LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1

      “What the hell are you doing in a place like this?”

      Maggie, on her hands and knees, didn’t look up. “C.J., you’re playing the same old song.”

      C.J. pulled down the hem of his cashmere sweater. He was a man who made worry an art, and he worried about Maggie. Someone had to. Frustrated, he looked down at the sable-brown hair twisted untidily into a knot on top of her head. Her neck was slender, pale, her shoulders curved slightly forward as she rested her weight on her forearms. She had a delicate build, with the kind of fragility C.J. had always associated with nineteenth-century English aristocratic ladies. Though perhaps they, too, had possessed endless stores of strength and endurance under frail bones and porcelain skin.

      She wore a T-shirt and jeans that were both faded and slightly damp from perspiration. When he looked at her hands, fine-boned, elegant hands, and saw they were grimy, he shuddered. He knew the magic they were capable of.

      A phase, he thought. She was just going through a phase. After two marriages and a few affairs, C.J. understood that women went through odd moods from time to time. He brushed at his trim, sandy mustache with one finger. It was up to him to guide her back, gently, to the real world.

      As he glanced around at nothing but trees and rocks and isolation, he wondered, fleetingly, if there were bears in the woods. In the real world, such things were kept in zoos. Keeping a nervous lookout for suspicious movements, he tried again.

      “Maggie, just how long are you going to go on this way?”

      “What way is that, C.J.?” Her voice was low, husky, as if she’d just been awakened. It was a voice that made most men wish they’d awakened her.

      The woman was infuriating. C.J. tugged a hand through his carefully styled, blow-dried hair. What was she doing three thousand miles from L.A., wasting herself on this dirty work? He had a responsibility to her and, damn it, to himself. C.J. blew out a long breath, an old habit he had whenever he met with opposition. Negotiations were, after all, his business. It was up to him to talk some sense into her. He shifted his feet, careful to keep his polished loafers out of the dirt. “Babe, I love you. You know I do. Come home.”

      This time Maggie turned her head, looking up with a flash of a smile that involved every inch of her face—the mouth that stopped just short of being too wide, the chin a bit pointed, the sweep of cheekbones that gave her face a diamond shape. Her eyes, big, round and shades darker than her hair, added that final spark of animation. It wasn’t a stunning face. You’d tell yourself that while you tried to focus in on the reason you were stunned. Even now, without makeup, with a long streak of topsoil across one cheek, the face involved you. Maggie Fitzgerald involved you because she was exactly what she seemed. Interesting. Interested.

      Now she sat back on her haunches, blowing a wisp of hair out of her eyes as she looked up at the man who was frowning at her. She felt a tug of affection, a tug of amusement. Both had always come easily to her. “C.J., I love you, too. Now stop acting like an old woman.”

      “You don’t belong here,” he began, more exasperated than insulted. “You shouldn’t be grubbing around on your hands and knees—”

      “I like it,” she said simply.

      It was the very simplicity of the tone that told him he had a real problem. If she’d shouted, argued, his chances of turning her around would’ve been all but secured. But when she was like this, calmly stubborn, changing her mind would be like climbing Mount Everest. Treacherous and exhausting. Because he was a clever man, C.J. changed tactics.

      “Maggie, I can certainly understand why you might like to get away for a while, rest a bit. No one deserves it more.” That was a nice touch, he thought, because it was true. “Why don’t you take a couple weeks in Cancún, or go on a shopping spree in Paris?”

      “Mmm.” Maggie shifted on her knees and fluffed up the petals of the pansies she was planting. They looked, she decided, a bit sick. “Hand me that watering can, will you?”

      “You’re not listening.”

      “Yes, I am.” Stretching over, she retrieved the can herself. “I’ve been to Cancún, and I have so many clothes now I left half of them in storage in L.A.”

      Without breaking stride, C.J. tried a different turn. “It’s not just me,” he began again, watching as she drenched the pansies. “Everyone who knows you, who knows about this, thinks you’ve—”

      “Slipped a gear?” Maggie supplied. Overdid the water, she decided as the saturated blossoms drooped. She had a lot to learn about the basics of country life. “C.J., instead of nagging me and trying to talk me into doing something I’ve no intention of doing, why don’t you come down here and give me a hand?”

      “A hand?” His voice held the slightly appalled note it might have if she’d suggested he dilute prime scotch with tap water. Maggie chuckled.

      “Pass me that flat of petunias.” She stuck the small spade in the ground again, fighting the rocky soil. “Gardening’s good for you. It gets you back in touch with nature.”

      “I’ve no desire to touch nature.”

      This time she laughed and lifted her face to the sky. No, the closest C.J. would come to nature would be a chlorinated pool—solar-heated. Up to a few months ago she’d barely gotten much closer herself. She’d certainly never attempted to. But now she’d found something—something she hadn’t even been looking for. If she hadn’t come to the East Coast to collaborate on the score for a new musical, if she hadn’t taken an impulsive drive south after the long, grueling sessions had ended, she never would’ve happened on the sleepy little town tucked into the Blue Ridge.

      Do we ever know where we belong, Maggie wondered, unless we’re lucky enough to stumble onto our own personal space? She only knew that she’d been heading nowhere in particular and she’d come home.

      Maybe it had been fate that had led her into Morganville, a cluster of houses cupped in the foothills that boasted a population of 142. From the town proper, it spread out into farms and isolated mountain homes. If fate had taken her to Morganville, it had again taken her past the sign that listed the sale of a house and twelve acres. There’d been no moment of indecision, no quibbling over the price, no last-minute doubts. Maggie had met the terms and had had the deed in her hand within thirty days.

      Looking up at the three-story frame house, with shutters still hanging crooked, Maggie could well imagine her friends and colleagues wondering about her mental state. She’d left her Italian-marble entrance hall and mosaic-tiled pool for rusty hinges and rocks. She’d done it without a backward glance.

      Maggie patted the dirt around the petunias, then sat back. They looked a bit more spritely than her pansies. Maybe she was beginning to get the hang of it. “What do you think?”

      “I think you should come back to L.A. and finish the score.”

      “I meant the flowers.” She brushed off her jeans as she rose. “In any case, I am finishing the score—right here.”

      “Maggie, how can you work here?” C.J. exploded. He tossed out both arms in a gesture she’d always admired for its unapologetic theatrics. “How can you live here? This place isn’t

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