LITMIR.BIZ

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we could get together tomorrow evening … if you’re free, that is. I’d like to show you around my home and explain to you what I’d like to have done.”

      He felt as if he were standing in the direct path of a city-owned snowplow. “Sure. What time?”

      “Any time after four would be fine.”

      “Four-thirty?” he suggested.

      “Perfect.” She rattled off her address, then said, “I’ll see you then.”

      “Four-thirty,” he repeated, confirming the time just before he hung up. Turning around, he saw both his sister and his daughter smiling at him. Widely. “What?” he asked uncertainly.

      “Nothing,” Virginia replied quickly.

      But she knew if she didn’t say something, he might grow suspicious. Her brother was the type who, upon finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow would look around to see if there was a group of leprechauns somewhere, having fun at his expense.

      “I can just hear the sound of bills getting paid,” she answered cheerfully.

      “Well, don’t count your checks before they’re written,” he cautioned, thinking of the job that had just fallen through earlier. “You never know how these things can turn out.”

      “Sorry,” Virginia murmured. “Don’t know what came over me.” There was a time, Virginia couldn’t help remembering, when her brother was just as optimistic as she was. She missed those times.

      I hope you’re as good as Ginny thinks you are, Maizie Sommers, Virginia said silently. I can’t wait for my brother to fall in love again and become human, like he was with Eva.

       Chapter Two

      Sometimes, when Danielle Everett thought about it, it still took her breath away.

      Three years ago, she was living in Atlanta, struggling to pay off not just her student loans but also the mountain of medical bills her father had left in his wake. At the time, she was working at an insurance company, living on a shoestring and feeling her soul being sucked away, bit by bit, with every passing day.

      Back then, Danni was vainly trying to keep her head above water and wondering if her utterly unfounded optimism would eventually erode because from any angle she looked at it, her optimism had absolutely nothing to hook on to.

      All she wanted back then was to wake up in the morning and not feel as if she were struggling against an oppressive feeling. She didn’t want to feel that if she ever let her guard down, she’d be a victim of the dark, bottomless depression whispering along the perimeter of her very being.

      Back then she’d never dreamed that she could actually wake up grinning from ear to ear—the way she did these days.

      Granted she was as exhausted now as she had been back then, but then the exhaustion had come from trying to keep her footing on the treadmill she was running on—the treadmill that threatened, at any moment, to pull her under. Now she was exhausted from trying to do ten things at once. The difference being was that these were ten things she loved doing.

      Back then she’d been a company drone, an anonymous, tiny cog in a huge machine, expected to perform and make no waves. These days she was her own person. And, in many ways, her own boss as well. She took suggestions, not orders. Which made a world of difference to her everyday existence.

      And all because of a skill, a talent she’d never even thought twice about.

      Danni cooked like a dream and baked like a celestial being.

      It all started innocently enough. She began by cooking for friends, then for friends of friends. Friends of friends who insisted on paying her for her time and skill. Before Danni knew it, she had branched out to catering full-time. There was no room left to squeeze in her day job.

      The happiest day of her life was the day Danni handed in her resignation to Roosevelt Life Insurance’s actuarial department. Her second-happiest day was the day she paid off the last of her late father’s medical bills. Her last student loan payment followed a year later.

      She was finally solvent and didn’t owe anyone anything!

      By then Danni realized that she was doing far more baking than cooking. A few heady connections later and she found herself being courted to star in a brand-new cooking show.

      Initially, Danni had some serious doubts about going in that direction and she hesitated about making the commitment, which also meant relocating cross-country. After all, weren’t there more than enough cooking shows already all over the airwaves? Their life expectancy was projected to be somewhere a little longer than that of a common fruit fly—but not by all that much.

      By then Danni had become too successful catering parties for an established clientele to want to set herself up for failure again.

      She had no gimmick, she protested to the agent who had approached her with the idea of cooking before a live audience. She had nothing to set her apart from all the other chefs on TV.

      “I think you’re selling yourself short, Danielle,” the agent, a thin, diminutive man named Baxter Warren told her with more than a little conviction. “A lot of people—the right people,” he emphasized dramatically, “think you make desserts to die for.”

      As the words came out of his mouth, the agent paused for a moment, looking as if he had just had a world-altering epiphany. And then his thin lips split into a wide smile.

      “That’s what we’ll call the show. Danielle’s Desserts to Die For.”

      “Most people call me Danni,” she’d told him.

      “Danni’s Desserts to Die For,” he amended, then nodded his head. “Even better.” Baxter gave her a penetrating, almost mesmerizing look. It was easy to see that he was exceedingly pleased with himself. “You can’t say no.”

      She didn’t.

      Danni had packed up her pots—Baxter told her she could buy a complete designer set of new ones once she landed in Southern California, but she’d insisted on bringing the ones that she’d been using. The ones her father had given her before she’d even hit her teens. They had belonged to her grandmother and to Danni the pots were the very embodiment of family history. They represented who and what she was.

      She’d also brought along a box full of recipes. Recipes that she habitually—and unconsciously—augmented each time she prepared them.

      With her prized possessions safely packed away, Danni had flown from Atlanta to begin a new life in the land of endless summers and endless beaches: Southern California. The cable station where her half-hour program was scheduled to be filmed was located in Burbank. Baxter had encouraged her to find either an apartment or a house in the area.

      But the pace in Burbank was too frantic for her and she longed for something a little more sedate and laid-back, as well as a town that was a little less populated. What she was looking for was something to remind her of the Atlanta suburb that she’d left behind.

      She was searching for a little bit of home in a completely unfamiliar environment.

      She found what she was looking for in Bedford, with the help of a Realtor one of the cameramen working on her new show had recommended.

      Maizie Sommers.

      Moreover, Maizie, with her low key approach, her soft voice and especially her kind smile, reminded her a great deal of the mother she’d lost years ago.

      What Danni appreciated most of all was that her association with Maizie was not terminated when escrow closed. When the woman urged her to call if she ever had a problem or needed anything—or just to talk, Danni believed her.

      As a matter of fact, they’d talked several times since Danni had sent out her change-of-address postcards to the

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