Shove that aside. Think like a businesswoman. No. More than that.
“Hang on, Sue.” She muted the phone.
“Perrin,” Melanie called out into the darkness of her blindfolded eyes.
“Yes?” she was so close they were almost touching.
“Do you do any swimwear? Really sexy, short-out-a-man’s-brain kind of swimwear?”
“Some. Oh yeah, on you, it would be screamingly hot. I did fluorescents this year, amazing with your hair and skin tone. And I can make more. I have the materials right here and some more ideas already sketched that I just haven’t had time to build.”
Melanie considered the factors. “Do you want to skip three or four levels at once and trade up for a whole different set of problems?”
“You’re the CEO. You tell me.” Melanie could hear Perrin’s smile.
That had been Joshua’s elegant solution. Melanie would step in as CEO. She’d also save the startup corporation, Perrin’s Glorious Garb, a bundle of money while guaranteeing international quality marketing by being its signature model as well. She’d get to take Perrin global, and still do the modeling she so loved.
Melanie clicked the phone back off mute, “You still there, Sue?”
“Right here.”
“Okay. Here are my conditions. If you say yes, we can deliver the images within seventy-two hours. Condition one: I will be using Pike Place Market and a fine Italian restaurant as my locations. Maybe throw in a Seattle ferry for a northwesty bonus.”
That should boost Jo and Angelo’s national profile significantly. And she’d bet she could talk Joshua into another ferry ride, especially if she was clad only in Perrin’s swimwear.
“We can fly you there,” Sue sounded eager.
“I am in Seattle right now, along with my second condition: I will have Russell Morgan do the shoot.”
“Oh yes. He’s amazing. I can’t believe you found him. Seattle? Really? That’s where he went? Whatever for? Never mind. Don’t care. Yes and yes so far.”
“I knew you’d like that. Third and final: I will be exclusively providing all of the swimwear, each piece of which will have the standard designer credit. Trust me, it will be innovative.” Because Perring didn’t know how to design anything that wasn’t.
“Done. Contract within the hour.”
“Standard rates plus my and Russell’s rush fees.”
“Okay,” she gave a very insincere sigh about the rush fee, but she had to know that was coming. “You’re the best, Melanie. By the way…”
“Yes?”
“We haven’t selected the cover yet.”
Melanie did the best to keep the smile out of her voice, “Always a pleasure doing business, Sue.”
She hung up and held the phone out into the darkness. It was taken from her fingers.
“Holy shit!” Perrin breathed out slowly from where she’d apparently been frozen at Melanie’s side. “Did you just get into the swimsuit issue?”
Tamara’s squeal of excitement was loud enough that Melanie could hear all the others rushing into the back studio.
As Tamara cried out the news, there were numerous gasps and comments, some of which made sense and some of which didn’t. The latter included a fair amount of shushing noises.
Melanie was still blindfolded and couldn’t see their expressions to figure out what was going on.
“Can we lose the blindfold, Perrin? Please? Anyway, Lesson One in business: never burn a bridge.” Joshua and his counting lists were rubbing off on her. “Lesson Two in business: there’s no longer a me, there’s only an us.”
“Well, you may think that, Melanie, but you’re wrong.”
“Oh?” she tried to sound arch and haughty, but there was a merriness to Perrin’s tone that made her attempt a total failure. The others were laughing as well.
Fingers worked at the loose knot of her blindfold.
“Sometimes,” Perrin whispered in her ear over the noise in the room, “it is all about you.”
And she slid the blindfold aside.
Melanie stood in front of a three-fold modeling mirror.
But it was a Melanie she barely recognized.
The bright sheen of the pearly Duchesse satin shimmered down her length like water. The strapless bodice was an elegant finger weave of the Duchesse and the palest sky blue of the crepe back satin. The slightest breath caused the satins to shift and shimmer, all the more so because of the contrast of the shiny and the crepe textures. The blue brought her eyes to light like sapphires without the hardness that some blues caused. Bright and soft.
The sheen of the dress had been complemented by a lacy, pearl-studded, flowing back veil that left her face exposed and, while covering her hair, still allowed it to spread and billow. It positively shone.
“Mariée!” Even to herself her voice sounded drifty with wonder. “A bride! You made me a wedding dress, Perrin. All this time, you were making me a wedding dress.”
Perrin moved up beside her in the mirror and reached out to tweak a seam.
Melanie brushed her hand aside and then grabbed it and held on. “You don’t mess with something this perfect. I can’t wait to wear this for Joshua.”
“Not before the wedding!” they all chimed in, and gathered close around to look at her in the mirror.
“Of course not. He hasn’t even proposed yet. I won’t let him. We both agree it is too soon.” She turned in profile, unable to believe what she was seeing. In an entire career built on looking beautiful, she had never looked this magnifique before. Not even close. “But I can’t wait.”
“Oh, I got you an early wedding present. Maria and Angelo are giving you the condo—”
“Perrin!” Maria and Jo cut her off.
“Crap! I wasn’t supposed to say that. You didn’t hear that. But they are. This isn’t nearly that impressive.”
Perrin handed her a small card.
Melanie first gave Maria and Jo a hug.
The condo. It was so perfect for them. A gift she couldn’t accept. She’d buy it. Though she’d insist on that later. That wasn’t a problem.
It was a home.
A real home, with Joshua. They’d make the second bedroom into an office for him. Or perhaps convert the overlarge pantry just off the kitchen he so enjoyed cooking in. Then the bedroom could be for a child.
She had to blink aside the tears that threatened to overwhelm her. The circle of friends, The Smashing Six. These were the women she would have as lifelong friends. Have children with. Grow old with. Belonging with them was a gift beyond price.
She had to wipe away more tears before she could read the card.
Perrin’s Glorious Garb. Her name and title: CEO.
CEO. The card made it real. She’d found her back door. Except it wasn’t some safety net to the end of her real career. Instead it said that her entire career to date had only been building toward this new beginning.
She hugged Perrin, carefully so as not to muss the dress.
Perrin was looking at her strangely, “Read it again. Out loud.”
“Perrin’s Glorious Garb. Melanie Harper.” She didn’t manage to get the title out past the sudden tightness in her throat.
It took her a moment, and then it wrapped around her like lover’s embrace.
Years ago she’d thrown away a last name that meant nothing.
And now she’d have the name that meant everything.
And always would.
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Return to Eagle Cove (excerpt)
a small town Oregon romance
“Almost home, sweetie.”
“Oh joy,” Jessica Baxter tried to clamp down on her sarcasm. It was a bad habit that worked fine in her social set back in Chicago, but sounded more petty with each mile they drove toward the Oregon Coast. She slumped down in the passenger seat of her mom’s baby-blue Toyota hybrid. It still had that new car smell. As much as she’d dreamed of owning a hot sports car some day, she k
new that she was enough her mother’s daughter that this was probably the exact sort of eminently sensible car she would buy when her VW Beetle finally gave up the ghost.
Just like her mom.
Maybe she’d get it in red to be at least a little different.
Jessica sighed again, keeping it to herself so that she wasn’t being overly offensive. Her mother was one of the many reasons that she’d gone as far away as possible for college and did her best to rarely return—she didn’t want to turn into her mother and it was too easy to imagine doing so if she’d stayed in the small town of Eagle Cove, Oregon.
They were like twins separated by twenty-two years. The two of them had been able to trade clothes since Jessica hit puberty and had shot up to match her mother’s slender five-foot-ten. Other than a very brief mistake of dying her hair black as part of a tenth-grade dare, which had turned her fair complexion past goth and into bloodless vampire, they were both light blond.
The one part of twin-dom that she couldn’t seem to pull off even though she wanted to was Mom’s casual-chic. Monica Baxter was always dressed one step above the world around her; not fancy, just really well put together. The closest Jessica ever managed was Bohemian-chic which wasn’t really the same thing, but she’d learned to make it her own. Of course, Bohemian was easier on the budget and often available in consignment stores which had only reinforced her chosen style.
Jessica did her best to not regress as they drove up into the Coast Range that separated the beach towns from the rest of Oregon…and failed miserably at that as well. She felt as if she was rapidly descending back toward being a pouty, pre-pubescent twelve from her present urban and worldly thirty-two.
Why did crossing the Oregon state line always take twenty years off her intelligence?
Maybe it was only Coast County. Because of the landscape the Oregon Coast felt incredibly far from anywhere. The Coast Range topped out at a mere four thousand feet high, but only a half dozen passes made it through the three hundred mile range of rugged hills that separated the beaches from the broad farming and industrial realm of the Willamette Valley. The interior of the state might as well be in a whole other country for how little it had in common with where she’d grown up.
“It’s so strange being back here,” Jessica rolled down the window and sniffed at the air. The scents were so rich and varied that they tickled. Bright with pine. Musty with undergrowth. Damp. A first hint of the sea.
“Well, it has been four years, honey. That’s bound to make it seem a bit odd. But I’m so glad that you came.”
“Me too, Mom.” Better. She managed to say it as if she meant it, however unlikely that might be. Chicago fit her like a…but it didn’t. The city was…something she was not going to give a single thought to for the next eight days. If she didn’t fit there and she didn’t want to fit in Eagle Cove, Oregon, then where did she belong?
Jessica breathed in deeply this time, trying to clear her thoughts with the fresh air of the Coast Range and nearly choked herself on how green everything smelled. The harsh slap of the mountains was almost an affront. The two-lane road dove and twisted along narrow corridors sliced through towering spruce and Douglas fir trees. The babies were sixty feet high along the shoulder as the car twisted up toward the pass; the mother trees behind them were much, much bigger.
And it wasn’t just the trees that were lush. As they wound deeper into the Coast Range, each branch became covered with mosses and lichens. It soothed her eyes, so used to towering concrete and glass, with a living tapestry of greens, golds, and silvers. Beneath the trees grew an impenetrable tangle of salal and scrub alder. Old barns on the roadside didn’t have shingle roofs, they had moss ones; some of them were covered inches thick. Many RVs, left unattended in front yards for too long, had a sheen of green growth on their north side.
“I really want to hate this,” the Coast Range had three times the rainfall of Chicago, often surpassing a hundred inches a year. She expected to feel the weight of all that biomass crashing down on her shoulders, but instead she noticed the start of a disconcerting lightness as if coming home was a good thing. Jessica did not like that encroachment of pending appreciation, perhaps even enjoyment, upon her true feelings. “But it smells so good. Like sunshine and new growth.”
Her mother’s laugh was amused as they twisted along the two-lane road slowly climbing up a narrow valley.
“I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“But you said it anyway.”
“Not helping, Mom.”
Thankfully her mother’s laugh said that she had understood Jessica’s response as a tease. Which it mostly was, partly.
Jessica didn’t want to like coming back to the coast. She didn’t have small-town dreams. That was the main reason she’d left Eagle Cove. She had big city dreams…which weren’t exactly coming together for her despite her efforts over the last fourteen years. But scurrying home wasn’t going to fix those. And the selection of men in such a tiny town was, to put it kindly, pitiful. Puffin High—
Why they hadn’t called it Eagle High in Eagle Cove was a subject of heated debate by every single class.
Puffin High’s problem was that she knew every male her age all too well. The only reason the town had its own high school was that it was too far away from everywhere else for busing to make sense. Her senior class had just thirty-four students. Grades seven through twelve numbered under two hundred. And she knew far too much about every single one of them.
Even more obnoxiously invasive on her sense of right and wrong, instead of dumping rain, it was a perfect day. The sun sparkled down revealing a thousand shades of green in the living walls that lined the road. The air coming through the open window was thick with pine sap and the gentle tang of rotting undergrowth. There was so much oxygen in the air that it made her feel a little giddy.
Yes, a perfect day, if she’d been alone…and still in Chicago.
“I could have rented a car and saved you the drive, Mom.” Actually, her budget had been thrilled when her mother had offered to come and fetch her. Also, once in Eagle Cove there wasn’t a lot of use for a car, except when the rain poured down. The whole town was only a few miles long and she could walk most places she’d want to go. As if there were any old haunts that she’d care to revisit. She’d made good her escape to Northwestern University’s School of Journalism at eighteen but every now and then the town still sucked her back.
“Nonsense, honey. I’m always glad to drive up and get you. Besides, I needed a few things for the wedding.”
“How many is this?” As if she didn’t know. It took much of her journalistic skill to keep “that judgmental tone” out of her voice. Something her early teachers had dinged her on until she’d learned to eradicate it. But since she was regressing as they neared the coast, it was trying to make a comeback.
“Number four.”
“Why, Mom?”
“Because I love the man.” Her mother actually glanced away from the road to offer her a scowl. “I’d have thought that was obvious.”
“It is. But you’ve divorced him three times.”
“Because your father can drive a woman crazy without even trying.” They giggled together because that was an absolute truth about Ralph Baxter.
“I meant, why marry him again? You’re both legal age, your daughter lives in Chicago,” and wouldn’t complain if she lived on another planet entirely. “Just shack up together. Then you can lock the door whenever Daddy becomes too much like himself.”
Ralph Baxter was always getting caught up in monster projects. Without a word of warning he would suddenly rip out the entire kitchen, once on the morning before a dinner party, because he’d thought of a better way to design it. Or he’d start building a new boat from scratch in the middle of the driveway, rather than in the generous side yard, which blocked parking near the house for months.
“Oh, honey. I’m too old fashioned a girl to ‘just shack up’.”
Which was alm
ost believable, even in the twenty-first century. To hear Aunt Gina—who despite her name was as not-Italian as a pastrami sandwich—tell it, Monica Lamont had chosen Ralph Baxter as her sweet sixteen love. She’d never even shopped around. How 1950s was that for a woman who hadn’t even been born then?
Jessica had shopped plenty, or at least window-shopped. She’d found only a few men worth the cost of trying on for size. Definitely not a one worth taking home to keep. She might look like her mom, all blond, tall, and waiflike—which she kind of hated though the men seemed to like it—but inside she wanted to be like Aunt Gina.
Luigina Lamont looked nothing like her twin sister…or Grandpop…or much like Grandma for that matter. She was a statuesque redhead, in every voluptuous sense of the word and completely lived up to her name: Luigina meant “Famous Warrior.” Her merry laugh slapped up against you at the most unexpected moments and constantly poked at your ticklish spot until you were curled up on the couch begging her to stop. Unlike Mom and her serial marriages to the same man, Gina brought home plenty yet had only tried to keep one.
That “unholy disaster” (as the family tales described it) had produced Natalya Daphne Lamont—Jessica’s three-hour-older (and Natalya never let her forget it) first cousin and best friend. Just like Gina, Natalya didn’t look like either her mom or Gina’s brief husband. Maybe that was hereditary on that side of the family to balance out how much Jessica resembled her own mom and their shared grandma. Jessica had a sudden flash of her own future daughter looking just like her…and felt the world spin just a little at thinking about children at all.
“If I hadn’t seen her come out between my legs myself,” Aunt Gina would announce loudly, “I’d have thought I adopted the kid. Maybe I signed up to be a surrogate then forgot all about it.”
Mom blushed every time Aunt Gina let that one loose in public, without understanding that if she didn’t, Aunt Gina would have stopped long ago.
Where Dreams Are Written Page 19