One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1)

One Way to Succeed

A Casas de Buen Dia Novel

By Marjorie Pinkerton Miller

Sunacumen Press

Palm Springs, CA

Marjorie Pinkerton Miller is the romance genre pen name of Marj Charlier, whose previous contemporary women’s novels include
Thwack!, Professional Lies, Hacienda: A South American Romance, Drive for Dough
and
Putt for Show
.

Copyright 2016 Marj Charlier

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Marj Charlier, or as expressly permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, likenesses or other resemblances to companies, businesses, characters, places, and organizations are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual person, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.

Cover design: Marj Charlier

Cover photo: istock.com

The day had started out like most weekdays: Amy dragged herself out of bed at 5:15, once again leaving herself less than an hour to get ready for work. She always intended to get up when the alarm rang at five—she was awake by then anyway—but obedience wasn’t her long suit.

The usual, chaotic rush to shower, throw on some mascara, and pull on a clean uniform gave her no time to fuss with her hair. She pulled it back into a stubby ponytail, dressed it up with a bright blue ribbon, and squirted a quick spritz of hairspray on top to keep the stray hairs out of her eyes.

“Not good, but plenty good enough,” she critiqued her reflection in the rearview mirror as she backed her convertible out of the garage. Even with little make-up and no curls, her looks were striking enough to turn heads, especially, it seemed, when she didn’t want them to.

The little two-seater BMW was perfect for her short commute, and quick trips to the grocery store or to bars and restaurants around town, even though it too sporty and small to trust out on the highway. Amy knew it was extravagant for a single woman to have two cars, but she hated trying to wedge her hulking SUV into tight parking spots around Palm Springs, and hated having to wrestle with the stiff steering of little convertible when she drove to Los Angeles. She needed them both.

She drove the two miles to work, parked in the back lot, and tied on her apron. She nodded hello to the cook in the kitchen and then to Katie who walked in after her, and got busy making coffee and opening up the blinds to signal the Best Little Café was ready for customers.

By the time the breakfast customers dispersed four hours later and wended their way down the street to what she thought of as “real” jobs, Amy was halfway through her shift. She looked up at the empty booths, retied her hair ribbon, and sat down at the counter with her first cup of coffee of the day. She propped her iPad up in front of her and pulled up her list of job-sites.

“Any luck on the job search front?” Katie asked, wiping down the counter around Amy’s coffee mug. The other early morning waitress at the café, Katie had become Amy’s best friend over the past two months, ever since Rob left and the sycophants who had once surrounded them had pulled away.

“Nah,” Amy shook her head. “I don’t know why I even look anymore.”

“I’m surprised,” Katie stopped, scrunched her pretty face up in an exaggerated scowl, and tossed her long, blond ponytail behind her back. She rarely did anything without a theatrical flair. Years on stage at the amateur playhouse theatre in town had imbedded a kind of melodramatic habit to even her most quotidian actions and exchanges. The coffee shop’s regular customers and employees were accustomed to her histrionics, but every now and then, a tourist would wander into their mostly local joint, and do a double take at Katie’s over-the-top greeting. More than once, overwhelmed and perhaps a bit frightened by her enthusiasm, they walked right back out the door.

That was fine with Katie and Amy. They weren’t particularly fond of tourists, anyway. They didn’t tip nearly as well as the regulars.

“Why?” Amy asked, scrolling down through the job postings on Monster.com. “Why are you surprised?”

“It seems you have an awful lot of great experience.”

“Yup, you’d think so.” It was true. Amy had held good jobs in public relations, accounting, and hotel management over the past decade, as she moved around the country with Rob, her TV anchor boyfriend. He was constantly on the move, climbing up from one small TV market to a slightly bigger one, to a slightly bigger one until he hit the big time and moved to Los Angeles nearly two months ago. This time, however, she didn’t follow him.

“What do you think the problem is?” Katie put her hands on her hips and her weight on one leg, just like she would on stage when she wanted to telegraph curiosity.

“Too many things, too little tenure at any one of them,” Amy said. She reached for her coffee cup without taking her eyes of the screen and knocked it over. The hot liquid spread quickly over the Formica.

“Oh shit!” Katie exclaimed, reaching for the cup in time to keep it from rolling off the counter, and jumping back as if she was being attacked by a raging wildfire. “Maybe if you weren’t such a klutz!”

Amy rolled her eyes at Katie’s exaggerated alarm. “Calm down,” she said, grabbing a handful of napkins out of the dispenser and soaking up the spilled liquid. “No harm done. I’ll clean it up. Coffee was pretty awful anyway.”

She spun off the counter stool and tossed the soggy mess in the big trash can by the front entrance. She stopped and stared out at the narrow street, lined with parked cars. The sun had climbed high enough in the sky to slip above the concrete awning over the door, and she reached for the cord to pull the blinds all the way to the top.

“Quiet day,” she said, staring out at the brightly-lighted asphalt. In another hour or so, the sticky surface would be too hot to walk on with bare feet, and too soft to support high heels. It was already late September, but summer in the Coachella Valley could last well into October. Until it started to cool off significantly, the snowbirds that swelled the population in the winter months would stay away.

She turned to head to the kitchen. “I should probably tell Carlos to go light on the potato salad today or it will go to waste.”

“Right,” Katie said, taking Amy’s vacated seat at the counter with a glass of juice. She pointed out the window. “Hey, here comes a potential customer.”

Amy turned back to watch a big stray dog wander from the vacant lot across the street and step off the curb between the parallel-parked cars. He headed straight across the street towards the café door as if he had decided a grilled cheese sandwich was just what he needed right then.

“He looks a lot like the dog we had when I was a kid,” Amy said, smiling at the memory. “I wonder—“

“Aaaaahhhh!” Katie screamed and pointed again. A convertible, exactly like the one Amy had driven to work that day, had turned the corner and now screeched to a stop in front of them. The dog leapt forward to get out of the way but not fast enough. The bumper struck one of the dog’s hind legs, and the shepherd crumpled onto the side of the street next to the gutter.

Amy was out the door before the driver got out of the car. She knelt down on the street next to the dog, supporting herself with one hand on the curb, and put the other hand in front of his nose. He was stunned but alive; collarless but well-groomed. He sniffed her fingers and closed his eyes as if trying to block out pain.

“Is he okay?” Amy heard the driver ask as she gently ran her hands down the dog’s legs. He flinched when she touched the one struck by the bumper.

“I think so, but I think his leg is broken.”

She looked up at the man standing above her. His face was obscured by the bright sun behind his head, but his physique—tall, thin, athletic—was obvious. For a moment, she focused on the figure towering over her.

His posture radiated the kind of confidence and charisma she had come to associate with trust funders. There were plenty of them in the valley—rich boys whose mamas supported their lifestyles of partying and shopping and cruising while patiently waiting for their perfect sons to grow up. These young men’s poise was magnetic, which was why they were seldom alone, and they remained single only because they were determined to stay that way.

“Here, let me.” Breaking his own spell over Amy, the driver squatted down beside her and reached out to check the animal’s spine, running one hand down his back while cradling the animal’s head with the other. The dog lifted his head up and tried to lick his hand.

“I think his back is fine,” the driver said. “He seems friendly enough.”

Amy should have been watching the dog, but as they knelt close together over the animal, she couldn’t help studying the man’s face. He wasn’t as young as his posture had suggested. She guessed he was at least thirty. Even though his clean-shaven face was still boyish, his hair had started to turn gray at the temples, and he was dressed in an expensive but conservative business suit, not the usual Hawaiian shirt and khaki cargo shorts of the trusters. He looked into the dog’s eyes and smiled as if willing the mutt to trust him.

“I’m going to try to pick him up,” he said, turning his face toward her for the first time. She registered the depth of the color of his dark brown eyes. “Will you open my passenger door for me?”

“In your suit? Are you sure?” Amy wasn’t sure she could stand up herself. Her knees felt weak, and she knew it had less to do with the dog’s injuries than the face of the man next to her.

“My suit is the least of his worries.” The man smiled, making her knees even weaker.

“Where are you going to take him?”

“There’s an emergency vet down on Indian Canyon,” he said. “That’s the closest one, I think.” He slid his arms under the dog’s belly and lifted it gently and with some effort. Amy guessed the dog must have weighed at least seventy pounds.

“I wish I could help.” Amy struggled to her feet and supported the dog’s head as the driver gently laid him down on the leather passenger seat. “But I really can’t leave work.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got him.” He carefully closed the passenger door and ran around the front of the car. He ducked low into his seat and threw the car into gear.

Amy stepped back and stood in the street, shaking as the car disappeared around the corner. She took a deep breath and wiped at tears streaming down her face; she hadn’t realized until then that she was crying.

Katie was waiting for her back on the sidewalk. She put her arm on Amy’s shoulder and led her through the door of the café.

“Is he going to be okay?” Katie asked in a rare, calm voice. “Are you okay?”

“I didn’t even get his name,” Amy whined.

“The dog?”

“No. Not the dog. Well, I guess the dog too. But no, I wasn’t talking about the dog.”

~

Usually Amy went home straight from work to fill out the applications and write cover letters for whatever job openings she’d found during her breaks that were worth applying for. There weren’t many, even though she had become less picky over the past two years since she moved to Palm Springs, and even less picky than that once Rob left the valley for Los Angeles. She had started out looking for accounting jobs, and then public relations or marketing jobs at accounting firms, and then any public relations job, and now, just about anything that looked like it might pay more than minimum wage and provided health insurance.

Today, however, she hadn’t even found one of those. Instead of sitting down at the computer and searching some more, she reached into her kitchen wine refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Pinot Grigio. She had waited on nearly one hundred customers at the café since the morning incident with the dog and the mystery driver, but she still felt a little shaky from it. She could use a little calming fluid.

It was the dog, she told herself. It was the injured dog that shook her up. Not the man who rescued him.

The shepherd, clearly a mix and not a purebred, reminded her of the last dog she had as a child, the one who had lived with her family up to a year before she left for college. She thought she would never stop crying when it died—from a variety of old age ailments—and swore she’d never put herself through that again. No more dogs, no more broken hearts.

“Yeah, right,” she snarled at her attempt to convince herself. She sat down at the breakfast bar with the bottle and a tall goblet. “It’s the dog you’re thinking about. Yup. Sure it is.”

She poured an ounce of the white wine into her glass and swallowed it quickly. Maybe a quick shot of alcohol would calm her down and help get rid of the lingering picture in her mind—the picture of the driver looking at her with those deep brown eyes.

She had no reason to obsess over him. Brown eyes had never been her thing. Rob, for example, had the light blue eyes and blond hair of his German ancestors. That was the look she’d always been attracted to. And, as small a town as Palm Springs was, she’d never seen Mr. Brown Eyes before, so she had no reason to believe she’d ever see him again.  And that was for the best.  She needed to focus on her future, and right now, her future had nothing to do with another man who would drag her around the country and keep her from ever realizing her professional potential.

Whatever that was.

Rob thought her obsession with a career was silly. His success and his rapidly rising stardom would be enough for both of them, he told her. He made plenty of money and she knew that as long as his ego was assuaged, he would never understand why she needed to succeed too.

They had been together for six years, passing through three TV markets in that time, making quick friends thanks to Rob’s affability and both of their good looks, losing those friends as they moved on, and not talking about her dissatisfaction with the jobs she was settling for. He didn’t want to talk about it. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to ruin what she had—life in nice digs, plenty of spending money, being part of the popular new couple in town.

Then, suddenly, they weren’t the popular new couple in town anymore; he was still as popular as ever, but she was no longer at his side. Apparently Rob started to believe that having her along limited his possibilities—especially the possibility of accepting the companionship, so to speak, of the all of gorgeous young women who threw themselves at him. Their eagerness had grown as his TV celebrity grew and his face matured. Every single, straight woman in town had a crush on him, whatever her age, and the more the women swooned, the cockier and less trustworthy he got.