Flirting With Forever Read Online Free Page A

Marsha had been business partners for thirty-five years and married for thirty. They were the kind of couple who, when you saw them, you were struck by how much they adored each other. They worked hard, played harder, but when it came to money, they were deadly serious.
    “It’s from my personal account. I trust my husband, but I’ve seen this happen to too many women not to protect myself. And next time, you’ll know better.”
    “I can guarantee there won’t be a next time, but this is a lot of money.”
    “Friends do what they can, and I can do this for you. I love you, Tara.” She wrapped her arms around me. “You’re going to be okay. No, you’re going to be great.”
    After Marsha left, I sat back down on the floor beside my dog and scratched the sweet spot she hadn’t been able to reach in years. My cellphone rang. Lilly looked up at me with sad brown eyes and let out a pitiful sigh before she did the circle dance again and faced the wall. Her signal for me to answer the call and leave her be. I dug the phone out of my pocket and headed down to the dock. If I was paying for this beautiful place, or borrowing money from my best friend to pay for it, I might as well enjoy it.
    “Hey,” my publicist, Erin said. “What are you doing? And before you say, I have you on speakerphone.”
    “Sitting on the dock. Enjoying the sun. How about you?”
    “I just got off the phone with Kit. She said you shot down the tour.”
    “I did.”
    “Tara, you can’t turn this down, it’s going to be huge. Besides, I started planning this weeks ago.”
    “No surprise there.”
    Erin was much younger than me, but we happened to be from the same tiny Lowcountry town. Although she could probably find anything she wanted in New York, she appreciated the care packages I sent her from time to time with Charleston red rice mix, benne wafers for her sweet tooth, and Jack’s Cosmic Dog’s legendary sweet potato mustard. We’d hit it off from the beginning, but we weren’t close enough for me to tell her about Jim.
    To hear her talk, you’d never guess she was from the South, but whenever she talked to me, she let down her southern drawl.
    “Well, bless your heart for about five minutes and get off your ass. Come on, Tara, we’ll have a blast. Not to mention what it will do for your sales. And packaging your romances in a side-by-side display with the book is genius, like when stores put the battery displays with the Fifty Shades books.”
    “When would the tour start?”
    “The book’s so hot, I can get you in soon, like two weeks.”
    Maybe Marsha was right. My husband was gone, but I had the beginnings of a successful career. What did I have to lose? “Okay.”
    “Yay.” Erin’s drawl made the word sound like seventeen syllables.
    “Oh, lucky you. You’ll have to move heaven and earth to get her in,” I heard a man say in the background. “And where in the hell did the southern accent come from?”
    “Shut up, Jake,” Erin sounded like a New Yorker again.
    “Who’s that with you, Erin?”
    “Jake’s a fellow publicist and sometimes friend, when he’s not being an ass.”
    “Hi, Tara, don’t listen to Erin, she really loves me.” He laughed. “And no offense about the heaven and earth thing.”
    “None taken, Jake.”
    “Get out of here, Randall. Go annoy the hell out of someone else.”
    “Bye Tara. You and Erin have fun.” That laugh again.
    “Okay he’s gone. So, you’re saying yes to the tour? Wow, that was really easy.”
    “I’ll explain over a glass of wine when I see you.” She ran down the cities and the tour events. It sounded exciting. Maybe this would be good for me.
    “I’ve got us set to kick off on the Today Show, The View, and maybe a couple of other shows, but there is one thing I’m going to give you a heads up about. Janzen Industries, a huge event company who handles big celebrity tours wants a piece of this.” I smiled. Lilly would get a kick out of her mommy being