iris in fury. “You little bitch! I can’t believe you spied on me! And told Mama!” I grabbed a hank of her curly brown hair and gave it a ferocious yank. “I’ll teach you to tattle-tale, dog dammit!

“Maamaa!” she yelled, genuinely scared by my reckless reaction. “Help! She’s gonna kill me!”

I could have sworn Cissy was trying not to laugh, but Mama was anything but amused. “Dahlia! Let go of your sister this instant!” She shoved Rose at Violet, then headed our way to break it up. But I was so furious at Iris for ruining my chance to see West Side Story that I started slapping at her and cussing with all my might, consequences be damned.

Ever allergic to conflict, little Rose started to wail, and Vi patted her in comfort even as she grimaced to witness my self-destruction.

But Iris, eyes alight to see me digging myself in so deep, dodged the blows and laughed at me. Laughed! Which made me so furious, my string of cusswords dissolved into gibberish, making me even madder.

“Dahlia! Stop it!” Mama grabbed my forearms from behind and pinned me hard against her, lifting me off my feet. Kicking at my sister as Mama dragged me out of range, I vowed revenge, but even that came out garbled.

Meanwhile, Cissy just took it all in with a mildly amused expression.

“Dahlia!” Mama’s arms tightened around me. “Calm down, honey. Stop. Breathe.”

Mortified, I went limp and started to cry.

Mama subsided into the wicker armchair, drawing me into her lap. “That’s it. Just take deep breaths.”

“Yeah,” Iris goaded, “like the ones you took when you inhaled those cigarettes.”

“That’s enough from you, young lady,” Mama scolded her. “Go to your room!”

“Me?” Iris protested. “She’s the one who stole your cigarettes and smoked!”

“And she’ll have consequences to deal with for that,” Mama said. “Just like you will for spying and tattling on your sister.” She pointed toward the bedroom Iris shared with Rose on the other side of the cabin. “Now go. And don’t you stick that lip out at me.”

Iris stomped away.

Drained, I closed my eyes and accepted the fact that I would probably be stuck in the house doing chores for the rest of the summer.

“And you,” Mama said to me, “you could have set the whole woods on fire. Why did you take my cigarettes and smoke them?”

“I just wanted to know what they tasted like,” I said dully, which was at least partially true. The fact was, I’d wanted to act grown, like Cyd Cherise, and I’d enjoyed every menthol-soaked molecule.

“One puff would have told you that,” Mama responded. “Three whole cigarettes is a pattern, and a dangerous one. Not to mention the fact that you took them.”

I’d figured I could get away with it, since Mama smoked at least a pack a day—all our parents did, back then—but I hadn’t taken my spying, sneaky grease-spot of a sister into account. “I’m sorry,” I said, genuinely regretful that I’d been caught. “I won’t do it again.”

Not till I was at least sixteen, anyway. Or maybe twelve.

Mama let out a short, hard sigh. “All right. Back to your room. And no swimming or trips to Hilltop for the next week. You can stay here and help me with the chores.”

Only a week? My heart rallied. I’d expected at least a month.

“A week?” Cissy said, reminding us both of her presence. “Isn’t that a bit severe? The child’s inquisitive. Children experiment with such things. It’s only natural.”

Mama stiffened, her features congealed. “Not my children.”

Uh-oh. I shot Cissy a pleading look, willing her not to make things worse by taking up for me. “It’s okay, Cissy, really. I deserve it.”

Mama patted me, then urged me to my feet. “Off you go, then. I’ll call you when it’s time for K.P.” She stood to face Cissy. “A week, Mother. I mean it.”

It was the first and last time I ever heard her address Cissy that way, and my grandmother actually flinched when she did it.
“Very well.”

That night when Mama came in to hear my prayers, she insisted I ask God to bless Iris, too.

“But Mama, it won’t count,” I argued. “God knows I don’t mean it.”

“The Bible says to pray for those who despitefully use you,” she countered, “so you must always pray for Iris. It isn’t easy for her, being your little sister, you know. You’re a pretty hard act to follow. She feels like everybody’s disappointed in her compared to you.”

I sighed. “But all she has to do is tell people she’s herself, not me.”

Mama kissed my hand. “To whom much is given, much is expected. I’m counting on you to be kind to your little sister, even when she’s not kind to you.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I won’t like it.”

“Just do it,” Mama told me. “In time, your heart will follow your actions.”

I tried, really I did. Forty years later, I was still trying, and Iris was still driving me nuts.

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1. Strange Brew – An Exclusive Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

The machine that lowered the casket into the ground made a grinding noise. They really ought to oil the mechanism. Fog rolled in as the light faded. She pulled her black wool cape tighter around her shoulders. Spring in San Francisco still seemed far away in March. A guy waited in a small tractor-thing to scoop dirt back into the grave. Indoor-outdoor carpet was draped over the excavated pile, as if that would camouflage the finality of dirt

The other mourners had gone after they said all the proscribed words about the “unfortunate event” being a blessed release since her father had Alzheimer’s, and how he was going to God’s bosom—that sort of thing. She couldn’t quite muster the will to take her eyes from the coffin. If you’d watched as many horror movies as she had, you couldn’t help but wonder what he’d look like after a year or five or ten or fifty in there. Maybe she should have opted for cremation. But her father wanted to be buried beside his wife of thirty years. They were the reason she could write romances. She knew at least one couple who’d found love.

The thunk as the coffin hit the bottom of the grave was like a slap. She heaved in a breath and jerked her eyes up. Her gaze was drawn to the grove of redwoods up the hill from the gravesite. The shadows between their trunks were filling up with mist.
She knew he was there before he stepped out from the trees. Dark hair, fair skin, bulky shoulders. She might have been mistaken when she’d seen him across the lake at the Palace of Fine Arts. He could just have been someone who looked a little like the guy who pushed past her in the corner liquor store near her apartment.

But this time, there was no doubt. It was the same guy all right. If she got closer, she’d see the blue-green eyes (or maybe gray?) and classic features she’d glimpsed in the liquor store. Was he stalking her? You can’t stalk somebody if you look like the cover model for a romance novel, she wanted to shout. People notice a guy like you. Women anyway. And while she might not be someone guys ever noticed, she was still a woman. In that liquor store, as his whatever-colored eyes had met hers, she’d experienced some thrill of… well of the sort she only wrote about. Spooky, really. You couldn’t be attracted to a man you didn’t even know. Not like that. But it meant you’d recognize him when you saw him again.

A thrill of fear found its way into her stomach. She couldn’t look away from the stalker now, as though staring at him could solve the mystery of why any man would be stalking someone like her. Romance writers sometimes acquired stalkers. The guys who wrote all those fan letters from prison sometimes got out. But she wasn’t a big name or anything, though she’d had a score of books published. She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t beautiful. He just stood there, maybe fifty yards away, letting her look. Did he want her to know he was stalking her, just to wring maximum fear out of the situation?

He looked… familiar, somehow. More than just the two or three times she’d glimpsed him. He couldn’t be…and yet…

“Miss Dearborn?”

Diana gasped and jumped.

“Oh, I am so sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Diana heaved breaths while she patted her palm against her breast as though that would start her heart. How had the woman surprised her? She always heard what people would say just before they said it. That was her gift, or her curse. The world was like an echo chamber for her, people forever repeating what she had just heard them saying. Like singing a constant “round robin” song. She must have been distracted by her stalker. “Don’t mind me,” she said breathlessly. The woman was a candidate for “portly short” clothing. Her hair had been dyed what hairdressers called “menopause red.” She glanced up to the redwood grove but her stalker had disappeared. Was she imagining him?

Now the familiar echo of what the woman would say reverberated in Diana’s mind. “I don’t mean to interrupt your hour of mourning.” People in the funeral business used those formal phrases to mask the fact that they no longer gave death any but the most cursory attention. “Perhaps you’d like to continue your meditation in the comfort of our reception lounge while our associates put the final touches on your father’s resting place.”

Diana tore her eyes from the redwoods, now enveloped in mist. “No, thank you. I’d better go.” She put her head down and squished away over the damp grass inset with flat headstones. Thank goodness I wore flat shoes.

Diana turned before the woman could call after her. “You don’t have to send the flowers to my apartment.” The woman looked shocked. Diana usually didn’t reveal herself that way, but she couldn’t stand any more formal sympathy. The tractor engine ground to life. “You just…do whatever you do with them usually.” A big dumpster crouched in back of the reception building.

She stumbled down the gentle slope. Her car looked lonely in the visitor’s parking lot because the employees parked around back by the dumpster.

Fitting. She’d always felt… separate. Not only because she lived in an echo chamber but because she had no childhood. At least until she was thirteen. That’s about how old she was when they found her wandering around the suburbs of Chicago, dressed strangely and speaking in tongues, with a big gash in her scalp and a king-sized knot, unable to remember anything about where she came from or where she belonged. No one came forward to claim her. After some disastrous foster care she’d been adopted by a wonderful older couple. Her adoptive mother died in a car accident a couple of years later after the family moved to San Francisco. Now her father was gone too.
She had no one.

She sloshed across the gravel parking lot to the old Honda Accord that had been her father’s. She slid into the driver’s seat and closed her eyes, hugging the shoulder bag that held her treasured antique book. Maybe the book was all she had now.

She couldn’t even write anymore. She had only twenty-five pages done on the novel that was due next month. She dreaded telling Jen, her editor. The whole thing made her want to rip her hair out. Much as she loved the setting of Camelot and her hero, Gawain, the romance just wouldn’t come to life. She’d give back the advance and call it a day but the money had gone to pay the deductible on Dad’s insurance this year. Happy endings seemed to be in short supply right now, even fictional ones.

She put her bag on the passenger’s seat beside her. The priceless book inside had been taking up more and more of her thoughts. That was just because she needed an escape. It was hard to visit her father every day and wonder whether he’d recognize her or not. But the obsession had really ramped up since her father’s death. She knew why. She just didn’t want to admit it. At least she wasn’t imagining the book. It was real. And it was by Leonardo DaVinci.

Yeah. That DaVinci. She’d have enough to set her up for life if she sold it, let alone enough to give back her advance, but the horror at even the thought of selling the book made the word “obsession” seem inadequate.

Whoa. Probably imagined stalker, obsession over a precious book, writer’s block, all on top of her little natural proclivities… Maybe she needed a therapist. As if she could afford one.

She took two deep breaths and started the car. Okay. It wasn’t crazy to feel bereft on the day your father was buried. Adopted father, but still….
She headed west on Waller, to hit Delores south. Time to go home to her little apartment just east of the Mission District. Unable to help herself, she reached over to touch the book. The way it had come into her life was a little surreal…

Diana had been coming out of the office at the Exploratorium, the children’s science museum where she supervised docents to make ends meet when she practically ran into the family. The woman had very green eyes and very red hair and that translucent, perfect skin that goes with them. Her baby bump was just beginning to show. The little girl was a paler version of her mother. The father was a looker. Anything in range with a female hormone was casting surreptitious looks at him. He ought to be standing at the prow of a Viking ship, preferably stripped to the waist.

“Closing time,” Diana announced. The Viking’s next words echoed in her mind.

“Okay.” He gathered the little girl into one big arm. “We’ll just stop at the restrooms before I take my two girls home.” He took his wife’s elbow protectively.
The woman took one look at Diana, gasped and slumped against her husband.

“Lucy, are you all right?” The Viking hauled her in against his free hip with one massive arm. “You need to sit down.” He looked around, frowning.

“Over here, sir,” Diana guided to a bench beside the door marked with a large sign that said “Danger. Keep out.” The little girl was worried.

“What’s wrong with Mommy?” she asked in a small voice.

“Nothing, honey,” the woman called Lucy managed as she eased down on the bench. “Mommy didn’t eat enough at lunchtime.” She laid her large shoulder bag down beside her.

The Viking’s gaze swept the area. “Can you look after Pony?” he asked Diana, setting the little girl on her feet. “I’ll buy a mug at the gift shop and bring some water.”

Diana grabbed Pony’s hand, and the Viking strode away. Pony. Odd name, but cute.

The woman grabbed her shoulder bag again and clutched it to her chest, her green gaze fixed on Diana’s face. “Have…have you been a docent long?” she asked.

Diana glanced up from the little girl to the woman her husband called Lucy and… and a connection sparked between them. Did Diana know her? “I’m actually a supervisor. It pays the bills while I wait for my ship to come in.” She never told anyone about her father’s illness.
“And what exactly would your ship look like?”

Diana mustered a smile “Well… I write books.” She looked up to see the woman’s expression of sympathy. Everybody and their brother was a failed writer these days. “Oh, I’m published,” she assured the woman. “But it doesn’t come with health insurance or a 401K. City of San Francisco provides those.” That was her standard line. People always thought you were rich if you were published. Only a few, like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling and Nora Roberts made millions at writing. Almost everybody else just survived.

“What do you write?”

Diana sighed. Now she’d see the flash of derision or the uneasy shifting of the eyes. “Romances. They aren’t the usual romances,” Did she sound defensive? “They’re very carefully researched. They’re well-reviewed too.”
“Historical?”

She nodded. “Premedieval. The origin of courtly love.”

Not even a hint of eye-rolling. Emboldened, Diana continued. “That was the time to live.” She couldn’t help the longing that drenched her voice. “Right now I’m researching Camelot. I think that was the start of everything.”

Diana watched as Lucy gave a sharp intake of breath and examined Diana’s face as though she’d just had a revelation. The Viking strode toward them with his cup of water, a worried frown creasing his brow. The woman smiled, first at him, and then at Diana. A look Diana could only describe as sureness suffused her expression. “I have a gift for you.” She hauled a very large leather-bound book from her bag and handed it to Diana.

“This… this is old. I…I couldn’t take this.” The tooled leather binding was beautiful.
“Of course you can. I’m giving it to you just as it was given to me.” The woman glanced to her husband and stilled what Diana was sure was an incipient protest with a look.

Diana opened the book gingerly, scanning the pages. “It’s written backwards.”
“Yes. It’s in archaic Italian and Latin.”

Diana frowned. “I have some Latin but I’m afraid I don’t read Italian.”

“A professor over at Berkeley, Dr. Dent translated it. He’ll confirm its authenticity.”

Authentic what? The woman rose, looking strangely serene. “I’m feeling fine. We can go.” Diana caught her husband’s pointed look at the “Danger” door. “I’ve done what I came to do,” his wife assured him. To Diana she said, “What’s your name? I’d like to read your books.”

Diana blushed. “Diana Dearborn.”

“That’s a great name for a romance writer.”

They always thought it was a pseudonym, “That’s what my mother named me.” In a way it was a pseudonym, since it certainly wasn’t the name she’d been born with.

“Lucky you.” The woman pressed her hands. “Use the book. It will change your life. And when you’re ready…” She leaned forward to whisper in Diana’s ear. “Look behind the door.”

Diana drew back in shock, then glanced to the door marked “Danger.”

“Yes. That one,” the woman smiled. And then she and her family strolled out into the San Francisco fog. The whole scene looked like the fade-out happy ending to a movie.

Diana jerked her head around as a car honked at her and sped by on her left. She felt a little shaky. Maybe she’d just pull over. Dolores Park loomed to her right. It was easy to find a parking place at this time of night. The park was cool and black. She’d just get her breath.

But the feeling of anxiety in her chest was ramping up into panic.

The red-haired woman called Lucy thought there was something behind the door marked danger that would change Diana’s life, apparently for the better. Once she’d read Dr. Dent’s translation, Diana knew what Lucy thought was behind that door.

Ultimate craziness. The very fact that Diana could half-believe it was a sign that she was going a little round the bend. The book was a hoax, even if it was a hoax by Leonardo DaVinci. The manuscript recorded Leonardo’s effort to build time machine. It said he succeeded.

There was a picture on the last pages, after all the diagrams and calculations, and all the scientific stuff she didn’t have a hope of understanding. In the illustration the machine seemed to be just a bunch of gears. Appropriate for 1508 when the book was written, but not exactly the kind of thing that could manipulate the time/space continuum.

It would be easy to check it out. As a supervisor she had a set of master keys. But in the five months she’d had the book she’d never used them on the door. Opening it, thinking there might be a time machine behind it seemed like crossing some line toward insanity.

Like it wasn’t crazy to carry the book around all the time. Or to sleep with it.
Okay. A little crazy. And it had gotten so much worse in the three days since her father died. It was like the book was shouting at her now, where before it had only whispered. But you had to draw a line somewhere. She wouldn’t believe there was a time machine hidden in a children’s museum. Bad enough that she thought she had a stalker. The fact that she’d been researching Camelot was research for the novel she couldn’t seem to write. She’d brushed up on her Latin because it gave her something to do as she sat with her father.

Oh, hell. She brushed up on Latin because that was what they spoke in Camelot as a second language to Brythonic Proto-Celtic. Because she wanted there to be a time machine behind that door and she wanted it to take her back to Camelot, far from this stark reality. She’d always had an affinity for Camelot. She wanted to live in a time with things were simpler, when anything could happen and people believed in love and magic and honor. She felt like she belonged there and she, who had no childhood wanted so much to know where she belonged.

Her chest heaved and she couldn’t seem to get air. She glanced over at the book. It exuded hope. It almost seemed to be pushing at her. Like maybe it could make her happy, like the red-haired Lucy said it could, like maybe stalkers and deadlines and obsession and grief were what was unreal and there was some new reality just waiting for her.

That was dangerous. Sanity was knowing reality for what it was, no matter how stark, and learning to cope with it. If there were no machine that could change your life behind that door, then she’d be able to go home to her empty apartment, make an appointment with a therapist at some free clinic and face her future. So she knew what she had to do.

She was going to the Exploratorium tonight and look behind that door marked “Danger.”

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