Chapter 2

Tabitha Amelia Logan stared at the email on her screen. She didn’t notice the colorless walls of her hospital room, the long table on casters hovering over her bed, or the plate with the bare remnants of a double serving of pie on it. None of it.

Only the email.

The shock of the typed words overwhelmed her. It couldn’t be.

The urgent demand in her best friend’s voice coming through her cell phone poked into her ear. “Hey,” Charlie asked. “Why did you go quiet?”

Tabby didn’t answer. Instead, she whistled. Long and low. It was enough to make her momentarily forget the pain tearing through her side with the slightest movement. She’d twisted quickly the other day to avoid falling on her ass in the corridor.

This was the after-effect. These days her muscles had their own personalities, and they weren’t cheery and bright.

“Holy. Shit.” She paused. She and her best friend Charlotte Cavanaugh understood each other. They didn’t need long explanations. “Email.”

Charlie made a strangled noise. “What? Say something. You’re freaking me out. Did you get some weird test results back? Or did that swine of a landlord finally apologize for tossing your stuff out into the hallway six months ago?”

After all that had happened the last year, and all the things she could be thrown by since she’d started writing erotica, this was not what most people would expect a person to be upset about. Seriously.

But when the accident happened and twelve additional life shocks had beset her all at once, she’d needed an escape. Desperately. Or she would have crawled out of her skin and dried up in the hot Toronto sun.

So…she’d written.

And the natural choice of material, seeing as the prig had let her know in no uncertain terms that she really wasn’t capable of satisfying a man, and yes, was indeed divesting himself of her after her accident and her disfigurement…was sex.

No, make that erotica. Imaginative erotica. There wasn’t a whole lot of romance in what she wrote, but that was par for the course, the way her mood had been. Said heroine was the instigator. Even, one might say, the aggressor. Perusing the human pool, deciding which man struck her fancy.

And the men she favored were the men of the west.

Cowboys. Ranchers. Rugged, close to the land. Definitely not sanitized babies.

As far away from Clare, short for Clarence—even his name was stupid wimpy—as she could get.

The words had flowed. Instead of stewing about what had happened, and what Tabby’d thought she’d lost, abruptly, it became her addiction. Her choice of drug, what helped her not to think.

A switch had been turned on in her.

When a friend popped it online, the number of hits she’d received had been phenomenal. After that, it was an exhilarating, shocking ride to being contacted by one of the mid-sized presses and here she was…

Staring at the really big surprise.

She saw the picture of her great aunt, Amelia, hands on wide hips, in her requisite flowered dress and string of dollar-store pearls, frowning at her and shaking her head.

Girl. Don’t you know when you need to be thankful for something?

Oh yeah. Tabby remembered. It was Amelia who always told her: When one door closes, another opens. And usually, a bazillion of ‘em, honey.

Well, hell. She scrolled, looked at the header of the email, saw it was authentic. From her publicist, not some freaky spammer. Checked out the contents one more time, disbelief still swirling in her.

Looked like those damn bazillion doors had just opened. They were swinging wide, beckoning her to go through them. And all she had to do…was actually go through them.

It had been an effing kind of year, to be honest. But now those doors were waving, wildly open, in front of her. And yeah, maybe soon she’d go on an eff word diet. Probably should, right away, the way she was going. ‘Cause…

“Tabby?”

“You’ll never believe it, Charlie.”

She pictured Charlie, out in Vancouver, manning tall steel structures for her daily living. Yep, she was an iron worker. An apprentice now, but determined to make it, despite all the challenges, and doing well.

Jamie too, speared into her mind, another close friend, out in who’s-its-ville, otherwise known as Terrence Point, British Columbia. The girl had made a huge life change, ended up on some crazy mountain, at some barely opened ski chalet. Snowy Peaks, she thought it was.

Tabby missed Jamie and Charlie something fierce. Thank goodness they’d all made a strong effort to keep in touch. And she was never more grateful than at this moment.

She struggled to get the words out, to tell her best friend straight. The thing so many beginning writers would be thrilled to tell those that loved them, instead of viewing it like a trip to the gallows.

“The tour I told you about, Charlie? It’s on. The damn book made the Decade’s Hottie List, and the tour is on. For Heartbreak Heroes, my first cowboy erotica book. It’s starting next week.”