by Wendy Wax
“I am Heart, Incorporated,” Nicole said, raising one eyebrow, just to demonstrate that she could. “I’ve closed the New York and L.A. offices, but they’re only addresses. I still offer the same services and set the highest possible standards in safeguarding my clients.” She widened both eyes subtly just to make the woman jealous. “And I still guarantee results.”
After all she’d found an appropriately ripe young woman for the Greek grocery tycoon, Darios T., and delivered a laundry list of attributes from leg length to brain size for others. She’d learned over the years that marriage could be founded on many things as long as the risk–reward ratio appeared equally beneficial.
Nicole kept the conversation with Helen Maryn going over dessert and afterward in the grand salon, a wonderful room lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the estate’s beautifully manicured grounds. But even without the frozen-faced woman’s inept smirk, she could tell that she’d lost her.
“I’d be happy to meet with you tomorrow before I drive down to Miami,” Nicole said to Helen, careful to keep the desperation out of her voice. “We could have a late lunch and discuss what you’re looking for.” Even if she had to use her emergency credit card to pay for the meal, it would be worth it to collect a retainer and land a high-profile client. All she needed was one to build from.
Helen’s eyes slid away. The woman with the frozen face nodded and lifted half a lip.
Keeping her own smile in place, Nicole pulled a card from her evening bag and handed it to Helen. For the rest of the evening she pretended that she didn’t have a care or a debt in the world and that her matchmaking days were not over.
“She wiggled off the hook, didn’t she?” Bitsy asked when she’d closed the massive wood door behind the last of her guests.
Nicole nodded and managed an unconcerned shrug. “I appreciate the evening. The meal was wonderful.” She hugged Bitsy. “I won’t forget your efforts on my behalf.”
In the plush guest suite Nicole stepped out of the gray silk dress and hung it carefully on a padded hanger. In the gilt and mirrored bathroom she twisted her hair up in a clip, eyed the spa robe that hung on the back of the door, and opened the expensive jar of bubble bath that sat beside the claw-foot tub. She turned on the tap, and when the tub was full, she lowered herself into the steaming-hot water and sighed at its buoyant loveliness.
With her eyes closed and her body cocooned in the fragrant warmth, Nicole pushed back her worries, determined to enjoy this last night of luxury. She had no idea what she and Madeline and Avery would find in Miami. Or what conditions they’d be living in. Tomorrow would be soon enough to face those realities; all of their futures hinged on an uncertain television career and the sale of Bella Flora in the worst real estate market since the Great Depression.
Burrowing deeper into the warm water, Nicole reached for the waiting loofah. Tomorrow she’d meet up with the women who’d so unexpectedly become her friends. Together they’d do their best to make Do Over a success.
But until they knew they had a hit show and the rewards that that entailed, she couldn’t afford to give up on rebuilding Heart, Incorporated. Even in today’s economy Miami was rife with celebrities and high-net-worth individuals.
If she were lucky she might find someone who’d never heard of her felonious brother. Someone who didn’t read or speak English. Or who had been able to afford a ride on a Soyuz spacecraft and had just returned to earth.
“To us!” Steve Singer’s tone was jubilant as he raised his wineglass to Madeline and smiled across the cloth-draped table of Bacchanalia, one of Atlanta’s finest restaurants. “To twenty-six years as man and wife.”
Madeline clinked her glass to his and took a long sip. The flickering candlelight turned his gray eyes a metallic shade of silver and cast shadows across the planes and angles of his still-handsome face. If she squinted just right she could almost see Steve as he’d been when they’d first met twenty-seven years ago. Then he’d been tall and trimly built, his manner reassuringly calm and certain. For a moment Madeline could almost feel the too-rapid tattoo of her heart in her chest each time she saw him. And the delicious ache in her jaw that had come from hours of nonstop talk and laughter.
Today, they had crossed the great marital divide; she had now been married to Steve Singer longer than she’d been single. Madeline smiled and raised her glass for another clink. “Happy anniversary,” she said. “To us!”
Steve watched her face as they drained their wineglasses and Maddie pressed play on their joint highlight reel to search for a specifically fabulous memory to drink to.
She realized just how many great moments there’d been as she fast-forwarded through the years in her mind. She paused over the births of their children Kyra and Andrew, and all of the special moments that had filled her twenty-plus years as a stay-at-home mom. Freeze-frames of Steve’s achievements in the financial world followed along with the best of their family holidays and vacations.
Not that long ago she would have put their reel up against anyone’s. Maybe even nominated it for Best Movie and Screenplay. So much of their marital movie deserved applause.
But the last year and a half had been brutal. It had reframed an entire lifetime of memories.
Maddie drank the rest of her wine while the waiter combed the last offending crumbs from the tablecloth and retreated with a bow, promising to return shortly with coffee and dessert.
She tried the squinting thing again but couldn’t block out the image of Steve lying on the couch after he’d lost his job, their savings, and, finally, his backbone.
Somehow they’d survived the nuclear blast that blew their lives apart. In many ways they still looked the same. All of their limbs remained intact. But inside, Maddie knew, their guts had been rearranged. She was afraid that crucial pieces might be missing.
Eyeing her empty wineglass, she almost smiled as the line “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” ran through her head.
“Mad? Maddie?”
Madeline blinked and dragged her gaze back to Steve. She looked directly into his eyes, which were the color of a stormy sky with clouds of what she recognized as hurt.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”
“I said, I have a job now. You don’t have to go to Miami and work like a slave on that house.” His tone was eminently rational. “The television series is a crapshoot—nothing may even come of it—and for such a big network they’re not even offering a living wage.”
This much was true. But if Madeline had learned anything during their personal nuclear meltdown, it was that it was better to act than be acted upon. If she hadn’t spent last summer in St. Petersburg with Avery and Nicole trying to bring the dilapidated Bella Flora back to life, they wouldn’t even have that potential asset. And she wouldn’t have this opportunity to do a television series with her daughter and the strangers who had become Madeline’s friends.
“Do Over is a big break for all of us and especially for Kyra,” Madeline said. “It was her documentation of our work at Bella Flora that made it happen and she deserves to reap whatever rewards come out of it.” She shook her head, still amazed at how completely their daughter, now a far too young single mother, had turned her life around.
Steve reached for her hand. “Then let Kyra go. She’ll shoot the video, Avery will run the construction, Avery’s mother can handle the interior design. Nicole will do whatever it is she does.” He smiled winningly. “I know how you like to mother everyone—and you’re really great at it—but they’ll survive without you.”
Madeline stilled. “So you don’t think I add value?”
“I didn’t say that.”
No, he hadn’t. Not exactly. But that was the thing about being married longer than you’d been single. You no longer needed an interpreter for what had been left unsaid. She drew her hand back.
Not that long ago, when Andrew had left for college and their nest had first emptied, she’d dreamed of her own craft
room and long periods of doing nothing, but she wasn’t that person anymore. Now all that nothingness just looked like…not quite enough.
“We’re married,” Steve said. “I love you and I want you here with me. Where you belong.”
“I love you too,” she said. She did not need to replay their reel again to know that. “That’s not what this is about. I can’t just let Kyra go down to Miami and handle what could be the project of her life while she takes care of our six-month-old grandson by herself.”
Nor did she want to.
The chocolate mousse and coffees arrived. Steve stirred cream and sugar into his coffee and took an exploratory bite of the dessert.
“I thought you were okay with this,” Maddie said. He had helped her pack the minivan for the drive down tomorrow and hadn’t said a word.
“They’re not paying you enough for this to make sense,” Steve continued, turning on the earnest charm that normally served him so well. “I have an income now, and I’m starting to build clientele again. If Bella Flora sells, we can erase pretty much all of our debt.”
He put down his spoon and reached for her hand once more. It was beginning to feel like the prize in a tug-of-war. “You’ve done enough, Maddie. I’m sorry you’ve had to do so much. But I know the worst is behind us. Or it will be if you let it.”
There it was. The subtext to everything that had and hadn’t been said. The thing they tiptoed so carefully around. Steve wanted to pretend that he hadn’t broken rank and run when their foxhole had been shelled. He hadn’t forgiven her for taking on the enemy, not really. And despite all the months of trying, she hadn’t completely forgiven him for forcing her to do it.
Maddie watched her husband eat the mousse and sip his coffee, but could no longer imagine swallowing either.
“I’m sorry,” she said as gently as she could. “But I’ve signed a contract with the network and I’ve given my word to Avery and Nicole. I know Kyra is counting on my help with the baby. But I am counting on you coming down to visit often.”
Because she knew that it would hurt him, she was careful not to give away how much she was looking forward to working on this project with her friends and her daughter. And that she hoped that Do Over would be exactly that for all of them.
Chapter Two
Long before she went to college to study architecture, Avery Lawford was painfully aware that her exterior and her interior did not match. Like a multimillion-dollar Manhattan co-op filled with IKEA furniture or a Frank Lloyd Wright built around a Country French kitchen, her form just didn’t fit her function.
The problem began with her height, which was too short to command respect, and was compounded by china-doll features, an oversize bust, and the kind of blue-eyed blondness that caused complete strangers to deduct IQ points and to speak to her slowly. Using really small words.
Avery was thirty-six, and despite her education and three years on HGTV, her struggle to be taken seriously continued. Even the successful—if desperate—double renovation of Bella Flora, the 1920s Mediterranean Revival–style mansion in front of which she now stood—had failed to garner respect.
Bella Flora had no such problem. The house sat in the afternoon sun like a massive wedding cake fresh from the bakery box. Pale pink walls with white icing trim framed banks of arched windows. Bell towers topped a multiangled barrel-tile roof and jutted up into the cloudless sky. Her massive façade stood in beautiful contrast to the deep blue-green of the Gulf of Mexico and the bay it bled into.
Avery’s satisfied gaze skimmed from the house to the shiny new “For Sale” sign that dangled over the low garden wall. She knew and loved every inch of Bella Flora, had touched almost every part of the grande dame with her own hands.
A truck pulled up to the curb and Chase Hardin, the contractor who’d been a part of both renovations—before and after Hurricane Charlene had damaged so much of the tiny beach community of Pass-a-Grille—and become their partner in the process, joined her.
“I know,” he said. “We all need for her to sell, but it’s hard to think of someone else living in her.”
He smiled, which was a far cry from the way he’d looked at her when they’d first been forced to work together. Then he’d treated her like the Vanna White of the do-it-yourself set instead of the professional she was, and fought her for control of the job. Now his smile caused a jumble of reactions, all of them complicated. “But then I’m not expecting anything to happen all that quickly,” he said. “Even without the economy, summer is the absolute worst time to sell expensive Florida real estate.”
It wasn’t the best time to renovate it either. But none of them could turn down the opportunity that Do Over presented.
The worry she’d been tamping down reared its nasty little head. Part of the reason for their success in bringing Bella Flora back to life lay in the fact that walking away had not been an option. Renovating an unknown house for television could be a dicey thing, and she knew firsthand what could happen when there was a network to answer to.
Avery’s gaze moved to her car, which sat on the bricked driveway. The Mini Cooper’s convertible top was down. Suitcases and baggage, almost none of it hers, teetered on the backseat and spilled between the front seats.
High heels tapped their way down the brick drive and she looked up to see Deirdre Morgan, Avery’s former mother, interior designer to the stars, and unwelcome hitchhiker walking toward them with a large overnight case in her arms.
At sixty-one, Deirdre looked a decade younger. Her makeup was expertly applied and her blond bob had been wrapped in a designer scarf that would no doubt blow artfully behind her as they made their way south. Her chest, like the one she’d bequeathed to Avery, was too large for her frame, but the pale blue silk blouse that she’d tucked into white linen pants was cut for camouflage and her jeweled high-heeled sandals made her almost tall enough to counterbalance the weight.
She looked, Avery thought in irritation, as if she were planning to board a cruise ship, not shoehorn herself into an overstuffed compact for a bugs-in-the-teeth drive across Florida’s Alligator Alley.
A whiff of Deirdre’s gardenia perfume assaulted Avery’s nose and once again Avery wondered why Deirdre had really come back into her life and how long she planned to stay.
“It should be a pretty drive down to Miami,” Chase said conversationally.
This might have been true if Avery had been making the trip down to South Beach without Deirdre and her possessions. And if the network hadn’t gotten all wonky, refusing to tell them so much as the address of the house they’d be working on until they got to town.
She watched Deirdre contemplate the car and the makeup case, but made no move to help her figure it out. Avery was already half afraid the trunk would pop open on the highway and shoot Deirdre’s possessions into the Everglades like a geyser spewing oil.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said to Deirdre. “I had to sit on that trunk to get it closed. The only way you’re bringing that case is if you intend to hold it on your lap all the way to Miami.” Avery removed her sunglasses long enough to stare into a pair of blue eyes the exact same shade as her own. Looking at a far more polished version of herself at every turn was incredibly annoying.
“Fine.” Deirdre set the case on the passenger seat and placed her oversize hobo bag on the floor then looked Avery up and down taking in the ancient halter top, frayed jean cutoffs, and fuchsia flip-flops. “As soon as you change, we can get going.”
There was a strangled laugh from Chase, but the man was smart enough to remain silent.
“I’m not getting dressed up to sit in a car for five hours,” Avery said. “Kyra promised no filming until tomorrow morning. But just to be clear, I’m not planning to try to protect a manicure or mince around in high heels while I sand floors and paint walls either.”
“I know, dear,” Deirdre said. “But we don’t really know what we’ll find when we arrive. Wouldn’t it be best to have your game face on?”
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“This is my game face,” Avery said through gritted teeth. “And if it’s not working for you, I can drop you off at a car rental place on my way out of town.”
“No need,” Deirdre replied. Which Avery assumed meant “no money.” Like all of them, Deirdre was strapped. Her years as a big-name Hollywood designer, a career for which she’d ditched Avery and her father, had just made her more adept than the rest of them with smoke and mirrors. “I’ll be right back.” She turned and headed back into the house.
“She’s giving us a chance for a private good-bye,” Chase said, reaching for Avery and slipping his arms around her waist. His kiss was long and thorough. The power of it still surprised her. “I wish I knew how soon I’ll be able to get down.”
Avery sighed and looked up, way up, into his eyes. A widower with two teenage sons, Chase was running what had once been their fathers’ construction business in a cratered construction climate while dealing with his father’s failing health. She still wasn’t sure how they’d gone from adversaries to lovers, but she was hyperaware of the daunting load he carried, and did not intend to add to it. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You’ll come when you can come.”
He let this go by and changed the subject with another kiss. “You can make it in under five hours and there’s no sign of rain.”
“If I see so much as a raindrop, I’m going to start ditching Deirdre’s things on the side of the road so that I can put the top up.”
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Chase asked. “I’m kind of afraid I’m going to see a story in the morning paper about a woman’s remains found along Alligator Alley.”
“Well, if the remains are sitting on top of a stack of designer luggage, you’ll know they’re Deirdre’s.”
He smiled again and ran a hand through his short dark hair. “She’s trying, you know.” They stepped apart as Deirdre reappeared.
“Maybe.” But with Deirdre there was inevitably an angle. Something self-serving that you only discovered when it was too late to protect yourself. Avery wasn’t sure what she dreaded more, dealing with Deirdre or the network.