Her Fifth Husband?. Dixie Browning

a work ethic. Even her father, redheaded, stern-faced Addler Parrish, had sold his tobacco farm and taken up preaching.

      Not that he was very good at that, either. Everyone said old Ad was mean as a snake, and she could personally vouch for that. But at least the hours suited him better, giving him plenty of time to lay down the law to his family and punish anyone who broke his rules. Which Sasha had consistently done.

      She’d been plain Sally June Parrish back then. Her overworked mother had lacked the strength to defend either herself or her children from her husband’s vicious tongue, much less from his belt and his fists. As soon as Sally June could escape she’d left home and found a job stocking and clerking in a furniture dealer’s showroom. Within a few years, she began taking night classes at the community college and attending the International Furniture Market in High Point with her employer.

      By that time she’d been married to Larry Combs, a Jude Law lookalike who couldn’t manage to hang on to a job for more than a few months. He’d claimed to be overqualified. What he’d been was under-motivated. Larry had been the first. Her second husband had been even better-looking, and witty, besides.

      Unfortunately, he’d also been a crook.

      With two brief marriages behind her, she had left the Greensboro area and started her eastward migration, eventually leaving behind two more ex-husbands. None of her marriages had provided her with what she so desperately needed—a close and loving family. And none had lasted much longer than a year. By the time she’d moved to Muddy Landing and set herself up as an interior decorator, Sally June had become Sasha. She had stuck with her fourth husband’s name because it was easier than changing everything again.

      Besides, it sounded good with Sasha.

      She’d chosen Muddy Landing because at the time, property in Currituck County had been comparatively cheap. That was rapidly changing as more and more of it was developed, but the location was perfect, being little more than an hour from the Norfolk shopping area and less than half that from the Outer Banks where building was booming and decorating jobs were plentiful.

      That had been eleven—no, nearly thirteen years ago. Once it gathered momentum, time seemed to fly. At the age of thirty-eight, thirty-five years of which she admitted to, Sasha was single for keeps. Each time she’d married she’d been certain she’d finally found her prince.

      Instead she’d found another poor jerk who thought that learning to dress and speak well would alter who he was. Underneath the designer sportswear, the fancy colognes and the rip-off Rolexes, they’d all been every bit as insecure as she had once been, the difference being that they’d lacked her guts, her brutal self-honesty and her relentless drive to succeed.

      She might joke with her friends about looking for number five, but before she would ever allow herself to get involved with another man, she would let her hair go natural, dump all her makeup in the North Landing River and turn her jewelry into fishing lures.

      Parked in the shade of the Jamison cottage, she sat outside for a few minutes, savoring the perfect spring weather and the last of the double-strength coffee. She should be able to wind things up here in an hour, with some time to spare.

      Opening the door, she swung her legs out and sat there for a moment, savoring the relative quiet of the early morning. A week from now, traffic would have doubled and most of the cottages would be filled, but for now the quiet cul-de-sac was almost like a private retreat.

      Leaving the top down, she trudged up the first flight of outside stairs, unlocked the main door and disarmed the security system. The place still smelled of stale cigarette smoke, so she left the sliding glass doors open to air it out. Mosquitoes weren’t yet a problem as they’d had a record dry spring. On the next level up, she opened another door, drawing air from below.

      At least she didn’t turn the air-conditioning full blast with all the doors and windows open the way too many thoughtless tenants did.

      Humming under her breath, she began double-checking the list she’d made yesterday to make sure that everything that had been lost, stolen or damaged had been replaced. The new bar stools had been delivered. She checked that off her list. Climbing to the top level, she took a good look around to confirm that she hadn’t overlooked anything. Once she was done, she slid open the glass doors on the top floor and stepped out onto the sundeck, her favorite place of all. Ignoring the spectacular view of dunes and ocean, she glanced at the cottage next door.

      Not that she’d expected to see him—the parking area next door was empty. Not that she even wanted to see him, but he’d said he wasn’t finished with whatever it was he was doing over there—installing, updating or repairing a security system.

      She told herself she wasn’t disappointed, and really, she wasn’t. Not for herself. But for months now she and her friends had been looking for a candidate for Lily Sullivan, the beautiful blond CPA with the sad eyes who lived a few streets over from Marty’s house. So far as anyone knew—Faylene could find out more about a person from their garbage alone than any CIA agent—Lily had no social life at all.

      The trouble was that there were so few available men around—certainly none who might interest a woman who was both attractive and intelligent. The best had already been taken; the rest were too old, too young, too dull or too dumb.

      Ironically, over the past couple of years it had been Daisy and Marty, two of the original matchmakers, who had skimmed the cream off the top, with Daisy marrying Kell Magee when he’d come east to check out a relative, and Marty marrying the yummy carpenter she’d hired to renovate her house.

      And she wasn’t envious, she really wasn’t! As she turned to go, one of her heels slipped between two boards. Flailing her arms for balance, she grabbed at the chaise longue, which slid away from her, throwing her even more off balance. Pain shot up her left leg. Trying to catch herself as she went down on her behind, she jammed her fingers on the sun-warped deck.

      “Oh, help, oh, shoot, oh, damn, damn, damn!” She rocked back and forth, clutching her ankle with one hand and waving the other hand in the air, her shoe heel still trapped in the crack between boards.

      Seeing that the pink suede covering the five-inch heel was ruined, she cried out in frustration as well as pain. She’d paid dearly for these shoes, knowing that nothing flattered a woman’s legs like a good pair of spike heels. Especially a woman who had stopped growing—at least vertically—in the fifth grade. Having been told at an early age that redheads shouldn’t wear pink, she’d gone out of her way to wear something pink on every possible occasion, even if it was only pink tourmaline jewelry.

      With trembling fingers, she managed to unbuckle the ankle strap, unwrap it and ease her foot from the arrow-shaped toe that looked so gorgeous she usually didn’t even notice the torture.

      Oh, gross! Her ankle was already starting to look like an overstuffed sausage. Not only that, she had popped three fingernails and collected a handful of splinters that would probably give her blood poisoning. Didn’t they use arsenic to treat the lumber for these beach houses? Did that include the sundecks?

      At least she managed to unfasten her gold ankle bracelet before it cut off circulation. Oh God, she was going to die right here on the top deck of an empty cottage. The sun would turn her red as a boiled crab. Her nose would blister, seagulls and ospreys would drop disgusting things on her body—

      Her cell phone—she’d left it in her purse inside. If she could just get up she could use one of the plastic chairs as a walker and hop inside to call 911. Although after yesterday…

      Maybe a different dispatcher would be on in the mornings.

      Tears streamed down her cheeks, leaking trails of mascara through her blusher, dripping off her chin onto her Tilly MacIntire blouse. She unfastened her other shoe and tossed it aside. What good was one shoe when its mate was ruined? If it weren’t for the fact that nothing flattered a woman’s legs like putting them on a pedestal—and she was just vain enough to want every advantage she could possibly get—she’d burn the treacherous things the minute she got home.

      But