Dying to Get Published Read Online Free PDF Page A

But then, she supposed, all outdoor porches in Georgia, French or otherwise, could be termed verandas.
    The stars twinkled in the black of the night. The breeze was unusually warm for so early in spring. The food—well, the food was adequate. What could she say? Dining out is a mixed blessing for a caterer, especially one who worked for a cook as exacting as Dee Dee.
    But the wine—the wine was yummy. And deceptive. One glass was normally Jennifer's limit, and she'd had two. If Sam had looked gorgeous before, he was looking downright heavenly about now.
    "So you're a caterer and you write books on the side. What'd you major in at college that you wound up doing something like that?"
    Jennifer almost choked on the sip of wine she was savoring. She coughed and cleared her throat. "Psychology."
    "Psychology?"
    "Yeah. I like to think of it as one of those freedom majors."
    "What do you mean—a freedom major?"
    "You can't do anything with it, so you're free to do whatever you want."
    "Yeah. I got one of those, too. English."
    She raised her wine glass in a mock toast.
    Sam leaned closer. "I want to ask you something else."
    "Blue," she said. "At the moment, it's a deep, dark blue." She stared into his eyes. "But this afternoon it was more of a mauve, and yesterday—"
    "What are you talking about?" he asked, taking the wine glass from her hand and setting it next to his, well out of her reach.
    She blinked and shook her head. "Ask away."
    "When you're catering an event, I suppose you hear a lot of what's going on. How do people react to you?"
    "Like furniture. I like to think of myself as a nice, mahogany sideboard—eighteenth century American."
    "Elegant, classic. I can see how…"  He shook his head. "My God, I'm beginning to understand you."
    She smiled. The wine was definitely giving her a warm fuzzy glow. "They either treat me like furniture or they hit on me.  But mostly it's furniture. One time at a bar mitzvah some joker was telling his wife about sleeping with her best friend. He'd gotten her off in a corner, and I swung by with a salver. I heard the whole sorry story while she cried, and I cried, and she stuffed her mouth with cheese straws. The three of us—we could have been in their den at home—with me as the TV tray."
    Sam nodded. "Good. When Steve Moore calls you for a catering job, I want you to take it."
    She pinched off a piece of warm, crusty bread and popped it into her mouth. The conversation was taking a decidedly unpleasant turn. Jennifer screwed up her face. She sensed some of the aggressiveness she had found so irritating in Sam at the wedding breaking through his perfect-man veneer.
    She swallowed. "I don't like him. He's yucky."
    "Of course you don't like him, but I'm asking you do it anyway. Don't worry. I'll be there with you."
    "You? Not without a TB test, you won't." She shook the fog she had encouraged from her mind. The flow of the conversation was finally falling into place. Mr. White Roses Sam was attempting to seduce her into her catering outfit, not out of her intimate apparel. How dare he use her like that?
    "What'd he do? Kill somebody?"
    "He didn't exactly do anything. He wrote a book that could well become a bestseller."
    She rolled her eyes. "So who, other than me, hasn't?"
    "Do you remember when Kyle Browning committed suicide last fall?"
    "Sure. I always liked him when he was on national TV. Then he got mixed up in that scandal when all those news people died in that hurricane in the Carolinas, and he got banished from New York to Macon. And then he jumped off the Channel 14 building like that…. It didn't make any sense. The skyscrapers are a lot higher in New York."
    "Some of us don't think Browning's death was a suicide, and—"
    "And you think Moore knows something. So why don't you just ask him?"
    "I did. He's not talking—at least not to me. "
    "If you think Moore is saving his secrets for his book, then you'll have no story once the book is out. You'll look like one of