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Change of Life
Leigh Riker
She didn't need any more surprises…Not when Nora Pride's life was changing at a pace faster than the Indy 500. With her birthday a whisper away, she was prematurely becoming a grandmother. She'd just had her first hot flash (to her archrival's undisguised glee). And Nora had gone from primo designer to prime suspect in one day when a priceless vase disappeared from a house she'd designed.The topper–sexy detective Calvin Caine was nipping at her heels. His rough-around-the-edges authority was causing her whole world to heat up. And making her feel as empowered as a modern-day Scarlett O'Hara. As Nora set out to crack the case of the missing vase, she found an even more welcome surprise. Older didn't mean wiser. It just meant feeling more free to be yourself.
“You’re an incredible kisser.”
Caine grunted. “Out of practice.”
“Well, keep working at it. It’s coming back to you.” Nora meant herself, too. “I saw you today not only as a man,” she said, “but as a real…human being. A lonely human being, not a member of law enforcement.”
“I am a member of law enforcement.”
Nora leaned back in his embrace, enough to see his face in the moonlight. She felt entirely intent for once on not caring about others but focusing on herself, and she didn’t care. The notion was somehow freeing—for these few moments not to feel responsible for every person in her life, for everyone she loved. The day’s cooking, cleaning, entertaining, caring had drained her, leaving her vulnerable.
So had Caine’s kisses. Nora decided to indulge her notion. And herself. Not even stopping to question her actions, she whispered against his parted lips.
“And I can be a very bad girl.”
Leigh Riker
Leigh Riker is an award-winning author of thirteen novels—some, it seems, written from the back of a moving van. An Ohio native with an English degree from Kent State University, she has lived east, west, north and south, from New York to Kansas, and various points in between. In the process she “raised” one husband, two sons, four cats, several dogs, numerous guinea pigs, gerbils, birds and a horse. Always, of course, with a sense of humor.
Oddly enough, she still likes to travel, and firmly believes that change and new experiences, make life interesting.
A member of Romance Writers of America, the Authors Guild and Novelists, Inc., she is a sometime contest judge and former creative writing instructor. Always ready for a new challenge, she is now at home (for good!) in the mountains of Tennessee or in Cabo San Lucas, where she keeps trying, like her heroine in Change of Life, to become ever more and more…herself.
Please visit Leigh at her Web site, LeighRiker.com.
Change of Life
Leigh Riker
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
From the Author
Dear Reader,
Change—good, or sometimes not so good—is a part of life. Big surprise. But lucky for me, I’m a Gemini and we thrive on change.
It’s a good thing, too.
After leaving my original home base in Ohio, I spent a few years in New York City, then married and began a series of long-distance relocations that may not have suited someone born under a different astrological sign. The Gemini Twins, however, don’t like to be bored!
Like my heroine, Nora Pride, I’m always happiest at home…wherever that may be. The births of children, or grandchildren (by the time you read this, my new little granddaughter will be here), the loss of parents or beloved pets, the triumphs and challenges of career, even the progress of a marriage, are all a part of the fabric—the changes—of our lives.
Above all, these changes are essential, necessary, often exciting. They make life interesting and provide us with ever new opportunities to grow. With Nora Pride, I wanted to explore the changes we face and how we not only learn to survive them but, in the end, thrive.
And now for my next challenge…the start of a new book.
Leigh
For Aidan…
An old Irish blessing
May the wind (of change) be always at your back.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 1
N ora Pride was having a heart attack.
Wearing her best black silk power suit, in the middle of an Interior Design Association luncheon at the Sandestin Hilton, of all places, she broke out in a sweat that seemed totally unrelated to the still-blistering end-of-September day outside the posh Florida hotel. The grand ballroom’s frigid air-conditioning wasn’t doing her a bit of good.
Her pulse raced. It skipped then thumped, hard, and Nora coughed twice, a knee-jerk physical reaction that tried to stabilize the beat. She prided herself, so to speak, on her appearance. On keeping up appearances, in fact.
My God, I can’t die in public. That would be humiliating.
Nora fumbled through her handbag for her cell phone, ever ready not only for a quick business deal but also for any emergency, like her mother’s unexpected coronary several years ago, in case Nora was needed again in a hurry. Now, it seemed, her own life was at risk. Still, she hesitated to pull out the phone and make a fuss.
At the podium someone droned on.
“…and with the Gulf area’s incredible growth rate in housing—a boom that seems to have no end or even a peak—our design talents in this region will continue to be highly sought…”
Nora didn’t hear the rest. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. She suddenly felt light-headed. Should she call 911, or was that premature? She would hate calling in a false alarm, but as her daughter often pointed out, Nora was much better at caring for others than for herself.
Pulse still pounding, she tried to restore a sense of inner calm. This might be simple anxiety, an everyday, garden-variety panic attack. True, she’d never had one before, but…
Weren’t cardiac events more typical in the early morning than at noon? Whew, the room did seem hot. Nora glanced across the table. Her gaze landed on her longtime nemesis, Starr Mulligan, with whom Nora had disagreed again only yesterday about a new client they both wanted—badly.
The memory provided a brief distraction. Nora’s business, in particular, had been thriving until the past couple of years. During a pair of especially powerful hurricane seasons, some of her clients had, sadly, lost their homes, and until they rebuilt their devastated properties they obviously had no use for Nora’s design services. There were no interiors. Then more recently, another, luckier client had reneged on his payment, and although Nora didn’t want to refer the account to a collection agency, she needed the money. Her cash flow was hurting, and the competition with Starr wasn’t helping her financial picture. Despite some personal misgivings about the new client they both wanted, Nora still needed the job.
Starr reminded her of Elizabeth Taylor soon after her first marriage to Richard Burton. A few pounds too heavy but still attractive, if not the stunning beauty Liz had been in her youth, with that same dark hair and those arresting lavender eyes.
Nora wasn’t mean-spirited by nature. She liked helping people, and she wanted to get along with Starr. But no matter what Nora did, they always seemed to wind up at each other’s throats. And it was Nora who tended to back down, to let Starr win.
At the moment, Starr’s coal-black hair failed to reflect the overhead light, and her normally piercing gaze stayed as dull as dust—Starr’s usual reaction to a boring after-lunch speaker. For a second, Nora forgot her own problems to wonder if Starr had fallen asleep with her eyes open. Maybe she was like a canary in a coal mine, and too much carbon monoxide floating through the cold air had zapped her into wide-eyed yet vague unconsciousness. Now it was causing Nora to…blush.
She reached for her napkin to fan herself.
Women didn’t have heart attacks at her age. Her birthday might be circled on her calendar next week in red—Nora would turn fifty—but she had hoped for more time before she had to fret about her health like Leonard Hackett, one of her favorite clients, who could be a world-class hypochondriac.
She couldn’t die. People needed her. Her mother, Maggie, who had already lived two-thirds of her life playing the helpless widow, was beginning to fail. Sooner or later she would require Nora’s help, whether or not Maggie wanted it. Then there were Nora’s two grown children. Savannah and Browning might sometimes accuse Nora of intruding in their lives (meddling was the word they used), but they, too, needed her. And what about her friends? Her dog?
But then, as if she’d been sacked like a quarterback during the Super Bowl, the truth struck her. Nora dropped her napkin with a soft plop on the linen tablecloth and jerked upright on her ivory damask-upholstered chair. Her eyes again met Starr’s across the round table.
And wouldn’t you know? Starr couldn’t resist arching a penciled eyebrow, which drew the attention of several other people in their circle. Worse for Nora, in the suddenly too-quiet ballroom Starr’s voice rang out like a Buddhist temple gong for all to hear.
“Hot flash, darling?”
“Mark, you have to do something,” Nora murmured later that afternoon, flat on her back in her gynecologist’s examining room. The peaceful blue and gray decor, which Nora had done, didn’t soothe her, but to her immense relief he had squeezed her into his schedule. Nora gazed down her body at her spread legs in the stainless steel stirrups she had hated since before her first pregnancy.
Dr. Mark Fingerhut patted her hand. “Nora, relax.”
His touch felt warm, comforting. He must remember her tendency to overreact.
“Why do you always say that? Relax? You know I despise white coats.” Actually, she adored him—all of his patients did—if not, at the moment, the specialty he had chosen to make his living.
Mark pushed his stool back from the exam table. He flicked dark hair from his eyes. They were brown, like bitter chocolate, but compassionate.
“Listen. I know you’re feeling a bit needy…”
“What I need, apparently, is to take ten years off my life.”
“Would that be chronological?” he said, sounding amused. “Or biological? There’s a difference, you know.” But of course he could afford to look smug. To Nora, he appeared too young to be a doctor at all, much less a highly respected gynecologist. And her daughter, Savannah, who was perhaps his newest patient, agreed with Nora. His boyish smile belied the fact that he was pushing forty.
“I have women in their early forties who are perimenopausal,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Fresh panic beat inside her like a hummingbird’s strong yet delicate wings.
Mark sighed, but his dark eyes twinkled behind his black oversize frames.
“In a way, you’re overdue.” With a quick glance at her chart, he snapped off his latex gloves. “Fifty—actually, 50.8—is the median age at which women in this country stop ovulating, which means some do when they’re slightly younger, others a bit later. Like those women, you’re about to undergo what was euphemistically known before the sexual revolution and women’s lib as The Change. These days, we tell it like it is.”
Her heart sank. “My ovaries are dying.”
“Well, not exactly. Slowing down, I’d say.” His smile broke through as he smoothed his hair. “You can sit up now. Put on your clothes and I’ll see you in my office. Then we’ll talk.”
“About what?”
He stepped out of the room into the hall. “Your future. There are some choices of treatment for your symptoms we need to consider.”
Symptoms? Alone, like the dying woman she’d feared she was at lunch, she saw her life flash before her eyes. Her childhood, alone with Maggie after Nora’s father died. Her marriage to Wilson, and the flaming torch she’d carried for years after their divorce. The births of her two children, and the joy they had given her, and still did. Despite her recent attempts to smooth away the lines of experience with a little Botox, and those necessary thrice-weekly trips to the gym to keep in reasonable shape, she was clearly, in Mark’s opinion, on her way out.
In the empty room, squishing excess K-Y jelly, Nora wriggled into her panties and skirt, tucked in her silk top and then slipped into her shoes. Blinking, she grabbed her jacket.
“The future,” she murmured.
She ducked out of the exam room into the corridor, then bypassed Mark’s office and kept going toward the reception area and the door that faced the elevator in the hall. He could be wrong. Naturally, Nora had attended informative lectures (only half listening), read the occasional magazine article on the topic (and instantly dismissed it as irrelevant), and talked to her friends (who all suddenly seemed older than she was). She’d thought she was prepared. But this was her. One silly hot flash didn’t mean she was entering another stage of her life.
Menopause—she shuddered at the term—happened to other women.
Not to Nora Pride.
On her way home, Nora stopped at Starbucks for a mocha Frappuccino, her preferred grande size, although she wasn’t sure it would be a big enough pick-me-up today. Back in the car, she pulled out her cell phone to call her mother. In spite of their usual differences, she needed to hear Maggie’s voice, needed perhaps to weep in Maggie’s sympathetic ear.
Unfortunately, as was often the case, she didn’t get the chance.
When Maggie answered, Nora said brightly, “Hi, it’s me. I know it’s been a while,” she added so Maggie wouldn’t point out that Nora hadn’t phoned last week. “How are you?”
“How else would I be? I’m bored. I watch CNN all day. At six o’clock I switch to Fox News. My balanced diet of current events,” she said. “Big whoop.” Her tone changed in a heartbeat from dry to sad. “If I watch enough TV, it helps me—a little—to bear up after losing your father.”
Nora zipped along in the rush-hour traffic, the AC on high, sipping at her Frappuccino while speaking into her hands-free phone. She envisioned her mother’s graying hair, corkscrewed into the unflattering style Maggie still preferred. Nora could almost see her mother’s baggy house dress and her white ankle socks scrunched down into the heels of her worn-over, laced-up shoes. Like some Ice Age mummy, in forty years of widow-hood Maggie hadn’t changed.
“Daddy died when I was ten.” Nora willed herself to find the patience she had lost earlier in the day. She threaded her way between an SUV and a semitrailer rig on the narrow stretch of Route 98 that led through Destin. “We both miss him. But isn’t it time you got past that, and went on with your life?”
“Life? I’m seventy-five years old,” Maggie informed her as if Nora didn’t know.
Nora’s pulse hitched. “Are you feeling all right? I told you to make an appointment with your cardiologist. If you want me to, I can take you.” It wasn’t that far from Destin to the Commonwealth of Virginia, but sometimes just far enough for Nora’s peace of mind. Now she felt worried. She could block out the time on her schedule, even cancel a few appointments if she had to, to spend a couple of days with her mother. Take care of business, meaning her mother’s health.
With luck, maybe Maggie would welcome Nora’s company.
