LITMIR.BIZ

      JENNIFER GREENE

      lives near Lake Michigan with her husband and has two children. She has written more than fifty category romances, for which she has won numerous awards, including three RITA^® Awards from the Romance Writers of America in the Best Short Contemporary Books category, and a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times magazine.

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Epilogue

      One

      When Daisy Campbell hit the first patch of black ice, she was tempted to let loose a glass-shattering scream.

      She didn’t, of course. If she’d learned one thing in the past eleven years, it was to shut up and be careful instead of impulsive—but deep down, she sure wanted to scream.

      January in Vermont was no new story for her. The wild winds and blizzard snows and bleak-naked trees and mirror-slick roads were as familiar as a tedious TV rerun. It was for reasons like this that she’d left White Hills, Vermont, and never planned to come back.

      However, now, in the middle of a life-threatening spin, really didn’t seem an ideal time to digress.

      The cheap compact she’d rented at the airport was a mighty contrast to the red Ferrari she’d driven on the Riviera, but when push came to shove, a car was a car. The compact spun a complete 360, skidded into the oncoming traffic lane, and then careened toward the crest of the hill. Below was an unpleasant drop. Very unpleasant. In fact, unpleasant enough to likely kill her if she couldn’t get the tires to bite—damn soon. Damn, damn, damn soon.

      But the tires did bite. For a few hairy moments, the compact faced oncoming traffic, but Daisy battled for traction and eventually turned the son of a seadog around. Since no other vehicles were in sight—thanks to the blizzard—she wasn’t hit or harmed. Nothing was endangered at all, beyond her pulse thumping at sonic-boom levels, but that was no special event. Her ex-husband had regularly raised her blood pressure beyond stroke level easier and faster than any old Vermont blizzard.

      It could be that she was getting a tiny bit tired, though.

      The past two months on the Riviera had been a nightmare rather than a vacation. The past two days of solid traveling and negotiating airports had been nonstop grueling. And the past two hours, she’d been driving in escalating ghastly conditions.

      The car clock claimed it was three in the afternoon, but it might as well have been midnight. Black-cheeked clouds kept rolling in low. The wipers could barely keep up with the slashing, bashing snow. Drifts were forming fast, making big, fat white pillows on fence posts and roofs—but where the wind swept the roads clean, the surface was slick ice.

      Exhausted or not, she simply couldn’t relax. Not yet.

      Ten minutes from home—even though Daisy hadn’t considered the Campbell homestead to be her real home for more than a decade—her body seemed to sense the ordeal was almost over. She couldn’t see Firefly Hollow, where every teenager in the county traditionally made out on Saturday night, but she knew it was there. She couldn’t see Old Man Swisher’s pond, either, but growing up, she’d spent so many hours in the neighbor’s swimming hole that she knew where it was from the curve in the road. A huge, lioness of a yawn escaped her lungs. Less than a half mile, she’d be home free and safe.

      Only, right then, a hundred yards from the driveway, the compact found another diamond slide of ice. It was like trying to control a bullet. She did all the things she was supposed to do, but the little rental car went with the spin, then dove, nose first, into a ditch.

      The back tires were still spinning when Daisy let out a long, furious blood-curdling scream.

      There were times for impulse control—and times when a woman was justifiably fed-up, ticked-off, had-it, and every other multiple-guess choice there could possibly be.

      She turned off the damn car, grabbed her damn purse and overnight bag, and then wrenched open the damn door. Her elegant Italian boots promptly sank into two-foot-deep snow. Naturally she fell. Abandoning all pride, she clawed and crawled her way up from the damn ditch to the damn road.

      In that brief period of time, her toes and nose froze solid. Her red cashmere coat and fuzzy hat were designer French; her bags and gloves were Swiss. She’d have traded all of it—including her Manolo Blahnik boots—for a practical L.L. Bean jacket. The kind she grew up in. The kind she swore she’d never wear again as long as she lived.

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