Dakota Cassidy - Talking After Midnight

Shields up, sugar—things in Plum Orchard are about to get real.

Marybell Lyman is notorious for two things:

Her look. The wicked hairstyle, multiple piercings and practiced sneer that say: “Stay back—I bite.”

Her voice. The syrupy lilt that’s her bread and butter at Call Girls, the prim little town’s flourishing phone-sex company.

Hunky handyman Taggart Hawthorne is mesmerized by the contradiction: such sweet tones inside such a spiky shell! He wants to know more about mysterious Marybell, to hear more of her sexy talk—all for himself.

But Tag’s attentions, delicious as they are, have Marybell panicked. She’s been hiding a long time. She’s finally got a home, a job and friends she adores. She won’t have it all snatched away by another stupid mistake—like falling in love. So when Marybell’s past comes calling, she and the Call Girls will prove no one handles scandals like a Southern girl!

Talking After Midnight

Dakota Cassidy

www.mirabooks.co.uk

First, to my editor, Leonore Waldrip, for my repetitive overuse of so many thighs and eyes, this one’s for you! Also, for suggesting a very unusual heroine, and the challenge creating her presented.

And to my BFF, Renee George, who always knows when I’m on the brink. She listens. She hears. She nurtures. I love you much.

Last, but never least, my husband, Rob—you’re the best decision I foolishly almost didn’t make. Thank you for some of the best years of my life!

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

One

“Heaven and a ring o’ fire...”

Under normal circumstances, Marybell Lyman would have laughed at her employer and friend Dixie Davis’s shocked words when she pushed her way into her small basement apartment, stopped dead in her tracks and tipped her head to the side as if she’d just witnessed the second coming.

But this circumstance wasn’t normal.

Dixie stood poised in her doorway for a moment, the cold draft from the late-winter evening ruffling her knee-length burgundy sweater. Dixie, never without words, stared at her, speechless. She tucked a strand of her long auburn hair behind her ear and hummed something else Marybell couldn’t quite hear because of her clogged ears.

Marybell scurried back to her couch without a word, plunking herself down on the new sofa she’d just had delivered. She huddled into her bathrobe, keeping her head down as far as she could without making her nose begin running again.

When her friends from work had all shown up to coddle her with chicken soup and some good ol’ Southern love, she’d panicked. Her heart racing, her head full of cotton, throbbing an endless, crushing beat, she’d battled with whether to answer the door.

No one saw her this way—unmasked—ever, and definitely not Dixie, the owner of the phone sex company where she worked as a phone sex operator.

But it wasn’t as though there was any hiding from the three pretty faces full of concern, pressed against the glass of her front door like a trio of suction-cupped Garfields in the back of a car window.

She couldn’t simply shoo them away or make up some excuse to keep them from barging in even if she truly wanted to. As a whole, Team Call Girls was unstoppable. If you told them no, they yelled, “Bless your heart,” and trampled all over you and your nos with their cute heels.

Why, oh, why hadn’t she thought to pull the shade down over the glass before she’d taken those cold meds and fallen asleep?

Breathe, Marybell. Act natural.

Ha! Easy for the voice inside her head to say. It didn’t have to fend off three gawking mother hens, as well meaning as they were, and remain calm while its insides twisted into a knot fit for a Boy Scout.

LaDawn Jenkins, coworker, friend, best phone sex operator in the universe, stood next to Dixie, a woven basket with a red-checkered napkin covering what Marybell suspected were freshly baked rolls, and cocked her platinum-blond head. “I have rolls,” she mumbled, dropping them on the end table next to her box of tissues. “With butter,” she added, her brow furrowing.

Marybell hunkered farther down in her bathrobe, fighting another violent shudder of chills, almost too feverish to care about her friends seeing her for the first time devoid of what she’d secretly dubbed her “people shield.”

Almost.

She should be in the process of making a break for it. Or at the very least, putting a paper bag over her head. But she’d spent herself simply finding her gel eye mask and answering the door. Her legs were so weak, her chest so congested and tight, it would take everything she had left in her to move again.

Instead, she cast her eyes toward her feet, covered in fuzzy black calf-length socks with the slipper-grippers on the soles.

There’s nowhere to hide but in plain sight now, Marybell Lyman. You’re stewed. Try not to look obvious.

Emmaline Amos, soon to be Emmaline Hawthorne if the way things were shaping up between her and Jax was any indication, almost fell smack into Dixie and LaDawn when she rushed in the front door. The skid of her conservative black pumps screeched to a halt against the wood floor.

She gasped in her “clutch your pearls” way but covered by quickly clamping her lips shut. Naturally, she didn’t mean for her mouth to open before her brain properly filtered her shock. Em was nothing if she wasn’t the epitome of Southern decorum.

That Southern diplomacy was why Dixie had given her the position of general manager at Call Girls Inc. She was tactful, kind and able to appease even the crankiest of customers.

And she always did what was right and decorous—even if it killed her. Though, mostly this behavior was due to her incredibly kind heart. She’d earned Marybell’s deepest respect since coming to Call Girls, newly single after her ex-husband had all but abandoned her and her boys to live his life as a cross-dresser.

Em was down-home tough. Soft and pliable like Play-Doh on the outside, but made of steel parts of resolve on the inside. There wasn’t a coon dog’s chance in purgatory she’d acknowledge just how astonished she was.

Instead, she carried in a large Crock-Pot bowl with two heart-covered oven mitts over her hands to protect them from the heat. Em assessed Marybell for a moment, brief and fleeting, before her eyes flickered, and proper Em was firmly back in place. “We brought you...” She almost stuttered the words, gazing down at Marybell. But then she caught herself reacting and forced her shoulders to square and her spine to straighten. Em cleared her throat. “Soup,” she finished with a warm smile full of perfect white teeth and ruby-red lipstick. “Chicken soup—for your poor, flu-riddled soul, you sweet, phlegmy angel.” Em set the Crock-Pot on the old chest Marybell used as a coffee table, dropping the mitts next to it.

Marybell murmured a thank-you into the collar of her bathrobe.

Em flapped her hands in the way she always did, signifying that her kind gesture was much ado about nothing. “Did you really expect we’d let you suffer all alone? Not on my watch, miss. Mercy, we’ve been worried to death about you ever since you called in sick earlier today, sugarplum. Dixie said you sounded like a congested bullfrog, and weak as a kitten to boot. You hafta feed that cold. Which is why we all cooked up something and forced our way in here like the interfering henpeckers we are.”

“Rolls,” LaDawn repeated again stiffly, clearly still experiencing aftershocks of the “holy Hannah in a wet suit” variety. “I brought rolls. With butter.” She pointedly tapped the basket.