Talking After Midnight. Dakota Cassidy

      

      Shields up, sugar—things in Plum Orchard are about to get real.

      Marybell Lyman is notorious for two things:

      Her look. The wicked hairstyle, multiple piercings and practiced sneer that say: “Stay back—I bite.”

      Her voice. The syrupy lilt that’s her bread and butter at Call Girls, the prim little town’s flourishing phone-sex company.

      Hunky handyman Taggart Hawthorne is mesmerized by the contradiction: such sweet tones inside such a spiky shell! He wants to know more about mysterious Marybell, to hear more of her sexy talk—all for himself.

      But Tag’s attentions, delicious as they are, have Marybell panicked. She’s been hiding a long time. She’s finally got a home, a job and friends she adores. She won’t have it all snatched away by another stupid mistake—like falling in love. So when Marybell’s past comes calling, she and the Call Girls will prove no one handles scandals like a Southern girl!

      Talking After Midnight

      Dakota Cassidy

       www.mirabooks.co.uk

      First, to my editor, Leonore Waldrip, for my repetitive overuse of so many thighs and eyes, this one’s for you! Also, for suggesting a very unusual heroine, and the challenge creating her presented.

      And to my BFF, Renee George, who always knows when I’m on the brink. She listens. She hears. She nurtures. I love you much.

      Last, but never least, my husband, Rob—you’re the best decision I foolishly almost didn’t make. Thank you for some of the best years of my life!

      Contents

       One

       Two

       Three

       Four

       Five

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Eleven

       Twelve

       Thirteen

       Fourteen

       Fifteen

       Sixteen

       Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Twenty-One

       One

      “Heaven and a ring o’ fire...”

      Under normal circumstances, Marybell Lyman would have laughed at her employer and friend Dixie Davis’s shocked words when she pushed her way into her small basement apartment, stopped dead in her tracks and tipped her head to the side as if she’d just witnessed the second coming.

      But this circumstance wasn’t normal.

      Dixie stood poised in her doorway for a moment, the cold draft from the late-winter evening ruffling her knee-length burgundy sweater. Dixie, never without words, stared at her, speechless. She tucked a strand of her long auburn hair behind her ear and hummed something else Marybell couldn’t quite hear because of her clogged ears.

      Marybell scurried back to her couch without a word, plunking herself down on the new sofa she’d just had delivered. She huddled into her bathrobe, keeping her head down as far as she could without making her nose begin running again.

      When her friends from work had all shown up to coddle her with chicken soup and some good ol’ Southern love, she’d panicked. Her heart racing, her head full of cotton, throbbing an endless, crushing beat, she’d battled with whether to answer the door.

      No one saw her this way—unmasked—ever, and definitely not Dixie, the owner of the phone sex company where she worked as a phone sex operator.

      But it wasn’t as though there was any hiding from the three pretty faces full of concern, pressed against the glass of her front door like a trio of suction-cupped Garfields in the back of a car window.

      She couldn’t simply shoo them away or make up some excuse to keep them from barging in even if she truly wanted to. As a whole, Team Call Girls was unstoppable. If you told them no, they yelled, “Bless your heart,” and trampled all over you and your nos with their cute heels.

      Why, oh, why hadn’t she thought to pull the shade down over the glass before she’d taken those cold meds and fallen asleep?

      Breathe, Marybell. Act natural.

      Ha! Easy for the voice inside her head to say. It didn’t have to fend off three gawking mother hens, as well meaning as they were, and remain calm while its insides twisted into a knot fit for a Boy Scout.

      LaDawn Jenkins, coworker, friend, best phone sex operator in the universe, stood next to Dixie, a woven basket with a red-checkered napkin covering what Marybell suspected were freshly baked rolls, and cocked her platinum-blond head. “I have rolls,” she mumbled, dropping them on the end table next to her box of tissues. “With butter,” she added, her brow furrowing.

      Marybell hunkered farther down in her bathrobe, fighting another violent shudder of chills, almost too feverish to care about her friends seeing her for the first time devoid of what she’d secretly dubbed her “people shield.”

      Almost.

      She should be in the process of making a break for it. Or at the very least, putting a paper bag over her head. But she’d spent herself simply finding her gel eye mask and answering the door. Her legs were so weak, her chest so congested and tight, it would take everything she had left in her to move again.

      Instead, she cast her eyes toward her feet, covered in fuzzy black calf-length socks with the slipper-grippers on the soles.

      There’s nowhere to hide but in plain sight now, Marybell Lyman. You’re stewed. Try not to look obvious.

      Emmaline