He looked from Pokey to Annajane and sighed. “She tricked you into coming here, didn’t she?”

Annajane nodded. “She tricked you, too, didn’t she?”

“Yup.” They both turned to confront Pokey, who’d scooped the baby out of his highchair and was beating a fast retreat out of the kitchen.

“Traitor!” Annajane yelled.

Mason sighed. “Did she tell you I’m moving back?”

Annajane nodded.

Mason stared at her intently. “It’s a small town, Annajane. You can’t hide from me for the rest of your life.”

“I haven’t been hiding from you,” she lied.

“Sure looks like it from where I stand,” Mason said. “Maybe let the past be past? At least agree to be friends again?”

She bit her lip and looked out the window. Because she knew if she looked at him, she would cave. Wasn’t there some cure for the way she felt every time she was with him? Wasn’t it about time she outgrew this adolescent obsession with Mason Bayless?

He reached out and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Please? Gimme another chance?”

She did. Two months later, she signed on as assistant VP of marketing at Quixie, working for Davis Bayless. Six months later she and Mason were engaged.

*   *   *

While Annajane figured out how to work for her charming, hyper, demanding future brother-in-law, Mason was busy climbing the corporate ladder.

Within six months, he’d been named divisional sales manager. For the first time, he was working for, and with, Glenn.

Father and son were on the road constantly, meeting with supermarket chains and convenience stores, trying to gain a foothold for Quixie in new markets.

Which meant that Annajane was back at home in Passcoe, working long hours, and trying hard to prove her own worth as a professional to Davis, who still tended to treat her like an annoying little sister. Which might not have been so bad, except for the fact that she could hardly complain about her job to her husband or her best friend—since Davis was their brother.

Two short weeks before the wedding, Ruth abruptly announced that she and Leonard were selling their house to move to Holden Beach.

“Now?” a bewildered Annajane had said, looking around at the boxes her mother had seemingly packed overnight. Leonard smiled wanly from his reclining chair, then looked away.

“It’s his heart,” Ruth had said. “The doctor says he’s got congestive heart failure. From working at that damned plant…”

“He said no such thing,” Leonard objected. “My heart trouble ain’t got a damned thing to do with Quixie or the Baylesses. Thirty years of smoking and that chronic obstructive whatever you call it, that’s what’s done a number on my heart.”

“But why the coast?” Annajane had asked. “You don’t know anybody there. Why not stay here, where your family and friends are?”

“Because it’s high time we got out of Passcoe,” Ruth declared. “We’ve always wanted to live at the beach. Watch the sunsets, play golf, eat seafood whenever we want. Enjoy our lives while we’ve still got time.”

“Your mother’s allergic to shrimp,” Leonard put in. “And I don’t know a putter from a driver. We’ll be bored to death. But I can’t do nothin’ to change her mind.”

A month later, Leonard suffered the first of two heart attacks, and the emotional tug-of-war began in earnest.

Annajane made the long drive to Holden whenever she could, but when she couldn’t, Ruth’s sniping was relentless.

“I guess you got better things to do with your fancy new family than come all the way down here,” her mother would say, with a martyred sigh. “Probably there’s something going on at the country club.”

Whenever she did spend the weekend with her parents, she felt guilty for not spending the time with Mason. Although Mason, she noticed, seemed to have no problems keeping busy when she was away, and even some weekends when she was home. He’d always been a huge fan of college football and basketball, but after their marriage, it seemed to her, he spent an inordinate amount of time either watching UNC games on television or in person.

“You didn’t even go to Chapel Hill,” she fumed the Saturday after Thanksgiving as he waited for his father and Davis and some other buddies to pick him up for the big UNC-Duke game, only a few hours after he’d gotten home from a weeklong business trip. “I don’t see why this is such a big deal for you.”

The words sounded bitchy and whiny, even to her, but she couldn’t help it. She hadn’t seen Mason alone in nearly two weeks. As it stood now, he would get back from Chapel Hill around noon Sunday, then turn right back around and hit the road with his father again on Monday.

He’d looked incredulous, and then annoyed. “Are you serious? This is just the biggest game of the year in this state. I’ve been going to this game since I was five years old. My grandfather took me to my first Carolina-Duke game. And his grandfather took him. If you really wanted to go, I could get you a ticket.”

“And spoil all your fun by making you be the only guy who has to drag his wife along? No thanks,” she’d said quickly.

Home alone most weeknights, Annajane, in turn, felt resentment seeping into her usually cheerful demeanor. Pokey was busy chasing her toddler son, so they didn’t see each other that much. Her other friends, young and living the single life, occasionally invited her to join them for drinks or dinner, but she no longer enjoyed staying out til two in the morning, only to stumble to work half-awake and half-sober. She made up excuses not to go. She stayed home and dined alone on canned soup and a vague, simmering sense of dissolution.

And when Mason made his nightly long distance phone call, reporting on the dinners he’d just shared with important accounts at four-star restaurants in Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, or Charleston, Annajane would silently contemplate the shabby little cottage and her lonely bed. This was not what she’d thought marriage would be.

If Mason noticed her misery, he never mentioned it. He and Glenn were engaged in a high-stakes battle, trying to place Quixie in Maxi-Mart, a huge regional discount supermarket chain with nearly three hundred outlets around the South, many of them in new markets for Quixie. The deal was potentially worth millions for the company.

Among the Maxi-Mart executives father and son were wooing was a woman named Eva. Mason referred to her frequently in those late-night phone calls. “Eva wants us to meet with the guys down in Orlando,” he’d say. Or, “Sorry, babe, we won’t be home tomorrow after all. Maxi-Mart is the sponsor of a charity golf tournament in Richmond, and Dad and I are gonna play in a foursome Eva put together. You understand, right?”

She wasn’t the jealous type. She and Mason were still practically newlyweds. And after all, this was company business. He was doing this for the company, and for them. Just six more months, Mason promised, “Maxi-Mart will be signed and sealed and we’ll start house hunting. Hell, you can start looking now. All I ask is that you find something with a den for my big-screen, and a master bedroom big enough for a king-size bed. And no leaks overhead!”

“And a nursery?” Annajane asked.

“And a nursery,” Mason assured her.

Still, she heard whispers around the office about this Eva woman. Whispers she chose to ignore. She’d asked Mason about Eva once, on one of their rare weekends together. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess she’s all-right looking, if you like that type.”

“What type is that?” Annajane wanted to know. “Sexy? Flirty?”

Mason shrugged. “I guess some guys might find her sexy. You know, high heels, expensive business suits. She’s pretty buttoned-up.”

“Not your type?”

Mason laughed and reached around and began to tug at the zipper on Annajane’s dress. “Nah, I’m more a zipper man my ownself.”

And then Christmas rolled around.