by Sarah Hegger
“Oh, my God.” The pretty blond girl who was talking to her friend dashed up the steps after Tiffany. “Excuse me?”
Tiffany stopped and turned.
Thomas leaned forward to hear what happened next.
“I, like, love your shoes,” said the girl.
A smile spread across his face.
Tiffany tossed back her mane of glossy black hair and smiled back. “Thank you, but they’re so last season.”
“Yeah, but they’re Jimmys, so that totally doesn’t count.”
His smile widened into a great goofy grin.
“Are you new?” the blonde asked.
“It’s my first day.” Tiffany smiled, looking so adorable and unsure of herself, he nearly sprinted out of the truck and tucked her into his arms. He was learning to control this desire to pick her up and bundle her in silk every day of her life. It had taken her this long to get away from her father’s suffocating brand of love, the last thing she needed was Thomas taking up where he’d left off. Her dad was coming around. He’d sulked for a few months, and that had been hell on Tiffany. But she’d held to her line, and when Carter finally got around to calling, she’d given him love and understanding. She also held firm on not taking any money from her father.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” the blonde said. “You’re going to love it here.” She turned and yelled to the group of boys, “Hey, guys, come and meet”—she stopped and turned back to Tiffany—
“Tiffany.”
The horny little shits got up those steps so fast they could get altitude sickness. Thomas suppressed the desire to bang their heads together.
“Is that, like, your boyfriend?” Blond girl motioned over to him, and Thomas waved one hand.
His lady turned and looked at him. Her beautiful face split into a smile that, honest to God, made his chest hurt.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s my man.”
Keep reading for an excerpt from
POSITIVELY PIPPA,
the first in a new series from
Sarah Hegger!
Available in Summer, 2017
from Zebra Books.
“Aren’t you—?”
“No.” Not anymore she wasn’t. Pippa snatched her boarding pass from the checkin attendant and tugged her baseball cap lower over her eyes. Couldn’t Kim Kardashian help a girl out and release another sex tape or something? Anything to get Pippa away from the social media lynch mob. She kept her head down until she found her gate, and chose the seat furthest away from the other passengers waiting to board the flight to Salt Lake City. Latest copy of Vogue blocking her face, she flipped through the glossy pages. At least she wasn’t on Vogue’s shit list yet and they still sent her an early copy. Probably not for much longer.
She peeped over the top of her magazine and straight into the narrowed gaze of a woman three rows over. Pippa dropped the woman’s gaze and went back to Vivienne Westwood bucking the trend.
The woman’s eyes beamed into the top of her head across the airport lounge like those laser tracking things you saw on spy movies. Pippa buckled under the burn and slouched lower into her seat.
Look at that, Fendi was doing fabulous separates this season. And, really, Ralph Lauren, that’s your idea of a plus size model? Stuff like this made her job so much harder. Her former job. Losing her show still clawed at her. Losing? Like she’d left the damn thing at Starbucks as she picked up her morning latte. More like her jackass ex with zero conscience had knocked it out of her hand. Framed, stitched up, wrongfully accused—judged, found guilty, and sentenced to months of public loathing wiping out all the years spent building her career. Burning sense of injustice aside, she was stuck in this thing until it went away.
Angry Woman lurked in her peripheral vision. Pippa risked another glance. Sweat slid down her sides and she tucked her elbows in tight.
Under an iron-gray row of rigidly permed bangs, the woman’s eyes gathered heat. A housewife on a rampage.
Back to Vogue. The knot in her stomach twisted tighter, and she checked her cap. What the hell? A baseball cap and shades always worked for other celebrities. Why not her?
Angry Woman kept right on glaring.
This could go one of two ways. Either Angry Woman would come over and give her a piece of her mind on behalf of women everywhere, or she’d confine her anger to vicious staring and muttering. Maybe some head shaking. Please don’t be a crusader for women. Please, please, please. After two weeks of glares, stares and condemnation, Pippa had gotten the message:
Pippa St. Amor, the woman America loves to hate.
Right now all she wanted was to sneak home and stay there until someone else topped her scandal. God, didn’t Vogue have anything fresh? She’d make a list. Lists were good. Soothing. Item one, run away from Angry Woman and hide in the bathroom. Item two, get your career back. She moved Item two up to first place, where it had been since she left home at eighteen.
The woman lifted a phone and snapped a shot of Pippa.
Damn, she’d forgotten that option, this one by far the worst. She was no longer trawling the Internet for mentions of her name at this point. God, she hated Twitter. And Facebook. And Instagram, and Vine, and whatever-the-hell new social torment site some asshat was thinking up right this minute. The ongoing public derision chipped off bits of her until she felt like an open nerve ending.
A friend huddled next to Angry Woman, long hair that was totally the wrong shade of brown and aged her by ten years at least. A cute, hip cut would do so much more for her face.
Pippa was getting it with double barrels now. Lips tight, matching twin spots of outraged color staining their cheeks as they whispered over the first woman’s phone. They both wore mom jeans. Up until two weeks ago it had been her mission to deliver moms everywhere from jeans like that. Along with those nasty, out-of-shape T-shirts they sold in three-packs of “meh” colors that had no business existing on the color spectrum. Angry and Long Hair were so her demographic. They’d probably seen the original episode live and watched it over and over again on demand or something. Maybe even watching it right this minute on YouTube.
YouTube! She hated YouTube, too.
Why didn’t they call her flight already and get her the hell out of here?
You didn’t sleep with the boss, and especially not in television. For four years. Ray had always been a bit sneaky, but to annihilate her career to boost his own? She hadn’t seen it coming. How stupid could you get?
Three minutes until boarding.
“Excuse me?”
Shit. So close. Two minutes and fifty-five seconds. Smile and look friendly. “Yes.”
Try not to look like you.
“You’re that woman, aren’t you?” Angry Woman narrowed her eyes viciously, and Pippa leaned back in her chair, out of striking range.
“Hmm?”
“It is you.” Long Hair got into the eye action with some lip pursing. “I watched every single one of your shows. I can’t believe you said those things, and I—”
Two minutes, thirty seconds.
“—should be ashamed of yourself. What you said is a crime against women everywhere. You made that poor woman cry.”
Of course they cried. They were supposed to cry. The shows were edited to make them cry even more, but not the time to point it out.
“Shocking. And cruel. You’re just a … a nasty bitch.” Angry Woman got the last word in. She’d been called worse. Recently, too, and it still stung.
A man in the row opposite turned to watch the action. The three teens beside him openly stared.
I didn’t say it, people. Okay, she’d said it, but not like that. Editing, people. Creative editing—the scourge and savior of television celebrities worldwide. She could shout it across LAX and it still wouldn’t do any good. Until the next scandal broke and hers was forgotten.
“This is a boarding call …”
Thank you, Jesus!
“I’m sorry, that’s my flight.” Pippa creaked a smi
le and gathered her things. Handbag, iPad, and coat. Her hands shook under the combined weight of several sets of eyes and she nearly dropped her phone.
No cabin baggage, not on this flight. Nope this flight she’d packed just about everything she owned into the two heaviest suitcases on the planet. Paid extra weight without an argument. Anything to get the hell out of LA and home to Philomene.
Phi would know what to do.
*
“Isaac, if the plumber needs quarter-inch pipe, get him quarter-inch pipe.” Matt threw open the door to his truck as he half listened to another lame excuse. He could recite them by heart at this point anyway.
“No, I can’t get the pipe. I’m at Phi’s house now.” He sighed as Isaac went with the predictable. “Yes, again, and I can’t come now. You’re going to have to fix this yourself.”
He slammed his door and keyed off his phone. Damn, he missed the days of being able to slam a receiver down. Jabbing your finger at those little icons didn’t have the same effect.
When God handed out brains to the Evans clan, he must have realized he was running low for the family allotment and been stingier with the youngest members. Between Isaac and their sister, Jo, there could only be a couple of functioning neurons left. And their performance, like a faulty electrical circuit, flickered in and out.
He grabbed his toolbox from the back of the truck. This had to be the ugliest house in history. As if Hogwarts and the Addams family mansion had a midair collision and vomited up Phi’s Folly.
His chest swelled with pride as he stared at it. He’d built every ugly, over the top, theatrical inch of this heap of stone. He’d bet he was the only man alive who could find real, honest to God, stone gargoyles for downspouts. Not the plaster molding kind. Not for Diva Philomene St. Amour. Nope, she wanted them carved out of stone and mounted across the eaves like the front row of a freak show.
“Hey, Matt,” a voice called from the stables forming one side of the semi-circular kitchen yard.
“Hey yourself.” He couldn’t remember the name of Phi’s latest rescue kid doing time in her kitchen yard. Kitchen yard! In this century. Diva Philomene wanted a kitchen yard, so a kitchen yard she got, along with her stables.
“I want a building to capture the nobility of their Arabian ancestors thundering across the desert.” She’d got it. Heated floors, vaulted ceilings, and pure cedar stalls—now housing every ratty, mismatched, swaybacked nag the local humane society couldn’t house and didn’t want to waste a bullet on. A smile crept onto his face. You had to love the crazy old broad.
He skirted the circular herb garden eating up the center of the kitchen yard. A fountain in the shape of a stone horse trough trickled happily. He’d have to remind her to drain it and blow the pipes before winter. He didn’t want to replace the piping again next spring.
The top half of the kitchen door stood open and he unlatched the bottom half before stepping into the kitchen. The AGA range gave off enough heat to have sweat sliding down his sides before he took two steps. He opened the baize door to the rest of the house and yelled, “Phi!”
He hadn’t even known what a baize door was at nineteen, but the Diva had educated him because she wanted one and it became his headache to get her one.
“Mathieu!” The Frenchifying of his name was all the warming he got before Philomene appeared at the top of her grand, curving walnut staircase. Thirty-two rises, each six foot in length and two feet wide leading from the marble entrance hall to the gallery above.
The soft pink of the sun bled through the stained glass windows and bathed the old broad in magic. Her purple muumuu made a swishing noise as she descended, hands outstretched, rings glittering in the bejeweled light. “Darling.”
Hell, she made his teeth ache. “Hold onto the railing, Phi, before you break your neck.” It had taken a crew of eight men to put that railing in, and nearly killed the carpenter to carve a dragon into every inch of it.
She pressed a kiss on both his cheeks with a waft of the same heavy, musky perfume she’d always worn. She smelled like home. “You came.”
“Of course, I came.” He bent and returned her embrace. “That’s how this works. You call, I drop everything and come.”
A wicked light danced in her grass green eyes, still bright and brilliant beneath the layers and layers of purple goo and glitter. She’d been a knockout in her youth, still had some of that beautiful woman voodoo clinging to her like sun motes all around her. If you doubted that for an instant, there were eight portraits and four times that many photos in this house to set you right. Or you could just take a look at Pippa. If you could catch a quick glance as she flew through town. He made it his business to grab an eyeful when he could.
“I am overset, Mathieu, darling.” She pressed her hand to her gem-encrusted bosom.
“Of course you are.” The Diva never had a bad day or a problem. Nope, she was overset, dismayed, perturbed, discomposed and on the occasion her dishwasher broke down, discombobulated.
“It is that thing in the kitchen.” She narrowly missed taking his eye out with her talons as she threw her hand at the baize door.
Her kitchen might look like medieval reenactment, but it was loaded for bear with every toy and time saving device money could buy—all top of the line. “What thing, Phi?”
“The water thingy.”
“The faucet?”
She swept in front of him, leading the way into the kitchen like Caesar entering Rome in triumph. “See.” He dodged her hand just in time. “It drips incessantly and disturbs my beauty rest.”
He clenched his teeth together so hard his jaw ached. He ran a construction company big enough to put together four separate crews and she called him for a dripping faucet. “I could have sent one of my men around to fix that. A plumber.”
“But I don’t want one of your men, darling.” She beamed her megawatt smile at him. “I want you.”
There you had it. She wanted him and he came. Why? Because he owed this crazy, demanding, amazing woman everything, and the manipulative witch knew it. He shrugged out of his button down shirt and pulled his undershirt out of his jeans. He was going to get wet and he’d be damned if he got faucet grunge all over his smart shirt.
Phi took the shirt from him and laid it tenderly over the back of one of her kitchen chairs. “This is a very beautiful shirt, Matt.”
“I’m a busy and important man now, Phi. A man with lots of smart shirts.”
She grinned at him, and stroked the shirt. “I am very proud of you, Matt.”
Damn it all to hell, if that didn’t make him want to stick out his chest like the barnyard rooster strutting across Phi’s kitchen yard. He turned the faucet on and then off again. No drip. “Phi?”
“It’s underneath.” She wiggled her fingers at the cabinet.
He got to his knees and opened the doors. Sure enough, a small puddle of water gathered on the stone flags beneath the down pipe. Good thing Phi had insisted on no bottoms to her kitchen cabinets. It had made it a bitch to get the doors to close without jamming on the stone floor, but right now it meant he wouldn’t be replacing cabinets in his spare time.
“You should be out on a date,” Phi said from behind him.
“If I was out on a date, Phi, I wouldn’t be here fixing your sink.”
“Yes, you would.”
Yeah, he would. He turned off the water to the sink. “Have you got some towels or something?”
She bustled into the attached laundry and reappeared with an armload of fluffy pink towels.
Wheels crunched on the gravel outside the kitchen and Phi dropped the towels on the floor next to him. She tottered over to the window to stare. A huge smile lit her face and she gave off one of those ear-splitting trills that had made her the world’s greatest dramatic soprano. Everyone, from the mailman to a visiting conductor got the same happy reception.
He leaned closer to get a better look at the pipes beneath the sink. Were those scratch marks on the elbow joint?
Neat furrows all lined up like someone had done that on purpose. He crawled into the cabinet and wriggled onto his back. They didn’t make these spaces for men his size.
“Mathieu?” Phi craned down until her face entered his field of vision. Her painted on eyebrows arched across her parchment pale face. “I have a visitor.”
“Is that so?” What the hell, he always played along.
“Indeed.” Her grin was evil enough to have him stop his tinkering with the wrench in midair. “I thought you might like to know about this visitor.”
The kitchen door opened. A pair of black heels tapped into view. The sort of shoes a man wanted to see wrapped around his head, and at the end of a set of legs he hadn’t seen since the day they tripped out of Ghost Falls and left the town poorer for their loss. His day bloomed into one of those eye-aching blue sky and bright sunlight trips into happy.
Welcome home, Pippa Turner.
ZEBRA BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Hegger
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ISBN: 978-1-4201-3743-9