LITMIR.BIZ

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter One

      “I hate men. I hate tall men, I hate short men, I hate old men, I hate young men. I hate men!”

      Alison Quintano held the phone away from her ear for a moment. Distance hardly muted her older sister Lily’s tirade. It was as if the petite woman who had dominated a large portion of Alison’s childhood was standing right here in Hades’s lone medical clinic rather than far away, in her own trendy Seattle apartment.

      “You. Men. Hate. Got it,” Alison quipped, trying to get Lily’s voice down to a level that didn’t threaten to shatter her eardrum. Lily had called her about three minutes ago and had been carrying on like this from the moment she’d answered the phone. “Now calm down and tell me what brought this on.”

      Even as she said it, Alison had a sneaking suspicion she knew what the problem was. Or rather, who.

      Lily steamrolled right over the question, not hearing her sister. She was just too angry and trying very, very hard not to be hurt. But the pain was there, hot and biting.

      How could she have been this blind?

      “I especially hate sneaky plastic surgeon men.”

      Ah, now they were getting to it, Alison thought. Lily’s fiancé, Allen, was a plastic surgeon. Alison felt guilty over the sense of relief she was experiencing. But it was there nonetheless. She had never liked Allen. None of them had.

      “Does this mean the wedding’s off?” Alison could just see their older brother, Kevin, doing a little jig.

      Of the three of them, Kevin, who had raised them ever since their father had died, had disliked Allen the most. The artificial surgeon was the way he referred to Allen whenever he mentioned the man to the rest of them.

      But, Lily being Lily, none of them had said anything to her. It would have only made her dig in her heels. Now, it looked as if her heels had been naturally dislodged.

      It was hard for Alison to keep from cheering.

      Feeling like a caged animal, Lily paced the length of her kitchen, a headset sitting like an appendage on her straight black hair. Normally, being around the various state-of-the-art appliances in her kitchen soothed her. But nothing was soothing her now. Short of filleting her fiancé.

      Ex-fiancé, she amended with a vengeance. How could he? How could he?

      “Not only is the wedding off, but I very nearly came close to taking his head off, as well.” She huffed angrily, struggling to keep the skewering feeling of betrayal at bay. “Not that he needs his head since he seems to rely very heavily on the Braille system of doing things.”

      With the telephone wedged against her shoulder and her ear, Alison tallied up a bill for the burly miner who had just walked out of examining room one. It took her a second to decipher her brother Jimmy’s illegible handwriting. Even for a doctor it was awful, she thought.

      “Does this come with any subtitles, Lily, or am I going to have to figure out what you’re talking about on my own?”

      Alison’s words bounced off Lily’s brain like so many cascading beads. Nothing was making sense right now. Lily looked around her, searching for a way to siphon off some of the anger she was feeling.

      It was as if she were a kettle with the top about to blow.

      She’d never been so angry in her life. Never. She’d given that narcissistic idiot some of the best entrées of her life.

      Taking a breath, she tried to begin at the beginning. “Allen kept complaining about how predictable I was, how all I ever thought about was work, that I was never spontaneous.” Lily ground her teeth together, thinking what a fool she’d been. Had this kind of thing really been going on under her nose all the time? “So I was spontaneous. I got Arthur to take over for me at Lily’s, grabbed a bottle of our finest champagne from the wine cellar, packed a picnic lunch of nothing less than my finest fare and came over to his apartment to surprise him.”

      Finding herself in the living room without the slightest idea how she got there, Lily sank down onto the sofa as if all at once all the air had been let out of her body.

      “I surprised him, all right. In bed with one of his former patients. The breast enhancement one.” She spat the words out. There was no comfort in the fact that the woman had looked as though she’d been wearing a flotation device.

      Lily blinked. Were those tears she felt on her lashes? No, damn it, she wasn’t going to waste tears on that jerk. “He was trying to get closer to his work, no doubt.”

      Handing the miner his receipt, Alison nodded as the man paid her and took his leave. Poor Lily, she thought. But thank God the so-called gift to the medical profession wasn’t going to be part of the family, after all. “I get the picture, Lil.”

      Lily tossed her head and then grabbed the headset as it threatened to slide off. “Well, picture him and his cutie wearing the lobster Newburg I threw at them.”

      Alison knew her sister was very capable of pitching things when she got angry. She laughed, tickled as she envisioned the sight. “Good for you. I never liked Allen anyway.”

      Frowning,

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