Mary Leo - A Pinch of Cool

Dear Reader,

There are times when everything seems to be going well.

Don’t be frightened. It won’t last.

I got the idea for this story during one of those rare moments when I arrogantly thought I could accomplish one of my goals. It was at that exact moment of total self-satisfaction when life stepped in and slapped me with a ripe tomato…thank you very much.

I like to think I can roll with the punches, but most of the time it’s more of a heavyweight championship. When goals come too easily, it makes me uncomfortable. I tend to crave the challenge, or else, what’s the point?

That’s why I brought Mya and Eric together. It seemed only right that they should battle it out and come to the only reasonable conclusion…well, I can’t tell you that conclusion here. You’ll simply have to read the book.

Please come visit me at www.maryleo.net. We’ll talk more.

Enjoy the tomatoes.

Best,

Mary Leo

To the world they were just another kissing couple at the airport.

However, Mya had a different take on the whole thing. Hers was more of the startled variety. Such as, when out of a crowd of people, a stranger calls your name and you try your best to recognize this person.

Okay, it wasn’t quite like that, but it should have been for all the contact she’d had with Eric over the years. Let’s see, the last real memory Mya had of him was when they were seven years old and he had just thrown a huge bucket of water over her sand castle. Of course, she had retaliated by wrecking his sand castle by bulldozing it with her sweet little feet.

She had seen pictures of him at various stages of growth and accomplishment, but who can keep up with all that changing? She was too busy with her own life to worry about Eric’s—he had just been the boy who tormented her and whom she loved to torment back.

Now Mya didn’t know what to say—which absolutely, positively never happened to her. Yet here she was in the arms of Eric Baldini, who, for some odd reason, made her pulse quicken and, for a brief moment, seemed enormously sexy.

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A Pinch of Cool is Mary Leo’s third novel. She’s had careers as a salesgirl in Chicago, a cocktail waitress and Keno runner in Las Vegas, a bartender in Silicon Valley and a production assistant in Hollywood. She has recently given up her career as an IC Layout Engineer to pursue her constant passion: writing romance.

Mary now lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and new puppy.

I’ve been blessed to have known

quite a few extraordinary women in my life,

but none of them have impressed me more, been

as plucky, made me laugh, guided me, inspired

me, shown as much courage, and ultimately been

as cool as Katina Resann. This book,

my flamboyant friend, is dedicated to you.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

“MOM, DON’T CRY . I hate it when you cry,” Mya Strano said into the phone. Her mother had called bright and early on a Monday morning in April, just to chat, but there had been very little chatting. Just that silent thing mixed in with heavy sighing and runny-nose sounds, which only meant one thing. Tears.

“Who said I was crying?” Rita Strano spluttered.

Denial, that was the key. Always a clue to her mom’s true emotions.

“I can hear it in your voice.”

“A person can’t hear tears.”

“Believe me, Mom. I could hear your tears in my sleep.”

“How you talk.”

It was one thing to hear a friend cry, or see a coworker cry, or watch tears stream down Cher’s face in a movie. Why is it that she never got a red nose? Some people have all the luck. But when your own mother cried, it was almost surreal. Like, it couldn’t possibly be happening. Not to my mom.

Mothers weren’t supposed to cry, at least not on the phone to their daughters. The whole mother-daughter system wasn’t set up for such episodes. It threw the world off balance, blew the stars out of the sky, and made twenty-six-year-old daughters want to hurl themselves down flights of stairs for lack of knowing what to do to stop it—a completely unstable act, but acceptable given the extreme circumstances.

“Okay. So maybe I’m upset.” Ah, an admission. The first step in the order of things. “But who wouldn’t be? We’ve made that network more money than anybody else and just because we’re slipping a little…”

The knot in Mya’s stomach began to unwind, and she could forgo the stair hurling. A ray of light had beamed in through the tunnel of despair, or something equally as metaphorical.

“Mom, how far are you slipping?”

Mya gazed at her light gray cubical walls and waited for the answer. This might take a while. The walls were littered with local fashion ads, mostly from SoHo, upscale restaurant logos, and pictures of New York street vendors. She especially liked the street vendors. Some of those guys were really cute in an entrepreneurial sort of way. There was something sexy about a guy who depended on his ability to pitch to make his living that was exciting to her. Not that she’d go off and have an affair with one of them. Not really. Okay, there was that one artist in Times Square who hocked those cute little cigar-box purses—so totally out now—but he didn’t count. He was actually an intellectual, caught up in society’s intolerance of the struggling artist.

All right, so she fell for the line, and until she came to her senses, they’d had a great time together…that one night, when he gave her all the purses, then left for Toledo to take over his father’s plumbing business. But that was ancient history, when she’d first arrived in the city. Something like that could never happen again, she told herself as her feet rested on a recently delivered carton of I Heart N.Y. T-shirts.

“Minor details,” her mother finally said.

“What?” Could her mother now hear her inner musings? Had she gone psychic?

“Stay with me, dear. Our ratings should be minor details to the network. We still get a ton of fan mail.”

Oh, yeah, crying mothers. “Mom, the network doesn’t care about fan mail. They only care about ratings.”

“Fickle bastards.”

Mya sat back in her Aeron—ergonomically chic chair. She thought she should simply get used to these mom-tears. They weren’t for anything catastrophic like a relative dying or a mile-long meteor heading for earth, although, to her mom, low ratings ranked right up there with a good blight, or the ever popular imploding sun.

Mya’s mother, Rita, and Franko Baldini, Rita’s long-time business partner and sometimes lover, were the stars of a network cooking show, La Dolce Rita. The show had been on the air for nine straight years. Lately, however, the show was hitting a dry spell, and her mother seemed to get all weepy about it almost every time Mya spoke with her. Only this time Mya was determined to do something, despite her mother’s inability to accept help.