Chapter One
One week later…
Pepper glanced around the cul-de-sac, another bead of sweat trickling down her brow. Sun charred the silvery Spanish moss draping the live oaks while the high-waisted Spanx beneath her pencil skirt compressed her organs into diamonds. Good thing she didn’t believe in signs from the universe because this shortcut through Hopes and Dreams Way had turned out to be a dead end. Moisture prickled behind her knees, under her boobs, and between her thighs.
Please, Universe. Don’t be a sign.
Her judicial clerkship offer had hinged on an immediate start date. The last week was a blur, packing her Manhattan life into three suitcases. She’d stepped off the Greyhound yesterday afternoon with barely enough time to pick up the keys for her new rental house and visit the local Piggly Wiggly, never mind getting oriented.
The absence of a city skyline or a street grid left her sense of direction as broken as the GPS navigation on her smart phone. She huffed a small sigh, blowing up her bangs. Everland, Georgia, appeared to be block after block of grandly renovated antebellum homes, all with jasmine-smothered wrought iron fences, rocking chair–lined verandas, and names like Love Street, Forever Boulevard, Hopes and Dreams Way, and Kissing Court.
Better find a dentist. A year surrounded by this much sugary sweetness put her at risk of a cavity (or five).
A glance at her wristwatch revealed that her Human Resources appointment wasn’t for another forty-five minutes. Her shoulders relaxed. It paid to be prepared. Dead end or no, she’d left herself ample time to fire Siri and navigate her own route to the courthouse.
The lace curtains in the gingerbread Queen Anne across the street twitched and a blue-rinsed older woman peered through the slit with a frown. Pepper adjusted the strap on her leather computer bag and bit down on the inside of her cheek. First impressions were everything, and a Yankee fish out of water marinating in a pool of her own perspiration wasn’t a great one.
Head down, she quickly backtracked, retracing her steps. Homesickness nipped at her heels. Or more accurately…sister-sickness. Tonight there’d be no cuddle fest over Chinese takeout in Tuesday’s Hell’s Kitchen walkup, no debriefing about her day before her sister performed—in side-splitting detail—impersonations from her latest Broadway casting call. There wasn’t time for a check-in, but she could fire off the next entry of their ongoing Ugly Selfie Challenge and let Tuesday know she was in her thoughts.
Pepper paused beneath the Forever Boulevard street sign, stuck out her iPhone, and contorted her face into a hideous, triple-chinned expression.
And that’s when it happened.
The menacing growl sluiced icy dread through her insides, numbing her core. She didn’t have to turn her head to confirm what her body reacted to on instinct.
Dog, two o’clock.
Collapsing her shoulders in a protective cringe, arms shielding her face, she recoiled in jerky steps as fast as her tight skirt allowed. A white ball of fluff with matching organza ear ribbons sat on a red-bricked walkway in the shade of palmetto fronds—devil’s spawn in a lap dog disguise. It curled back its lips to reveal razor sharp fangs.
Pug or Pit Bull, it didn’t matter. Man’s best friend was her worst nightmare.
The tiny tail twitched. She swallowed a whimper.Easy, easy now.The fence separating them was five feet high. Fluffy wasn’t going to spring through the air, latch on to her throat, and gnaw her jugular like a corn cob. Dogs were statistically more likely to lick a person to death.
By a lot.
By a lot, a lot.
But try telling that to her dry mouth and trembling hands.
The growls crescendoed into shrill yaps. Fluffy reared on hind legs, an eight-pound demon cavorting in the seventh circle of hell.
Pepper’s stomach responded with a queasy burble. More yowling rose ahead, a Boxer-looking hellbeast tried cramming its fat head through its white picket prison.Nope.She veered around a parked minivan and crossed the street, pulse leaping with panic.
“They don’t want to hurt me. They don’t want to hurt me,” she chanted a mantra from Canine Calm, a weekend cognitive therapy clinic she’d shelled out three hundred bucks on after a close encounter with a Shih Tzu in SoHo last summer left her, well, shit-tzuing her pants.
Blink and breathe. Unravel the negative feelings within before they unravel you. Observe fearful emotions and give them space as they arise, watching them float away like soap bubbles. Blink without judgment. Remember, there is no right way or wrong way to blink. Simply be the blink.
Blink that. She’d dropped out an hour into the nonrefundable session. But now her ears were hot and her jaw tight, all the hallmarks of spiking blood pressure.
She could chant “They don’t want to hurt me” all day, but the faint white scars on her cheek, one below her eye, and the other to the side of her nose, the exact match to a Doberman pinscher’s mouth, begged to differ. Her nervous system issued a warning:Imminent threat to life and limb. Take cover.
Two Corgis joined the din, followed by a baritone bow-wow-wow from another backyard.
Which way to go? No direction was safe.
“Is that lady dancing?” a high-pitched voice asked behind her.
“Dunno,” another answered.
