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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Synopsis

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Other Books by Tracey Richardson

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author's Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Bella Books

  Synopsis

  Claire Melbourne is a steely newspaper editor who’s just lost the biggest scoop of her career, thanks to her naïve intern’s mistake. Firing the young Ellie Kirkland for the offense was a no-brainer.

  But when fate brings the two women together again, Claire finds herself questioning everything she thought she was—especially her cynical, take-no-prisoners approach to life. When she’s not breaking stories or breaking in reporters, Claire’s one outlet is to lose herself in Motown music and in the seat of a cheerful antique Mustang. But lose herself to the much younger, far-too-nice Ellie? There’s no breaking news there. Nope. That’s a story that needs to be spiked before it ever sees print.

  Ellie Kirkland is at loose ends—and not for the first time. Resistant to following the path her parents insist on, she’s been trying out careers like she’s trying on outfits at Banana Republic. Now that her dream of being a journalist is over, Ellie must begin again. And the woman who crushed that very dream is the very woman who just might hold the key to Ellie’s future.

  Copyright © 2018 by Tracey Richardson

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  First Bella Books Edition 2018

  eBook released 2018

  Editor: Medora MacDougall

  Cover Designer: Sandy Knowles

  ISBN: 978-1-59493-614-2

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Other Bella Books by Tracey Richardson

  Blind Bet

  By Mutual Consent

  The Campaign

  The Candidate

  Delay of Game

  Heartsick

  Last Salute

  No Rules of Engagement

  Side Order of Love

  The Song in My Heart

  The Wedding Party

  Acknowledgments

  My foremost thanks is for the readers—to those of you who’ve stuck with me novel after novel, as well as to those who are taking a chance on their first Tracey Richardson novel. Without all of you, I wouldn’t be doing this. Also my thanks to the reviewers out there who tirelessly promote lesbian fiction—you folks have my respect and admiration. My editor, Medora MacDougall, is simply the best, and I’m delighted to have been able to work with her for several novels now. Erin Hodgson, thank you for taking a peek at my manuscript while it was still a work in progress and making some great suggestions. Bella Books is like a family to me, and I am grateful for their top-notch work and dedication. To my wife, Sandra, thank you for putting up with me being in my own head so much of the time! I can’t even describe how lucky I am to be able to call myself a full-time fiction writer.

  About the Author

  Tracey Richardson lives in the Georgian Bay area of Ontario, Canada, with her partner and their dogs, and grew up near Windsor, Ontario. She retired from a long-time newspaper journalism career a few years ago and devotes her time to writing, reading, playing (and watching) hockey and walking her dogs. Life is good!

  Author’s Note

  Ah, Motown music. The songs of my youth, heard while growing up a stone’s throw from Detroit, Michigan—the birthplace and heartbeat of Motown. I can so clearly remember as a kid listening on my little transistor radio to CKLW, The Big 8, a radio station shared jointly between Detroit and Windsor. It played all the best music back in the 1970s, including tons of Motown music. Motown music struck a chord in my young, music-loving soul. As my character in this novel, Claire Melbourne, says of the music, even when the songs are about getting your heart handed to you, they make you want to get up and dance. I had my own little record player back then and a nice little collection of forty-fives (they’re still in the closet at my childhood home!). The coolest thing about the Motown label back then? It featured a map of Detroit, which included a highway that ran right through my small town near the city of Windsor, Ontario. It made me feel like Motown was my music, like I too was on the map. This novel is a tribute to what I think of as some of the finest music to have emerged from the 1960s and ’70s.

  Chapter One

  Nowhere To Run To

  It’d been one of those days from hell that demanded a massive drink or five—anything, Claire Melbourne prayed, to obliterate the sting of having to fire someone and losing a scoop that turned out to be the city’s biggest story in months. It should have been their story, it was their story, right in the palm of their hands—an exclusive, a scoop, about the deputy mayor on the take. Her newspaper had been gifted the chance to break the story, and now it was too late. Rival print and broadcast news outlets had grabbed the ball and run with it, leaving her paper to follow like a dog looking for scraps. Goddammit, she thought with fresh outrage. It was the kind of story that made careers, won awards, brought in new subscribers and advertisers. They blew it. Or rather, their clueless intern blew it. Hence, the firing.

  The drink could wait. Claire palmed the keys to her mom’s—no, her—1965 convertible Mustang the color of a shiny red apple. Speed. The top down. An empty road unspooling ahead of her like a black ribbon. Music cranked to compete with the wind. It wouldn’t be enough to make her forget today, but it would be a start. Driving the old girl always gave her overloaded mind a badly needed distraction. And a cool antique car like the ’Stang with its V-8 engine was exactly the permission she needed to be a little reckless, a little daring, and a whole lot immature.

  Five minutes later the city grew smaller in the rearview mirror. The late spring sun was glorious, warming Claire’s face while the win
d tossed her collar-length, honey-blond hair in about six different directions. She tugged on her Oakley sunglasses and punched the stereo on—the only modern thing in the car because, hell, you needed a good sound system in a car like this. And on a shitty day like today, rock music, maybe even metal that she could scream to, would definitely help. But same as always, she felt the familiar tug—guilt too—and hit the pre-set button to the only oldies station in the city. It was, she was sorry to admit, sacrilegious in this car to listen to music any more contemporary than the seventies.

  Claire tightened her grip on the nubby steering wheel, its solidness making her feel connected to the road and to the machine traversing it. The steering was loose, though, not like modern cars; you had to pay attention, keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road and feel everything. No checking texts or fiddling with the radio or you’d be on the shoulder before you knew it. She never understood why her mother withdrew a big chunk of her retirement savings to buy this thing nineteen years ago. Never truly appreciated it until her mother was gone and it ended up hers, along with a simple three-bedroom ranch-style home in disrepair and a bone-dry savings account. She’d almost sold the car after the funeral, but after taking it out a couple of times, she discovered it was more liberating, more relaxing, way more playful than she had expected—something her mom would have enjoyed teasing her about. This car, her mom had told her on more than one occasion, could teach a person to appreciate life. While Claire never entirely believed her, the car stayed, and she’d not regretted it.

  She tapped the wheel distractedly. Ellie Kirkland was the girl’s—correction, the intern’s—name. Thick, wavy dark hair and big brown eyes that were too sensitive, too expressive, too vulnerable to belong to a reporter. Claire had thought so right from the get-go, but her best friend Jackson Hurley, who also happened to be Claire’s best reporter, convinced her to give Ellie a try for the twelve-month internship. Claire hadn’t wanted to. Ellie, she told Jacks, looked like she didn’t have the chops to be a reporter. Looked too trusting or something.

  “What, because she’s pretty?” he’d countered.

  “Maybe.” Pretty was for television, not print. Pretty didn’t like to get down and dirty, where the real news took place. “You know pretty doesn’t always get taken seriously, Jacks. This isn’t a goddamned fashion magazine. It’s a newspaper. A daily newspaper.”

  “What, are you saying I’m not pretty?” He batted his long blond eyelashes at her, his hand on his hip. Indeed, Jackson was far too pretty for a guy. “Fine,” he snorted. “But don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like some chauvinistic man in a three-piece suit with slicked back hair and a wife at home who won’t give him a blow job.”

  Claire was used to Jackson’s crude talk, but she rolled her eyes out of duty. He’d hit a bulls-eye with the chauvinism comment, though, and so she relented and brought Ellie aboard, because women in any business sometimes needed a hand up, especially from other women. But oh, god, how she wished now she hadn’t. What a fucking mistake! The blunder was ultimately Claire’s responsibility as city editor of the newspaper, and she was fully expecting to be called up on the carpet for it. The only silver lining, if there was one, was that she’d saved this Ellie girl a lot of future heartache by firing her, because whatever she was, she was not a reporter.

  Motown music—what else!—poured cheerfully from the speakers. The damned station was fixated on the stuff, and yes, this was Windsor with the real Motown only a stone’s throw across the Detroit River, so of course Motown was her mom’s favorite and of course Claire grew up on a steady diet of it. She’d tolerated it for her mom’s sake, but when it came to sixties and seventies music, if pressed, she preferred the pre-disco Bee Gees, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, Hendrix, Elton John, America, and of course Janis. Always Janis. Claire hadn’t been born until 1976, so her taste in music was more Prince, Madonna, Bryan Adams, The Pretenders. The stuff you could really party to. Party to like it was 1999. Every generation had its signature music. Her mom’s was Motown. Someone like Ellie, Christ, it was probably Lady Gaga or Katy Perry, or worse, Justin Bieber. Ugh!

  She glanced at the rising needle on the speedometer. The gauge was laid out horizontally on the dash with a big orange needle crawling up the miles per hour: thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five. Everything was simple in this car. A shifter on the floor between the seats, the round gas gauge with another orange needle, a headlight knob that you pulled out to turn on the lights, a cigarette lighter, windows you had to manually roll up or down. She had just finished college when her mom bought the car, and with typical know-it-all, new-to-adulthood arrogance, Claire had asked her why she hadn’t gone for a hot little foreign job. A BMW or a Porsche—something cool like that. Her mom wouldn’t bite, though. Just smiled and announced she was in love with this car and had wanted one since the day Ford began making them.

  “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Not the Diana Ross version but the Marvin Gaye-Tammi Terrell one, and Claire couldn’t stop her mouth from twisting into a smile because dammit, her mother was right. Motown music, even when the songs were about getting your heart handed to you, made you want to get up and dance. Which was exactly what her mom did whenever she played the old records or the songs came on the radio. She’d grab Claire by the hand and twirl her around in their little linoleum and Formica kitchen and dance like it was some kind of contest she wanted desperately to win. They’d spin and mimic the sleek Motown choreography, as if they were a couple of Supremes, before collapsing into a heap of giggles. For all the rough moments they’d endured together, there was always a Motown song waiting to be played.

  It struck Claire that something about this Ellie kid reminded her of her mother. Ah, yes, of course. It was that annoying, perpetually sunny outlook. The nice factor. It was what had turned her off Ellie in the first place, made her want to teach her that life wasn’t ice cream and sunshine and bright red convertibles (like this one) flying down an open highway. The newspaper business was about ferreting out controversial stories, working up contacts, sitting through boring old board meetings, or poring through two hundred pages of meeting minutes to find one decent storyline. It was about talking to murder victims’ families, watching EMTs scrape up the injured or dead from the pavement. It was about reporting on poor kids whose only good meal of the day was being cut by the school board, about city politicians or bureaucrats taking kickbacks over paving jobs and garbage pickup. The news business didn’t happen on the sunny side of the street, which was exactly where her mom, and this Ellie, preferred to dwell. It wasn’t reality, all that Pollyanna bullshit. And it didn’t get anybody anywhere. Just meant you sailed through life without a clue as to what was really going on around you. Christ.

  So many times Claire wished her mother had been a fighter, that she’d possessed even the tiniest nasty streak. Like when Claire’s dad left her for that floozy who worked at the diner out in the industrial park. Yeah, that would have been a good time for Claire’s mom to let out her inner bitch. Also, the times when he was late with child support payments or withheld them altogether because floozy Cheryl needed a new car. Nice didn’t keep your husband at home. Nice didn’t pay the mortgage. And nice sure as hell didn’t qualify you for a job in journalism. But what the hell, eh Mom? Throw on the old Motown tunes and act like none of this shit is happening to you. Yeah, that’s the way to do it, right, Ma? That’ll make it all better. Not!

  “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” was next on the hit parade, by Diana Ross and the Temptations. She knew the damned words by heart, had almost started singing them when instead she ground her teeth in frustration at how perfect this little spit in her eye was. The song was her mother’s favorite. She used to sing it to Claire when Claire was a kid, sing it while dancing her around the kitchen floor. Against Claire’s will, the memory began to soften her mood. Because whatever her shortcomings, her mom—

  “Shit! Shit!” Claire jerked the
wheel in the direction away from the furry black animal that had darted out beside her right front tire. There was a screech of rubber on pavement before the car launched into a fishtailing skid and onto the gravel shoulder, missing the animal as far as Claire could tell. She fought the wheel to hold it steady, prayed the tires did their job. They did. When the car mercifully came to a halt, Claire hopped out, pissed. Pissed that the car could have been damaged or, worse, that she could have been injured. These old cars didn’t come with airbags and side impact panels. Didn’t even come with shoulder strap seatbelts.

  She cast around for the animal that she’d like to kick into the next county, and there it was, a medium-sized, curly-haired, black dog, one of those whatcha-ma-doodle things. Labradoodle? It sat shivering in the ditch like it was the middle of winter instead of the end of May.

  Goddammit. It was looking at her with big wet brown eyes that would surely be weeping if the thing were human, but she refused to let the pathetic sight defuse her anger. “Come here, you little bastard,” she yelled, but the dog only hunkered deeper into the mud and tall grass. “Don’t make me come and get you.”

  That was exactly what it did, and Claire cursed as she hopped the ditch and grabbed the thing by the collar. Not that she’d ever be mistaken for being a dog lover, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave it there to get hit by the next car that came along. Plus it had a collar and tag, with a pink leash dangling from it—pink, for fuck sakes!—which meant it was somebody’s pet—somebody who did a shitty job of watching their pet, mind you. Piper, the bone-shaped metal tag said, with a phone number and address on the back. With one hand she hung on to the quivering dog and with the other pulled her cell phone from a cargo pocket in her pants. The line was busy. Of course it was, because it was one of those fucking days.