Talking After Midnight. Dakota Cassidy

raise,” she offered, pushing through her purse to find her phone and make a note of it. “Em, turn up that heat while I let Nella know, would you?”

      Dixie in a nutshell. Generous, funny, gorgeous and loyal to the core. Plum Orchard legend had it back in high school she was once feared for her horrible pranks.

      Yet she’d come home just a few months ago, emotionally broken and cash poor only to turn around and win, in what the folks of Plum Orchard called the “phone sex games,” the entirety of the company Marybell worked for.

      Since then, Dixie’d redeemed herself for the most part with nearly everyone who’d once held a grudge against her—well, everyone except the snotty Magnolias, the group of women who considered themselves the backbone of fine Southern breeding and ran Plum Orchard as if they were the mob.

      Though, the people of Plum Orchard still didn’t love that not only did she own a phone sex company, but she consorted with her employees on a regular basis. Some of them still made no bones about sayin’ so.

      Oddly, those same people who frowned upon her and the wicked women of Call Girls sure didn’t mind Dixie and her fiancé, Caine Donovan, funneling their alleged ill-gotten gains into town functions and fund-raisers for the elementary school.

      Either way, Marybell didn’t give a hoot about the things Dixie had once done when she was just a teenager. Not a one of these set-in-their-ways folk were above making mistakes. Small towns had a way of holding a grudge the likes of which she’d never seen.

      But Marybell had liked Dixie from the moment she’d been assigned by Cat as her guide to the world of the phone sex industry. Dixie had risen above ridicule and cruel attacks, and she’d defended the women of Call Girls right in front of God and man. Now, several months later, Marybell liked her even more.

      And she didn’t want to lose Dixie, or any of them, on the chance they might recognize her. Knowing who she really was would create an invasion the likes of which Plum Orchard had never seen. But it wouldn’t just invade her life; it would invade the women’s lives. Women she’d come to care a great deal for, and she’d die before she let that happen.

      Her gut tightened with the fear of loss in that way it always did—uncomfortable, choking her from the inside out. The fear that almost never entirely went away—even after all this time.

      Always. It was always with her. Sometimes the panic muted, became a dull roar, but it never truly left. It hovered around the fringes of her life, poking at her like an animal in a cage, reminding her.

      Em’s voice interrupted her private misery. She stood over the thermostat, studying it. “It says it’s eighty-five degrees in here, Dixie, but that can’t be right.” Em had a gift for most things DIY. Except anything electrical, as evidenced by the enormous hole Jax Hawthorne had in his backyard gazebo when she’d decided it would be pretty to put in a paddle fan with a light.

      “It’s broken,” Marybell croaked, her nose itchy and raw. “And put your bags of money away, Dixie Davis,” she teased on a cough. “I don’t need a raise. You pay me just fine, thank you. I just forgot to ask Miss Carter to fix it with the warm spell we had not long ago. Leave it be, Dixie. I’ll have it taken care of when I’m better.”

      She loved the basement apartment she’d rented from Blanche Carter. This apartment was the first place she’d called home in four years. It harbored all the things she’d lovingly collected when she finally decided it was safe to stay in Landon’s, and then Dixie’s, employ. But it was mighty cold in the winter.

      Dixie planted her hands on her hips. “I can’t, in good conscience, leave you here to freeze to death. Blanche is in Atlanta till Tuesday and the weatherman said it’s going to be down in the thirties this weekend. With you so sick, it’ll just make it worse. I won’t have it.”

      The cold medicine was beginning to work its magic, leaving her too exhausted to fend Dixie’s mothering off.

      Suddenly Em was digging in her purse, too, pulling out her phone, her beautiful blue eyes lit up by the face of her phone. “Oh, I know! I’ll call Jax’s brother—he’s a licensed electrician. He’ll come take a look. If he can’t do it today, then you’re comin’ home with me until he can, MB. Hear me? Or maybe with Dixie. Sanjeev’ll take fine care of you.”

      The cold meds LaDawn had given her began to affect her train of thought. Was it irony she could pound down a half bottle of vodka shots with the best of them and not feel a thing, but give her a cold remedy meant to help you sleep, and she was a goner?

      Words became hazy, her fear of exposure growing dull. She realized her head was falling back to the couch, yet she had no energy to stop it. Hands comforted her, moved over her to lift her feet up on the couch. Dishes clanged in faraway tones and then someone with warm fingers brushed her hair from her face, pressing a heating pad to her chest and dropping a kiss on her burning forehead just before she succumbed to the quiet of her stuffy head.

      Though she did remember to do one thing before she allowed her drug-induced haze to take over. It was as important to her as her “people shield” and had become almost a superstition of sorts. Or maybe it was just a stinkin’ crutch.

      That’s probably what a therapist would say. Be it crutch, superstition, good-luck charm, whatever, no matter where Marybell Lyman was, who she was with, before she laid her head on a pillow and closed her eyes, she said a quick prayer just in case the universe really was one big ball of positive thinking. It was the prayer she said every night before she went to sleep.

      Thank you for all these wonderful blessings, for food to eat, for my friends and for my job.

      But please, please don’t take them away.

       Two

      More banging on her door. Loud. Obnoxious. Heavy-handed.

      Gravy sakes, could a sick woman just be left to die in splotchy, ugly red runny-nosed peace?

      Not if Emmaline Amos and Dixie Davis are your friends, Marybell. With friendship came a certain amount of invasion of privacy, she’d learned. Still, she was going to kill them for waking her again, and just when she’d found a bit of sleep without the threat of coughing her left lung to implosion.

      Muddled and fuzzy, Marybell sat upright, her head pulsing its angry protest, making her reach for another tissue. The last time she’d looked at the clock while the girls were still here, it was five in the afternoon. She’d slept for three solid hours.

      Pulling herself to a standing position, she shivered as she left behind the warmth of the heating pad and made her way to the front door, jamming her hands into the deep pockets of her favorite, albeit ratty, flannel bathrobe.

      She began to open it with a moment’s hesitation, warding off another coughing spell. Then she caught hold of her runaway fears, forcing herself to rationalize through the thick haze of cold meds. Clearly, her friends hadn’t made the connection to her past, and they’d already seen her. So seeing her twice without her makeup and hair gel wouldn’t change anything. What was done was done.

      Still, Marybell kept her eyes averted—in hindsight, she’d wish her tongue had done the same. She yanked open the door, her eyelids at half-mast. “You know, you three are like havin’ really annoying sisters. Maybe akin to the stepsisters in Cinderella, only nicer and with smaller feet,” she grumbled, sneezing into her tissue. “How will I ever nab the prince if you pair of mother hens won’t let me rest? Would you have me search for my Prince Charming lookin’ like this?”

      A delicious man with hair the color of a dark, exotic wood, worn just long enough to brush the collar of his black sweatshirt, partially covered by the navy-blue knit hat he wore, smiled a smile surely carved with the tool of a god. “Wow. Prince Charming’s a lot of pressure, don’t you think?”

      Her breathing stalled while her heart crashed against her ribs and her eyes swiftly hit the floor.

      “Are