Maizie ran, the high-end cleaning service that belonged to Cecilia or the popular catering business that had initially begun in Theresa’s kitchen—were once more required.
Cecilia frowned at the hand she had been dealt and separated four of the five cards she held, disdainfully putting them face down on the table.
“Well, I don’t know if this constitutes a ‘project,’” she began offhandedly, “But Anastasia Del Vecchio was carrying on again about her son’s single status. The last time I was overseeing the cleaning crew at her mausoleum of a house, she told me that she would be going on tour in this revival for the next six months. She would really love to leave him and her granddaughter in good hands.”
Maizie paused, thinking. Remembering. “Her son’s that writer, isn’t he? The one who writes those bestselling thrillers, right?”
“Brandon Slade.” Cecilia supplied the author’s name. “I clean both their houses.” She leaned slightly forward, sharing a confidence. “Brandon is rather organized for a man. As for her, Anastasia couldn’t pick up after herself if her life depended on it.”
“She’s an actress. It’s not part of her repertoire,” Maizie commented with a soft laugh. “As for hoping to leave her son in ‘good hands,’ I’m sure someone as famous and successful as Brandon Slade never lacks for female companionship.”
“There’s a difference between ‘female companionship’ and a woman of substance, the kind a man could spend the rest of his life with,” Theresa interjected with a knowing expression.
The others knew she was referring to what would have, until recently, described her son Kullen’s situation. The highly successful, handsome young lawyer had once had a different woman on his arm every week. They had arranged things so that he reconnected with the only woman who had ever meant anything to him. A woman, thanks to them, he would soon marry.
Maizie stopped pretending that the cards had any sort of a hold on her attention and placed them all face down on the card table. She slanted a look at Theresa.
“I know that tone. You have someone in mind for Anastasia’s son, don’t you?”
Theresa smiled. Of the three of them, she was the shyest. But her convictions and loyalties were just as fierce as those her friends harbored.
“Let’s just say I have someone who needs to be led to water,” Theresa admitted subtly.
“Give,” Cecilia ordered, shifting to the edge of her seat and looking at her friend expectantly.
“I catered a lunch for Healing Hands—it’s a private physical therapy organization,” Theresa explained, answering the silent quizzical looks she saw on Cecilia’s and Maizie’s faces. “The owner, Zoe Sinclair, said she was worried about her younger sister, Isabelle. She said Isabelle was entirely too dedicated, which was good for the company, but bad for Isabelle’s love life—something Zoe said that, as far as she knew, her sister hadn’t had in at least a couple of years. Maybe more.”
Cecilia sighed. “I know how that is,” the woman murmured.
The truth was all three of them did. Friends since the third grade, they had cheered one another on through courtships, marriages and children. And grieved as, one by one, they found themselves sharing yet something else: widowhood.
Eternally optimistic, they believed firmly in romance, which had first caused them to dabble in their daughters’ lives, then in Theresa’s son’s situation. Hooked on the challenge, they were eager to branch out, to help friends and clients who sought to have their children or their siblings find satisfying, lasting relationships. They sought no repayment for their efforts. They did it for the sheer joy of bringing two people together.
Making no response to Cecilia’s comment, Theresa produced a candid photograph of her catering client’s sister, taken by someone at the party.
With a laugh, Cecilia dug into her oversize purse and pulled out the latest thriller by Brandon Slade, a book he’d given her the last time her crew had cleaned his house. She placed it front cover side down on the table.
“I’ll see your photograph and raise you a dust jacket,” Cecilia declared, pushing the book to the middle of the table, next to Isabelle Sinclair’s picture.
Maizie looked from Brandon to Isabelle and nodded thoughtfully. “Looks to me as if these two young people would make a truly wonderful couple,” she agreed, then raised her eyes to look at her friends. “But how do we bring them together?”
That, they all knew, temporarily stumped, was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
Drama was Anastasia Del Vecchio’s life. In the spotlight since she’d been three years old, the venerable actress could be forgiven if at times she indulged her inner child and fell back on being a drama queen, something that had been deemed “adorable” by the movie reviewers when she was three, four and five, but seen as a tad grating on the nerves when she hit her teens and twenties.
Ever the trouper, she’d reinvented herself a handful of times since then and was now considered one of the acting world’s last true icons.
For the most part, the actress refrained from giving in to this whim. Although, by no stretch of the imagination could the terms “shy” or “retiring” ever be applied to Anastasia Del Vecchio, not even when she slept. At this point in her career, everything about the legendary star was considered to be larger than life. She made a point of greeting both life and people with enthusiastic gusto.
If something couldn’t be done in a big way, she saw no reason for it being done at all. Her energetic approach was the hallmark of her life, her five marriages and her numerous affairs. That aspect of her personality would never change. So it was no surprise that when an unexpected fall from the stage where she was rehearsing her latest play necessitated her being rushed off to the hospital, Anastasia was quite vocal about her pain. And she fiercely fought off the suggestion that any sort of drugs be introduced to alleviate her suffering. “I can use this,” she declared, batting away the paramedic’s hand as he hovered over her with a syringe containing a measured dose of morphine. There were genuine tears of pain in her eyes as she gritted her teeth together. “I can remember this when I have to portray a woman in the throes of dire physical agony.”
Anastasia had witnessed too many falls from grace to be complacent about taking any drugs. Drugs would wrestle the control she treasured so highly away from her.
As it turned out, these words were the last the renowned actress said in the ambulance before the pain succeeded in knocking her unconscious.
At the time of his mother’s accident, Brandon Slade had been in the midst of wrestling with a completely unfamiliar foe. Writer’s block. Like any writer faced with this demon, he had welcomed any distraction. So when the phone had rung, he’d snatched it up and found himself summoned to the theater by a very shaken and distraught director, Tyler Channing. He’d been in his car less than three minutes later and managed to arrive just in time to climb into the back of the ambulance with his mother as the doors were shut.
The paramedic slanted a nervous look at him as he administered the injection to the now unconscious actress. “She always like this?” the man asked.
A fond smile curved Brandon’s mouth as he held his mother’s hand. “Always.”
Brandon Slade, a media darling in his own right, was Anastasia’s only child, the product of his mother’s second marriage. Head over heels in love, she’d married a passionate Australian actor whose ardor, sadly, was not restricted to the woman he’d exchanged vows with.
Unable to overlook the mounting number of women her husband slept with, Anastasia, with a secretly aching heart, had sent him packing eighteen months into their marriage—and eight months into her one and only pregnancy. The rather pedestrian