LITMIR.BIZ

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be back tomorrow night. Maybe I should swing by and see you on my way home?”

      “You know you’re always welcome,” she said. “All I have planned is to clean out the closets. High time I got rid of all those old clothes just clutterin’ up the place.”

      “Are you all right?” Nikki asked.

      “’Course,” she replied coolly.

      “And he doesn’t remember what happened?”

      “Isn’t that fortunate?” Dixie cleared her throat. “I’m sure his wife’s very grateful.”

      She clicked off, slipped the phone back into her purse and asked, in her very sweetest and most innocent drawl, “Can I get anyone a latte?”

      “Great idea,” Bea said. “I’ll go with you.”

      “Don’t get up, darlin’,” Dixie said. “My treat. Anyone else?”

      There were no other takers. Dixie walked to the coffee kiosk, allowing the rest of the crew the privacy to talk about her behind her back. Lost his memory, huh? Forgot he was married for a while? How does she let herself get into these situations? All she’d have to do is make one phone call to check him out. What does she use for brains? Ah, she’s just thinking below the waist, as usual. Lots of miles on that chick. They would be quite entertained. They would also be quite accurate.

      

      Dixie, whose given name was Helen, came from real brainy stock. Her father was a CPA with an MBA, and her mother had her doctorate and taught anatomy and physiology in a nursing college. Her older brother was a pediatric oncologist and her younger sister was in computers—the vice president of Information Systems for a large corporation. And Dixie had been the Homecoming Queen and the Fiesta Queen and the Oktoberfest Queen and Miss Temple, Texas.

      At twenty-one she had dropped out of college to become a flight attendant, and there was no question this disappointed her parents, if not her entire family.

      There was a very familiar pattern to what she’d just been through with Branch, Dixie realized. The only wonder was that she never saw it coming. Her denial must have been powerful. Over and over again she kept falling in love and getting lied to, cheated on and dumped.

      She wished she’d been as brilliant as the rest of her family, but what bothered her even more was that she’d apparently missed out on the meaningful-relationship gene, as well. The rest of them, Mom and Dad, her brother and sister, were all very happily married and had wonderful family lives. From high school through her short college career and every year since, all Dixie had wanted was to have a partner she could love, count on and have children with, like the rest of the McPhersons had.

      Her brother, Hal, was a wonderful husband and father, as well as a big-shot doctor in Houston; her sister, Sue, was married with two kids who went to the day care in her Dallas office building, but Dixie just limped along looking for love, getting jewelry instead. She had been kicked in the teeth so many times it was a surprise she didn’t need dentures. And not just by pilots. She had been used and then jilted in nearly every profession. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d had to go get tested for STDs after discovering the man of her dreams had been cheating on her. In fact, she couldn’t count how many men she’d had sex with—and she’d tried. Suddenly she was terrified.

      Still, despite the brevity of her college education and the lunacy of her romantic life, Dixie knew she was intelligent. Maybe not brilliant like the rest of the McPhersons, but damned smart enough in other ways.

      Although it might not seem like much to the Ph.D.s in her family, at thirty-thousand feet, her kind of skill could be priceless. No one could get control of a cabin or calm a ruffled passenger better than Dixie. She was good with people and she was excellent with safety procedures. She had administered CPR along with an onboard physician, had blown a slide to safely evacuate an aircraft after an engine fire, and had even once calmed the hysteria of a crew member who was suffering some form of posttraumatic stress disorder after the 9/11 attacks.

      For fifteen years she had performed at the top of her game, and now she was tired and disappointed. She wasn’t going any further in her job, even if she did rack up seniority, which translated into a little more pay and a little less work each year. But the challenge was gone and her personal life was in tatters. She was lonely, her heart hurt, and her coworkers didn’t respect her.

      How did Nikki do it? Nikki hadn’t had a guy since her divorce. She didn’t appear to want one or need one. But then Nikki had those two fabulous kids; maybe that was what sustained her. As for Dixie, disappointment that she had no one special had left her feeling bitter. She had just resorted to violence, for God’s sake!

      She felt like such a loser. Not only had she failed to find The One, but she’d let that be the most important thing in her life for the past fifteen years.

      Now she was on her way home from one of the worst trips of her career. Branch was simply the last in a long line of failures, and the fact that he had lied to her didn’t let her off the hook—she should have done some investigating. She was, as her sister flight attendant so coldly pointed out, a ditz.

      Well, all that was about to change.

      

      Dixie lived in a quaint little town house at the edge of the city in the shadow of the mountains. The complex was gated and secure and featured a community room, fitness center, pool, tennis courts and a drop-dead view. There were four town houses to a building, all with garages. When she’d bought the place she thought it would be temporary. Something to keep the rain off her head until she found Mr. Right, married, got pregnant and bought a nice little house near good schools.

      Her friend Carlisle and his partner, Robert, lived right around the corner; she had told them about the unit when she saw the For Sale sign go up three years ago.

      Now she found herself driving past her own town house, around the corner to Carlisle’s place. It wasn’t late. Maybe she could talk Robert and him into dinner, or at least a drink, because she just didn’t feel like being alone. As she turned into their cul-de-sac, her headlights strafed the front of his house, and she saw something very strange. Carlisle was sitting on the front step of his town house, wearing his flight attendant uniform, his overnight bag parked upright on the sidewalk in front of him. The garage door was open, and his car sat next to Robert’s inside. There was a nice little BMW parked on the street, and the lights were on in the house.

      Dixie parked and got out of the car, then walked up the sidewalk to the steps. Hands on hips, she looked down at him. “Hey, you. You goin’ to work?”

      “I just got home,” he said, standing up. He tossed a look over his shoulder at his house and there was no mistaking his sad expression. “My trip was cancelled. I came home unexpectedly and I found Robert…entertaining.”

      “Oh, damn, Carlisle. That’s awful.”

      He shrugged, his hands shoved into his pockets. “I could’ve called. But I didn’t.”

      Smarter than me, Dixie thought. I never had a clue. “What are you gonna do?”

      “I’ve been trying to decide. Yell and break things? No. That’s unlike me. Too messy. Get drunk? Exact revenge of some kind? I could dip his toothbrush in the toilet every morning.”

      “Very passive-aggressive,” she observed. “You could hit him in the head with somethin’.”

      Carlisle stretched his back. “I doubt he’d hold still for that.”

      She chuckled in spite of herself. “Carlisle, the idea is to do it real fast, surprise the critter, get off one good shot like that whack-a-mole game, before—” She stopped talking as the front door slowly opened.

      A pudgy young man around twenty-five poked his head outside, checking for danger. He paused as though listening for the cocking of a rifle. Dixie and Carlisle both glared. The young man sheepishly came out the door, down the steps past Carlisle, and, head down, made

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