Shields up, sugar—things in Plum Orchard are about to get real.

Marybell Lyman is notorious for two things:

Her look. The wicked hairstyle, multiple piercings and practiced sneer that say: “Stay back—I bite.”

Her voice. The syrupy lilt that’s her bread and butter at Call Girls, the prim little town’s flourishing phone-sex company.

Hunky handyman Taggart Hawthorne is mesmerized by the contradiction: such sweet tones inside such a spiky shell! He wants to know more about mysterious Marybell, to hear more of her sexy talk—all for himself.

But Tag’s attentions, delicious as they are, have Marybell panicked. She’s been hiding a long time. She’s finally got a home, a job and friends she adores. She won’t have it all snatched away by another stupid mistake—like falling in love. So when Marybell’s past comes calling, she and the Call Girls will prove no one handles scandals like a Southern girl!

Talking After Midnight

Dakota Cassidy

www.mirabooks.co.uk

First, to my editor, Leonore Waldrip, for my repetitive overuse of so many thighs and eyes, this one’s for you! Also, for suggesting a very unusual heroine, and the challenge creating her presented.

And to my BFF, Renee George, who always knows when I’m on the brink. She listens. She hears. She nurtures. I love you much.

Last, but never least, my husband, Rob—you’re the best decision I foolishly almost didn’t make. Thank you for some of the best years of my life!

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

One

“Heaven and a ring o’ fire...”

Under normal circumstances, Marybell Lyman would have laughed at her employer and friend Dixie Davis’s shocked words when she pushed her way into her small basement apartment, stopped dead in her tracks and tipped her head to the side as if she’d just witnessed the second coming.

But this circumstance wasn’t normal.

Dixie stood poised in her doorway for a moment, the cold draft from the late-winter evening ruffling her knee-length burgundy sweater. Dixie, never without words, stared at her, speechless. She tucked a strand of her long auburn hair behind her ear and hummed something else Marybell couldn’t quite hear because of her clogged ears.

Marybell scurried back to her couch without a word, plunking herself down on the new sofa she’d just had delivered. She huddled into her bathrobe, keeping her head down as far as she could without making her nose begin running again.

When her friends from work had all shown up to coddle her with chicken soup and some good ol’ Southern love, she’d panicked. Her heart racing, her head full of cotton, throbbing an endless, crushing beat, she’d battled with whether to answer the door.

No one saw her this way—unmasked—ever, and definitely not Dixie, the owner of the phone sex company where she worked as a phone sex operator.

But it wasn’t as though there was any hiding from the three pretty faces full of concern, pressed against the glass of her front door like a trio of suction-cupped Garfields in the back of a car window.

She couldn’t simply shoo them away or make up some excuse to keep them from barging in even if she truly wanted to. As a whole, Team Call Girls was unstoppable. If you told them no, they yelled, “Bless your heart,” and trampled all over you and your nos with their cute heels.

Why, oh, why hadn’t she thought to pull the shade down over the glass before she’d taken those cold meds and fallen asleep?

Breathe, Marybell. Act natural.

Ha! Easy for the voice inside her head to say. It didn’t have to fend off three gawking mother hens, as well meaning as they were, and remain calm while its insides twisted into a knot fit for a Boy Scout.

LaDawn Jenkins, coworker, friend, best phone sex operator in the universe, stood next to Dixie, a woven basket with a red-checkered napkin covering what Marybell suspected were freshly baked rolls, and cocked her platinum-blond head. “I have rolls,” she mumbled, dropping them on the end table next to her box of tissues. “With butter,” she added, her brow furrowing.

Marybell hunkered farther down in her bathrobe, fighting another violent shudder of chills, almost too feverish to care about her friends seeing her for the first time devoid of what she’d secretly dubbed her “people shield.”

Almost.

She should be in the process of making a break for it. Or at the very least, putting a paper bag over her head. But she’d spent herself simply finding her gel eye mask and answering the door. Her legs were so weak, her chest so congested and tight, it would take everything she had left in her to move again.

Instead, she cast her eyes toward her feet, covered in fuzzy black calf-length socks with the slipper-grippers on the soles.

There’s nowhere to hide but in plain sight now, Marybell Lyman. You’re stewed. Try not to look obvious.

Emmaline Amos, soon to be Emmaline Hawthorne if the way things were shaping up between her and Jax was any indication, almost fell smack into Dixie and LaDawn when she rushed in the front door. The skid of her conservative black pumps screeched to a halt against the wood floor.

She gasped in her “clutch your pearls” way but covered by quickly clamping her lips shut. Naturally, she didn’t mean for her mouth to open before her brain properly filtered her shock. Em was nothing if she wasn’t the epitome of Southern decorum.

That Southern diplomacy was why Dixie had given her the position of general manager at Call Girls Inc. She was tactful, kind and able to appease even the crankiest of customers.

And she always did what was right and decorous—even if it killed her. Though, mostly this behavior was due to her incredibly kind heart. She’d earned Marybell’s deepest respect since coming to Call Girls, newly single after her ex-husband had all but abandoned her and her boys to live his life as a cross-dresser.

Em was down-home tough. Soft and pliable like Play-Doh on the outside, but made of steel parts of resolve on the inside. There wasn’t a coon dog’s chance in purgatory she’d acknowledge just how astonished she was.

Instead, she carried in a large Crock-Pot bowl with two heart-covered oven mitts over her hands to protect them from the heat. Em assessed Marybell for a moment, brief and fleeting, before her eyes flickered, and proper Em was firmly back in place. “We brought you...” She almost stuttered the words, gazing down at Marybell. But then she caught herself reacting and forced her shoulders to square and her spine to straighten. Em cleared her throat. “Soup,” she finished with a warm smile full of perfect white teeth and ruby-red lipstick. “Chicken soup—for your poor, flu-riddled soul, you sweet, phlegmy angel.” Em set the Crock-Pot on the old chest Marybell used as a coffee table, dropping the mitts next to it.

Marybell murmured a thank-you into the collar of her bathrobe.

Em flapped her hands in the way she always did, signifying that her kind gesture was much ado about nothing. “Did you really expect we’d let you suffer all alone? Not on my watch, miss. Mercy, we’ve been worried to death about you ever since you called in sick earlier today, sugarplum. Dixie said you sounded like a congested bullfrog, and weak as a kitten to boot. You hafta feed that cold. Which is why we all cooked up something and forced our way in here like the interfering henpeckers we are.”

“Rolls,” LaDawn repeated again stiffly, clearly still experiencing aftershocks of the “holy Hannah in a wet suit” variety. “I brought rolls. With butter.” She pointedly tapped the basket.

Marybell smiled in an abstract, afraid-to-meet-their-eyes way, too cold to pull her hands from the confines of her bathrobe to take a roll, too rattled to move. “Yum, butter. How kind. Thanks, girls.” She dabbed at her eyes, red-rimmed and drippy under the mask.

Now that formalities and justifications were made, she waited, quietly, if not inquisitively, for an answer to the unspoken question.

Why haven’t we ever seen who the real Marybell Lyman is?

They all waited.

For an explanation about her appearance, with plenty of side-eye and questions in the form of an entire conversation played out with only the expressions on their faces.

Em folded her fists at her waist, resting them on her slender hips, her teeth working the corner of her lower lip.

Dixie placed her forearm over her chest, resting her other arm in the crook of it, and cupped her chin with her hand, blatantly stumped.

LaDawn just left the opportunity for flies to congregate in her mouth, which was now, unabashedly, wide-open.

Marybell waited, too. Her fuzzy, medicated brain was searching for a way to handle this without turning it into a topic of long discussion wherein she explained why no one ever saw her freshly scrubbed face.

Under any other circumstances, mentally guessing who’d crack first under the pressure of etiquette would have been as much fun as watching Nanette Pruitt bluster when Marybell sat next to her in church and sang “Onward, Christian Soldier,” loud and entirely off-key.

The stunning difference between this MB—sans red-and-green-spiked Mohawk, heavy eye makeup, nose ring and facial piercings—and the one sitting before them had to be killing them.

This was the Marybell Lyman not a solitary soul had seen in at least four years, except her bathroom mirror just before she spent an hour applying the “people shield.”

If she were a bettin’ kind, she’d lay bets on LaDawn, the most vocal of their group, and while Southern to her last breath, she was also unashamedly opinionated and outspoken. There was no subtext to LaDawn, and it was probably one of the things Marybell loved most about her. She was an ex-lady of the evening, or as she jokingly called her former profession, a “companionator.” Words weren’t something LaDawn struggled with.

Yet nothing. The old clock on her coffee-with-cream-painted wall ticked away the seconds while each woman internally struggled with her appearance and fought not to visibly squirm.

Marybell’s sudden sneeze into a crumpled tissue made all of them jump, forcing her to address the issue. If she made light of it, they would, too, and she needed them to make light. She prayed they’d follow her lead.

“My nose ring is at the cleaners,” she teased, breaking the ice with a honking snort into a brand-new tissue.

Dixie finally spoke, her voice just above a whisper, as though if someone heard her, she’d be tagged responsible for letting the cat out of the bag. “If I didn’t know this was your apartment, I’d never have—”

“Known you from a hole in the wall!” LaDawn crowed, her voice now located. She planted her hands on her hips, encased in her usual skintight jeans, and pushed her hair over her shoulder with daggerlike-tipped fingers of glittery purple. “Dang, girl.” She pulled the words from her lips as if she were pulling a thick milk shake from a straw. “You’d better hurry up and get better so you can do up that hair before the town fair starts next week. I’ll never be able to find my way to the cotton candy stand if that Mohawk o’ yours isn’t stickin’ out in every direction, pointin’ me to the land of sugary pink heaven.” She chuckled, leaning forward to tweak a wet strand of Marybell’s hair with affectionate fingers.

Marybell sniffled, wincing at the sharp tug to her sinuses, afraid to let loose a sigh of relief. Keeping her chin tucked inside her bathrobe, she forced a chuckle. “Oh, you hush, LaDawn. You don’t need me to do that. You have Doc Johnson to light your way.”

LaDawn chuffed, popping her dark-purple-lined lips. “Don’t you talk to me about Doc Johnson. That man hasn’t come callin’ in three solid days.”

Em, obviously unable to stand it anymore, plopped down on the couch next to her, directing LaDawn to bring her a bowl and ladle from the kitchen. She smoothed the fan of her skirt over her knees. “First off, Cat sends her love. She didn’t want to, but we made her stay home. Wouldn’t be good for her to catch somethin’ from you with the baby on the way.”

Marybell loved Cat Butler. A free spirit, a hugger, one of her first real friends, and now madly in love with Flynn McGrady and well on her way to beginning their family. “Tell her I said thank you, and keep that bun in the oven safe.”

Em popped her lips. “So, how is it that we’ve been friends for all this time now, and we’ve never seen the true Marybell?” She plucked at the eye mask, making Marybell swat at her hands. “Well, almost the true Marybell. You’ve seen us in all sorts of manner, miss. Drunk, seminaked, riding a mechanical bull, for heaven’s sake. Fair is fair.” She asked the question as though it were some slight for Marybell never to have revealed herself without her makeup and gel-spiked hair.

She really wanted to ask why they’d surprise-attacked her with food and hospitality when she’d expressly told Dixie she’d be fine and back at work within the week. All she needed was some rest and cold medication. She’d done that with the fervent hope they wouldn’t catch her exactly as they’d done.

But leave it to Em and Dixie to have to see for themselves she wasn’t going to do something as dramatic as die of the latest illness they’d hunted down on WebMD.

Still, her friends made her smile. They were a reason to get up these days when for so long, there wasn’t any reason at all.

They were loving, nurturing machines, the lot of them. Give them an ailment, and they were fixing it with age-old home remedies and more smothering love than you could shake a stick at. How could she be angry with them for caring about her?

But she hadn’t been prepared for their insistent knock on her door. It left her more than uneasy without her cloak of heavy makeup and piercings in place. There was always the chance, even in small-town Plum Orchard, Georgia, she’d be recognized. The people here had been ever so slow to come to terms with how different her appearance was from the likes of them.

Yet she’d sucked up the strange looks and whispers behind hands at Madge’s Kitchen where she had dinner almost every night before her shift for a reason. It beat the livin’ daylights out of the alternative.

Rather than answer Em, Marybell deflected, looking her friend square in the eye. She was the master of deflection. “Do I ever see the true Emmaline?” she asked with mock innocence, glad for the cloak of her congestion concealing her weak attempt at subterfuge.

“Bah! You most certainly do see the true Emmaline. You see her with lipstick.” Em pursed her lips, dragging a throw from the back of Marybell’s couch to cover her with it. She tucked the edges under her chin with gentle fingers, pressing the back of her hand to Marybell’s forehead with a wince.

Marybell coughed, turning her head and using her arm to shield Em from her germs. “Exactly.” She smiled.

“Gravy,” Dixie murmured, patting her on the back while setting a cup of steaming lemon tea laced with honey on the end table, her eyes perusing Marybell’s freshly scrubbed face. “Even stricken with the flu and a gel eye mask, you’re beautiful. I don’t like this turn of events Ms. MB,” she joked with her infamous flirty smile. “I’m glad Caine didn’t see you without your goo or I’d be a goner. Plus, you’re younger than me by six years. I simply won’t have you, or anyone in this town, bein’ prettier than me.”

Em clucked her tongue, shooting Dixie a chiding finger. “Are you sayin’ Caine wouldn’t fall for her with her makeup and the pointy green-and-red things all over her head? Are you sayin’ he doesn’t love you for what’s on your insides, Dixie Davis? That he’s nothing more than a shallow shell of a man with a heartbeat and a chiseled jaw?”

Marybell giggled, letting a little of her tension ease. Conversation successfully deflected. “I don’t think you have to say anything, Dixie. Caine can’t see anyone but you, whether you have insides or not. Now, I thought I told y’all to stay away so you don’t catch this nasty bug. Surely you don’t want to leave me to answer everyone’s calls because you’re all too sick to do your jobs, do you? Especially if I have to answer LaDawn’s calls. I’m not nearly the Jedi master with the flyswatter she is. I always miss and end up swatting myself.”

The joke at the Call Girls office, situated in the guesthouse of dearly departed multimillionaire Landon Wells, a man who’d given Marybell everything when she’d had nothing, was LaDawn’s skill with her beloved flyswatter.

She was like Bruce Lee with a pair of nunchakus. Daryl from The Walking Dead with a bow and arrow. Phone sex operators throughout the land should all cower in fear when LaDawn broke out the flyswatter.

It was really just an audio prop for her BDSM clients to hear over the phone, but she fooled them into believing it was a flogger every time. For her birthday, they’d collectively had a real flyswatter bronzed with her name on it, which she proudly displayed in her office on her desk.

Dixie rolled her eyes at Em. “First off, not a chance we’d let you go this alone. There’s nothing like some love and coddlin’ when you’re so sick. Second, you hush, Em. I’m not saying that at all, and you know it. I love our Marybell—even today, nose redder than a tube of crimson lipstick and eyes drippin’ from behind that mask like a leaky faucet.”

Marybell took the tea with a grateful sigh, still keeping her eyes semiaverted over the rim of the china. “I think what Dixie’s saying is, I’m not Caine’s type.”

That was okay, too. She was no one’s type, and that was just as well. Buried in small-town Georgia, she’d never have to worry about the temptation of finding someone whose type she was.

There were few available men in town, anyway, but the men here liked women who wore pretty dresses, the proper-height heel for the appropriate time of day and subtle makeup. Their hair was always long and flowing, or up and smooth. It wasn’t riding a colored line along the tops of their heads, and they certainly weren’t wearing clunky black work boots and leopard-skin leggings slashed as if a knife had been taken to them.

LaDawn sat down on the chest, scooting the Crock-Pot to the side, tilting Marybell’s chin upward to look her in the eye. Well, as much as her cooling gel eye mask allowed, anyway.

Her heart stopped cold for a moment, her fingers trembling on the handle of the teacup. Caught. She was caught. They knew who she was and her safe, quiet, if not terribly exciting life would be over.

That clawing anxiety, usually reserved for late-night insomnia and mentally backtracking every move she made, pushed its way to lodge in her raw throat.

LaDawn’s lips, the color purple meant to match her nails, turned into a smile. She plucked at a strand of Marybell’s now drying, shoulder-length hair “As I live and breathe. You’re a natural blonde, aren’t you? How do you get all that red-and-green gunk in your hair every day? You know, I’d hate you if it wasn’t for Brugsby’s Drugstore and Miss Clairol.”

Marybell gulped before she forced a smile, praying she could stare LaDawn down without looking away. “It’s a spray. It washes out easy. And you’d love me any ol’ way, LaDawn. Who’d bring you those frosty pink doughnuts and coffee from Madge’s on the night shift, if not for me? Not even Doc Johnson does that. I’m forever your girl.”

LaDawn’s eye grew critical, though it still twinkled beneath her purple eye shadow and glittery gold eyeliner. “And when did you stop shavin’ half your eyebrow off? Next thing you know, you’ll be pluckin’ ’em into a fine arch like the rest of us ninnies. Why, if this keeps up, you might even wear a dress. Now, wouldn’t that be somethin’? Our Marybell in anything other than ripped-up or spotted with some kind of animal-print britches?” She chuckled deep and rich.

Conformity. Blessed be.

Em rubbed Marybell’s arm and smiled before pulling her frozen fingers into her hand and warming them. “Never you mind LaDawn and her teasin’. I think you’re hair’s pretty as a picture. All that natural curl leaves me with ugly envy in my heart. I don’t know why you hide it behind black eye shadow and all those colors and hair gel. It looks like it takes an awful lot of work to get it to stand up straight like someone scared the life outta you, but I don’t give a fig either way. I like the way you stare society and all its preconceived notions right down, look ’em square in the eye, and dare ’em to say anything. I like it especially when you do it to Louella Palmer. It always makes me giggle till I swear I’m gonna wet myself when her eyes are forced to give you the look of disdain and you growl and snap your teeth at her.”

Rage against the machine.

Marybell squeezed Em’s hand. Her snarling at Louella Palmer, the most hateful woman she’d ever encountered, was all part of the act to keep everyone she didn’t allow into her circle at bay.

Marybell lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I have a gift. Some people paint. I snarl. If I didn’t have my hair gelled up like I’d been scared half to death, she wouldn’t be afraid of me. Louella fears what she doesn’t understand. Besides, you just like when I growl at her because it keeps her too busy tanglin’ with me to hatch another plot against you and Dixie,” she quipped, accepting the dose of thick emerald-green cold medicine LaDawn handed her, chugging it down like a shot of tequila.

“You’re a wingman for the ages, MB. No doubt,” Dixie assured with her familiar warmth, rubbing her arms and shivering. “So explain to me why it’s so cold in here? Surely this isn’t on purpose, is it?” Dixie’s brow creased, her pretty face lining with concern. “Are you conserving heat for budgetary reasons? I won’t have it with it being so cold out and you ragin’ with flu, Marybell. A raise—I’ll give you a raise,” she offered, pushing through her purse to find her phone and make a note of it. “Em, turn up that heat while I let Nella know, would you?”

Dixie in a nutshell. Generous, funny, gorgeous and loyal to the core. Plum Orchard legend had it back in high school she was once feared for her horrible pranks.

Yet she’d come home just a few months ago, emotionally broken and cash poor only to turn around and win, in what the folks of Plum Orchard called the “phone sex games,” the entirety of the company Marybell worked for.

Since then, Dixie’d redeemed herself for the most part with nearly everyone who’d once held a grudge against her—well, everyone except the snotty Magnolias, the group of women who considered themselves the backbone of fine Southern breeding and ran Plum Orchard as if they were the mob.

Though, the people of Plum Orchard still didn’t love that not only did she own a phone sex company, but she consorted with her employees on a regular basis. Some of them still made no bones about sayin’ so.

Oddly, those same people who frowned upon her and the wicked women of Call Girls sure didn’t mind Dixie and her fiancé, Caine Donovan, funneling their alleged ill-gotten gains into town functions and fund-raisers for the elementary school.

Either way, Marybell didn’t give a hoot about the things Dixie had once done when she was just a teenager. Not a one of these set-in-their-ways folk were above making mistakes. Small towns had a way of holding a grudge the likes of which she’d never seen.

But Marybell had liked Dixie from the moment she’d been assigned by Cat as her guide to the world of the phone sex industry. Dixie had risen above ridicule and cruel attacks, and she’d defended the women of Call Girls right in front of God and man. Now, several months later, Marybell liked her even more.

And she didn’t want to lose Dixie, or any of them, on the chance they might recognize her. Knowing who she really was would create an invasion the likes of which Plum Orchard had never seen. But it wouldn’t just invade her life; it would invade the women’s lives. Women she’d come to care a great deal for, and she’d die before she let that happen.

Her gut tightened with the fear of loss in that way it always did—uncomfortable, choking her from the inside out. The fear that almost never entirely went away—even after all this time.

Always. It was always with her. Sometimes the panic muted, became a dull roar, but it never truly left. It hovered around the fringes of her life, poking at her like an animal in a cage, reminding her.

Em’s voice interrupted her private misery. She stood over the thermostat, studying it. “It says it’s eighty-five degrees in here, Dixie, but that can’t be right.” Em had a gift for most things DIY. Except anything electrical, as evidenced by the enormous hole Jax Hawthorne had in his backyard gazebo when she’d decided it would be pretty to put in a paddle fan with a light.

“It’s broken,” Marybell croaked, her nose itchy and raw. “And put your bags of money away, Dixie Davis,” she teased on a cough. “I don’t need a raise. You pay me just fine, thank you. I just forgot to ask Miss Carter to fix it with the warm spell we had not long ago. Leave it be, Dixie. I’ll have it taken care of when I’m better.”

She loved the basement apartment she’d rented from Blanche Carter. This apartment was the first place she’d called home in four years. It harbored all the things she’d lovingly collected when she finally decided it was safe to stay in Landon’s, and then Dixie’s, employ. But it was mighty cold in the winter.

Dixie planted her hands on her hips. “I can’t, in good conscience, leave you here to freeze to death. Blanche is in Atlanta till Tuesday and the weatherman said it’s going to be down in the thirties this weekend. With you so sick, it’ll just make it worse. I won’t have it.”

The cold medicine was beginning to work its magic, leaving her too exhausted to fend Dixie’s mothering off.

Suddenly Em was digging in her purse, too, pulling out her phone, her beautiful blue eyes lit up by the face of her phone. “Oh, I know! I’ll call Jax’s brother—he’s a licensed electrician. He’ll come take a look. If he can’t do it today, then you’re comin’ home with me until he can, MB. Hear me? Or maybe with Dixie. Sanjeev’ll take fine care of you.”

The cold meds LaDawn had given her began to affect her train of thought. Was it irony she could pound down a half bottle of vodka shots with the best of them and not feel a thing, but give her a cold remedy meant to help you sleep, and she was a goner?

Words became hazy, her fear of exposure growing dull. She realized her head was falling back to the couch, yet she had no energy to stop it. Hands comforted her, moved over her to lift her feet up on the couch. Dishes clanged in faraway tones and then someone with warm fingers brushed her hair from her face, pressing a heating pad to her chest and dropping a kiss on her burning forehead just before she succumbed to the quiet of her stuffy head.

Though she did remember to do one thing before she allowed her drug-induced haze to take over. It was as important to her as her “people shield” and had become almost a superstition of sorts. Or maybe it was just a stinkin’ crutch.

That’s probably what a therapist would say. Be it crutch, superstition, good-luck charm, whatever, no matter where Marybell Lyman was, who she was with, before she laid her head on a pillow and closed her eyes, she said a quick prayer just in case the universe really was one big ball of positive thinking. It was the prayer she said every night before she went to sleep.

Thank you for all these wonderful blessings, for food to eat, for my friends and for my job.

But please, please don’t take them away.

Two

More banging on her door. Loud. Obnoxious. Heavy-handed.

Gravy sakes, could a sick woman just be left to die in splotchy, ugly red runny-nosed peace?

Not if Emmaline Amos and Dixie Davis are your friends, Marybell. With friendship came a certain amount of invasion of privacy, she’d learned. Still, she was going to kill them for waking her again, and just when she’d found a bit of sleep without the threat of coughing her left lung to implosion.

Muddled and fuzzy, Marybell sat upright, her head pulsing its angry protest, making her reach for another tissue. The last time she’d looked at the clock while the girls were still here, it was five in the afternoon. She’d slept for three solid hours.

Pulling herself to a standing position, she shivered as she left behind the warmth of the heating pad and made her way to the front door, jamming her hands into the deep pockets of her favorite, albeit ratty, flannel bathrobe.

She began to open it with a moment’s hesitation, warding off another coughing spell. Then she caught hold of her runaway fears, forcing herself to rationalize through the thick haze of cold meds. Clearly, her friends hadn’t made the connection to her past, and they’d already seen her. So seeing her twice without her makeup and hair gel wouldn’t change anything. What was done was done.

Still, Marybell kept her eyes averted—in hindsight, she’d wish her tongue had done the same. She yanked open the door, her eyelids at half-mast. “You know, you three are like havin’ really annoying sisters. Maybe akin to the stepsisters in Cinderella, only nicer and with smaller feet,” she grumbled, sneezing into her tissue. “How will I ever nab the prince if you pair of mother hens won’t let me rest? Would you have me search for my Prince Charming lookin’ like this?”

A delicious man with hair the color of a dark, exotic wood, worn just long enough to brush the collar of his black sweatshirt, partially covered by the navy-blue knit hat he wore, smiled a smile surely carved with the tool of a god. “Wow. Prince Charming’s a lot of pressure, don’t you think?”

Her breathing stalled while her heart crashed against her ribs and her eyes swiftly hit the floor.

“Are you Marybell Lyman?” he prompted, rough and chocolaty rich, cocking his head in question.

Oh, no. Heaven, no.

She knew that voice. That voice had been in the Call Girls office on more than one occasion as of late. The voice that was always looking for his brother, Jax, who’d created some security software for Dixie and Caine, specifically designed for Call Girls. The voice that belonged to this man—an unconventionally delicious man.

One who made her tremble in her zebra-striped leggings and work boots. One she’d avoided purposely for several months now—even with her Mohawk and trimmings in place.

A man from her past she’d only vaguely known socially, but who would most certainly know her sans her “people shield.”

And hate her for the knowing.

But she had her eye mask. Everything was okay. Her hands self-consciously flew to her face to find her eye mask was no longer there.

Oh, gravy.

Think fast, Marybell Lyman, or all your carefully built walls, all your beloved friends, job and possessions will come crashin’ around your ears.

* * *

As the woman who answered the door made a stumbling, wobbly break for another room, Taggart Hawthorne stood awkwardly at her door, tool belt in hand, remembering only that Em had told him this Marybell Lyman’s protests weren’t an option. She was sick, it was cold out and her heat was broken. Take no prisoners—Em’s exact words.

Which, if you considered her current relationship with his brother, Jax, didn’t surprise him. Em was a warrior disguised in pretty dresses and flowery perfume. Her lipstick was really a magic wand that made you do things you wouldn’t normally do, and her sweet nature bent you to her will without ever realizing you’d been manipulated by flirty eyelashes and pretty words.

Yet she’d become a part of not just his brother’s and his niece Maizy’s world, but his universe, too. And when Em demanded, he listened, largely because he respected the hell out of her.

Tag leaned against the door frame, savoring the smell of chicken soup, tea and Vicks as he assessed the view of this woman’s small but nicely decorated living room.

A thickly cushioned couch in soft ivory, littered from one end to the other with overstuffed pillows in gold and a light turquoise, sat in disarray. What was it with a woman and some fancy pillows?

It was as if the damn things made everything okay. That must be it, because every woman he’d encountered so far always had a mess o’ pillows—little Maizy included.

Though he had to admire her choice in the chest she’d chosen to use as a coffee table. The surface was scarred, battered from years of use, holding a simple, darkly stained bowl of colored balls. It was sturdy, the lines of it clean and squarely crisp, the color a deep walnut, streaked with hints of red and antique white.

If he had a place of his own, and he wasn’t sponging off his brother, Jax, till he got back on his feet, he’d definitely put his feet up on something like that—every night with a plate of hot wings and a football game.

Perusing the walls, where abstract rectangles of ivory, red and that same turquoise she seemed so fond of, streaked the canvases, reminding him of somewhere warm. Somewhere the sun shone all the time and you sat in the sand with a bottle of Corona while salty waves rolled over your toes and buttery-rayed days turned to purple-hued nights.

There was a big square rug in the center of the bleached white barn-wood floor, woven in the same willowy color of her couch.

So this was the apartment of a phone sex operator? Huh. Truth time. He’d been expecting all manner of paraphernalia. In fact, he’d been damn curious when he thought about running into her tools of the trade.

Yet not a hint of a shelf with hooks where rows of worn floggers and masks in black and red might hang. No fuzzy handcuffs tossed carelessly over a doorknob, and there certainly weren’t any leather catsuits.

Obviously, the job did not define the lady.

It didn’t bother him in the least that Em ran a phone sex company. True, when Em had hired him to fix some faulty wiring at Call Girls, it had made him a little uncomfortable to hear the women talking to their clients through the walls of one office or another. Especially LaDawn. Damn, that woman could make somethin’ out of nothing.

But the discomfort had nothing to do with disapproval and everything to do with the fact that even he had to admit, their breathy sighs and softly moaned words turned him on a little.

Still, he just couldn’t connect with the notion. It was a false connection. Once the operator hung up the phone, she was creating another relationship just like the one she’d had with the caller before. He couldn’t submerse himself enough—or maybe his imagination just wasn’t vivid enough to get past the idea. Of course, Em didn’t do the dirty-talkin’, either. This woman, according to Em, did.

Either way, he’d stick with one-on-one, messy, down-in-the-mud, flaws-and-all, human connections.

Speaking of messy, when Marybell finally reappeared, it was with the floppiest-brimmed hat he’d ever seen cover a woman of no more than five foot two. It was white with black polka dots, sporting a big, shiny pink bow around it. The brim was so big it fell over her eyes, masking almost every feature of her face but the tip of her cold-infested nose and her full, chapped lips. It would have swallowed her whole if she didn’t hold it in place.

“Fancy date?” he asked, unable to stop himself from noting how comical she looked in a moth-eaten bathrobe and summer hat, still trying to figure how she fit into the sparse but colorful landscape of her apartment.

She rocked back on her fuzzy black feet. Not amused, said her posture. “Not unless he wants the black plague.”

“So you kiss on the first date?” he asked, almost looking around to see whose mouth those suggestive words had come out of—and more important, why they had come out at all.

She clucked her tongue, her lips never changing their pursed disapproval. “Only if my date doesn’t mind some snot.”

Unfriendly fire, Captain. Man your battleships. “I’m Tag Hawthorne.” He offered his hand, noting it was cracked and calloused from working outside in Jax’s unheated barn.

She backed away, covering one foot with the other in the process. “I’m dying of the flu.”

“Is dying your first name or your last?” Beneath that wide brim of her ridiculous hat, he’d swear he saw her almost smirk. What was with the hat to begin with? Sure, she was sick, but no one could be that vain, could they?

“Why are you here?”

Tag paused. If he was reading her right, there was a whole lot of territorial in her. This is mine. Keep out. So he smiled, opting to reassure her. “Zombie outbreak.”

Her sigh crackled, wheezing from her chest as her fingers pulled a tissue from her bathrobe pocket and pressed it to her nose. “You’re no Daryl,” she replied, her voice, even congested and tight, so sweet it almost hurt his teeth. Fascinating.

“Really, who is?” he joked, still trying to figure out what it was about this woman that made him want not only to get a rise out of her, but to have her treat him with something more than an upturned nose of total disregard. He was all but pulling her pigtails for no reason other than to pull.

Maybe it was the hat. He damn well wanted to see what was under the hat.

Marybell tapped an impatient fingernail on the door she held on to as if it were the armor that helped her protect her castle. “So, you’re here why?”

She wasn’t biting. Not even a nibble. So he slapped on his serious face and played the Emmaline card while still trying to figure out how, in all the trips he’d made to Call Girls over the past few months, he’d missed seeing her. “Em sent me to fix your heat.”

She flapped a hand at him. A ringless hand. Interesting. There were plenty of unattached women in Plum Orchard, a thirsty crew, if you asked him. They’d shown up at Jax’s on more than several occasions with all sorts of casseroles and pies, but he’d never seen Marybell in the mix. “Not necessary. I can take care of it when I’m better.” She began to close the dungeon door on him.

Tag stuck his hand in it, shaking his head. “Uh, no. I mean, wait. That came out wrong. What I mean is, you do know Em, don’t you? I mean, you work with her, right?”

Still nothing but cool disdain and the scent of Vicks. “I do.”

“Well, try living with her. Or almost living with her. She doesn’t like the word no. If I don’t at least look at the problem, she’ll have my head. You don’t want carnage on your hands, do you?”

Her sigh was full of phlegm, making him wince in regret. He was teasing her while she was standing at the door with the raw wind nipping at her. Em wouldn’t like that, either. “Listen, you need to get inside out of the draft. If you get sicker, Em’ll have my head. Just let me take a look, okay? You can trust no one will read a story about you and your hacked-off limbs hanging in a smokehouse in the Plum Orchard Herald. I’m safe. Call Em and check, if you need to.”

Her chin lifted a little, still standoffish. “No, thank you. I’m fine.”

Patience. She just needed patience. He had time for that. “It’s going to be down in the thirties tonight, Marybell, and if I remember right, this apartment has concrete floors. Great in a hot Georgia summer, not so great in the winter with this recent cold snap. One quick look and then I’m out of your hair. Deal?” He smiled wide, hoping to sway her with his winning grin.

Yet as he held that grin for as long as his mouth would allow, Marybell clearly wasn’t affected in quite the way he’d hoped. In other words, letting him in had nothing to do with the magic of the Hawthorne charm.

While his teeth stuck to his cold lips from smiling so hard, she finally rolled her hand toward the thermostat, keeping the hat pulled down over her eyes. “Fine.” She turned on her fuzzy foot without another word, leaving him to wipe his feet on the small mat outside her door and enter the enemy’s castle.

Oddly, as she made her way back to the couch, clinging firmly to her hat, he couldn’t help admiring her petite frame, even in a rumpled bathrobe. Compact and curvy.

Then guilt stung his gut. Jesus, Hawthorne. She’s full up with snot, and her nose, what you can see of it, anyway, is redder than a poker fresh from the fire, sick as a dog and still, you gawk.

Jackass.

* * *

Like before when the girls sneak-attacked you, remain calm. Walk to the couch. Sit your backside down. Hang on to your hat and say as little as possible.

When Tag sauntered past the couch, he stooped at her feet, making her freeze and stiffen. “Dropped this,” he offered casually, picking her throw blanket up and placing it on her lap before scanning the room and locating her thermostat.

As Tag popped the face of the digital thermostat off, Marybell let her fingers drift to the arm of her couch and gripped it hard. Every cell in her body ordered her to run and hide. Yet her aching muscles refused to unclench.

Watching him from beneath the brim of the ridiculous hat Dixie had given her as a gift when they’d all watched the Kentucky Derby together was like watching the numbers grow smaller on a ticking bomb.

They were sexy numbers, no doubt. Tight, muscled, encased in a pair of jeans that set her heart to fluttering and skipping as if she were jumpin’ double Dutch. He wasn’t classically handsome like his brother, Jax.

On the contrary, he was rough, unkempt, his large hands spotted with a dark-wood stain that had set into the rough calluses on his fingers. His skin was ruddy, hard-weather worn and kissed by the sun. His eyes were an odd combination of brown and gold, as rich and deep as his voice, making her wonder what lay behind them.

As Tag tinkered with the dial, emitting a sound from deep within the strong column of his throat, Marybell fought a sigh of girlish admiration. He was strong and rock-solid, all hard edges and craggy surfaces.

If she wasn’t already flush with fever, she’d swear she was on fire while watching him bend over and scoop up his tool belt.

When he lifted his head, Marybell tugged the brim of the hat down again, leaving only his lower torso for her eyes to feast upon.

If she didn’t stop gawking, at any moment he’d realize who she was and her whole life in Plum Orchard, so carefully crafted these past months, would explode. She’d lose everything. Admiration turned to panic, clawing her gut, making her blood run cold in her veins.

Tag turned to her, not as smiley as he was a few moments ago. “Where’s your water heater?”

Instead of being gracious, or even just a little grateful Em had insisted out of the goodness of her heart that Tag come fix her heat, she pointed to the back of her small kitchen where a door led to the garage.

In fact, she all but grunted the directions like some cave dweller.

As Tag strode past her, his muscled thighs working beneath his jeans like well-oiled machines, he looked as though he was going to stop and say something, then thought better of it because he liked his head attached to his neck, and wandered out to her kitchen.

When Marybell heard the door leading to the garage shut, she attempted a sigh of relief, only to end up thwarted by the crackle of her chest. Hopping up off the couch and grabbing her phone from the end table, she ignored the unbelievable ache of her muscles and the wheeze in her lungs and headed straight for the bathroom, where she took one look at her image and almost fainted dead.

Closing the door, she gripped the edge of the sink until her knuckles were white. She was in no condition to apply her “people shield” tonight, so the ridiculous hat stayed. Pulling it from her head, she wet a cloth and pressed it to her flaming cheeks, bright with fever, her body still warring with chills and the sweats.

You’re being incredibly rude, Marybell Lyman.

Mercy, she was indeed. Yet better rude than revealed.

A brisk rap of knuckles on the door made her jump, almost tripping on her work boots, carelessly discarded beside the bathtub when she’d come home last night.

“Marybell?”

Yes, Prince Gruff And Hot? She shivered, at war with his affect on her as much as her wish to remain hidden behind the door until he went away. “Yes?” she managed to croak. Think, think, think, Marybell!

“I just need to grab a few things from my truck. I’ll be right back.”

Her lips trembled, but she managed to force the words out. “Okay...and thank you,” she remembered to add.

Tag’s footsteps rang in her ears just as she sank to the edge of her tub. What to do, what to do? Clearly, she had to leave the bathroom. She couldn’t hide in here the entire time he was fixing her heat. How ungrateful and rude would that appear?

Lost in misery, she jumped when her phone rang, screeching out a Marilyn Manson tune. With shaky fingers, she rode her finger across the surface without even bothering to look and see the identity of the caller. “Hello?”

“Oh, my poor, sweet angel! You sound just dreadful. If this keeps up, I’m calling Doc Johnson,” Em crooned into her ear. “Are you okay? Is Tag there with you?”

She nodded as though Em could see her. Oh, yes. He was here. So very here.

“MB, honey?”

Marybell gnawed on the inside of her lip, perusing the shelves above her toilet, looking... “Yes! Yes, he’s here. Thank you, Em. I told y’all I’d be fine. You didn’t have to bother.”

“Oh, hush. Friends are never a bother. So, has he figured out the problem?”

Not yet, but when he does... She frowned. “Problem?”

“Yes, dumplin’. The problem with your heat,” Em insisted.

Oh, he has no problem with my heat. He’s got me plenty heated. Marybell cringed. Finding this man attractive was absolutely a no-no. “Um, not yet. He’s in...”

“Are you all right, MB? What’s goin’ on over there?”

Realizing she was distracted, Marybell pressed the heel of her hand to her head, massaging the incessant throb. “Everything’s fine, Em. I’m sorry. The cold meds are making me fuzzy, is all.”

Em giggled into the phone, light and sweet. “Or is it Tag makin’ you fuzzy? He’s pretty cute, you know, respectin’ the fact that he’s the love of my life’s relative, of course.”

Of course. Boundaries and such. “I didn’t really notice,” she muttered just as her eyes landed on a way to solve her problem, hoping to hide the fact that her pants would be on fire right now if her denial wasn’t for such a good cause.

“Oh, you did, too. Why, surely you’re not blind from the ragin’ flu, are you, MB?” Em teased her, sliding into a thinly disguised, nosy inquiry. She was forever trying to set Marybell up with someone, declaring she just wanted everyone to be as happy as she and Jax were.

“He’s been very nice.” There. No more discussion. She reached up, pushing her endless bottles of conditioner out of the way. The Lord was good. Eureka!

“Nice? Is that how one describes men like the Hawthorne boys? Nice?” she prodded.

Marybell fished out the large container, filled with green goo. “Em?”

“Marybell?”

Her sigh was ragged as she tucked the phone under her chin and tried to screw the lid off the jar, putting it between her knees and giving it what little she had left. “I look horrible. I smell like I’ve been swimmin’ in a mentholated pool, my eyes are swollen and goopy and my nose is red as your mama’s roses. What difference does it make how I describe this man? I can promise you this, as crazy bag lady as I look right now, he’ll just be glad to get out of here visually unscarred. He won’t give a hoot how I describe him.”

Em sighed into the phone, the happy noises of her household full of children and assorted pets in the background. “Sorry. I was doin’ your dreamin’ for you, wasn’t I?”

Because every girl dreamed of falling for a man who, if he knew her true identity, would rather spit on her than acknowledge her existence. End of dream. “I have to go now, Em. I don’t want to be rude to the very nice Tag Hawthorne while he fixes my heat.” Or heats my fix. Or something along those lines.

“Now, you listen to me, MB. You get yourself back to bed the moment Tag’s done, hear? And you stay there until you’re better. Your clients won’t die for lack of you. LaDawn’s got you covered. Now, one of us will be over in the morning to check on you and make you some breakfast, okay?”

Marybell nodded again, finally loosening the lid on the jar.

“You hear, MB?”

“Yes! I can’t wait. The more chicken soup for my flu-riddled soul, the better,” she chirped. “And thank you again, Em. I really do appreciate you.” She clicked the phone off before Em had her married to Tag and fixin’ her heat for better or worse for an eternity.

Dropping the phone into her pocket, she glanced at her naked face in the mirror before driving her hand into the jar of green goo, taking a huge scoop of it and slathering it across her forehead and cheeks.

When she was done, she wrinkled her nose at her image, turning her head from side to side to be sure she’d covered every inch of her face. Flipping on the faucet, she rinsed her hands, toweled them off and grabbed a clip, pulling all of her hair up on the top of her head to imprison it there.

It wasn’t a pointy Mohawk, but it was just as scary.

One last glance as the goo on her face began to harden. Okay, she assessed. This could work. Feeling only a shade less uneasy, she wrapped a towel around her neck and popped open the bathroom door, running right into Tag.

“Oh!” she yelped, putting her hands in front of her to find them flat on his chest.

Tag grabbed for her, wrapping his arm around her waist.

Marybell’s head popped up and she’d swear, if she ever retold this story, when describing his reaction to the hardening green mass on her face, she’d call it horrified quickly followed by the world’s worst acting job at covering up.

He grinned down at her, deep lines on either side of his mouth forming inviting grooves she had to stop herself from reaching up and touching to feel how deep they really were. “You okay?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, unsure if she was dizzy from the brush of their bodies or her cold. But the brush of his long length against hers, even with the flu, was a whoa moment.

Then, like every other moment she’d spent in his presence, the whoa factor passed and she remembered she was just a girl. Just a girl hiding for her life behind a flaking green face mask of goo.

Forcing herself to step out of his reach, Marybell nodded. “I’m fine, thank you. So, have you figured out the problem?”

He nodded, his eyes flickering over her face before resting on her mouth. “I have. You should be nice and toasty in three, two...one.” Tag held up his index finger just as a rush of air from the vent on the floor blew up her bathrobe.

Marybell smiled in relief, sinking her spine into the wall behind her to avoid making contact with him in the narrow space. “What was it?”

“Pilot light. It was out.”

She rolled her eyes in self-disgust, bringing on another wave of dizziness that left her groping for the wall in support. “Of course it was.”

“It’s an easy thing to miss.”

“It was a dumb thing to miss.”

“You’re sick.”

“Sick? Yes. Brain-dead? No.”

His teeth flashed white in the darkened hall. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

She snorted, congested and gross. “You’re too kind.”

He stared down at her, making her wonder how many times he’d smiled just like this and how many times the recipient of that smile had been a woman. It appeared his boyish grin was Tag’s standard default when he wanted his way.

Ridiculous thoughts likely brought on by her unstable, drugged brain.

“I also fixed the thermostat. The digital reader was broken. Anyway, I’ll let you rest now. Em called to remind me to remind you to take your medicine and get as much rest as possible. Hope you feel better soon.”

Suddenly he was leaving, just like that, his reign of unwitting terror over. And so soon. She put a hand on his arm, letting her fingers sink lightly into it. “Money,” she garbled.

Tag turned, cocking his head. “The root of all evil?”

“No.” She forced the word out, noting she’d left green flakes of goo on the arm of his sweatshirt, covering the roped muscle of his arm.

“Are we free-associating here?”

“I meant, let me pay you.”

“For igniting your pilot light?”

No. For lighting my hormone’s pilot. “Well, yeah. Don’t you charge an hourly wage?”

He chuckled. Rich. Thick. Slippery. “Not when Em’s hiring.”

But wait... “I can’t just let you light my pilot for free.” Smooth, Marybell. Since when did anyone do anything for free, especially a contractor? And what was this reluctance to let him leave? Twenty minutes ago, she been living for his exit.

Now she was every bit Thumper eyes and lobbing money at him.

He backed away, deftly avoiding her black bag with the silver spikes on it, lying on the floor in the nook of the sharp right turn into the living room. “You can, and you will. Feel better, Marybell,” he called out, the sound of the wind and then the door muffling his voice as it closed, greeting her ears.

Her shoulders slumped.

But they were warm when they did.

She wandered back into the living room, hands in her pockets, feeling strangely empty.

Tag had filled up an entire room, and when he’d left, which was exactly what she’d wanted him to do from the moment he entered, the space felt void of something.

Something.

As she pondered the something, she sat back down on the couch, pulling the throw over her legs, and that’s when she noticed it.

A freshly made cup of tea, sitting beside the bowl of decorative balls on her coffee table, complete with tendrils of steam lifting off the amber liquid in wispy waves of heat.

Tag Hawthorne had made her tea.

The corner of Marybell’s lips tilted upward in a reluctant smile, somehow evolving into butterflies in her stomach. Her schoolgirl smile cracked the thick layer of her green face mask until chunks of it fell into her lap.

Then she caught herself, the butterflies accumulating in the pit of her belly fleeing, replaced with dread. The green chunks were a warning. A symbol of what could happen.

Liking Taggart Hawthorne, even a little, would crack her carefully guarded life, turning it into a steaming pile of similar face-mask goo.

Nothing, especially not the temptation of a good-looking man, would ever entice her enough to do that.

Three

Marybell gasped low and long, making his spine stiffen. “Ohhh, Fredrico! The things you do to me!” She cooed the words, following up with a customary moan Tag had become familiar with since he’d started eavesdropping at her office door like a stray dog hungry for scraps.

These constant thoughts about Marybell, this mystique he wanted to unveil, with no sense to it at all, were damn inconvenient. Unwarranted, and totally unwelcome.

Yet here he was, a week after meeting Marybell for the first time, exercising his right to curiosity.

From the moment he’d left her apartment, he couldn’t shake the crazy need to see what she really looked like without the big ridiculous hat and that green mess she’d put on her face.

What drove her to go to such lengths to keep him from seeing what she looked like, anyway? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen her before, whether she knew it or not. Not up close and personal, but he’d seen her around. They’d even met briefly once a few months ago in Em’s office, Marybell on her way out, him on his way in.

He’d concocted an answer for that while he thought about her nonstop since they’d met.

The answer was easy. He’d discovered a thing or two about the women here in Plum Orchard. They didn’t like to be caught without their pretties, as Em called them. Marybell had been really sick, so it stood to reason that catching her at such a bad time would make her run for cover if she was anything at all like Em. She was Em’s friend. They were bound to be on the same wavelength. Though Marybell’s makeup and hairstyle were a little more over-the-top than Em’s, they were clearly what made her feel pretty. He’d taken care of lumping their motivations together in his mind quite nicely.

That handled, he still had no answers.

This strange fixation on Marybell wasn’t like him. Not since Alison, anyway... No one had interested him even a little since Alison.

He couldn’t pinpoint his curiosity, couldn’t reason with it. So he’d chalked it up to Marybell’s voice, sugary-sweet and light as air even nasally with congestion, and those enormous eyes, looking up at him in the midst of the crusty stuff surrounding them. She’d sparked his curiosity, and since he’d fixed her heat, he hadn’t stopped wondering what Marybell Lyman really looked like.

When Em mentioned they needed some work done around the guesthouse at Call Girls, he’d done everything but jump up and down with his hand in the air, yelling, “Pick me!”

Now, as he hovered around her office door, pretending to fix an outlet that didn’t need fixing, he found himself glued to her every word through the door separating them. And whoever the hell Fredrico was, he already didn’t like the bastard.

Which was irrational at best. Why his back was up over a phone call with a stranger, one of the twenty or so he’d heard her take since he’d started his “behave like an ass” campaign, was a question Tag wasn’t ready to find the answer for.

You couldn’t be jealous about a guy you didn’t even know for having an intimate conversation with a woman you didn’t know, either. Could you?

Shit.

If she’d just show her face, he’d probably find out she wasn’t his type and then this hunt for Marybell Lyman would be done. End of irrational.

But it was as if she was hiding from him. Every time he thought he had her cornered, and she was going to walk out of her office door at any second, she didn’t.

Then Em, being the kind of GM she was, a stickler for details, would hunt his ass down and drag him off to another project to complete before he had the chance to pin Marybell down.

“Tag?”

Em’s voice cut into his thoughts, making him drop the screwdriver in guilt. It clattered to the floor, smacking into his toolbox. Damn. Caught again.

Tag dragged his eyes upward, meeting Em’s inquisitive gaze. “Yes, ma’am?” he drawled, hoping he’d managed to keep his voice level.

“How do you keep ending up here?”

Here as in parked in front of Marybell Lyman’s office? Or here as in here way past the time most contractors call it quitting time, here? Play dumb, Hawthorne. “Here?” Tag lifted his knit cap and scratched his head.

Em pursed her lips, her eyes not amused. He knew that look. It was the “there’ll be no plum pie for you” look—the one she gave to her sons and his niece, Maizy, when they misbehaved. “Yes. Here.” She pointed to the hallway, swishing her finger around. “Whenever I wonder where you are, I don’t have to wonder long. Somehow we always end up here. What is your fixation with this hallway?”

It was Marybell Lyman’s hallway? Probably not the answer she’d want to hear. Though why should he feel guilty for his interest in a woman? He was a single, mostly healthy, thirty-four-year-old man. He was allowed to be interested.

Except whenever he came to do any work at all at Call Girls, there was always the residual Neanderthal concept he felt ridiculously compelled to silently defend.

Women talked dirty in these here parts. Men liked to hear women talk dirty. There was always the natural assumption he was voyeuristically living out a caveman’s dream under the guise of “fixing” things.

If he were completely honest, hearing Marybell say some of the things she said did make him hot. They damn well did. But the heat was always tempered with the reminder that this was her job, and she likely filed her nails and caught up on her reading while she did it. Not quite as hot.

Yet this quest to meet Marybell wasn’t about her words. Not at all. This was about finding out if she was still just as cute without the floppy hat and flakey goop. If her hair was buttery blond all over, or just at the tips, leading to the question: Why don’t you just ring her doorbell and meet her right and proper, Hawthorne?

Answer? He wasn’t sure if he was ready for that yet. Calling on her was an unspoken commitment he wasn’t prepared to offer. A gesture he wasn’t sure he’d properly be able to follow up with anything more than his curiosity. He’d only just begun to get his life back on track—complications, especially with a woman, were the last thing he needed.

So instead, he skulked around the fringes of her doorway on the off chance he could take the easy way out and catch a glimpse of her—in the effort to rule out any possible attraction, of course.

Em poked his shoulder, bringing her once more into focus. “Tag?”

He shrugged casually, straightening. “I thought you said you needed me to fix the outlet.” Em had said fix the outlet. She’d said the one in the entryway to the guesthouse, but he said tomato; she said tomahto. At least that was the explanation he’d go with if push came to shove.

Em nodded her dark head, patting him on the arm as if he were ten. “I did, but not the outlet here in the hall. The outlet in the entryway. You know, that pretty room with all the lush green plants you’re always complainin’ remind you of the rain forest section of the zoo? The one out there, not in here?”

Right. The room which damn well wasn’t anywhere near Marybell’s office. “Right. Sorry. Must’ve misunderstood you.”

She planted her hands on her hips, cocking her head. “All week long? I swear, it’s like I’m speakin’ in a foreign language!”

Movement in Marybell’s office took his attention away from Em’s clear impatience with him. Tag stopped just shy of holding up his hand to quiet her in order to listen uninterrupted.

Marybell’s chair creaked. There was the rustling of paper and then the typical nothing. No door opening. No blare of trumpets playing, signaling that the elusive Marybell had finally strolled out of her office door to grace them with her presence.

Em snapped her fingers under his nose, the clicking interfering with what was going on in Marybell’s office. “Taggart Hawthorne, where are you?”

He blinked to refocus, catching Em’s confused gaze. Tag let his head hang low to show appropriate shame. Em had given him work he damn well needed, and he was too busy hunting Marybell like prey to pay attention. “Sorry, Em. Just distracted. Won’t happen again.”

Em’s finger rose in lecture pose just as he heard another noise coming from Marybell’s office, blotting out everything else.

Her office window. He’d know the sound of a latch snapping unhinged on a window from a hundred paces.

Oh, the hell she’d escape him this time. That thought made him spring into action. He swooped down and grabbed his toolbox, skirting around an annoyed Em with a grin of apology. “Entryway. I’m on it.”

* * *

She fell into a thorny bush just outside the window of her office, catching her nose ring on the brittle end of one of the limbs before dropping into the mulch surrounding it with a grunt she tried to muffle.

Her shaking fingers reached up to attempt to untwist the small hoop when she heard an amused “Good thing I brought my chain saw. I’m happy to help. Just say the word, and I’ll rev her up. Vroom-vroom.”

Surely there was no one looking out for her up there. Hadn’t she just expressly prayed for the umpteenth time in the past week, to whoever was in charge, to allow her an easy escape? Or had she been slacking off? She’d lost count of the times she’d sent skyward the pleading wish to avoid Taggart Hawthorne.

Knock-knock, is anyone home?

Would he ever be done with whatever it was he was doing and go away? What kind of contractor was he if it took him this long to do what Em had labeled “minor repairs”?

The sheer terror she’d fought all week long while Tag banged around outside her office door rose in her throat like cream to the top of a cup of coffee.

But you have the “people shield” on, Marybell. Relax.

How could she relax when her entire life was a lie? Seeing Tag confirmed that, drove that point home as sure as he was the hammer and she was the nail.

Since she’d recovered from the flu, and reasoned her fears away without the influence of cold medication, she’d taken a deep breath about the situation with Tag and had decided avoiding him was better all around.

There was no reason why she couldn’t do it, she’d told herself. Even though she and Em were friends, and there’d be occasions when she’d have no choice but to mingle with him, it didn’t have to be difficult if she didn’t make it difficult.

Except Tag had made it difficult, probably without even realizing he had. First, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him and his tea, which tasted awful. But the gesture still made her heart quicken and soften.

Second, it wasn’t just his awful tea lingering in her house. Tag’s rugged sexy had hung around long after he was gone, and she couldn’t shake it. Every time she thought she had her lusty thoughts contained, the fantasies of his calloused hands on her flesh, sweeping along her skin to part her thighs, reared their ugly heads in the way of an erotic dream or seven—if she kept count.

She’d spent hours wondering what his lips tasted like—felt like. Was he a sloppy kisser, his tongue doing that awkward slap at hers? Or was he an expert with a tongue like the god of sex and sin?

Since Em had told them all he’d be doing some work around the office, she’d been on pins and needles, avoiding him at every turn while he breezed in and out of Call Girls. Not just because he might somehow recognize her even with her “people shield” in place, but because just the sound of his voice beyond her door made her knees weak.

“Marybell?’ Tag rustled his way into the bush, sitting on his haunches and leaning over to bring his face into her line of vision.

It was such a great face. Almost classically handsome, but not quite. Angled, defined, rough. That was the word that came to mind every time she thought about him.

His sharp jaw caught the light of the half-moon, his eyes, heavily fringed with black lashes, full of playful amusement. “Here, let me,” he offered deep and delicious, lifting that calloused hand to her nose, the one she’d spent a ridiculous amount of time recalling.

Swallowing her hysteria, Marybell protested, raising a finger to ward him off. It was trembling, but she waved it for all it was worth, anyway. “No, no. I’ve got this.”

Tag grinned, infuriatingly wide, deepening his boyish dimples, that were a stark contradiction to the rest of his face. “You’re pretty hooked on that limb. One move the wrong way and you’re gonna lose a nostril.”

She attempted to twist her finger up under the hoop to no avail. “Nostrils are overrated. I can always breathe through my mouth.”

His hand went to her nose, anyway, shooing hers out of the way. “You should always have backup,” he teased, far too gravelly and sex-on-a-stick-ish for her panic’s comfort. With easy fingers, Tag plucked the limb from her nose ring and grinned again with his success.

Free from the limb, Marybell scrambled to her feet, cursing her clunky work boots when she tripped over the cement Buddha statue Sanjeev, Dixie’s friend and house manager, insisted each of the Call Girls have beneath their office windows.

Tag’s hands, strong, so incredibly solid, went to either side of her waist, settling there to right her. An unfamiliar thrill shot straight to places Marybell was unused to having thrills.

She flattened a palm against his chest to protest—a chest like a hard wall of granite. This would be so much easier if his chest was more on par with something mushy—say a bowlful of Jell-O maybe. Yet the firm surface of muscle through the wall of his thermal shirt set her palm on fire.

Tag’s breathing picked up, shooting a stream of condensation from his hard line of a mouth, slicing the chilly night air. Had that hitch in his breath happened because of her hand? She marveled at the notion.

No. It couldn’t be. Marybell dismissed the thought entirely. She was a sex-starved fool. That’s what she was. There was no siren in her, no unique song she sang that brought droves of men to flounder at her feet as they did at gorgeous Dixie’s.

She wasn’t carved-in-stone pretty. She was gothic and dark with a touch of glam to motivate her to continue this charade she’d long since outgrown.

Then Tag’s skin was touching hers, his long fingers, as calloused as she’d remembered them, snaked around her wrist in a loose hold. “You have nice hands,” he commented clear as day. “Interesting color choice for nail polish.” He inspected her fingers one by one, holding them so close to his lips Marybell shivered.

“You don’t like gunmetal with gold flecks?” she croaked, acutely aware this hard, rough man was sucking her into his blatantly sexy aura.

“Oh, no. I like gunmetal, but I really love gold flecks,” he teased. “I like the green and red in your hair, too. I also like that you still have a nostril because of me. It evens out your face. Why don’t you thank me for saving it over dinner?”

Marybell’s breathing became rapid and choppy similar to the function of her brain. “It’s ten o’ clock. Too late for dinner.” No, no, no. No dinner. No tea. No contact.

But he doesn’t recognize me...

And we’re going to keep it that way. How do you feel about losing everything plus putting the people you love in a circus of media?

While she battled internally, they had somehow become pressed impossibly close together. His breath on her face, warm and minty. His thighs touching hers—thick and insanely hard. His scent—so Tag, clean, spicy. Tag’s everything mingled with her everything.

Was there no mercy tonight?

“But isn’t that what you were sneaking off to grab when you climbed out the window? Your dinner break is at ten, right?”

“What makes you think I was sneaking off at all?” There was no sneaking about this. She was flat-out in hiding.

“Simple deductive reasoning. It’s gotta be easier to get to the lunchroom by just opening the door of the phone-sexing room than by way of your office window, right?” he asked, his hips blending with hers and settling against them until the outline of him through her suddenly too-thin, zebra-striped leggings heated her whole body. “All that climbing out, climbing back in. Hard on the thighs.”

Hard thighs. Lots of that to go round here.

“Challenge is my middle name. I like a good one. The window seemed as good as any.”

“So you’re not avoiding me or anything, right? Because even though your office window presents a good workout, it’s a little extreme.”

“It’s hard to fit exercise in between takin’ calls. It was the obvious choice.”

He shook his head. “That’s not what I asked you.”

“What did you ask me?”

“I asked you if you were avoiding me. I’d find it hard to believe, because who’d want to avoid a nice guy like me, but there it is. I think you’re avoiding me.”

His point-blank stare was what was impossible to avoid. He’d pinned her with it, and he wasn’t letting her gaze go.

Blatantly lying wasn’t her strong suit. Her strengths lay in running away. But here went nothin’. “I don’t even know you. Why would I do that?”

“Only you have the answer to that, Marybell Lyman. What could the answer be?”

Her silence deafened even her.

“So, about saving your nostril...” he murmured, slow and easy, his gaze now roving over her face, taking in each feature with all-seeing eyes.

Marybell nodded, forcing her voice to project around a thick knot in her throat. “It was amazing. So heroic and chivalrous. We should give you a superhero name. Nostril saving is hard work. It deserves at least a cape.”

“You bet it does, and don’t the damsels in distress always have dinner with their superheroes?”

A giggle almost erupted from her throat before she remembered hanging out with the subject you wanted to avoid and gushing about him isn’t exactly avoidance. Admiring the way their bodies fit together, soaking in his maleness like a sponge, wasn’t dodging disaster, either.

She went slack in Tag’s arms, hoping, maybe even praying, he’d take the obvious hint. Because she couldn’t do this. This wasn’t allowed. It was just Marybell for always. No one was permitted in. Not even casually.

She shrugged. “Do they? I thought they never did normal things with their superheroes because of the identity thing. It was always on the DL, full of subterfuge and innuendo.” Oh, the parallels to be had.

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not like every other superhero, because I’m definitely available for dinner, and for the record, I don’t care if you tell people I’m the one who saved your nostril. No subterfuge here.”

“You have chivalry down to a science, but I’m not dat—”

Tag’s lips were on hers before she’d even formulated the rest of her sentence. Greedy. Hot. Firm. Demanding. Knee-buckling hungry. Tasting like mint and man.

So much man. More man than even she’d dreamed up.

Before her brain got in the way, Marybell was returning his kiss, melting against the solid wall of his chest, her nipples taut and rigid, pushing with need at her leather jacket.

Tag’s breath mingled with hers when she inhaled sharply, acutely aware of every sensation he aroused in every nerve ending she owned.

Her breasts swelled in her bra, driving against the material until her nipples tightened even harder. Things began to happen between her legs, too, wet, swollen things she’d long since left behind.

Tag’s tongue slipped into her mouth on a low groan, silky and taut, driving, tasting, deepening their kiss. With his arm around her waist, he hauled her tight to his body until Marybell had to dig her fingers into his thick shoulders to keep from tipping them over.

His arms tightened when her fingers sought the fringe of his hair at the bottom edge of his knit hat, the muscles in them flexing in firm ripples. She rolled the soft wisps between her digits, touching, memorizing the strands.

Tag’s kiss was everything, forcing her to see, hear, feel only him.

There was nothing but this kiss. This breath-stealing, mind-melding kiss. Everything about this kiss was wrong, but right. So right.

No. So wrong, Marybell.

But this kiss...

Tag’s lips were leaving hers in a sudden release of suction and air, allowing the sounds of the chilly night to crowd around her.

He looked down at her as though he wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened, either, but the emotion flickered and died, swiftly replaced with a grin that made the corners of his eyes wrinkle upward. “Dinner. Tomorrow night on your break. I’ll make it. All you have to do is show up. Bring your nostrils,” he said on a husky chuckle.

There was no chance for protest. No time for regret. No time to do anything but watch Tag’s broad back exit the bushes, hear his footsteps hard on the pathway that led back to the guesthouse.

Shaken, Marybell reached for the side of the house, pulling air into her lungs. It hit her chest in sharp, razorlike pangs.

Panic began its deep dive into her stomach, clawing and burning until she almost choked on it.

She couldn’t have dinner with Tag Hawthorne. She couldn’t have anything with him—ever.

In fact, if he found out exactly who she was, her head would be a selection on the menu—not a dinner date.

She’d seen him angry. In the one comment he’d made to a reporter at the courthouse just before the trial. Knew what true contained rage looked like in Tag’s eyes—in the clench of his fists. Marybell shivered at that rage.

Like her, everything had once been taken from him. She understood what that did to you. Her core hurt from what that did to her.

But Tag was unknowingly toying with the alleged enemy, and she had to find a way to keep him at bay.

Her panic evolved into bitter disappointment.

All because of that kiss.

Four

“You did what?” his brother, Jax, asked.

“I said I kissed her.”

“Marybell? Marybell Lyman—the one with the Mohawk?” Jax did a thing with his hands in the air over his head.

“That’s the one.” The one who’d, with just one quick kiss, set him on fire—reminded him he was still a man with working parts.

“Can I ask why?”

“Can I ask why you’d ask why?”

Jax scruffed his hand over his jaw and frowned at Tag. “Because it’s sort of out of the blue and really random, especially with you lately. You’d just as soon bite someone’s head off than kiss her.”

“Sometimes kisses are like that. Random.” It had taken him by surprise, too. But there she was, smelling amazing, her back up, her luscious lips covered in some crazy metallic-blue lipstick, and he couldn’t resist.

At first he’d kissed her because he didn’t want to hear that she wasn’t dating right now. He didn’t know why those words were so unacceptable to him. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been turned down for a date before. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t still stinging from a long-term relationship not so long ago. He had baggage. He didn’t want more.

Yet somehow those words were just unacceptable coming from her shiny-blue lips. So he’d kissed her—he wasn’t even sure if he’d expected the kiss to be especially good. But it was.

And yep, it was definitely uncharacteristic of him as of late. It was more like the old Tag. The one he couldn’t seem to dig out in the rubble of his life—forgive the past. Maybe that was why he was so fixated on Marybell. Because she shook something up in him—something that kept him on his toes—something that felt real.

“You don’t even know her, and you just laid one on her?” Jax pressed.

“I met her when I lit her pilot light for Em.”

“Is there some kind of magic involved in lighting a woman’s pilot light all these years I’ve been missing? I’d have lit one a long time ago.”

Tag grinned. “No, you wouldn’t have. You were waiting for Em to come along. And ya done good, brother.”

Jax smiled, that smile he always smiled whenever Em’s name was mentioned. Kind of stupid and head over heels, but nice. “Damn right I did. But that doesn’t explain how, after one light of a pilot, you were kissing Marybell.”

“I like Miss Marybell. She always makes me paper dolls when we go to Miss Dixie’s house for pool parties. Her hair is so cool,” his niece, Maizy, chimed from the playroom adjoining the kitchen where Tag was expending an infinite amount of time making bologna sandwiches for the date Marybell had never officially agreed to.

“She’s nice, right, A-Maizy?” Tag confirmed. He smiled and winked at her. He didn’t know why seeing Marybell was making him stupidly happy. But it was.

He’d woken up today with a smaller knot in his chest than usual. His financial worries, his life issues didn’t seem as daunting this morning, and when he thought about that, Marybell’s face had popped into his head.

“Does Em know you kissed her?”

Tag stuffed a sandwich into a Zip-Loc bag and frowned. “Why does Em have to know I kissed her?”

“Kissed who?” Em asked, floating into the kitchen to settle herself against Jax’s side with a sigh and a squeeze of his brother’s hand while her boys, Clifton Junior and Gareth, flew into the playroom to join Maizy. She dropped a plate of brownies on the counter for them. One of the many perks of Emmaline Amos.

He liked Em. She’d changed everything for Jax and Maizy. She was a pear-scented whirlwind of hugs and kisses, freshly baked pies, well-balanced meals for Maizy, and one of the biggest badasses with a band saw he’d ever seen.

Truth be told, he and his younger brother, Gage, were probably needed a whole lot less in Maizy’s case since Em had come into their lives. They’d both come to Plum Orchard for their own reasons, but the biggest one had been helping Jax take care of his best friend’s daughter.

Now Em did all the things they’d once done to help Jax, and she did them a damn sight better than the two of them ever had.

But Em wouldn’t hear of them leaving Georgia—even though a small part of the reason he’d come to Plum Orchard, to help Jax renovate their aunt’s old house, was no longer a valid reason. The house was mostly done, and this was due in part to Em who’d organized and planned until it was exactly the way Jax claimed he’d envisioned it.

He should be out trying to get some contracting work. Unfortunately, his tarnished reputation made that almost impossible, and here in Plum Orchard, there wasn’t a huge call for contractors. So he took side jobs that paid little but kept him doing what he loved to do more than most anything else. Building things.

He’d thought for sure now that Jax had Em, he and Gage would just be in the way of the eventual blending of their two families.

But Em had sat both men down and firmly said, with a teasing smile, “Ya’ll don’t become less important to Maizy and Jax because the house is finished. You’re all she’s ever known since birth. You’re family. Why should that change because of me and my interferin’? You both stay put until you want otherwise. I can work around you.”

He’d been surprised by her attitude. Thought for sure, even the nicest of women wouldn’t want two messy, loud roughnecks with more issues than a stack of magazines hanging around. But not Em. Em had embraced them as hard as they’d embraced her, but most of all, she’d brought all the things to Maizy’s life not one of the Hawthorne brothers could.

Hair ribbons and sparkly dresses and pink castles made out of life-size LEGOs. Nail polish, facials, bedtime stories of evil queens vanquished with the power of love, girl time once a week with Em and the women at Call Girls and a million hugs and kisses.

“So, who are you kissing, Tag?”

“He kissed Marybell,” Jax teased.

Em’s blue eyes went wide as she pulled off her coat and scarf. “My Marybell?”

“Did you have dibs on her, Em?” Tag teased, reaching for the bag of chips he’d dug out of the pantry.

Em made a face at him, her fingers going to her throat in a gesture he knew well. It was a signal she was concerned. “Oh, hush. I’m just surprised.”

“That she’d let a schlub like me kiss her?”

“That she’d let anyone kiss her. Marybell’s...”

Tag’s ears instantly went on alert. “Marybell’s what?”

Em sighed, her eyes thoughtful and cautious. “I don’t know. She’s very private. I just get the impression she’s had some troubles, though I don’t know what, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be tellin’ tales out of school. So you mind yourself, Taggart Hawthorne. I won’t have you upsettin’ my girl with your unspeakable charms.”

Yeah. He got that Marybell was private—closed off somehow; he just didn’t know from what. But he wanted to. “My unspeakable charms?”

Jax slapped him on the back. “It’s a Hawthorne trait. Ask Em. She couldn’t resist.”

Em gave his brother a flirty smile and a peck on the lips. “It was not, either. It was all the power tools you’re related to by familial connections that grabbed on to me and just wouldn’t let go.”

“Just ask me. Can’t get her to give up that darn belt sander to save my soul,” Gage joked, breezing into the kitchen to grab a brownie from the plate Em had brought over. He held it up after taking a bite. “Have I mentioned how much I love having you in our lives, Em?”

Em’s chuckle filled the kitchen. “That belt sander is almost better than a manicure.”

Tag packed up the last of his dinner, the only sort of dinner he could afford at this point, and stuffed it into a backpack. “Don’t you worry, Em. I’ll be on my best behavior. Gotta run, guys. Have a couple of things to do before tonight. Have a good one.”

“Wait!” Em yelled, a bottle of ginger ale in her hand. She caught him at the door and held it out to him. “Marybell likes ginger ale. Has it every night with her supper—which is what I’m assumin’ the bologna sandwiches are about? Supper—you and her?”

The words made his chest tight again. Damn stupid, but it took his mind off the other stuff. The bad shit. He was tired of the bad shit. Marybell made him think of good things—so he was going with it. “Guilty.”

Em’s eyes gleamed. “Then you be sure and wow her with your uncanny intuition and take the ginger ale. I won’t tell if you don’t tell.”

Tag looked down into her pretty face for signs of disapproval. “You okay with this? I know she’s your employee. I don’t want to cause trouble.”

Em grinned—the kind of grin she and Maizy shared when they were up to their eyeballs in something. “How could courtin’ Marybell cause trouble?”

Her heard the metaphoric skidding of brakes in his head. “Hold on there. I’m not courting anything. It’s just some bologna sandwiches.” He wasn’t courting. Was he? Hell, no. He was testing. Testing his social skills. Testing his ability to interact with the world again. Testing a connection that had made him feel good—as though there was life still left to live.

“I saw the way you slathered that mayonnaise on that bread like you were plastering a wall—you did it like you were da Vinci. That kind of care says courtin’ to me.”

“It’s just a sandwich,” he insisted. “I like my mayo to be even on all four corners of the bread. I just assume that’s how everyone else likes it. That’s not courting—that’s for the love of a good sandwich.”

“You call it whatever you like, Tag, but hear me clear, Marybell’s a gentle, kind soul. She’s one of the best hearts I know—one of the best friends I have—and I won’t have you toyin’ with her emotions. I don’t know everything about her, but I do know, if I lost her at Call Girls because of some silly love spat with you, I’d likely snatch old Coon Ryder’s gun from his gnarled grasp and hunt you down.”

Just one more thing he loved about Em. She was fiercely loyal. She could have wrangled the Hawthorne men and Maizy together in a million ways that would have left some of them feeling displaced, but she’d do it without a single resentment from any of them. Slow and steady with a firm hand on the prize. The prize being family.

This fact about her was to be admired. “Swear on my carefully placed mayo, I’ll be on my best behavior—a perfect gentleman.”

She gave him a motherly pat on his cheek. “You see that you are. And one more thing.”

“I know, I know. Coon’s gun. You’re not afraid to use it.”

“Leave your baggage at the airport.”

“My what?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I mean, Taggart. Leave all your broodin’ and sufferin’ out of this noncourtin’. Just for tonight, try to enjoy the company of another human being who isn’t related to you and doesn’t want to play Candy Land for twelve never-ending rounds.”

Tag barked a laugh. “Is this your way of telling me you don’t like Candy Land?”

Her face went soft. “I don’t like that you’ve hurt for a very long time and you might mess up this opportunity to have a little fun by dredging up something that’s long over. I’ve seen you do it before, but it wasn’t with someone I care a great deal about.”

Alison. She meant Alison. Fair. That was a fair assessment of his life at this point. He had things he was working out—coming to grips with. Sometimes they colored everything he did—or didn’t do. “It’s just a sandwich,” he defended.

“One I hope you have the most amazin’ time ever sharing with Marybell—baggage free.” She gave him a quick pinch of the cheek before returning to the kitchen to Jax.

Propping the door open, he fought the envy the picture of Em and Jax made. He loved Jax, wanted him to be happy.

But maybe, after all this time, it was time for him to find some happiness, too. Even if it was just sharing a bologna sandwich with a woman who made his pulse kick up a notch.

Maybe.

* * *

Marybell took better care when she climbed out of her office window this time, avoiding the shrubs below it and hopping right over them only to get caught up on the gutter. “Damn!” she yelped into the night, grabbing for the side of the guesthouse to no avail.

Her fingers slipped and she crashed to the ground onto something hard. Not ground-hard, something that was softer hard. And grunted.

Her eyes, still adjusting to the light, gripped an arm, muscled and covered in flannel.

That arm came up around her waist and rolled her off him. Tag, covering her upper body with his, pressed her into the cold ground with his chest. He grinned, impossibly handsome, and her heart responded with impossible flutters. “If you squashed my carefully made bologna sandwiches, I’m going to be really upset with you. It took me two hours just to get the bread to rise.”

Her heart pounded so hard she was sure Tag would feel it right through his jacket. Don’t panic. People shield is appropriately in place and it’s dark.

She scoffed at him, refusing to grin back, no matter how much she wanted to. “Two hours? Novice.”

He nodded as if she’d just complimented him. “You make bread, too? Only someone who makes her own bread would know two hours is a ridiculous amount of time to make bread. But look at all the things we have in common. Wanna swap recipes?”

“I make trips to the grocery store to support the people who make it. Now let me up, please.” Before I die right here on this ground with you and all those hard muscles of yours pressed against me. Because it feels far too good—and uncomfortable—and good.

“Is that any way to talk to the man who made you bologna sandwiches?”

Marybell gave him a nudge, even though she really didn’t want to. In fact, what she really wanted was to lie right here with Tag, on the ground that didn’t seem quite as cold, and watch the stars bobbing above their heads on this crisp night.

Instead, she let her arms rest limply at her sides. “Is pinning me to the ground any way to treat the woman you made the bologna sandwiches for?”

“I’ll take that to mean you’ll join me.” He thrust upward to a sitting position and held out his hands to her.

Marybell ignored them and levered herself upward on her own, taking a good look at her surroundings. Tag had spread a blanket out beneath the window of her office right next to the garden gnome that Sanjeev, Dixie’s right-hand man at the Big House, was so fond of. He’d laid out some paper plates and napkins, apparently, now scattered in every direction when she’d fallen on them. “What is this?”

Tag pulled some matches from his pocket and scraped one to ignite it. He held up a small candle and struck a match, illuminating his angular face and making his dark eyes look even darker. “This is dinner. Remember our date?”

For a couple of seconds, Marybell was speechless. No one had ever done something like this for her. Not in all her thirty years. The gesture stole her breath. It was sweet and thoughtful and utterly unexpected.

And under the window of her office. “I don’t remember confirmin’ our date.”

He popped open a bag of chips and dumped them on her plate with another grin. “Ah, but you didn’t deny it, either.”

“So if I don’t say no, it’s automatically a date?”

“That’s what the rule book says.”

“Who wrote this rule book?”

“Probably some desperate guy who couldn’t get a firm yes for a date.”

She laughed, or maybe she giggled. The silly noise coming from her throat sounded suspiciously like a giggle. The kind of giggle a woman uses when she’s enamored with a man. When everything he says is charming and a total orgasm to her ears. Marybell clamped her lips shut. “I thought I told you I wasn’t dating.”

Tag handed her a plate, complete with a sandwich cut neatly in a triangle, some fresh fruit and a pile of chips. “I don’t think you got that far.”

She hesitated. No food. She couldn’t have a sandwich with this man. She’d been an unwitting party to ruining his life. You didn’t have a sandwich with a man whose life you’d annihilated. “I’m not dating.”

He ignored her and thrust the plate at her again along with a bottle of ginger ale. “I know this is your favorite.”

He’d gone out of his way to find out what she liked to drink? Bits of the icy formation around her heart broke off like chunks of an overheated glacier. Marybell took the plate and the ginger ale and set them beside her on the blanket. “Thank...you.”

Tag leaned back against the guesthouse and grinned again, letting his long legs unwind in front of him. “That’s more like it. I like gratitude in the women I’m not dating.”

She quashed the smile she was fighting with a vengeance. “As long as we’re clear this isn’t a date, I’ll eat your bologna sandwich, but it’s only because I’m starving and you’ve left me little choice now. Madge will be closin’ up shop soon, which means I can only get whatever she has left. Usually that’s eight-hour-old meat loaf.”

Tag took an enormous bite of his sandwich and nodded, swallowing hard. “Bologna’s better for you than meat loaf. All these by-products put hair on your chest.”

Her laughter tinkled from her lips before she could stop it. She nibbled at a chip to keep from making any more unfamiliar mating noises, but her mind was racing. “Why did you do this?”

“Do what?”

Make me feel something for you. Make me fight a dreamy sigh. Make me want to twirl my Mohawk in centuries-old, ritualistic gestures of flirtation. “Here—this—under my office window.”

He shrugged his wide shoulders. “Because I had a funny feeling you’d try to skip out on our nondate. I figured this was the best way to catch you skipping.”

“I’m not dating.”

“Anyone, or just me?”

“Anyone.”

“Where do you come from, Marybell Lyman?”

“Did you just hear me?”

“Just because you’re not dating doesn’t mean you can’t have polite conversation.”

Everywhere and nowhere. “Atlanta.” Atlanta was big. That seemed safe enough.

“Me, too. The last name Lyman isn’t familiar, though.”

That’s because it’s not really mine. “I get the feeling we didn’t travel in the same social circles.” No truer words.

“Did you go to college?”

She stiffened. He couldn’t possibly know—could he? Why was he asking so many questions? That’s what people do when they want to get to know you, Marybell. They make conversation. “Did you?”

“Yep. Got a degree in architecture.”

“Which led you here to Plum Orchard where big buildings are just linin’ the streets.” She was doing her best to be surly, but Tag wasn’t having it, and she was having trouble sustaining it because he was blatantly ignoring her efforts.

“Nope. My sister’s death led me here.”

Damn. Now she was just being a jerk. She knew from Em that his sister, Harper, had died, but she didn’t know that was why he was in Plum Orchard. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so rude.”

“Sure you did. You want our nondate to be over. But you know what, Marybell Lyman, that’s all right. To be rude, I mean—because we’re on a nondate. If this were a real date, I’d make you pay the tab for being so rude.”

“I think I can rustle up some spare change for the bologna sandwich.” She stopped then. He wasn’t attacking her safe place knowingly. He wasn’t threatening everything she loved and held dear to be a malicious jackass.

Lighten up. At least enough to appear civil.

Marybell reached out and put her hand on his arm, softening her words. “And I really didn’t mean to be rude about your sister. I just didn’t know your reasons for comin’ to the PO. I’m sorry for your loss.” No one understood loss better than she did.

Tag grabbed her hand and used it to slide her closer. “I’m sorry, too. She was a great sister.”

The brief flicker of pain in his eyes made her wonder what had happened beyond what Em had told them. It was deep and it was personal, if Tag’s face lined with some raw emotion she couldn’t pinpoint was any indication. But then he smiled without letting go of her hand. “Why phone sex?”

Her hand in his felt so good, so warm against her icy fingers, Marybell forgot to pull away. “Why not?” she said on a smile.

“Hey, no judgment here. Just curious. I mean, if we’re honest, not many little girls dream they’ll grow up and be phone sex operators.”

Not this one, either. This one had wanted to grow up and be a ballerina and wear a pink tutu. “The economy stinks.”

“And that’s what led you to phone sex? Even in a bad economy, most people don’t consider phone sex. McDonald’s? Sure.”

“Most people aren’t me.”

“Fair enough. How’d you know you’d be good at it?”

Desperation made me good at it. Desperation and the kindest man in the world who’d offered her an opportunity to live in a warm house free of vermin and filth. “I don’t know. I just made it work because financially, I needed to.”

“Desperate times, huh?”

And so many desperate measures. “That about sizes it up.”

“Landon Wells, right? He’s the man who owned Call Girls before Dixie and Caine?”

Her heart twisted in her chest at the mention of Landon’s name. She’d loved him so much. He was the only person on earth who knew who she really was. The only person on earth who’d cared little about her past—who’d been willing to help her when the entire world wanted to spit in her face—and some had—literally.

“Yes.” She damned her throat for closing up. Clearing it, she sat up straighter, acutely aware of Tag’s thumb caressing her finger. “He was an amazing human being, and if not for him, I’d be livin’ on the streets.” She didn’t care that she was revealing something so personal, so painful. Landon would always have her undying gratitude, and she’d never hesitate to say it out loud.

“No family to turn to?”

“Nope.” Not a single soul.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me.” Please. “There are plenty of others who have it so much worse. For instance, just today I read one of the Kardashians broke a nail and Taylor Swift is never, ever getting back together with her boyfriend.”

Tag chuckled. “I didn’t mean it in a pity kind of way. I meant it in the ‘Wow, it sucks that you don’t have people nosing into your business twenty-four-seven’ kind of way. So, where’s your family?”

Marybell stared at him. This was getting too close for comfort. Yet she found herself repeating the words she repeated to everyone when they asked. “I was in the foster care system all my life. No family.”

His grip on her hand tightened, and she knew she should yank hers back to safety, but it was so warm and...safe. Something about the calloused surface was safe. “Damn. This time I am sorry.”

“Damn. I’d hoped you’d be more original.”

“Original?”

“Everyone says they’re sorry. I guess you’re not the exception I’d hoped for,” she teased, and smiled. She was used to the eyes full of sympathy, sad smiles, but it was all she’d ever known. She’d never truly realized what she’d missed until Landon came along.

Tag’s eyes searched hers. “Not laughing. My family drives me crazy, but I couldn’t live without them.”

Marybell shrugged to hide all her childhood hopes dashed—all her Christmas wishes ignored. “You could if you didn’t know what it was like to have one.”

“So I gather the Call Girls are your family now? You all seem pretty tight.”

There were times when she was almost afraid to acknowledge how she felt about them out loud. To say it was to throw it out into the universe and take the chance the universe would strike back.

If you didn’t tell anyone you cared about something almost more than you cared about breathing, it wouldn’t tempt the Fates to snatch it away. She kept her feelings about Em and the girls on the inside. “They’re the closest thing to family I’ve ever had.”

For all the years spent wondering what it was like to belong—really belong somewhere—she’d found that in the least likely place of all, and whether they knew it or not, she clung to their friendships. In silence, while she treasured them in ways she hoped they felt rather than heard.

She didn’t want these friendships taken away when it had taken thirty years to find them. Tag had the ability to obliterate the only real thing she had, and he didn’t even know it.

She faked looking at a watch that didn’t exist on her wrist, pulling her other hand from his. Without looking at him, she rose to her feet, brushing the dead leaves from her torn jeans. “My break’s almost over. I have to go.”

Tag was up and on his feet, his large frame looming above her. “So I bet you don’t want to do this again, huh?”

Yes, she did. No. She wouldn’t. “I’m not dating.”

Tag tipped her chin up and smiled, his white teeth gleaming against his sun-weathered skin. “But you are eating. You need your energy for all that oohing and aahing.”

Walk away now, Marybell. “Does what I do for a living bother you?”

“Nope. I won’t tell you it’s not a little weird to know you—”

“Get guys off over the phone?” Maybe if she was crude, he’d go away. He had to go away.

Tag didn’t miss a beat. “Okay, if you want to put it that way. Then, yeah. But that’s not something that’d scare me off.”

What would scare him off? If her outlandish makeup and hair didn’t do it, surely her job was cause to rethink pursuing her.

Tag gripped her shoulders. “Is that what you want? To scare me off?”

That’s what she should want, but she wanted that far less than she wanted to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him again the way he’d kissed her last night. Taking a step back and out of his reach, she kept her tone indifferent. “I want to go back to work.”

Tag latched his fingers together and held them out, hitching his sharp jaw at her office window. “You want a lift?”

She laughed, even though she knew she shouldn’t. Marybell pointed to the path that led back around to the front of the guesthouse. “I’ll take the long way. Thanks for dinner. G’night, Tag.” She made her way along the cobbled path, passing the neatly manicured topiaries with twinkling lights on them, her chest heavy and tight.

It was time to find a new escape route to avoid Tag.

“G’night, Marybell,” he called after her, his deep voice swirling in her ears.

Goodbye, Tag.

Five

Em clinked her wineglass as they sat around the break room at Call Girls on Even Phone Sex Operators Have Pizza Night. “Attention, Marybell Lyman!”

Marybell froze, midslice of gooey pepperoni. She lifted her eyes to meet Em’s devilish ones.

“I hear someone’s been kissin’ a Hawthorne? Dish, MB!”

It really was true all the bad press small towns got for gossip. Nothing was sacred.

Dixie’s head popped up from her Brides magazine, her eyes zeroing in on Marybell. “Ohhh, juicy—share!”

LaDawn sputtered, setting down the wine bottle she chugged from because she always said using a glass was a waste of dish washing liquid. “You been kissin’ a Hawthorne? Dang. Which one?”

“Tag!” Em said on a laugh, swirling the red liquid in her tumbler. “She kissed Taggart.”

“And you know this how, Emmaline Amos?” Dixie asked, closing her magazine.

Em winked at Marybell. “Because he said as much. And he was smilin’ when he did.”

Marybell had to fight the urge to run and hide. This was what girlfriends did, Landon had once told her. They shared secrets. They braided each other’s hair, had sleepovers, shopped and stuck their noses in your beeswax.

Always done with love, but still done. You could say anything to your girlfriend, even if it was something unflattering, but God save the fool outsider if she took it upon herself to insult your BFF.

She didn’t always understand the mechanics of a close relationship, friendships or otherwise. She’d never had a relationship that lasted much longer than six months before she was moved to a new foster home. It was barely long enough for her to adjust to her new surroundings, let alone forge bonds.

But Landon had taught her bonds could be forged virtually overnight. He’d taught her that not everyone had one foot holding the door open for her exit, and not everyone betrayed you.

The girlfriend thing she was still feeling her way around in the dark about.

If you let just one person in, Marybell, it eases the burden of your own troubles some because then y’all share them. I hope someday, when you decide we’re not all bottom-feeders, you’ll do just that.

She’d held those words to her heart when she’d taken the leap and decided to move with LaDawn, Cat and the others to Landon’s small hometown instead of staying in Atlanta. He’d prepared them for the kind of snobbery they’d be up against, but he’d also promised them if they moved with the company, there’d always be more love than hate.

And for the most part, he’d been right. Still, the security and friends he’d given her far outweighed the problems they’d faced in Plum Orchard.

“Why so quiet, Miss MB?” Cat, so beautiful in her last month of pregnancy, asked. She rubbed her swollen belly and batted her eyelashes.

So, what to say? It was amazing. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since it happened. It can’t ever happen again because I’m allegedly responsible for the downward spiral his life has taken.

She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. How could she keep this girlfriendish enough to keep them happy, but not lead them to believe that kiss had been with her every waking moment? “It was no big deal.”

Em threw her paper plate away and crossed the room to wrap her arms around Marybell’s neck, giving it a squeeze. “No big deal? It most certainly is a big deal when the woman we know hardly ever even looks at a man. Now, out of the blue, she’s kissin’ one? That’s big where I come from.”

Marybell patted Em on the arm and gave it a squeeze before untangling herself. “Men don’t really look at me, so why should I look at them?”

Dixie grinned. “Well, you been doin’ just a little more than lookin’ at Tag, now, haven’t you? So, are you going to see him again?”

“I’m not really dating.” Brief and to the point.

“But you are kissin’?” LaDawn snickered.

“It was just a kiss. No big deal.”

“He made her bologna sandwiches,” Em offered. “In all the months I’ve known Tag, he hasn’t shown a lick of interest in a soul here in the PO, and now he’s makin’ bologna sandwiches for our Marybell like he’s creatin’ the Sistine Chapel with a knife and some mayonaise.”

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