KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

       http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

      For JWR, for fun

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      1

      Bliss Johnson checked her things-to-be happy-about calendar. Today’s page listed beach roses and sailboats and velvety black skies filled with stars. Lovely. But not part of summer in New York. Almost everyone found a way to escape the hot sidewalks and gritty air sooner or later and her office building seemed oddly empty. Except for a few newcomers, recent college grads whose evil parents were forcing them to seek gainful employment.

      Like her assistant—oh, make that her former assistant. Bliss ripped the page off the pad and crumpled it into a ball, attempting a tough diagonal throw into her wastebasket. She missed.

      Okay, she would pick it up later, when her energy returned. When she finished flipping through the calendar to see if it said anywhere that going to Pittsburgh was something to be happy about.

      Kayla wouldn’t think so. The baby-faced intern, three credits away from a BA in media studies, had been Bliss’s assistant at Lentone Fitch & Garibaldi for only a week. Viola Lentone had hired her. Kayla was so enthusiastic at first, eager to learn all there was to know about advertising. She was so young, so fresh, so new…and she seemed to think the office was an extension of her dorm. Kayla kept her laptop open on her desk to check her Facebook site, posting despairing messages. Sav me!! Ths jobb sux!!!

      Unfortunately, Vi’d been looking over Kayla’s shoulder when the intern wrote that one. Bliss saw Vi flick the laptop closed with one red-lacquered fingernail and stare at Kayla without speaking.

      “Well, the job does suck,” the intern said at last.

      “And why is that, sweetie?” Vi asked calmly.

      “I thought I was going to have more to do.”

      Fatal words. Kayla, the underachieving daughter of Violet’s best friend, was assigned to filing contracts and disappeared into a room filled with high metal cabinets. The occasional sound of clanging drawers was all that was left of her.

      Which was why Bliss had to do all her own prep work for the Hot Treats account presentation. She was booked on a flight tomorrow to do a search-and-recon mission on the company, which was smack in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania. Bliss reviewed her game plan: Visit the factory. Flatter the execs. Come up with brilliant ideas for selling their new line of fruit pies to skittish, carb-conscious consumers. The flight was short, but she would have to travel in a rattletrap taxi all the way from Pittsburgh to tiny Leonardville, where the factory was. One hour on the plane, another hour in the taxi…there was no cure for the summertime blues.

      Crowded into a coach seat, Bliss looked through the HT press kit, making notes in the margins and wondering who wrote their copy.

      The friendly folks at HT are called food scientists—and millions of busy moms sing their praises for inventing the toaster pastry and other delicious extruded snacks!

      She winced and drew a line through the word extruded. Bliss wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded awful.

      A photo of a group of nerdy people in white lab coats caught her eye. They were brandishing long wooden spoons and wearing checked chef’s hats. Cute. Too cute for words, in fact. The HT marketing campaign was in need of a major overhaul.

      She reviewed the photos of the board members and execs, amused by the way their kind smiles didn’t match their cold stares. They looked more like hired killers than friendly pie people. They needed Lentone Fitch & Garibaldi, fast, and she needed to land this account even faster. Bliss would have to come up with an innovative concept to do it. Traditional media approaches didn’t cut it these days.

      Maybe it was time to explore a new career path, she thought glumly, and look for work that was less venal and soul-destroying than advertising. Like designing stuffed animals or something like that. But stuffed-animal designers were probably no less miserable than anyone else. Maybe more so. All those button noses and beady eyes would get her down sooner or later.

      Bliss turned to the back of the press kit, reserved for a message from Alf Sargent, the retiring CEO and son of the company’s founder. In a few brief paragraphs, Alf shared the highlights of his years at HT and introduced his replacement, Jasper Claybourn, whose photo—a lot smaller—was off to one side, along with a brief bio. He didn’t look like a corporate stuffed shirt and he didn’t look like a killer. He looked hot. Bliss studied the photo and sat up straight. That smile was real.

      Easy as pie. In its industrial application, the phrase took on a whole new meaning. Bliss Johnson was on the official tour of the HT factory, observing the process from start to finish. She peered down from a walkway into huge vats that held hot fillings, noting the bubbles rising sluggishly from the depths. Ploop. Plurp. Ploop.

      Bliss tried to think of something to say, feeling a little queasy. The fruity smell was overwhelming. But she managed a faint wow. The head pie guy, a giant in white coveralls and an incongruous hairnet, beamed at her. Bliss adjusted her own hairnet, tucking an escaped strand of dark brown hair back under its elastic edge and smiled back, even though she knew she probably looked like a cafeteria server in the damn thing.

      Her loaner coveralls were rolled up at the wrists and ankles, and the seat drooped unglamorously. So much for her short skirt and sleeveless red sweater. Bliss looked down at the toes of her high heels and sighed inwardly. Underneath it all, she looked fine. Her body was firm and her breasts were bouncy and her legs were toned and she looked better at thirty than she had at twenty. Underneath it all.

      Her escort didn’t seem to care what she looked like, because he was too busy talking. He made a joke about genetically modified fruit that could hop from vine to pie, and explained the software code that produced the perfect squiggles on cupcake icing, and couldn’t be stopped on the top-secret subject of Nutty Balls, a product name from hell if anyone was interested in her opinion.

      Apparently Alf Sargent was convinced that Nutty Balls were going to be bigger than cupcakes, bigger than pies, bigger than anything in the history of extruded snacks, and no one argued with Alf. The retiring CEO wanted to honor the memory of his recently deceased mother, who’d invented the recipe.

      He’d shown Bliss all the framed news clippings about his mom, a legend in her home state of Iowa. Back in the 1950s, Mrs. Sargent, a young widow, won first prize in a nationwide bake-off, her Nutty Balls beating out Miss Mimi Abarbanel’s heavily favored Camel Humps and Mrs. Elwood Clip’s Secret Spice Snaps in a thrilling upset victory for the rookie from Des Moines. With tears in his eyes, Alf had pointed out the black-and-white photo of his mom in cat-eye glasses and a teeny flowered hat, clutching a check for $25,000 and being hugged around the shoulders by the emcee.

      Just looking at the photo inspired him to give Bliss a hug too. Around the shoulders…but even so. She eased out of his grip as soon as she could.

      The prize money had been the beginning of Hot Treats, which Mrs. Sargent built into a food-industry powerhouse over the next four decades, amassing a multi-million-dollar personal fortune while she was at it. Bliss, who had a weakness for supermarket tabloids, vaguely remembered