LITMIR.BIZ

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her path marked by a parade of trees whose leaves were turning all the festive colors of fall.

      She didn’t feel very festive.

      Dakota wasn’t really sure why she kept on driving or where she was going. It wasn’t as if she could just allow herself to get lost for an unlimited amount of time. She had a live show to tape as of two o’clock this afternoon, the way she did every afternoon, Monday through Friday. That meant she had to return by noon or risk having her production assistant, who was, as well, her best friend, succumb to the heart attack MacKenzie Ryan always threatened her with if things weren’t progressing according to schedule.

      Schedule.

      Hell, if things had been progressing according to schedule, she and Dr. John Jackson would be standing side by side, maybe even here in this little, out-of-theway antique store, picking out their wedding rings. She’d thought her relationship with John was heading down the aisle. To a wedding. To the altar. For a brief, shining moment she’d actually believed that she’d finally found a man who didn’t want anything from her except her. She’d found a man with whom she could share forever, have the kind of life her parents had.

      John Jackson didn’t need her name or her fame, not to mention her money, to try to get ahead. The good doctor was a celebrity of sorts in his own right. He was the head of a very lucrative private practice and was currently one of the most sought-after plastic surgeons on the East Coast.

      Trouble was, on occasion the good doctor also liked to throw himself into his work—after the fact. Dakota had heard the rumors, but once her mind was made up that this was the man she was going to marry, she had refused to believe them. Having been raised in the entertainment business—thanks to a newscaster father and a mother and grandfather who between them had been in almost every B-grade movie ever written—and having spent the last four years as the star of her own daytime talk show, And Now a Word from Dakota, she knew very well how baseless rumors could be.

      Except that these rumors had turned out to be not so baseless. These rumors had turned out to be true. She’d come home early from a taping one afternoon, seeking a respite after working with a particularly difficult starlet, and wound up catching John, also home early, trying on one of his remodeled patients for size.

      Her heart and confidence had been shattered in one lightning-swift blow.

      Now the engagement was off, John had moved out to some Park Avenue address, and she was single again.

      And hating it.

      But at twenty-nine, she had also become resigned to the fact that she was probably going to remain that way for a very long time, if not forever. Men just weren’t worth the trouble, she’d decided during her drive up this morning. Besides, she had a full life. Between work and the occasional visits to her family, she didn’t have time to focus on the fact that there were no one else’s dishes in the sink but hers, that the only clothes strewn around the apartment were hers.

      “Would you like me to take the necklace out to show you?”

      Even as the woman asked the question, she was removing the cameo that had caught Dakota’s eye.

      It was a lovely piece, but not extraordinary by any stretch of the imagination. A small profile of a woman set against a field of Wedgwood blue and threaded onto a black velvet ribbon—new by the looks of it. There was nothing unusual about the small piece of jewelry to set it apart from the rest. And yet, as she’d walked through the store, browsing but not really seeing, Dakota found her eyes inexplicably drawn to the cameo.

      Still, she wasn’t really here to buy anything, only to kill time. She shook her head. “No, I—”

      The protest came a beat too late. The woman with the fluffy gray hair and compelling smile already had the cameo out. She held it up for Dakota’s approval.

      For a moment the face of the woman in the cameo was trapped in a sunbeam.

      “It has a legend behind it, you know,” the woman told Dakota softly.

      “A legend?”

      She was too much of her parents’ daughter not to be drawn in by the promise of a story, a history. Dakota could feel her interest being aroused as if it was a physical thing.

      The woman came around from behind the counter. Short, round, she had almost a cherubic appearance. If she were casting Mrs. Claus in a play, Dakota thought, the woman would have been perfect.

      The woman’s blue eyes gleamed with vibrancy as she spoke. “Yes. It’s said to have once belonged to a Southern belle, given to her by her fiancé just before he rode off to war in 1861. Her name was Amanda Deveaux. His was William Slattery, a handsome young lieutenant in the Confederate Army. William put this around her neck and made her promise to wear the cameo until he could return to marry her.”

      The sunbeam still held the woman in the cameo in its embrace. Dakota found she couldn’t draw her eyes away from it. Though injured by love, at bottom she was still a romantic. “And did he?”

      Rather than answer directly, the older woman smiled enigmatically. Taking the cameo, she stood up on her toes and gently placed it around Dakota’s neck.

      “Why don’t you try it on?” the woman coaxed softly as she tied the two ends of the velvet together at the nape of Dakota’s neck. Stepping back, she looked at Dakota and nodded her approval. “It suits you.”

      The delicate oval dipped into the hollow of her throat. Dakota lightly slid her fingers over the necklace, touching it. “Does it?”

      The woman nodded again, a wayward breeze that had sneaked in through the open casement playing with the ends of her hair. “They say that whoever wears it will have her own one true love come into her life. And once that happens, once she knows that this is the man she is to spend eternity with, she has to pass the cameo on to someone else so that the magic can continue.”

      “Magic,” Dakota echoed. Did anyone still believe in magic? She certainly didn’t. The woman took out a small, sterling-silver-framed mirror and handed it to her. Dakota looked at herself. When she glanced back at the woman, her smile was ever-so-slightly self-deprecating. “I don’t feel any magic.”

      The woman laughed to herself, shaking her head as if she’d just heard something very foolish uttered in innocence. “Magic doesn’t come riding on a bolt of lightning, my dear,” she assured Dakota gently as she stepped back behind the counter. “Real magic slips in without you noticing and unfolds its power very quietly. Before you know it, it’s taken a firm root inside your soul.”

      Dakota sincerely had her doubts about that. She didn’t believe in magic or cameos that came equipped with magical powers. But there was no denying that the cameo was truly lovely.

      And she deserved a pick-me-up, she decided.

      Dakota handed the mirror back to the woman. “I’ll take it.”

      The woman eyed her knowingly. If she didn’t know better, Dakota would have concluded that the woman’s smile was slowly seeping into her being. “I thought you might,” the woman was saying. “The moment I saw you walk into the store, I knew the cameo was meant for you.”

      Dakota frowned slightly, puzzled. The shop didn’t look as if it was wired with a surveillance system. It looked barely able to support the wiring for the overhead lights. “I didn’t see you when I came in.”

      The smile on the woman’s face did not falter. “But I saw you.”

      About to ask where the woman could have hidden in the small, cluttered room in order to observe her without being noticed, Dakota heard the ancient grandfather clock in the corner begin to chime the hour.

      Ten o’clock.

      How was that possible? It hadn’t taken that long to drive up here, had it? And yet the hours seemed to have melted into oblivion. Had she been lost in her own thoughts that long?

      Her eyes met the woman’s in surprise.

      “You’d

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