Once Tempted Read Online Free Page A

have announced she was moving to Mars. She fell silent, her expression solemn. “It’s so far. But I guess I understand why you’re doing it. If I’d been throughwhat you have, I’d want a fresh start, too. So, where in California?”
    Tess reached over and picked up her handbag from where it leaned against the edge of the sofa. Opening it, she pulled out a folded map. “I picked this up. It shows the entire state.” Moving the untouched platter aside, she laid the map on the coffee table and smoothed out its folds. “I thought you could help me choose my destination. What do you think of L.A.? Or maybe—”
    “Wait! Wait! I know!” Anna interrupted, her eyes bright with excitement. “Let me get my nonna’s favorite scarf. We can use it as a blindfold. I’ll tape the map to the wall, spin you around a few times, point you in the right direction, and give you a little good-luck shove. You’ll walk toward the wall with your index finger extended. Wherever your finger touches on the map, that’s where you’ll go. Fate will decide.”

A S FAR AS Tess was concerned, fate was a nasty witch.
    She was pretty sure she’d have felt this way even if she hadn’t been exhausted from driving solo cross-country, roughly a couple thousand miles farther than she’d ever driven before, and in a car she now had serious doubts about.
    It had been sold to her by a distant cousin of one of the retired employees from her dad’s construction company. The price had been right and the mechanic had assured her it should make the trip to Northern California with no problem. But maybe she should have had the car looked at by someone more interested in inspecting the engine than in checking her out, and one who wasn’t related by marriage to the car’s owner. That was Astoria for you: on every corner a cousin or an in-law.
    And she’d been in a hurry to get a set of wheels and go, convinced that the only way to escape the ghosts of the past year was to get the hell out of New York and put the pedal to the metal. That was how messed up her life had become.
    Now she could add yet another life lesson to her personal list. It wasn’t just marry in haste, repent at leisure—but also buy a car in haste, repent as yourpalms grew slick when the steering wheel failed to respond at even the easy stuff, like switching lanes. The less said about the blinding snow in Kansas and the car’s iffy brakes, the better. Then there were the vehicle’s ominous coughs and rattles. With each, her stomach had tightened.
    But somehow she’d made it to the Golden State, which on a cold, gray January day didn’t look very golden to her and didn’t make her feel like shouting “Eureka!” at the top of her lungs while she launched into a quick jitterbug, or whatever the state dance was. As a going-away present, Anna had given her a guidebook to California that contained all sorts of trivia and factoids about the state. Before Tess reached her current level of exhaustion (somewhere around Colorado), she had studied the guidebook every night after she’d checked in to yet another motel.
    The town of Acacia, California, where fate had decided she should go, hadn’t made it into Tess’s guidebook.
    Hardly a surprise. Acacia’s downtown had a grand total of four streets. A booming metropolis it was not. She’d never been in a place so small that “one-stop shopping” could be taken literally: Its post office was housed inside the same low-slung wooden building as the bank and a general store with a lunch counter.
    To give it due credit, the town possessed an offbeat charm. Who could quibble with a place that had among its businesses an organic wool store that offered knitting and weaving classes; a boutique that sold candles and handmade jewelry, smelled of lavender and beeswax, and had crystals hanging in the window, making rainbows that danced upon the rough-planked wooden floors; a coffee and tea shop that stocked free-trade beans and brews and