Welcome to Temptation

Welcome to Temptation
Book Jacket

Series:
Dempsey [1]

Rating:

Tags:
American Light Romantic Fiction, Fiction - Romance, Romance: Modern, Humorous, Documentary films, Contemporary, Fiction, Romance, General, Motion picture actors and actresses, Sisters, Romance - Contemporary, Ohio, Women motion picture producers and directors, City and town life, Romance - General

EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Turn left at small town secrets...

Sophie Dempsey is content living a quiet life filming wedding videos until an assignment brings her to Temptation, Ohio. From the moment she drive into town, she gets a bad feeling; Sophie is from the wrong side of the tracks and everything in Temptation is a little too right. And when she has a run-in with the town's unnervingly sexy mayor, Phineas Tucker, making a little movie turns out to be more than a little dangerous.

Yield to oncoming desire...

All Sophie wants to do is film the video and head home. All Phin wants to do is play pool with the police chief and keep things peaceful. They both get more than they bargained for when Sophie's video causes an uproar and the proper citizens of Temptation set out to shut them down.

Welcome to temptation...

As event spiral out of control, Sophie and Phin find themselves caught in a web of gossip, blackmail, adultery, murder, and really excellent sex. All hell breaks loose in Temptation as Sophie and Phin fall deeper and deeper in trouble...and in love.

Sophie Dempsey didn't like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her '86 Civic, broke her sister's sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.

Half an hour earlier, Sophie's sister Amy had been happily driving too fast down Highway 32, her bright hair ruffling in the wind as she sang "In the Middle of Nowhere" with Dusty Springfield on the tape deck. Maple trees had waved cheerfully in the warm breeze, cotton clouds had bounced across the blue, blue sky, and the late-August sun had blasted everything in sight.

And Sophie had felt a chill, courtesy, she was sure, of the sixth sense that had kept generations of Dempseys out of jail most of the time.

"Slow down," she told Amy. "There's no need to rush." She stared out the window as she twisted the rings on her middle fingers. More riotously happy, southern Ohio landscape. That couldn't be good.

"Oh, relax." Amy peered at Sophie over the top of her cat's-eye sunglasses. "It's a video shoot, not a bank heist. What could go wrong?"

"Don't
say
that." Sophie sank lower in her seat. "Anytime anybody in a movie says, 'What could go wrong?' something goes wrong."

A green sign that read
Temptation 1/4 Mile
loomed ahead, and Sophie reviewed her situation for the eleventh time that hour. She was going to a small town to make an unscripted video for a washed-up actress she didn't trust. There were going to be problems. They'd show up at any minute, like bats, dive-bombing them from out of nowhere. A strand of her dark curly hair blew across her eyes, and she jammed it back into the knot on top of her head with one finger. "Bats," she said out loud, and Amy said,

"What?"

Sophie let her head fall back against the seat. "We can't stop here. This is bat country."

"Johnny Depp ," Amy said. "
Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas . Stop quoting. There's nothing to be nervous about, you're just overreacting." She turned off the highway and onto the old road that led into Temptation. The exit was marked by a shiny new gas station and a less shiny but still-plastic Larry's Motel.

"Colorful," Amy said.

"Trouble," Sophie said.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," Amy said. "It's not the Bates Motel."

"You have no idea how dangerous small towns are." Sophie scowled out the window. "You were only ten when we moved to the city. You can't remember what hell all those little places we lived in were."

"Sophie."

"And it's not as if we have a plan." Sophie stared with deep suspicion as they passed a blackened, log-built bar that sported a rusting neon sign:
Temptation Tavern. Beer. Music.
"It's all very well for
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Clea to say, 'We'll improvise,' but even if this is just an audition video, I need more of a script than, 'Clea goes back to her creepy hometown and meets her long-lost love, Fred.'"

"Frank." Amy shook her head. "I don't believe you. We're finally filming something besides a wedding, and all you can say is, 'Trouble ahead,' and, 'Why can't we stay in Cincinnati ?' and, 'I don't trust Clea.'

Face it, the only reason you don't like Clea is because she dumped Davy to marry a TV anchorman. That's very sisterly of you, but it's time to get over it."

"That's not it," Sophie said. "I don't know what it is, it's just—"

"Come on, Sophie. This is good for you. It gets you away from Brandon ." Oh, yeah, sure this is good for me, Sophie thought, but Amy couldn't help it. It was in her blood to turn everything into a con.

"Why you're dating your therapist is beyond me," Amy was saying. "Your health insurance covered his fees."

"My ex-therapist." Sophie squinted at the deserted tree-lined road before them. Ominous. "It saved a lot of time. You don't know what a relief it was not to have to explain the family to him."

"You know sometimes I think it's just our destiny to be bad." Amy took her eyes off the road to smile at Sophie. "What do you say we quit making wedding videos and fall like the rest of the Dempseys?"

"No," Sophie said. "The fall will kill us."

She waited for an argument, but Amy was already distracted. "Oh, wow." She leaned forward and slowed the car. "Gotta love these road signs."

Sophie read the battered white-and-black signs:
Temptation Rotary Club, First Lutheran
church of Temptation , Temptation Ladies' club, Temptation Nighttime Theater. The last one was a corroded green-and-cream metal sign that said,
Welcome to Temptation
. Under it a smaller sign in the same rusted antique green said,
Phineas T. Tucker, Mayor
. And under that, a newer but still battered sign said,
We Believe in Family Values.

"Get me out of here," Sophie said.

"Can you imagine how old Phineas T. must be if the sign is that rusted?" Amy said. "Older than God. Hasn't had sex since the Bicentennial. Do you think the Church of Temptation is like the Church of Baseball ?"

"Not if it's Lutheran," Sophie said.

Then they crested the hill and there was Temptation.

"Pleasantville," Amy said, taking off her sunglasses.

"Almightyville," Sophie said.

The town proper was on the other side of a muddy river that streamed sullenly under a gunmetal bridge at the bottom of the hill. Beyond the bridge, the land rose up green and lush behind smug little
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brick-and-frame houses, and as the hills rose, the houses got bigger, much bigger. Sophie knew the kind of people who lived in houses like that. Not Her Kind. "It's quiet," she told Amy as they started down the hill. "Too quiet." But Amy was gaping at something in the distance.

"Oh my God!" Amy pulled off the road. "Look at that water tower!"

"What?" Sophie leaned forward to look.

The flesh-colored, bullet-shaped tower thrust through the trees at the top of the hill, so aggressively phallic that Sophie forgot to fidget with her rings as she stared at it. "Hello. Do you suppose they did that on purpose? I mean, you couldn't
accidentally
paint it to look like that, could you?"

"Maybe Phineas T. is compensating. I don't care.
I love this town
." Amy handed Sophie her sunglasses, yanked her orange tube top into place, and reached between the seats for her camera. "My God, the visual opportunities. Change places with me."

"Why?" Sophie said, but she climbed over the stick shift and into the driver's seat as Amy got out of the car. "Okay, the water tower is cute, but 'I bet the Chinese food here is terrible.'" When Amy gave her a dirty look, she said, "I'm not whining, it's a line.
My Cousin Vinny
." Sophie squinted out at the road. "I
will
bet they don't have a decent pool table. Probably outlawed them. Where are we going now?"

"Back to the beginning." Amy got in the passenger-side door. "I have to get all of this. The Church of Temptation , Phineas T. Tucker, and that big hard-on of a water tower. This is our opening – credits crawl."

"Can we film in public without a permit?" Sophie put on Amy's sunglasses with only a brief thought as to how pink plastic and rhinestones would look with her plain white blouse and khaki shorts. She double-checked the road and then pulled out and made a U-turn. "Because breaking the law is out."

"They'll never know," Amy said, sounding way too much like their father. She braced the camera on the window and added, "I'll keep watch this way and you keep an eye on the rearview in case somebody comes up behind us. Go about five miles an hour. I want to get all of this." Sophie drove back to where the signs began and turned around, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror as Amy filmed. All they needed was to get rear-ended by some irate Citizen of Temptation—

Then, as they reached the crest of the hill, the beige Caddy zoomed out of a side road that Sophie hadn't even seen and smashed into their front fender.