Night Fever

1990. The elevator was crowded. Rebecca Cullen was trying to balance three cups in a box without spilling coffee all over the floor. Maybe if she learned to do this really well, she thought, she could join a circus and go on stage with her performance. The lids on the Styrofoam cups weren't secure — as usual. The man who worked the counter at the small drugstore downstairs didn't look twice at women like Rebecca, and who cared if coffee spilled all over a thin, nondescript woman in an out-of-style gray suit?

He probably figured her for Ms. Businesswoman, she thought — some rabid man-hater with a string of degrees after her name and a career in place of a husband and kids. Wouldn't he be shocked to see her at home on Granddad's farm, in cutoff jeans and a tank top in supper, which this wasn't, with her mass of gold-streaked light brown hair down to her waist, and barefoot? This suit was pure camouflage.

Becky was a country girl, and the sole support of her retired grandfather and her two younger brothers. Their mother had died when she was sixteen and their father only stopped in to visit when he was broke and needed money. He ... read full excerpt from Night Fever ebook