Also by Nancy Frederick
A Change of Heart
Touring the Afterlife
Starstruck
The Sportin’ Life
The Astro Tutor
Love and Sex Under the Stars
The Lover’s Dream
Love Games: Psychic Paths to Love
Palmistry: All Lines Lead to Love
Tarot: Love is in the Cards
Special Edition!
This edition contains a bonus—the first half of Nancy’s best-selling novel, A Change of Heart. Hope you enjoy!
Copyright 2012 by Nancy Frederick
ISBN 978-1-4524-2850-5
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the vendor and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Print version:
ISBN-13:
978-0615615615 (Heart and Soul Press)
ISBN-10:
0615615619
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of this author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Heart & Soul Press
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks so much to my editorial black belt friends Jack Pettey and Steven Darancette for offering suggestions, corrections, and advice about this manuscript. I appreciate all your Ninja stealth in ridding me of my lamebrain mistakes.
Hungry for Love
Nancy Frederick
The kids were fighting as they did every morning at the car. There were screams about who was to ride up front, words like shotgun, insults like poptart. Candy, who was only eight, was screaming, “When is it my turn to be older? I want it to be my turn.”
Normally by now Dr. Bill Masters would have focused on the fracas and broken it up but he didn’t even hear his son Will chortle and cruelly say, “Never. Exactly never is when you’ll be older. Not even when we’re both dead.” Normally Bill would have stepped between his warring children and made a joke to set their minds at ease. By now he would have hugged Candy, who was weeping, and he would have set a stern but kind hand on his son’s shoulder. But he was distracted. There was a woman coming out of his house in running clothes and she carried two brown lunch bags. That wasn’t JoEllen. It looked like her though.
Bill shook his head like a dog tossing off some water. It didn’t work. He still felt damp and fuzzy. The woman locked the door—she had a key—and walked over to him. Suddenly his brain snapped awake. This was Chrissy and she was his live in girlfriend. For a year. What was wrong with him today?
“Forget your lunches, kids?” Chrissy smiled and tossed the lunches in the front seat, kissed Bill casually, and ran down the street, her voice floating back like music over a fence, “Have a slender day!”
“What?” said Bill. He turned to watch Chrissy run off and saw his dumpling of an old lady neighbor waving at him. Bill walked toward Sophie Gold as the kids continued to struggle over who would get to sit up front.
“Check me out, Dr. M.” said Sophie, striking a pose in her velour sweat suit. “I’m back down to fighting weight, thanks to you. Made it all the way around the block today.”
“Great work, Mrs. G. Where’s Mr. G? Why isn’t he walking with you?”
“If Bert were here how could I flirt with you?” she laughed. “I’m planning to bring you some of my strudel later today. Gotta sneak it in when that one isn’t looking.” She gestured toward where Chrissy was disappearing into the distance. She patted Bill’s cheek and sighed, “Oh so cute. If only I were a week or two younger.”
Bill laughed. “You’d be too much woman for me, Mrs. G, we both know that.”
She nodded in agreement. “I’d take it easy on you, but only at first.”
“Oh you’re just shameful. And what would Mr. G say? He’s not a gun collector is he?”
“He’d say go on, take my wife. But leave the strudel.”
Bill laughed only for a second until Mrs. G pointed toward the kids, who were involved in an athletic shoving match, which of course Will was winning. “Get Mr. G in on the exercise,” Bill said, waving as he walked back to the car.
“He has a good heart and a bad ticker,” Sophie sighed, turning to return to her front door.
“Kids!” said Bill, “C’mon already. Every single day. Candy, you know you sit in the back. Kids your age have to sit in the back. It’s safer. So that’s the rule. When you’re ten, you’ll take turns, okay?”
“Not okay.” Candy scowled and scrambled into the front seat anyway, snatching the brown bags and dumping out the contents. Will was about to grab her by the waist and pull her back out but Bill held up a hand to stop him.
“Dadeeeee,” Candy whined, “Look at this.” She held up two cans of Slimfast, pulled from the brown bags.
“Not again!” said Will.
Bill shook his head and settled the kids into the car. “We’ll stop for something.”
“She seemed so normal when we first started dating her,” asserted Candy.
“I miss those days,” said Will, sighing like an old man longing for the distant past.
Bill drove down his beautiful street, observing lush flowers on every lawn and noting that he should do some work in his own yard, neglected now for a couple of years. He pulled into a McDonald’s and parked the car.
“Wow,” said Candy, “McDonald’s for breakfast again. My stomach is glowing with joy.”
“Your mother would kill me,” said Bill. “We’d better hurry though.”
As they sat eating, Bill observed Candy squirming in her seat and looking at him as though something very weighty plagued her. She opened her mouth once or twice then shut it again. Finally he said, “Something on your mind, Toots?”
Candy gulped. She mumbled. She took a big swig of her milk. She opened her mouth. She took another gulp. Then she said, “Now Daddy I don’t want you to hate me or anything.”
“What,” said Bill, astonished. “Hate you? My best sweetheart? You know better.” He put his arm around her and squeezed her shoulders tightly, his dark eyes smiling.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while, Daddy, and I really think we have to break up with Chrissy.”
Will opened his eyes widely, glanced up to the ceiling, grimaced, then began eating with a feigned level of deep concentration.
“You do?” asked Bill. “Why’s that?”
“It’s the man pause,” said Candy.
“Man pause?” asked Bill, smiling.
“Yes, Jessica’s mom said girls have to get married young because soon enough the man pause comes and then you know what happens.”
“What happens?” asked Will. This was a new subject to him.
“Well,” said Candy seriously, “Just like it sounds. The men pause and don’t ask the girl out any more. Chrissy has been acting crazy lately cause she’s afraid of the man pause. Cause Daddy would never marry her. Then she’ll have man pause and no husband.”
“Why do you think I would never marry her?” asked Bill.
“Footwear,” said Candy with conviction. “Jessica explained it to me.”
“What?” asked
Bill.
“Your soles have to be a mate. She’s always in sneakers working out and your shoes are black.”
“Yeah well Jessica is right for once. No way Chrissy is Dad’s soulmate,” said Will.
Bill looked at his children silently and thought for a while. “Maybe Chrissy is a little stressed about getting older. It’s her birthday in a few weeks, but she’s only thirty-four—nowhere near man pause.” He laughed. “Maybe we could all be a little more understanding, show her we care. Why don’t we try that.”
Candy looked worried. “Okay Daddy I can try that but I don’t see how that fixes the shoe problem.”
“Maybe not,” said Bill. “C’mon, let’s get you to school.”
After giving the kids money for lunches and dropping them off at their exclusive school, Bill knew he should head into the office. Patients would be waiting. But he did first what he often chose to do instead, stop off to see JoEllen. He knew it made no sense to be visiting her grave daily. She’d been gone nearly three years. He was with someone new. He was allowed to be happy again. Every single day he reminded himself of that—he was allowed to be happy again.
He stood there silently, yet another bouquet of roses in his hands. Had he bought JoEllen more roses when she was alive and the love of his life or now, since she was stony, silent, and completely unreachable? He didn’t know.
Softly he said, “How am I supposed to live in the moment, when I never expected to live without you? That’s what I want to know. But will you answer me? Nope. Never. And you used to be such a chatterbox. You hated that didn’t you. You said don’t call me that, call me loquacious, it sounds smarter.”
Bill stood there for a while, just trying to feel JoEllen around him, but all he could feel was the memories. He sighed deeply and under his breath he said, “I feel like a guy who was at the best party ever, then for no good reason his gal ditches him way too early and he’s stuck trying to make do with all the other guests. I just wish you’d come to your senses and come back. But no, Jesus you’re not.”
Already at the Beverly Hills Wellness and Weight Loss Center, Bill’s partner, Dr. Kevin Flicker, was in his office but not at his desk. Patients sat outside, either impatient to be congratulated on the week’s current slimmer status or morose about the lack of same. Soon enough they would be weighed in and sent on their way, hopefully to return a little lighter the following week. Kevin and Bill had a good practice, mostly consisting of die hard dieters but also the occasional patient who wasn’t fat and had the flu.
Inside Flicker’s office there were stacks of unopened medical journals piled in a corner. An impressive mahogany desk was centered in the room and on it sat a collection of the desk toys Kevin favored. There was a nice tufted leather couch, so standard medical office that it was almost a cliché, and it would have been perfectly suitable for Kevin’s current activity, except because his partner lacked the good grace to knock before entering his office, Kevin had become furtive, which actually added to the cheap thrills.
At the back of the office was a small closet, with a fairly solid wood door, a door which now shimmied rhythmically with a thud-thud-thud sound that was the backdrop for the muffled moans coming from behind it. Moan-thud-shimmy was the cadence. Slowly the sounds began to subside and the door opened. Nurse Caryn exited first, jiggling her breasts back into her bra and zipping up her uniform top. Kevin followed her, zipping up his fly with a flourish that was comical in its grandeur.
As Caryn turned to exit the office, Kevin reached out and pulled her toward him for a kiss. Then they both giggled. Life was good in Beverly Hills.
Not far from the Beverly Hills Wellness and Weight Loss Center, Kevin Flicker’s most devoted—and determined—patient, a formerly fat, very fat, moderately fat, and now barely fat girl of twenty-six named Angie sat in a hairdresser’s chair having microscopic slivers snipped off the ends of her lush and tastefully streaked hair. Next to her was Ben, her oldest friend, squeamishly squirming as though he were about to have a vasectomy rather than a dye job. What was being done to him didn’t match his image at all. He’d worn cords almost since birth, even in the summer, and his thick glasses gave him a sort of New York intellectual look which in Beverly Hills made him resemble an actor in costume for a role.
Peering up hopefully, like a death row inmate waiting for that governor’s reprieve, Ben mumbled, “This is a bad idea. Maybe we should stop.” Looking more complacent than aghast, the hairdresser stepped back from Ben’s chair and raised her arms in a gesture usually reserved for one of those contestants on a timed cooking competition, until Angie signaled to her to resume working. Ben’s hair was enrobed in tin foil, and dye was painted on as he watched in the mirror with a grim look that suggested his next stop would be at an appliance store that sold beard and head trimmers that could cue ball him back into acceptability.
“Nobody will trust a shrink with streaky hair,” he said solemnly.
“You see all your clients on the Internet or the phone, so why not. For all they know you wear a bozo wig and consult them naked.”
Ben gasped, then returned his worried glance to the mirror. Haltingly he said, “And you don’t think I’m gonna look silly?”
Angie smiled at him in the same way adults do when placating a difficult child. “No silly, I think you’re gonna look hot and studly.”
Ben perked up instantly then braved the subject he really wanted to discuss, “I feel like I should make you stop seeing him.”
“Ahh Ben,” sighed Angie, sweetly reaching out and squeezing his hand, “You’re such a good pal, but I’ll be just fine, so don’t worry about me, okay?”
“But how can you just ignore your history? If you don’t remember, I’m right here to remind you. Do you really want another incendiary incident, more embarrassment? C’mon. Remember Chef Raul? Remember….”
Angie’s mind was lost then, floating back in time to culinary school. She was so desperately in love with this man, the chef of whom all the students were most in awe. Even though at the time she was terribly fat, she liked to believe that she was the teacher’s pet, the one student he responded to as a woman, not just a cook. They were alone in the teaching kitchen and a pot simmered on the stove next to a counter filled with the ingredients for Paella. There were baskets of shellfish, bouquets of herbs, bowls of rice, tiny vessels of prized saffron.
Raul was not a tall man, but his swagger made up for his size. He spoke with a vivacious animation, his heavy Spanish accent exaggerated often, and his waxed Dali moustaches bouncing in time to his speech. He stood that day chopping, causing Angie to sigh with pleasure, the sight of him mincing garlic into oblivion, the rat-tat-tat of the knife under his steady and confident hands pure poetry in motion. He was like a great swordsman, and it made Angie swoon.
“I’ll never be able to do it so fast,” she sighed.
“Everything in time,” Raul lisped. She jumped as he reached toward her, running his fingers under her nose. “Smell the garlic. Perfume. So beautiful,” he said.
Angie’s eyes watered, so she closed them, the pungent garlic wafting from his fingers into her nostrils. Raul drew a piece of basil across her lips, tickling her, and causing her to smile and open her eyes. Grabbing an unopened clam from a steamer basket, Raul held it up.
“Look at this, my little Crème Caramel. What do I have here?”
As though being quizzed in class, Angie opened her mouth to answer but Raul touched her lips with his finger, saying, “No, don’t speak. I know what it is. It is a rock, nothing more. Cold as a stone. But in the hands of a man—a man with a tool—a very excellent tool—it can be opened, opened, yes, and savored.” Grasping a shellfish knife, Raul began to wedge it into the clam’s hinge, but he turned to look deeply into Angie’s eyes, and in a foppish gesture of seduction, he raised his shoulders toward his ears, closed his eyes, and blew Angie a kiss, then screamed as though he were being carried out to sea by a man eating shark.
His accent almost impenetrab
le, he shrieked, “It is unthinkable! I have cut my finger. My knife is dull. I have a dull knife. Can I truly be a man with a dull knife?”
Angie grabbed a towel, and gently wrapped his hand in it, holding it tenderly, although the laceration had produced a virtually imperceptible quantity of blood.
“You’re a great man. Nobody is better than you with chiles.”
Comforted, Raul nodded, clicking his heels together and saying, “Yes, true! And I will set you on fire like a roasted jalapeno.” Reaching for the sprig of basil he’d previously flung on the counter, he pressed it between his teeth as though it were a rose, and lurched into an arrhythmic flamenco, whisking the towel off his hand and snapping it at Angie, who watched it all wide eyed and silent.
With a gesture that far exceeded grand, Raul swept the ingredients off the counter, pressing Angie against it, kissing her passionately. She was dazzled. This great man did like—perhaps love—her. Oh, she thought, oh, yes, I am his pet. Closing her eyes and sinking into a sensation of deep bliss, Angie stood there lost in the moment and wanting it never to end.
Raul spoke. “Wait my darling.”
Angie’s eyes snapped open. Oh no. He was coming to his senses. He was going to send her home. But no—he didn’t—he just reached over to turn off the burner.
And then they were lying on the counter, heaving and moaning against each other. As Raul began to untie her apron and remove her clothes, he muttered, barely able to speak because his words were interspersed with heaving and panting. “You are so beautiful,” he gasped, “You are like the tiny threads of saffron, begging to be warmed. Like the most exotic Tahitian vanilla, and I will open your pod, liberate your sweet aromas.”
But before pretty much anything could be liberated, they were greeted by a group of astonished students, who didn’t dare enter the room but couldn’t manage to look away. Their clothes flung on the floor, Angie and Raul each grabbed a chef’s toque and attempted to regain their modesty while the students laughed and Raul snarled, “Get out of here, you mangy dishwashers,” except he said it in Spanish so nobody understood or obeyed.
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