Her Passionate Plan B. Dixie Browning

meets are either doctors or patients. When a patient happens to die, it’s bound to be depressing, especially when it’s one she’s had as long as she had old man Snow.”

      “Well, duh. She’s a geriatric nurse, for Pete’s sake. She knew what she was getting into when she chose that specialty.”

      “She chose that specialty,” Marty reminded her friend, “because she had the hots for the guy who used to manage that adult day-care center, remember? The one who turned out to be skimming profits?”

      Sasha shrugged. “Okay, so she’s got lousy taste in men. Join the club.”

      “That’s right, your second husband got sent up for money laundering, didn’t he?”

      “Hell, no,” the redhead said indignantly. “It was my first. I was only eighteen—what did I know?”

      Both women chuckled. Marty said, “Right. So while she’s grieving, house-sitting and packing stuff up for the thrift shop or whatever, we can start trolling for eligible bachelors between the ages of what, twenty-five and fifty? By the way, who’ve you got in mind for Faylene?”

      Sasha frowned at her nails. “Hmm, it is sort of flashy, isn’t it? Okay, two possibilities come to mind, but I thought we might start with Gus down at the place where I just got my brakes relined. I happen to know he’s single.”

      “Gay?”

      “You ever heard of a gay mechanic?” Sasha slipped off her sandals and contemplated her unpolished toe-nails while Marty continued to sip her wine.

      “You know what, Sash? If we want to get Daisy involved in another project we really need to wait until she can sit in on the planning session. Maybe if we encourage her to come up with a few candidates on her own, she’ll perk up and get involved. But I still say Faylene will have a hissy fit if she finds out what we’re up to.”

      Applying purple glitter polish to a toenail, Sasha slanted her a grin. “She can have all the hissy fits she wants, just so she doesn’t quit. You know me and housecleaning.”

      A few miles outside the small soundside town of Muddy Landing in a handsome old house that had seen far better days, Daisy Hunter packed another box of her late patient’s clothing, to be dropped off at the Hotline Thrift Shop the next time she was in Elizabeth City. It would’ve been better if she’d moved out the day after he’d died, but her apartment still wasn’t ready. And then Egbert had suggested she stay on at least until she took on another case, and one thing had led to another.

      “The estate will continue to pay your salary while you inventory and pack away personal property. Aside from that, houses left standing empty for any length of time tend to deteriorate rather rapidly,” he’d told her. Egbert had a precise way of speaking that, while it wasn’t particularly exciting, was certainly reassuring. A woman would always know where she stood with a man like Egbert Blalock.

      Up until Harvey’s death she and the banker had been only nodding acquaintances. Since then they had met several times to discuss Harvey’s business affairs. It was during the second such meeting—or perhaps it was the third—that she’d begun to consider him from a personal standpoint. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that he was excellent husband material. After all, she wasn’t getting any younger, and if she ever intended to have a family of her own—and she definitely did—it was time.

      So while Faylene, the three-day-a-week housekeeper, gave the old house one last going-over, including rooms that had been closed off for decades, Daisy made lists, packed away various personal effects and thought about how to go about making a match for herself. She knew how to do it for someone else, but objectivity flew out the window when she started thinking of deliberately engineering a match for herself.

      Naturally she hadn’t confided in either of her friends. Knowing Marty and Sasha, at the first hint of any personal interest they’d have taken over and mismanaged the whole affair. Sasha tried on husbands the way other women tried on shoes. Marty was not a whole lot better, although she swore she’d learned after her last experience.

      Catching sight of herself in the large dresser mirror, Daisy touched her rumpled hair. At least it was dry now, but the color wouldn’t attract a dead moth, much less a man. She was long overdue for a trim, but before she did anything too drastic she needed to find out if Egbert preferred long hair or short. Did he like blondes, and if so, how blond? Platinum? Honey? Her hair was that indeterminate color usually called dishwater.

      His was a nice shade of medium brown, thinning slightly on top. Not that hair loss was anything to be ashamed of, she reminded herself hastily. These days baldness was a fashion statement. It was even considered sexy. And while Egbert wasn’t exactly sexy, neither could he be labeled unsexy. Sasha had once called him dull. Daisy hadn’t bothered to correct her. Egbert wasn’t dull, he was simply steady, reliable and dependable, all excellent traits in a husband. Some women might prefer a flashier type—not too long ago, Daisy would have, too. Now she knew better. Been there, done that, to use a cliché.

      Her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Once she’d returned to the house after the service, she had quickly changed out of her damp clothes and gotten to work again, anxious to get the job done so that she’d be ready to set her own plans in motion. A stickler for propriety, she preferred to wait until she was finished here before launching her campaign.

      Folding another of Harvey’s tan-and-white-striped dress shirts—he must have had a dozen, all the same color and style—Daisy allowed her thoughts to drift back to the brief rainy service and the stranger she’d seen there. Whoever he was, he definitely wasn’t a local. She’d have noticed him if she’d ever seen him before. What woman wouldn’t? Those long legs and broad shoulders—the high, angular cheekbones, not to mention the startlingly blue eyes. As a rule, eye color was barely discernible from a distance of more than a few feet, but the stranger’s eyes had reminded her of glow-in-the-dark LEDs.

      What color were Egbert’s eyes, she wondered idly—hazel?

      Brown. It was Harvey whose eyes had been hazel, usually twinkling with humor despite his painfully twisted body. Bless his heart, he should have had a family with him at the end, only he didn’t have a family and most of his friends had either died or moved away. A couple still lived in Elizabeth City, but their visits had dwindled over the past year.

      As she went about layering articles in a box, Daisy thought back to the last hour she had spent with her patient. The noise of the television had bothered him, so she’d read him the newspapers. They’d gotten as far as the editorials when somewhere in the middle of Tom Friedman’s piece on nation-building he’d fallen asleep. As it was nothing unusual, she had quietly refolded the paper, adjusted the covers and turned off the light.

      The next morning she’d prepared his morning meds and rapped on the door of his bedroom. Hearing no response, she had entered to find her patient sleeping peacefully.

      And, as it turned out, permanently.

      She hadn’t cried, but sooner or later she probably would. She’d been closer to Harvey Snow than with other patients, maybe because she’d admired his courage. Living alone with a steadily worsening case of rheumatoid arthritis and then two small strokes, he had never lost his sense of humor.

      Sooner or later the tears would come, probably at the worst possible time. It did no good to try to suppress them, this much she knew, both as a nurse and as a woman. Spare the tears and suffer a head cold. The correlation might not have been clinically proved, but she believed it with all her heart.

      A deep sigh shuddered through her as she closed the box and taped it shut. Wrenching her thoughts from her depressing task, she made up her mind not to wait any longer to have her hair trimmed, styled and maybe even lightened. She needed cheering up. In fact, she might even take a day off to go shopping, keeping in mind that Egbert’s tastes were probably more conservative than her own. But even a classic shirtwaist could be unbuttoned to show a hint of cleavage and maybe a flash of thigh.

      As long as she was shopping, she might as