“We’re going to go out right now and get our own sampling of what women are interested in.”

A dimple dented Cal’s cheek as he smiled. “Though if you want to fill one of these surveys out, you’re welcome to.”

Kit shot him a look. “No, thanks.”

“I don’t think I will either, though I do appreciate your interest in me.”

“I’m not interested in you!” she returned too fast. “Where do we start?”

“Central Park, of course. I bet there are a bunch of Little League-type games going on. We’ll probably find hundreds of women like you.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Panagos,” Kit said, feigning insult. “But there are no women like me.”

Cal stopped and looked over at her with a smile. “No, I don’t think there are.”

Dear Reader,

If you’re eagerly anticipating holiday gifts we can start you off on the right foot, with six compelling reads by authors established and new. Consider it a somewhat early Christmas, Chanukah or Kwanzaa present!

The gifting begins with another in USA TODAY bestselling author Susan Mallery’s DESERT ROGUES series. In The Sheik and the Virgin Secretary a spurned assistant decides the only way to get over a soured romance is to start a new one—with her prince of a boss (literally). Crystal Green offers the last installment of MOST LIKELY TO… with Past Imperfect, in which we finally learn the identity of the secret benefactor—as well as Rachel James’s parentage. Could the two be linked? In Under the Mistletoe, Kristin Hardy’s next HOLIDAY HEARTS offering, a by-the-book numbers cruncher is determined to liquidate a grand New England hotel…until she meets the handsome hotel manager determined to restore it to its glory days—and capture her heart in the process! Don’t miss Her Special Charm, next up in Marie Ferrarella’s miniseries THE CAMEO. This time the finder of the necklace is a gruff New York police detective—surely he can’t be destined to find love with its Southern belle of an owner, can he? In Diary of a Domestic Goddess by Elizabeth Harbison, a woman who is close to losing her job, her dream house and her livelihood finds she might be able to keep all three—if she can get close to her hotshot new boss who’s annoyingly irresistible. And please welcome brand-new author Loralee Lillibridge—her debut book, Accidental Hero, features a bad boy come home, this time with scars, an apology—and a determination to win back the woman he left behind!

So celebrate! We wish all the best of everything this holiday season and in the New Year to come.

Happy reading,

Gail Chasan

Senior Editor

Diary of a Domestic Goddess
Elizabeth Harbison

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ELIZABETH HARBISON

has been an avid reader for as long as she can remember. After authoring three cookbooks, Elizabeth turned her hand to writing romances and hasn’t looked back. Her second book for Silhouette Romance, Wife Without a Past, was a 1998 finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award in the “Best Traditional Romance” category.

Elizabeth lives in Maryland with her husband, John, daughter Mary Paige, and son, Jack, as well as two dogs, Bailey and Zuzu. She loves to hear from readers, and you can write to her c/o Box 1636, Germantown, MD 20875.

Dedicated to Greg Cunliffe, the best friend I ever had,

in loving memory.

And to Yolande Cunliffe and Jane Cunliffe Aylor,

with heartfelt thanks for your friendship in the difficult

times we’ve shared and in the brighter times yet to come.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter One

Edith’s Diary

Home Life Magazine

October 2005 issue

As the days grow shorter and the air carries the crisp bite of autumn, my thoughts turn to cool red apples, amber sunlight and ghosts and goblins with flashlights wandering the narrow country lane of our home in the Virginia hills. Steve has picked a pumpkin from the sunny patch on the hill and is in the kitchen right now sketching out an elaborate jack-o’-lantern using the stencil pattern on page twenty-two. Little Johnny is standing by, watching with fascination. Soon he’ll come in to help me make his pirate costume. That’s right, we’re making it. No more hot plastic masks that smell like glue, no nylon costumes that fall apart halfway through your little one’s candy pilgrimage. Everything you need to make a wonderful and memorable Halloween costume is probably already in your house.

“Mommy!”

“Just a minute.”

For the pirate costume, gather a red bandanna, black sweatpants, long white sweat socks, aluminum foil, a woman’s long-sleeved blouse, some gold craft paint and a plastic shower curtain ring for the pirate’s earring—

“Mommy!”

Kit Macy stopped typing and pushed her laptop back on the ancient Formica kitchen table with exaggerated patience. Then she turned to the four-year-old who was still tugging on her sleeve. “Are you on fire?”

“No—”

“Are you bleeding?”

“No, but—”

She lowered her chin. “Are you supposed to interrupt me when I’m working?”

Johnny pressed his lips together and glanced at the kitchen doorway behind him before saying, “No.”

Big, guilty kid eyes. They got to her every time. Kit smiled and ruffled his hair. “Look, I know you’re hot and bored. Just let me finish and we can go to the pool, okay? Maybe Mr. Finnegan can fix the air conditioner while we’re gone.” It was July, and the mugginess of the New Jersey summer had already hit them full force. The fan Kit had propped in the corner of the small apartment kitchen sputtered ominously, and she glanced at it. “Before that thing dies, too, and we melt.” One more month and she would be closing on her own house. A house with central air-conditioning and a community pool.

Sometimes it was the only thought that kept her going.

Johnny gave a distracted nod. “Okay, but Mommy?”

She sighed. “Yes?”

“Um, Mommy?

“Johnny, what?”

“Steve has something stuck on his nose.”

It took a moment for her to rewind and replay the mental tape. “What is it?”

He squirmed visibly around the question. “He wouldn’t come with me to show you.”

Two nights ago Johnny had smeared peanut butter on Steve’s nose because it was “so funny to watch him try and lick it off.” A quick calculation told Kit that if Steve wasn’t in the kitchen—and he wasn’t— it was likely that he was in the TV room with her new sofa. Her new twelve-hundred-dollar Open Space sofa with the custom vine-patterned upholstery. That and peanut butter would make for an ugly combination. Actually anything and peanut butter made for an ugly combination.

She jumped up. “Where is he?”

“In my room,” Johnny admitted, his voice small behind her as she dashed out of the kitchen.

She rounded the corner to the small, dark hallway and heard repeated sneezes behind Johnny’s closed bedroom door. “You’re not supposed to lock him in there, baby, you know that.”

“I know,” Johnny answered, drawing each syllable out guiltily.

Kit pushed the door open and saw Steve, the black Labrador mutt, lying on the floor, sneezing and growling and trying to wrestle something off his nose.

“Damn.” She dropped to the floor and tried to calm the squirming dog down enough to remove the shower curtain ring she’d gotten out of the bathroom to make an earring for the stupid pirate costume. “Damn, damn, damn.”

“You said a bad thing!”

“You’re right.” She pried the ring open and pulled it off the dog’s nose, trying to resist saying another stream of “bad things.” “You know you’re not supposed to put people things on Steve. I’ve told you that like a hundred times already.”

“That’s not a people thing,” Johnny said, his voice stern with four-year-old condescension. “It’s a bathroom thing.”

“Today it’s a people thing.” Arguing with him was like arguing with a slick Jersey lawyer. He always came up with some loophole she hadn’t previously covered. Last week, in the late-night emergency pediatric clinic, it was that she’d never actually said not to put the wheels from his Matchbox cars into his ears. Now she looked at him pointedly. “But, for the record, keep bathroom things away from Steve, too.” She examined the plastic ring. If it had managed to squeeze that tightly on Steve’s nose, it probably wouldn’t be all that good for a toddler’s ear. Frankly it had struck her as a stupid idea when the woman from the local playgroup had mentioned it in the first place. Now she’d have to come up with an alternative before her deadline.

“What’s it for anyway?” Johnny asked, taking the ring from her and immediately getting it stuck on his fingertip. He barely had time to whip up a good whine before Kit reached over and pulled it off with a snap.

“It’s supposed to be for your costume.”

He looked skeptical. No, afraid. “I don’t like it.”

“Neither does Steve.” Upon hearing his name, the dog pushed his wet nose against her hand and she patted his head.

“I don’t like pirates.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t like boats,” Johnny went on, clearly covering all pirate bases so that she wouldn’t try to convince him to be, say, a superhero pirate. “And I don’t like earrings. I don’t like them at all.”

Sometimes it felt as if he was plucking at her nerves as though they were strings on an out-of-tune ukulele. “Look, buddy, you don’t need to like pirates. You don’t need to wear the costume on Halloween. All you need to do is be a kid long enough for me to make sure these homemade costumes work so I can print them in my column.”

Though he was only four, Johnny had long since understood that all the quirky domestic things his mother worked on were part of her job as “Edith Chamberlain,” Home Life magazine’s monthly “Edith’s Diary” columnist. She’d been the managing editor of the magazine for five years now, but she’d taken over writing the column two and a half years ago when the real Edith Chamberlain—who had established the column forty years ago—had passed away.

“I don’t want to be a princess, either,” Johnny said in a small, husky voice. He’d been saying it ever since she’d taken him to the craft store to get the glitter for the princess costume she was also detailing in her article.

Kit gave the dog one last pat, then stood up. “Yeah, well, you’re just trying the costume on for me, then we’ll take it off really fast, okay?”

His voice went glum. “Okay.”

She looked at her watch. “In fact, we should do it now because your dad’s gonna come pick you up when he gets off work in an hour.”

“You said we could go to the pool!”

“We will. We’ll try the costume on really quick, then we’ll go to the pool and watch for him from there. Deal?”

“Okay.” He was already busy peeling off his sweaty Batman T-shirt and the pull-up diapers her mother kept telling her he was too old for.

“Just put him in regular underpants,” Kit’s mother would say. “If he messes them up, he’ll get uncomfortable in a hurry.”

“He doesn’t seem to have a problem with walking around in a poopie pull-up,” Kit pointed out every time. “How much difference will it make if it’s underpants instead? It would just make more work for me.”

But Kit’s mother was never wrong, even when she was patently incorrect. She just clicked her tongue against her teeth, shook her head knowingly and said, “You coddle that child too much.”

It wasn’t a surprising sentiment from her mother, she realized, considering the fact that Kit had done more to raise her two younger sisters than her working mom had, but it still made her feel bad.

“Got it!” Johnny called in a singsong voice. Kit hadn’t even realized he’d left the room, but he was walking back in with the pale blue princess dunce cap—she made a mental note to find out what the real name for it was before printing the column— perched on his head at a rakish angle. He dragged the satiny dress—made entirely with a tank dress from Target and cheap, shiny polyester fabric ironed on with stitching tape—behind him. The glitter they’d stuck on with glue left a vaguely Disney-like trail behind him.

She had to hand it to him, he really was a good sport.

Kit went to him. “Put your arms up.” He did, and she slid the dress over his head. She had to admit it looked pretty good. Perhaps a little like a trailer-park prom dress, but that was what Halloween was supposed to look like. “How does it feel?” she asked. “Comfortable? Move around a little bit.”

He struck a superhero pose, then ran across the floor and back again, feet stomping hard on the wood floor. Thank goodness it was just the Finnegans living beneath them, since they were both all but deaf. When he got back he nodded his approval. “It’s good.”

“I wonder if it will hold together,” she said, tugging gently at the hem. She was alarmed to see that the stitching tape was starting to pull apart when there was a knock at the door. “Wait there,” she instructed Johnny, pressing the hem together before getting up. “Don’t move.”

He stood still and she admired the costume one more time, hoping she might be able to improvise a quick fix. Maybe a glue gun? She was so distracted by the thought that when she opened the door and saw her ex-husband, it took a moment to compute. Why wasn’t he at work?

“Rick.”

“Daddy!” Johnny cried from across the room.

“Hey, bud.”

Johnny ran to Rick, arms outspread, dress coming apart more with every step. He threw himself into Rick’s arms, distributing pale blue glitter all over Rick’s Grateful Dead T-shirt.

Rick looked at his son. “What’ve you got on?”

Johnny flashed his mother a look of dramatic disapproval. “A princess costume.”

Rick looked over Johnny’s shoulder at Kit. “The column again?”

Kit nodded.

“They really ought to pay you extra for doing that. Put some money aside for therapy.” Rick laughed.

“Very funny. You’re early.”

“I know, I know, but I borrowed a car from my neighbor and I have to get it back to her by six.” Rick was six years younger than Kit, and once upon a time she had been enamored by his long-haired starving-artist persona. Now she was just weary of it.

“What happened to your company car?” she asked, dreading the answer even before the words were out of her mouth. He didn’t lose his job. Please, God, don’t let him say he lost his job.

Rick clicked his tongue against his teeth and let out a long aah breath. “I’m just not a corporate drone.” He set Johnny down. “I gave it a try—and I really appreciate your helping me get me the job and all—but it just wasn’t me.” He was unfazed by the withering look she was giving him. “The good news is, I got a gig painting a mural on the side of that old brick building on Maryland Avenue and Dobrey Street.”

“Does it pay?”

He tipped a flattened hand from side to side. “But the exposure is great. The theme is Indonesian history.” He nodded, as if that would make Kit feel all better about her son’s father’s complete lack of financial prospects.

Kit just looked at him. “Indonesian history.”

“What’s that?” Johnny asked.

“Excellent question, my friend.” Rick ruffled Johnny’s hair. “We’ll look it up this weekend.”

“You have to look it up?” Kit repeated incredulously. “You got this job without even knowing anything about it?”

Rick just smiled and said to Johnny, “Change your clothes—we have to go.”

“Okay. I’ll be right back!”

When Johnny was gone, Rick looked at Kit with pity. “Rough week?”

“What?”

“You look like hell. And you’ve got that past-deadline-temper thing going. You work too much.”

She frowned. “I have to. I’m trying to buy a house for our son. And it will be a lot easier if you keep up your support payments, such as they are.”

He waved her concerns away. “Don’t worry about it.”

It was good advice, because worrying about Rick’s lack of prospects had never made one whit of difference anyway. “So. Got big plans for the weekend? Besides studying Indonesian history, I mean.”

“Thought I might take him into the city to see the Modigliani exhibit at MOMA.”

“That would be good.” Better Rick than Kit, she figured. It wouldn’t hurt Johnny to be exposed to modern art, and God knew Kit didn’t want to do it. Modigliani gave her a headache. She didn’t like taking liberties with proportion. She was more of a Vermeer girl herself.

It wasn’t a bad metaphor for her life with Rick.

“Then again, we might stay in and watch Time Bandits.”

“Again?”

“Hey, it’s a classic.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. She’d known what she was getting into when she’d married him, and now, when he was consistently what she expected, she could hardly call foul on him for it. At least he loved his son and took good care of him when it was his weekend.

Johnny pounded back in the room. The dress was gone and he was in a Batman shirt—inside out—and shorts. He hauled his overstuffed Buzz Lightyear suitcase across the floor noisily. Buzz himself, the beat-up three-pound toy that could double as a weapon in the event of a burglary, was sticking out of the top.

“Ready to go, Buzz?” Rick asked, reminding Kit why she had loved him once. He was really good with Johnny, there was no denying it.

“Yup, he’s ready.” Johnny pointed to the obvious projection from his bag.

Kit knelt by the boy and gave him a tight hug. “You have a good time with Daddy, okay?”

“Okay, Mommy.”

She drew back and touched his nose. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you too. ’Bye!”

“’Bye, baby.” She stood up.

“Relax a little,” Rick said to her. “These sixty-hour weeks are too much. You need to just be sometimes, you know?”

And that, she realized all at once, was why she’d married him. That mellowness, that hippie-without-the-drugs peacefulness. That was why she’d married him.

And why the marriage had failed.

Because no matter how much she wanted to be that easygoing, mellow, pass-the-nachos person, she was always going to be the uh-oh woman.

Thank God Johnny had Rick around to balance that out.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I need to be employed.” She smiled. “But don’t worry about me—I’ve got the whole weekend to eat bonbons and listen to Frank Sinatra on the CD player.”

“Give it a try,” Rick said with a smile. “Couldn’t hurt.” He looked down at Johnny. “Let’s go. The car’s about to turn into a pumpkin.” He put his hand lightly on the back of Johnny’s blond head and guided him into the hallway.

For a moment she watched Johnny’s slight body walking away, his pipe-cleaner arm raised to hold his father’s hand, then stepped back into her apartment. The door closed with a light click behind her. She still heard their footsteps—Rick’s heavy plodding and the tap of Johnny’s run—disappear like music at the end of a song. When they were gone and she knew she was safely alone, she smiled. The weekend was hers. She didn’t have to make a single vegetable if she didn’t want to. In fact, she could eat Cap’n Crunch over the sink for two nights in a row if that’s what she wanted.

She had forty-eight hours to unwind the stress that had wound her up all week and she had to start right away.

She got the Cap’n Crunch out.

Chapter Two

“The thing is, I don’t think doctors actually give babies opium for teething anymore.” Kit leaned her elbows on her desk and listened to the old medical columnist’s patronizing response over the telephone line before responding, “I know it’s called paregoric, but it’s opium.” And four years ago she would have given her right arm to have some for her screaming baby, but still. Come on. It was a narcotic. “How about you just try describing more homemade remedies, like teething rings, freezing a sock, that kind of thing….” She listened on the line again. “A sock. Like, for your feet. You soak it in water, then freeze it and…” She sighed. “Never mind. Just go ahead and finish your column.”

She would edit it later.

Home Life magazine had been around for a hundred and twenty-five years, and Kit was willing to bet Orville Pippin had been writing his “Ask the Doctor” column for at least half that time. She would also bet his exploration of modern medicine stopped with whatever the Stenberg School of Medicine class of ’38 had taken away under their graduation caps.

Kit had only been the managing editor of the magazine for five years, but in that time she’d researched and written more of his columns than he himself had, thanks to all of the outdated advice he had a tendency to dole out. She had a hotline to her own pediatrician’s office to double-check just this kind of thing.

Opium.

Jeez.

“Hey, Kit!” Lucy, a young editorial assistant, barked from the hallway. “Phone, line two. Johnny’s babysitter again.”

Kit glanced at the clock. Two fifty-five. Damn. Five minutes ago it had been noon and even then she hadn’t had enough time to finish everything she had to do today. She closed her eyes and counted to five. If she didn’t pick up the phone, they couldn’t tell her to come pick him up early again. It wasn’t as if they’d put him out on the sidewalk.

She waited just a beat longer, then picked up the receiver. “This is Kit Macy.”

“Ms. Macy.” It was the director, Ellen Phillips. She always pronounced Ms. as if it contained twenty-two z’s. “We seem to have a problem.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, Johnny has been fighting with Kyle again.” Big surprise. It was like saying Churchill and Hitler had had another disagreement. “It seems both of them wanted to ride the fire engine, but Johnny refused to let Kyle have a turn.”

Kyle was a bully. Easily two years older than Johnny and at least twenty pounds heavier, the kid picked on Johnny every single day. One would have thought the facility administrator might have taken the older, bigger child to task, but she never did. Kyle’s parents were a whole lot richer than Kit, and if Mizzzzzzz Phillips had to alienate either boy’s parents, it was going to be Johnny’s every time.

And it was.

Kit took a short breath. “Ellen, look, can’t you please just separate them for the rest of the day?” She looked at the clock. Three o’clock. “It’s only another two hours or so, and I have a million things I have to get done.”

“I’m trying to do my job, too, Ms. Macy, but that’s difficult to do with these hellions creating chaos for me.”

Hellions. Man, she’d hissed it like a curse. “Well, maybe Kyle’s parents can pick him up this time.”

The phone line seemed to crackle with the chill of her response. “But you are in the building next door to ours. I would hate to ask Mr. Cherkins to come all the way downtown when you’re right here.”

Yes. Yes, she was right here. And that was the only reason she still had Johnny in the Petite Care Center. She was seriously thinking it wasn’t worth it.

If Johnny hadn’t been caught in the middle of this, Kit’s response would have been different, but she didn’t want to instigate an argument only to have Ellen take it out on the boy.

She looked at the clock on her desk. Three-oh-three. She sighed heavily. “I’ll be right there.”

“He wouldn’t let me ride.”

“I believe you.” Kit toted Johnny along the sidewalk toward the old building that had served as Home Life’s headquarters since 1948. “But I’ve told you before to avoid that kid. If he’s playing with something, you have to find something else to play with. If he’s not near you, he can’t fight with you.”

“But I was there first!” Johnny’s voice rang with the injustice of it. Obviously he’d had to explain this to Ellen, too, because his face crinkled the way it always did when he was truly frustrated.

“Then you should have walked away.” Kit heard her own advice and stopped. To hell with hurrying back to work. This was more important.

She knelt down in front of her son on the grungy sidewalk, holding his slight shoulders in her hands. “I take it back, Johnny. You shouldn’t have. You can’t walk away every time a bully tries to take something from you. You did the right thing. I’m glad you stood up for yourself.”

A dent formed in the perfectly smooth skin over his brow. “You are?” His blue eyes went dark with confusion. “But you just said—”

“I know, baby. But I was wrong. It’s easier to walk away from bullies sometimes, but it’s not always right.” She pulled him close for a hug, reveling in the soft, soapy smell of his skin and hair. She kissed the cottony-soft blond head and drew back. “Okay?”

“I don’t want to go back there.”

It broke her heart. He was there for her convenience, not because it was best for him. There was no pretending otherwise. She was best for him. And since she couldn’t be there all the time, she was going to have to find something else. Something that wasn’t Mizzzzzzz Phillips. “Remember how I told you I was going to try and put you in that Montessori school near our new house?”

“School?” His eyes lit up. He was enamored with the idea of school in the way only a person who had never been could be.

She nodded, but fear surged in her heart rather than the hope she saw in his. What if it didn’t work out? It didn’t bear thinking about. “Well, the application came in the mail today and I’m going to send it back to them this afternoon. Well, tomorrow afternoon.” After she was paid. The seventy-five-dollar application fee was nonnegotiable.

She knew because she’d tried to negotiate it.

“My new school,” he said with a small nod and the kind of smile that made her determine right there and then that she’d get him into the school even if she had to rob a bank to do it. “And Kyle Cherkins won’t be there, right?”

“No, he won’t.” She stood up again and took his little warm hand, leading him into the office. “Okay. Here we are. You know the drill. Sit quietly and color. No talking, no running, no interrupting me when I’m on the phone and no asking why Miss Pratt’s ankles are so wrinkly. Got it?”

“I know, I know.”

“Mommy! Mommy, Mommy.” Tap, tap, tap on her arm. “Look, Mommy.”

Kit held her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and shot Johnny a shut up look. She returned to her call. “So you’re saying you lost all of the documentation?”

The bank official on the other end of the line cleared his throat. “Your former loan officer left in something of a hurry. We don’t know exactly where she put all the files she was working on. It’s caused quite a backup, I must say.”

Kit’s heart lodged in her throat. “I’m not going to lose my interest rate, am I?”

“I sincerely hope not.”

Kit’s stomach dropped. “Wait. Sincerely hope not isn’t good enough. I need to know.” Or what? Or she’d go to another company? Although her credit was good, there were a few tiny glitches—a forgotten department store credit card that she’d once been thirty-one days late in paying, a collection effort on the part of Big Jugs magazine for a subscription she’d never ordered—that she’d had to clear with Best State Mortgage. She did not want to start the process over again.

“We’ll do our best, Ms. Macy. If you could just get your bank statements, tax forms, W-2’s and employer’s statement to us, we’ll get right on it.”

“Employer’s statement?” Unbelievable. They needed something new every single time she talked to them.

“Just something stating your year-to-date earnings and projected income.”

“Okay.” She glanced at Johnny. Maybe it was a good thing she’d already gotten him, because now she was going to have to stay after and hope the editor, Ebbit, had time to write something up. “Anything else?”

“It’s all on the checklist.”

There was a beep on the line. The phone said it was in-house. Ebbit himself. “Okay, Mr. Black, I have copies of everything else, so I’ll just overnight them to you again.”

“No need to hurry.”

“No need to hurry?” Her voice leaped toward hysteria. “I’m supposed to close on the house in twenty-eight days.”

There was a nerve-racking pause.

Then the sound of papers shuffling on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, did you say twenty-eight days? I have you down for September.”

Johnny tapped Kit’s arm and she pulled it away, turning her office chair around. “No, it’s this month. July 30.” It was all she could do to stay calm. If this stupid company prevented her from getting her house because one person screwed up, she’d—

“I’ll make a note of it,” the loan officer said noncommittally.

Kit’s phone beeped again.

She thought her head might explode.

“All right. I have to take this call, Mr. Black, so I’ll just collect the information and you’ll have it in the morning.” She clicked over to the other line.

“We have an urgent meeting this afternoon at five,” Ebbit Markham told her.

“Okay.” She glanced at Johnny. There was going to have to be some serious bribery involved in trying to keep him sitting quietly in her office during an editorial meeting. “Actually I’m glad you’re staying a little late because I need you to give me a written statement that I work here.”

Silence.

“Ebbit?”

“Why do you need that?”

She tapped her pen on the desk. “It’s not a big deal. The mortgage company just wants proof that I’m employed.” She gave a casual laugh. “You know how it is—they don’t want to lend you money until you can completely prove you don’t need it.”

Again nothing.

“Oh! Yes, yes, well…” What was with him? He sounded as if she’d shocked him out of sleep or something. “I’ll just, uh, I’ll see you at five.”

“Okay.” She hung up the phone thoughtfully.

“Mommy.” Johnny tapped her again. “Are you off the phone now? Look at my picture.” He produced her May bank statement, replete with indelible ink scribbles. “It’s our new house. Do you like it?”

“Yeah, honey, that’s nice,” she said, distracted.

Johnny tugged on her sleeve. “You didn’t look at it. You have to look at it!”

She looked.

Oh, no. Oh. No. No, no, no. The bank statement. All those numbers.

In her mind’s eye she saw herself spending the evening with a bottle of Wite-Out, removing every line he’d added. And even then she ran the risk of it looking as if she’d somehow doctored her books.

But Johnny looked so proud, so pleased with his work, that she couldn’t bear to let out the anger that bubbled in her chest. “It’s good,” she said in a tight voice. “But, honey, next time ask me for paper, okay? Don’t write on something that already has writing on it. That’s really important, got it?”

“You don’t like it?”

She took a long breath. “Yes, I do, it’s just…” She sighed. “It’s just great.” She produced a pile of paper from her printer tray, looked at it and added a few more sheets. “Here. Do some more. I’ve got to go in the room next door for a meeting in a little while, and you’re going to stay here, so why don’t you draw all your very best friends for me. If you run out of paper, get more from there, okay?” She pointed to the printer tray.

He barely glanced at it, said, “’Kay,” and set about drawing immediately.

She looked at her clock again.

It was four-forty.

Kit always thought that if Samantha Stevens had twitched her nose and turned an old basset hound into a man, she’d have ended up with Ebbit Markham. Today he looked even more basset houndish than usual, his face drawn and white.

The staff of Home Life was collected in the conference room. Ebbit’s lifelong secretary, Miss Pratt—no one was sure of her first name—was handing out coffee in foam cups, her shaking hands sloshing the hot liquid onto laps, shirts and the floor.

“What’s going on?” Kit asked her friend Joanna Sadler, aka Joe Sadler, Mr. Fix-It, another monthly columnist as well as the permissions editor.

“Don’t freak” was Joanna’s first response.

Kit quirked her mouth into a smile, belying the nervous tremor in her stomach. “Okay, now that I know it’s freakworthy, what’s going on?”

“I think the magazine’s been sold.”

“What?”

“It’s just what I heard. I could be wrong.”

How could this happen without her knowing something was up in advance? “Who bought it?”

Joanna shrugged. “Some idiot who wants a century-old monthly that’s hopelessly outdated and losing readers by the score every day, I guess.”

It was a fair assessment, Kit knew. The once venerable publication had become so desperate for readers that it offered subscriptions for the cost of postage. Every time she’d suggested to Ebbit that maybe they should become a little more contemporary, he gave her a lecture on tradition.

Lucy came up next to Kit, her small, tanned face tight with worry. “They sold the magazine? What’s going to happen to us?”

“Hang on—we don’t know anything yet,” Kit said, trying to inject reason. “As far as we know, this is just a regular editorial meeting.”

In her gut she knew it wasn’t.

The door opened and a tall, slick-looking man with dark hair, light eyes, a square jaw and a suit that probably cost almost as much as her monthly salary walked in.

Everyone made their way to their seats around the conference table and turned to face Ebbit at the head of the table like obedient schoolchildren.

He stood behind his chair rather than sitting down. “As you all know,” he began, clutching and unclutching the back of the chair with gnarled hands. “I have been working for Home Life for over fifty years. I began in the mail room and worked my way slowly but surely to where I am now.” He glanced at the man with him. “Or, that is, where I was until today.”

This was not good.

Ebbit mustered a smile. “Home Life has been sold, along with her sister publications, to the Monahan Group. If the name sounds familiar to you, it’s because they own and operate such publications as Sports World, Kidz and Celeb Dish magazines.” He looked at the man with him. “With the new management comes a new direction for all of us. As of today, I am entering into that wonderful state called retirement.” His voice wavered over the word retirement. “I plan to do a lot of fishing and gardening and generally get on Connie’s nerves.”

There was a small wave of polite laughter in the room.

“Anyhoo,” Ebbit said in his wrapping-it-up voice, “this is Cal Panagos.” He gestured toward the man. “Cal is the former editor of Sports World. Now he’s the new executive editor of Home Life.”

Ebbit stepped aside, and Cal Panagos stepped behind the chair as if it was a grand podium. “Thanks for the welcome,” he said, giving Ebbit a stiff but technically courteous nod. His bearing was positively regal. His looks were as strikingly sultry as one of the Calvin Klein underwear models who routinely looked over Times Square with long-lashed bedroom eyes. But it was his air of confidence that struck Kit the most.

He set his expensive-looking leather briefcase on the table and opened it up. “I know this is a surprise to many of you.”

Kit’s stomach turned over. Her heart pounded as if a boxer was caught in her rib cage. This couldn’t be happening. Yet it was.

She was losing her house.

Cal continued. “Personally I’m excited about the challenge this presents.”

Kit noticed he tensed his jaw for a moment. It was a gesture that hardened the planes of his face and made him look even more manly.

“My plan is to start this magazine over from the ground up, and I’m bringing in my own people for the task, so…” His expensively clad shoulders rose a fraction of an inch, then dropped. “I thank you for your years of service to Home Life and, if you’ll make your way to Ebbit’s former office, you’ll find your severance packages waiting for you.”

The room responded with silence. No gasps, no objections.

“I believe you’ll find the terms generous,” Cal finished. “Thanks for your time and your service to the magazine.” He gave a brief—and Kit thought insincere—smile.

And with that he turned and left the room.

Chapter Three

This was not happening. It couldn’t be happening. Surely God, Thor, Zeus and the rest of the Divine Justice League weren’t so ticked about Kit’s minor sins of the past—an overdue library book here, a little white lie about a man’s prowess in bed there— that they’d let this happen.

Now of all times!

Well, she just couldn’t let this happen. She didn’t know how she was going to stop it, but she had to.

She remembered her own words to Johnny—was it just this afternoon? You can’t walk away every time a bully tries to take something from you.

She couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t just let this guy pull her job out from under her. But how on earth could she stay? She’d been fired, for Pete’s sake!

She watched, numb, as her friends and colleagues collected thick manila envelopes from a makeshift desk manned by a glossy-haired buxom brunette Kit had never seen before.

“Are you really going to take this without a fight?” Kit asked Lila Harper, author of a sewing column that had, perhaps, contained a few too many crocheted sweater-vests.

“The man said he doesn’t need us anymore. No sense in fighting. Plus, I don’t need the work, dear,” Lila Harper said, patting Kit’s shoulder with a thin paper-white hand.

No, of course she didn’t. Neither did half the people here. They all either had other careers, well-paid spouses or retirement pensions. All the other staff members were in their twenties with no dependents or urgent considerations. For one ugly moment Kit felt as if she was the only one who really cared about keeping this job, the only one who needed it.

She continued to watch in disbelief as several of her other coworkers took their envelopes one by one and left as if they’d won some kind of prize. A slip-knot tightened in her stomach. It was over. She’d lost a battle without even realizing she was fighting.

Her house.

The little yard.

The school one block away.

The community pool with two diving boards.

All of it gone. Unless she could pull off some kind of miracle with this unapproachable man who seemed to have ice water running through his veins.

“Can you believe this?” Kathleen Browning asked, interrupting Kit’s thoughts.

Kit looked at her and was gratified to see that the copy editor looked unhappy about the turn of events.

“No, I can’t. I’m going to fight it,” Kit said.

“How?”

The answer seemed so obvious. “I’m going to talk to this Panagos guy. I’m going to tell him I want to keep my job. Come with me. There’s power in numbers.”

Kathleen looked doubtful. “I don’t know. Men like that make me nervous.”

“Men like what?”

“He’s so—” she sucked in her breath “—great-looking. If I try and talk to him, I’ll probably just get nervous and pass out at his feet or something.”

“Kathleen,” Kit returned impatiently. “That’s ridiculous. Look, I’ll do most of the talking, you just come and agree with me.”

Kathleen shook her head. “I don’t think so. Actually I saw an ad for a fiction editor just last week and I think I’d like to try moving in that direction.”

Wimp, Kit thought irritatedly.

“We’ll get together soon,” Fiona Whitcomb, the etiquette columnist, was saying to Lila as they shuffled behind Kit. “First Derek and I will probably go to Palm Springs for a few weeks of glorious sunshine.”

Kit watched each of her old friends file out the door, shaking Cal’s hand and smiling as they left. Who were these people? It was as if she hadn’t known them at all. She half wondered if there were pods in the basement of the building, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Lucy took her envelope, opened it and gave a delighted exclamation, as if her Pepsi bottle cap had just declared her a winner.

Jo gave Kit a look, then stood up.

“Are you really going to do this?” Kit asked her.

“I don’t have any choice,” Jo said. “Look at that guy.” She nodded toward Cal. “He means business. You can see there’s no compromise there. He walked into this building intending to fire every one of us today and that’s just what he did.”

Kit felt as if she might cry. But she wouldn’t. No way. “I’m going to change his mind about that.”

Jo put her arm around her friend. “I bet you will, too. I know this is really important to you, but don’t forget there are other opportunities out there if you can’t make this one work. You’ll find a job and get that house.”

There was no sense in pointing out that she needed this job now in order to get this loan at this interest rate. “What about you? Did you win the lottery or something? How come you don’t need to worry about work?”

“I do, Kit, but I’ve been thinking about leaving this job lately anyway. I don’t want to be Mr. Fix-It forever. There are better things out there for me. And if I get to leave here with a good recommendation and a severance package, I’m better off than I thought I’d be two weeks ago when I started seriously thinking of quitting.”

Kit hadn’t even realized her friend had been so close to quitting.

“Listen,” Jo said, “if you want to stay and battle this out, I’ll take Johnny home. We’ll go to dinner and swing by your place later, okay?”

“Thanks,” Kit said. For a moment she’d forgotten Johnny was still waiting in her office.

That was the kind of thoughtfulness that was going to make Kit really and truly miss seeing Jo at work every day. She’d been so lucky to work with her best friend for so long.

Now Kit was on her own. And she was going to go forward and change Cal Panagos’s mind no matter what.

One by one the Home Life staff went until there were only two heartbeats left in the room: hers and Cal’s. And she was pretty sure hers was faster.

Cal turned from the doorway and looked at Kit with what she saw now, on closer inspection, were piercing pale blue eyes. They were Newmanesque. This guy could be a movie star.

In fact, if he’d chosen that route, Kit would have been a lot better off.

“There’s just one envelope left,” he said to her in a voice that had probably melted lots of foolish women’s hearts.

“Let me guess.”

He gave a quick smile, the unexpectedness of which took her aback, and held the envelope out to her. “Thanks for your work, Ms. Macy.”

She took a bracing breath and said, “I can’t take that.”

He cocked his head slightly. “I’m sorry?”

“I can’t accept your severance package.” She swallowed hard. She was suddenly self-conscious about her small, mousy self standing in front of him. She’d been in such a rush today that she hadn’t done anything with her wild tangle of auburn hair. And she hadn’t done the laundry in a few days and was wearing her Emergency Work Clothes, meaning gray pants that would have been a lot more flattering if she’d ever been able to stay on the South Beach Diet for more than two or three days.

Still, she had to work with what she had and she had to pretend she had confidence, even if at this particular moment she didn’t.

“I need this job,” she finished simply.

It was clear he hadn’t been expecting an objection from anyone. He cleared his throat and said, “Well, I’m honestly sorry about this, but—”

She took a gamble. “Moreover, you need me.”

He gave her look of dry query.

She nodded at his unasked question. “You do. I’m the only person who knows how to run this magazine. Okay,” she conceded quickly, “things have been a little rocky here financially, but I know where we are with assignments right now and who needs to be contacted and so on. You wouldn’t want to be sued for breach of contract.” Shoot. She shouldn’t have said that. She should have stopped while she was ahead.

From the look he gave her it was clear that Cal Panagos was not a man who liked being threatened, even in a veiled, passive-aggressive way.

He took a moment to straighten the lapel of his Italian-tailored dark gray suit. It fit him perfectly, both physically and metaphorically. It was perfect and cold.

“Everyone needs to be contacted and all assignments need to be canceled,” he said coolly. “My secretary can do that.”

“Can your secretary find her way around the filing maze Lucy created? Some of our legal papers are filed under L for legal, but others are under S for serious legal.”

Cal frowned as if he was trying to figure out whether Kit was on the level.

“Can your secretary figure out kill fees, which are different for each assignment and which are based on past history with each writer? The files are in a spreadsheet on my computer, but there are a lot of them to figure out. More to the point, do you want to pay her—or him—for the hours she’ll have to spend trying to find her way through that maze? Or do you want to keep on the one person who can expedite it?”

He frowned again, drawing a dark shadow across the expression in his light blue eyes. “It may be hard for you to imagine, Ms. Macy, but, yes, I think I can do all of that—and more—without you.” He tilted his head slightly. “After all, we’ve only just met. I’ve managed a much bigger publication than this without any guidance at all.”

She’d taken the wrong tack. She needed to back off quick and try something different.

Maybe plain old honesty would do the trick.

It wasn’t as if she had a lot of other options.

“Look,” she said, “I’m not saying you and your staff aren’t capable of these things. I’m just saying I’m already up to speed, so it makes a lot more sense, economically and timewise, to keep me on.” She looked into his eyes, feeling as though she was swimming against the current in the turbulent ocean of his eyes. “It would benefit both of us.”

His expression softened almost imperceptibly. Perhaps a slight turning of the tide. “Things are changing around here. A lot.”

“I can change.”

He raised an eyebrow slightly. This was a man who knew how he looked at all times and used it to communicate everything he wanted to say. “Are you willing to commit to doing it my way, even before you know what that means?”

She didn’t have any choice. “Yes. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. I’m a professional.”

He nodded thoughtfully.

“Please.” She bit the bullet so hard she wouldn’t have been surprised if her teeth shattered. “I really need my job.”

He was still holding the manila envelope with her name on it. He looked at it, then back at her. A long moment passed before he dropped the envelope on the desk.

“This goes against my better judgment,” he said.

Hope lurched in her chest. “Some of the best things in life begin with that very statement.”

He raked his gaze across her. “You’re a persuasive woman, Ms. Macy.”

She smiled. “That will work to your advantage.”

The smallest hint of a smile played at the curve of his mouth. “That particular feminine quality has occasionally worked against me in the past.”

“Presumably you’re referring to pleasure, not business.”

He hesitated, looking at her. “Sometimes it’s hard to separate the two.”

A frisson of electricity zapped through her chest, and gooseflesh raised on her arms and against the cotton of her shirt. There was nothing to say he was talking about sex—he could have meant that he enjoyed his work so much that it was always a pleasure—but something about the way he looked at her gave Kit chills she didn’t want to attribute to his sex appeal.

So she assigned it instead to a cool blast from the air conditioner.

Even though it was so muggy in the office that she couldn’t be sure the air conditioner was even on.

“Well, I intend to make sure that working with me is a pleasure.” Kit fumbled, hearing—probably at the same time he did—the clumsiness of her sentiment. “I mean, I think we’ll work well together.”

“There you go with that persuasion again,” he said, with a smile that lit his pale blue eyes.

The air conditioner had to be on and she must be standing directly in front of a previously undetected vent, because she was positively getting chills. “Does that mean you’re willing to give me a try?” she asked.

He gave a short laugh. “It’s certainly tempting.”

“I’m talking about the job.”

He nodded for a long moment, then smiled and said, “Okay, you’ve got two months to prove yourself. If I can live without you by then, you’re outta here. Period.”

“Fine.” She turned on her heel to leave when she remembered the call from the bank.

Oh, this wasn’t going to be easy.

She turned back to Cal. “There’s just one more thing,” she said.

He looked at her wearily and let out a breath. “Don’t tell me you want a raise.”

She shook her head. “Just a letter to the bank assuring them that I’m gainfully employed.” She gave a small shrug. “And if you could leave out the part about it being for two months, that would be great.”

Cal watched the feisty redhead leave the room and shook his head. The girl was trouble, every nerve in his body told him so. The way she raised that chin and leveled those Kelly-green eyes at him—she was like a kitten, irrationally brave in the face of the wolf who could eat her alive.

Then she’d flounced out of the place, after having the nerve to ask him to put in writing that he employed her, with her long tangle of hair swinging behind her like spun copper. He had to admire her nerve, as crazy at it was. Hell, he was tempted to tell the bank he was paying her four times what she earned just because she’d taken the chance on asking him.

She was a nervy little thing.

And he could eat her alive all right.

For the time being, though, he’d resist that. She could flit around the office and pull files and make calls. He could use that. Maybe she’d even live up to her own advertising, though in Cal’s experience it was rare that a woman that pretty had the smarts to back it up.

His only real concern about keeping her was that she might prove to be too much of a distraction to him. He had a lot to do and almost no time to do it. In the past he’d had the leisure to flirt and enjoy the chase. He’d also had the security of a large number of personnel, so when the flirting was done and the chase was over, he could disappear back into the excuse of business and that would be that.

But at the moment Kit Macy was his only employee, and given the modest—no, meager—budget Breck Monahan had allowed, he wasn’t going to be able to hire more than fifteen or twenty more.

Hardly the sort of numbers that would allow him to back off gracefully at the end of a fling.

So there would be no fling.

He could live with that.

He got up and went to the back room where Ebbit Markham had pointed out a hundred-odd years’ worth of back issues of the magazine. It was musty and dark, and it occurred to Cal that he might be better off just lighting the whole lot on fire or locking the door and throwing away the key.

The unpleasantness of the room—of the whole damned chaotic and failing office, actually—was the perfect metaphor for the present state of his career.

How the hell had he let this happen? All his life Cal had succeeded wherever he’d tried. A psychologist could have a field day with his motivation— Cal’s father had died when Cal was just seven, leaving him alone to be the man of the house for his mother and sister—but whatever the reason, he’d always felt really good about his success. He’d enjoyed winning, whether it was class valedictorian or the Presidential Young Entrepreneur Award or a full scholarship to Stanford.

Winning was who he was. Who he’d always been.

And all the stuff that went with it now—the nice coop, a good car, thirty-year-old scotch in the cupboard—was proof of his achievements. The stuff itself wasn’t his goal, it was just the certificate on the wall.

He’d grown to appreciate it for that.

Now not only were his finances on the line—he could always make money again—but it was also his reputation. The reputation he’d spent a lifetime building, polishing.

If that went down in flames with Home Life he might never recover it.

So what was he doing in this crummy old building downtown trying to resurrect a business that had been terminally ill for half a century? Sure, he’d made a mistake—and it was just that, a mistake— but did he really deserve this kind of punishment?

If he’d had any time at all, he might have really felt ticked off about it. But as it was, he had to just step up to the plate and knock one out of the park.

So he’d do what he could, beginning with the one employee he had so far.

He’d gone to the archives with Kit Macy in mind. Now that she was gone and he wasn’t diverted by her obvious physical…assets, he could look at her work and try and determine if in fact there was any promise there.

Hell, maybe she could help him rescue this dog of a magazine. She probably couldn’t hurt.

Unless he let her.

His libido had gotten him into trouble before, God knew, and even today he’d tried to stop himself from letting Kit stick around and make his life harder. But in the end he just hadn’t been able to do it. There was something about her—he really couldn’t even say exactly what it was. It didn’t even matter now because he’d already said he’d give her a chance.

So maybe, just maybe, he’d find something in her work that would make him feel as if for once his head and his libido were both right about the same woman.

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