“Is it bad news?”
“Yes and no,” she whispered. “Sophie says she needs a place to hide and a job.”
“To hide? From what?”
“She doesn’t say,” Kim said.
Travis sat down on the bed beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. “If you want to go home, we can.”
“No,” Kim said. “Sophie said I wasn’t to do that. I—” Her head came up. “I’m going to call Betsy.”
“Who’s that?”
“My brother’s office manager. Reede doesn’t know it, but he’s getting a new employee.” She held the phone to her ear.
Travis stood up. “Sounds to me like you’re matchmaking.”
“Heavens no! Reede and Sophie? It could never work. She’s too smart, too nice for my brother. However, I think I’ll send my cousin Roan an e-mail and ask him to look in on Sophie.”
Travis shook his head as he sat down in a comfortable chair and opened a newspaper. It looked like his wife was going to be a while in organizing her friend’s life.
Behind the paper he smiled. He was sure he was the happiest man on the planet. “Take your time,” he said. “We have a lifetime ahead of us.”
Continue reading for an exclusive excerpt from
MOONLIGHT MASQUERADE
By Jude Deveraux
February 2013
From Pocket Books
Prologue
Edilean, Virginia
“I quit!” Heather said. “I cannot take any more of that man’s bad temper.”
She was in the outer office of Dr. Reede Aldredge’s medical clinic and she was talking to Alice and Betsy. Alice wanted to retire and she was nearly desperate for Heather, young, recently married, and new to Edilean, to take on her job. But Heather was having a difficult time adjusting to Dr. Reede’s sharp tongue. Betsy and Alice referring to it as his “perfectionism” wasn’t helping Heather to adjust. “He never says a pleasant word.”
“But what he does say is usually right,” Alice said, her face encouraging.
“Yes, but it’s the way he says it. Today I said, ‘Good morning,’ he says, ‘I’m inside so how would I know?’ And yesterday, he told Mrs. Casein that her only problem was that she ate too many of her husband’s pies.”
Betsy and Alice just looked at her. Betsy was in her late forties and had lived in Edilean since she was six. She was glad she wasn’t a nurse as Heather was. Instead, she sat at the computer all day and answered the phone—and that kept her away from young Dr. Reede for most of the workday.
Heather understood the looks the women were giving her. “I know, I know,” she said. “That’s true about the pies, but couldn’t he at least try to be diplomatic? Hasn’t he even heard of a bedside manner? Last week Sylvia Garland left here crying. He wasn’t at all sympathetic.”
The two women again gave her a look.
“What?!” Heather asked, exasperated. She’d moved to Edilean because her husband worked nearby and he said the small town would be a great place to raise kids. And Heather had been thrilled to get a nursing job so close to their new house. But that was three weeks ago and now she didn’t know if she could stay there. All this week she’d been saying she was going to quit.
Betsy spoke first. “Everyone in town except her husband knows that Sylvia Garland isn’t going out with the girls on Thursday nights. She’s sleeping around—and Dr. Reede told her so.”
“What business is that of his?”
“Communicable diseases, I guess,” Alice said. “Besides, he’s used to working with people who have serious problems, like elephantiasis and leprosy.”