by Lori Wilde
“I’m not going to pretend I don’t appreciate a bargain, but when it comes to my daughter’s wedding, we want only the best.”
“And that’s what you’ll get if you hire me.” Tish stashed the DVD player in her briefcase. Yes, okay, it was an egotistical thing to say, but she could back it up. She was damned good at her job. Why let false modesty sell her short?
“Mother, I really want Tish to video our wedding,” Felicity wheedled.
Addison shot her daughter a quelling glance and said to Tish, “You put together a very compelling video. It’s the best we’ve seen. But there are other considerations. I also want to make sure you’re of upstanding moral character. Last year, my friend June hired a videographer who turned out to have a criminal record. He got access to their security code when he came over to interview June’s daughter and during the wedding, his accomplices burglarized their home.”
“I can assure you, Mrs. James, I don’t have a criminal record. But feel free to run a background check on me if that would ease your mind.”
“Ms. Gallagher”—the waiter came back to the table looking distressed—“I’m afraid your credit card has been declined.”
Tish tried to make her face a blank slate as she inwardly cringed. She couldn’t let Mrs. James see her sweat. Smiling back the huge lump of trepidation in her throat, she said, “There must have been a mistake. Can you run it through again, please?”
The waiter shifted his weight. “I’ve been told by the credit card company to cut it up.”
He pulled a pair of scissors from his pocket. Right in front of Addison James, the conservative banker with concerns about Tish’s moral character, he chopped the card neatly in half.
Humiliation sank its fangs into her. Her heart lurched. The waiter was killing her lifeline. Tish kept the smile plastered to her face and pulled another card from her wallet. “Here, try the MasterCard.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He left her murdered Visa behind and trotted off with the MasterCard.
“There’s got to be some sort of mix-up,” Tish said. “I’ll call my credit card company as soon as I get home and find out what’s going on here. I hope it’s not identity theft.”
Addison shot her a judgmental look. Tish felt the deal slipping away.
The waiter returned a moment later, shaking his head, her MasterCard in one hand, scissors in the other.
Not again! Fear struck her then, hard and vicious. How on earth could she be over the limit on both credit cards? It wasn’t possible. Maybe someone had stolen her identity.
Snip, snip went the scissors. The desecrated MasterCard fell into pieces beside the Visa.
She felt fractured, disjointed, as if she, the real Tish, was separate from the woman who did dumb things like this. It was a feeling that dwelled in the fringes of her consciousness, a ghost of something she’d never been able to pinpoint. A feeling that she could never be whole, no matter how hard she struggled to integrate herself. It was a desolate sensation and made her want to run out and buy something expensive.
“What next?” the waiter asked. “Where do we go from here?”
“I’ll pay for the lunch,” Addison James said icily. She took out her wallet and counted out the correct amount of cash to cover the bill.
A deep silence fell over the table after the waiter departed. Tish worked up the courage to look Addison in the eyes. “I’m deeply sorry for that. I’ll reimburse you.”
Fury drew Addison’s brows down tight in a disapproving frown and her lips thinned out. “What kind of business professional does something like this? Invites clients to lunch and tries to pay for it with not one, but two maxed-out credit cards?”
The air leaked from Tish’s lungs. She couldn’t breathe, could hardly speak. “I… I…”
Addison pushed back her chair and got to her feet. “Come on, Felicity. We have somewhere else to be.”
“Please, wait.” Tish put a hand to the woman’s wrist.
Addison glowered at Tish’s arm. The price tag had fallen out of her sleeve and was dangling there for everyone to see.
“You were planning on returning that suit after you wore it, weren’t you?” Addison accused.
The deal was lost. No point lying at this juncture.
“Yes.”
“You are so pathetic,” Addison hissed. “Talented perhaps, but pathetic. Until you can pull your life together, stop shooting for the stars.”
Reeling, Tish watched her meal ticket, daughter in tow, sweep out of the restaurant. Feeling as if her arms had been amputated, Tish fumbled for the pieces of her massacred credit cards and stuffed them in the pocket of the suit that she had to return to Nordstrom’s for a refund.
Loser.
She raised her head and saw people were watching. Peeved with herself, she glared at an owl-eyed woman at the next table staring at her as if she had the avian flu.
Embarrassed but proud, Tish raised her head, pushed back her chair, and got to her feet. At the same time a waiter, zigzagging around tables with a big tray of butter-slick crawfish balanced over his head on the palm of his hand, zipped past.
The leg of Tish’s chair clipped his ankle.
The waiter stumbled. His tray slipped. The crawfish attacked—pelting Tish’s suit with red, buttery bits of seafood hail.
Horrified, she gasped.
“Oh, gosh, ma’am,” the waiter apologized as he brushed crawfish from her clothing. He lifted his head and met her gaze. His eyes narrowed, his lips curled. “Oh, it’s you,” he said out loud, and then under his breath he muttered, “deadbeat.”
Tish’s cheeks burned and her heart pounded. She wanted to throw back her head and bawl. This wasn’t the waiter’s fault. She was in a mess of her own making.
Again.
Accusing eyes scalded, judging her.
Flicking a crawfish off her lapel, she gathered up her briefcase, slung her purse over her shoulder, and strode from the restaurant. Shame tasted like heated aluminum foil in her mouth—hot, sharp, and metallic.
She dug her car keys from her purse and pressed the alarm button to locate her Ford Focus in the overflowing parking lot. No reassuring chirp-chirp indicated her car door had been unlocked. She hurried to the area where she remembered parking, hitting the alarm button a second time.
Nothing.
Tish was certain she’d been in this section of the lot. But an SUV sat where she thought she’d parked. Maybe, in her humiliation over what had just happened to her inside the restaurant, she was mistaken.
She retraced her steps. Yes, she was almost one hundred percent sure this was where she’d parked.
Clearly not. Your car isn’t here.
She stalked up and down the aisles, the humid Houston heat causing sweat to pool under her collar. Her stilettos were made for showing off, not for walking, and her toes throbbed beneath the leather straps. She felt a blister forming. The heels kept sticking in the heat-softened asphalt and Tish stumbled twice. Where was her car?
Dread, sudden as lightning in a cloudless sky, struck her. Someone had stolen her car!
She dug into her pocket for her cell phone and turned it on. Just as she pressed the 9 of 9-1-1 an image rose in her mind. She recalled the stack of unpaid bills on her kitchen table.
There’d been a letter or two from the finance company threatening to take back her car if payment wasn’t made soon. She thought of the phone calls left on her answering machine that she hadn’t returned.
And she realized the awful truth. Her car hadn’t been stolen.
It had been repossessed.
Chapter 3
Elysee Benedict was in love with love. She adored the heady rush of early romance—the kisses, the long, lingering glances, the surprise gifts, and the undivided attention. Her mother, Catherine Prosper Benedict, God rest her soul, had instilled in Elysee the staunch belief of happily ever after.
When she was young, her mother would occasionally take her out of school early on the pretext of a dental appoin
tment. Instead, they would slip off to the matinee and watch romantic movies, eating popcorn from the same box and giggling like best girlfriends over handsome movie star heroes. Elysee loved those surprise outings in the darkened theater with her mother.
When she was ten, Catherine passed on her dog-eared copies of romance novels with muscular, longhaired men on the covers. Reading the stories had made her heart beat faster and she yearned for a romance of her very own.
When she was eleven, her mother was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. “I’m not going to be around to see you fall in love and get married,” Catherine had told her. “So you must listen to me now.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“True love is out there for you, Elysee, if you just believe it.”
“I believe,” she vowed, believing as only a young child could.
Her mother squeezed her hand. “Don’t give up until you find him.”
“But how will I know when I meet the right one?”
“You’ll feel it.” Her mother laid her hand over Elysee’s heart. “Deep down inside here.”
“What will he be like?”
“He’ll be kind and strong and he’ll fight for you and he’ll protect you, even if it means he must give up his own life to save you, and he’ll be your very best friend.”
Six months later her mother was dead and Elysee’s longing to find her true love was stronger than ever. The problem was, she saw love everywhere, in any masculine face that smiled. She went through crush after crush, each time feeling it deep within her heart, each time thinking, It’s him. He’s the one.
“She’s too much like her mother,” she’d once heard her father tell her nanny, Rana Singh, not long after Catherine had died. “Head in the clouds, mind filled with silly romantic notions about life. I don’t know what to do with her.”
Much to her father’s consternation, at twenty-two she’d already been engaged three times. Elysee had been on the front page of too many tabloids, their ugly headlines burned into her brain.
First Daughter’s First Romance Fizzles.
Elysee Benedict: Fickle Princess or Lonely Teen?
Beau Number Three Breaks Heart of Prez’s Only Child.
Yes, okay, she’d made a lot of mistakes, picked the wrong kind of men, gone for flash over substance.
Shane Tremont, however, was different. For one thing, he was older. For another thing, her father liked and respected him. And there was the fact he’d saved her life, just as her mother had said her true love would do. Quiet, strong, steady Shane.
She’d stayed at his bedside from the beginning. Her father had tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted on being there when he woke up. He’d been her bodyguard for over a year and while she’d always thought of him as a good-looking man, she’d never considered him in a romantic way until he’d sacrificed himself for her.
Before that, well, he’d scared her just a little with his tough masculinity. In the past she’d favored polished, soft-featured, erudite men, and Shane certainly wasn’t that. But seeing him in that hospital bed, with those tubes coming out of him and his head wrapped in bandages, he’d looked so lost and vulnerable she’d wanted to scoop him into her arms and cuddle him. He wasn’t so big and tough and scary after all.
Elysee realized what she felt for Shane was different from what she had felt for her other three fiancés. This was a quiet love, a soft love, a mature love. This was the kind of love her father told her she needed, and she’d begun to realize that this was what true love must be—a deep, abiding friendship grown stronger through sacrifice and devotion.
So what if there was no electricity? No sparks. That was the point. Chemistry had led her down the wrong path before, caused her to make foolish choices. Sometimes, she missed her mother so much, it was a physical ache. She wished Catherine was here to confirm her belief that Shane was indeed The One. True friendship was the ingredient that had been missing from her other love relationships.
Elysee sat at Shane’s bedside day in and day out. Willing him well, willing him to love her back the way she was coming to love him. And if she squeezed her eyes closed and concentrated really hard, she could feel it deep inside her heart.
Yes. Shane Tremont was indeed her true love. Now all she had to do was convince him of it.
“Häagen-Dazs is not the answer,” Tish’s best friend Delaney scolded her as she pried the empty cup of what had once contained coffee-flavored ice cream from her hand.
“Creamery-ista,” Tish said to the woman behind the counter at the Häagen-Dazs kiosk in the Galleria mall, “I’ll have another round. This time serve up a double scoop of Dulce de Leche.”
Delaney shook her head at the woman and narrowed her eyes. “Don’t make me stage an intervention, Tish Gallagher. Put down the sample spoon and step away from the Häagen-Dazs.”
Tish gripped the spoon tighter, anxiety clotting her throat. She knew her friend had her best interests at heart. She also knew gorging herself wasn’t an antidote. She’d screwed up big time and now here she was, trying to drown her sorrows in high-fat premium ice cream.
Two weeks had passed since the incident with Addison James. Two miserable weeks dodging bill collectors and begging rides to work from friends and neighbors. Her cable service had been shut off for nonpayment and she’d had to cancel both her Netflix subscription and her broadband service.
She’d been without television or online access since her car had been repossessed. She’d nixed her morning trip to Starbucks and stopped picking up newsstand copies of People and Entertainment Weekly to read during her treadmill workouts. Hell, she couldn’t even go to the gym because she was behind on her membership dues.
Tish felt isolated, cut off. She had no idea what was going on in the world. For the last two weeks she’d spent her leisure time listening to mournful CDs and leafing through old photo albums, trying to figure out where things had gone so wrong. Addison James was correct: She was pathetic.
Stop whining, commanded the voice in the back of her head. You’re not a whiner. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
But the straps were gone off the proverbial boots and she had nothing left to pull herself up by. She was divorced from a man she was still in love with, her car had been repossessed, she carried over eleven thousand dollars in credit card debt, and she hadn’t been on a date in six months. Young and single in the city was not what television cracked it up to be.
“Give me the spoon.” Delaney waited, palm outstretched.
Biting down on the inside of her cheek to keep from crying, Tish put the tiny pink plastic spoon in her friend’s hand.
“Thank you.” Delaney tossed the spoon in the trash. She took Tish by the elbow, propelled her past Victoria’s Secret and The Gap to a wooden park bench underneath a trellis of fake yellow roses positioned beside a cement mermaid fountain. “Sit.”
Tish sat.
“Why don’t you let me loan you some money?” Delaney pulled a checkbook from her Prada purse. “To tide you over.”
“Friends shouldn’t borrow money from friends.”
“What kind of friend would I be if I let you flounder?”
“A smart one.”
“Tish, stubborn pride won’t help you.”
“I’m the idiot who dug myself into this hole. It’s not your problem.”
“But you ran up the credit cards getting your business going and surviving after your divorce. Those are extenuating circumstances. I know you’re going to come out on top in the end.”
“Most people would tell me to get a real job, to stop pipe dreaming.”
It’s what she’d been telling herself, too. But she hated so badly to give up on her dream that she’d ignored the mound of debts piling up and simply prayed it would all go away.
“I’m not most people and you know that I understand. Getting your own business up on its legs isn’t easy.” Delaney did understand. She had her own house-staging business, but she also had a trust fund.
&nbs
p; “Maybe some people aren’t meant to have their heart’s desire,” she mumbled, thinking of Shane.
Delaney patted her hand. “You’re just in a down cycle. You’re a fabulous videographer, Tish. If you can just hang in there, your career is going to take off big time. I know it.”
“I appreciate you, Delaney.” Tish shook her head. “But I can’t let you bail me out of this.” The same stubborn pride that had kept her from asking Shane not to walk out the door clutched her tight as a closed fist.
“Why not?”
“I’ve got to do this on my own,” Tish said, knowing she was tripping over her pride, but not knowing how to get out of her own way. “But thank you.”
“So what do you plan to do?” Delaney asked softly. She tilted her head and Tish felt the heat of her gaze.
“I’m going to get a real job. Two if it comes to that.”
“And how are you going to get to those jobs with no car, and no money or the credit rating to buy one?”
There was the major kink in her plans.
“Well,” Delaney said, putting her checkbook away. “If you won’t take my money, at least let me loan you a car.”
“How are you going to get around?”
“My parents have a spare car I can borrow.”
“No, it’ll be too big an inconvenience.”
“I don’t expect you to have to borrow it for long, because I’m going to put a bee in the ear of every dowager with a marriage-minded daughter in River Oaks and tell them what a wonderful videographer you are.”
“You didn’t much like it when your mother helped your business.”
“That’s because my mother was trying to meddle in my life. I’m your friend. I don’t want to control you or tell you what to do. I just want to help. It hurts my heart to see you in distress.”
Her friend’s kindness was too much. Tish felt tears pushing at the back of her eyes, threatening to flow down her cheeks. Aw, damn. She wasn’t a crier. She was tough. She prided herself on it.
Delaney reached over and hugged her. “Everything is going to be all right. I promise.”