“Uh-huh. Rest his soul. And now it belongs to Dixie here.” Even two months later, Em still hadn’t quite digested the situation.
Nella frowned. “I don’t get it. How do you win a phone-sex company?”
“You have the most amazing best friend ever, who even on his deathbed, knew what was good for you. Landon was both Dixie’s and Caine’s best friend. Dixie and Caine were engaged ten years ago, but they had a fallin’-out to beat the likes of World War Three, broke up and left town.”
Dixie shook her head of red curls with a giggle. “Your general manager exaggerates. It was not like World War Three.”
But Em disagreed. “Hah! Lest you forget the fire and rain... Anyway, Landon, in all his wisdom and hilarious sense of humor, knew they belonged together. So when Dixie and Caine came back for his funeral, he left this very company to them in his will—with one stipulation. They had to become phone-sex operators and work the phones. Whoever collected the most calls at the end of two months won the company.”
Nella suddenly grinned. “So that’s what all the talk about the Phone-sex Hunger Games is? I hear the rumblin’s in town all the time about you and Caine and how you two got back together. I ignored the bad and focused on how romantic it was under such a crazy set of circumstances.”
Yeah. Em sighed and nodded at Nella. “The most romantic set of circumstances ever. Friends like Landon don’t come along often. He loved these two so much, he meddled from the afterlife.”
Dixie’s smile was misty-eyed and blissful at the same time. “I’ll always wish Landon was here to see it—see us finally together. Maybe walk me down that aisle now that Caine’s proposed. And see you and I such good friends after a long spell of resentment.” She patted Em’s hand, tipping the glass she held upright to keep more liquid from sloshing out.
“Oh, I heard all about you and Em from that Essie Guthrie. My, she can talk,” Nella confided.
Em waved a finger. “Never you mind what that Essie tells you. She’d just as soon Call Girls was banished from Plum Orchard for good.”
The Mags, Plum Orchard’s generations-old society of women of prominence, had really given running Call Girls out on a rail their best efforts. They’d made all sorts of pleas to the mayor and the county—even the state of Georgia, and in the process, they’d attempted to make everyone’s life associated with Call Girls miserable.
Landon had done his homework when he’d moved the company here, and so far they’d been lucky, but Em still worried those bunch of gossipmongers might come up with a way to shut them down.
Dixie wrinkled her nose. “Just you forget about those awful Mags, Em, and let’s focus on the good stuff. Like how I also got LaDawn, Marybell and Cat as the best employees and friends a girl could ask for. For that, I’ll always be grateful. So a toast to Landon?” She raised her wineglass toward the ceiling in silent salute to her best friend.
“Hear! Hear!” Em cheered. Though her sigh, hot on the heels of her good spirits, was forlorn and wistful.
Nella leaned forward on her desk, folding her hands. “If you don’t mind me askin’, how did you become involved in all this, Em?”
“I don’t mind at all. I worked for Landon’s lawyer, Hank Cotton, at the time. So I spent his last days with him, doing all sorts of things he needed taken care of, and that’s when he asked me to oversee Dixie and Caine if they decided to stick around and accept the terms of his will. He said it was time Dixie made an ally here in Plum Orchard. I thought it was the throes of death talkin’, knowin’ how Dixie and I didn’t get along in school, but how could I say no to a man I’d come to love and respect in the course of our dealin’s? He was dyin’. I’d rather have died myself than say no to him.”
Dixie rubbed Em’s arm. “But he left her a letter to open once things settled down with Caine and I to explain everything, didn’t he, Em?”
Now Em’s smile was wistful. “He did, and once I read it, it all made sense. But to think, he’d appoint prim and proper Emmaline Amos, once Dixie Davis’s biggest target in high school, the mediator of her phone-sex contest... Well, everybody thought it was just crazy. They still talk about it now, almost three months later.”
They talked because she was the most unlikely suspect. Who’d believe good-girl Em knew much of anything about sex?
They talked plenty about how scandalous it was that an actual phone-sex company was housed in the middle of their quaint little town, and how horrible Dixie was for talking dirty.
They talked. That’s what Plum Orchard did, and though Em loved her small town and almost everyone in it, faults and all, they’d forgotten the core of what Landon had intended with all those machinations.
The purpose, the driving force behind Landon making Dixie and Caine play his game—the reason he’d gone to such great lengths to see his two best friends happy, had been lost in the mire of gossip Dixie’s return had created.
Love. Landon’s love for his friends, their love for each other—one that even after almost a decade, hadn’t died.
The kind of love Em found herself feeling a pang of yearning for as of late. One that lasted—one that filled her soul. One that didn’t want to divorce her because he wanted to cross-dress and become Miss Trixie LeMieux and he’d been too ashamed to tell her...
She cupped her chin in her hands and sighed again, listening with fondness to the music of the chirping phones from the back offices, where the on-duty operators took their calls from clients. They’d hired four more operators since she’d taken over as GM. Business was good, even if her jump back into the dating pool wasn’t.
She was certain she wasn’t destined for the kind of love Dixie and Caine had fought so hard for. You only bore witness to something like that once in a lifetime, and if what Clifton said about her was true, she was too conservative and prissy to ever find that kind of passion.
But she had her new job here. She didn’t care what the people of Plum Orchard said about it, either. Working for Call Girls made her happy—gave her purpose. “Look how far we’ve come, huh?”
Dixie grinned, twisting a long strand of her red hair around her index finger in dreamy satisfaction and sighed. “I can’t even believe what’s come to pass in the past few months since I’ve been back from Chicago, Nella. For both of us. Did you know, not four months ago, Em was in the middle of divorcin’ that cheater Clifton, I was up to my britches in debt, Caine and I were at each other’s throats trying to beat each other at phone sexin’, and everyone here in good ole Plum Orchard, Georgia, still hated me because of my mean-girl high school days—Caine included. So much has changed,” she marveled.
Em’s smile was wry. It was true. But Dixie still wasn’t very popular. She’d tried hard to put to rest her wrongful ways since she’d returned, but some just couldn’t let go of the past. She popped her lips with a smack of a reminder. “Well, not everything’s changed.”
Dixie flapped a dismissive hand at the implication Em made in reference to her archnemesis. “Thank you for reminding me Louella Palmer still sniffs the air when I walk by as though I’ve been dipped in cow dung.”
No one wished Dixie more ill than Louella. Dixie’s old high school rival still held her responsible for allegedly stealing Caine Donovan out from under her nose.
For the past few months since she’d become such close friends with Dixie, Louella and her fellow group members, the esteemed Magnolias, had outright shunned Em for forgiving Dixie and her jaded Plum Orchard past.
A burp threatened to escape Em’s lips. She swallowed the acidic bite back with a wince before saying, “I just want you to know your enemies. I can’t have Louella sneakin’ up behind you when you’re not lookin’. Remindin’ you of the people that wish you ill is my duty as your person.”
Dixie cocked her head,