True Love, Inc.

“Why, Madison, this is a surprise. It’s rather late. Your father and I were just getting ready for bed. How are you, dear?”

“I’m fine.” The polite response slipped effortlessly from Maddie’s lips. She shook her head, tried again with the truth. “Actually, Mother, I’m not fine. In fact, I’m having a really bad day.”

On the other end of the line, Eliza made an appropriately sympathetic sound. “I’m sorry to hear that you’re under the weather. Is it your...infirmity that’s giving you trouble?”

If it hadn’t so perfectly summed up the awkwardness of their relationship, Maddie might have chuckled at the discreet euphemism and the way her mother’s tone grew hushed whenever she used it.

“I am a bit sore today, but that’s not what’s bothering me. Do...do you know what today is?”

“Today? Hmm. I’m afraid not.”

For some reason—call it blind hope—Maddie had expected her mother, of all people, to know, to remember.

“Today should have been Michael’s birthday.”

“Michael’s birthday?”

“If he’d been born on his due date, he would have turned one...today.”

Maddie had spent her lunch hour beside his small gravesite—a gravesite only she had ever visited. Silence greeted her stifled sob, and she kicked herself mentally for seeking comfort and commiseration where neither had been forthcoming in the past.

“A good night’s sleep is what you need, dear. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“My baby will still be dead in the morning. No amount of sleep is going to change that. Why can’t we ever talk about what happened, Mother?” she be-seeched.

Eliza Daniels considered an emotional outburst as gauche as wearing white shoes after Labor Day. It simply was not done. She went on as if Maddie had not spoken. “Do you have any of those pills left that the doctor prescribed after the accident? Perhaps you should take one.”

Ah, yes, as far as her mother was concerned, there was nothing a little Valium couldn’t fix. Maddie shook her head in sad acceptance. Arguing would be pointless. “Yes, perhaps I’ll do that. I should have thought of it myself. Thank you, Mother.”

Relief evident in her tone, Eliza replied, “You’re welcome, dear. Sleep well.”

“I’m sure I will. Give Daddy my love.”

Maddie hung up, feeling even more fatigued. Her limp was more pronounced as she trudged down the short hall to the bathroom and turned on the tub’s faucet. She wouldn’t resort to a tranquilizer, but a nice long soak might ease the aching pain in her knee and hip. She added a capful of lavender-scented bubble bath.

She shed her clothing, secured her hair in a quick topknot, and gingerly lowered her scarred body into the bathwater. As it had for the past several months, work remained her best source of escape, so she redirected her thoughts to Cameron Foley and the unconventional bargain they’d struck earlier in the day. He said he wanted to be left alone, but despite his vehement words, Maddie hadn’t been convinced. It was the aching loss evident beneath his gruff words that had prompted her to put her livelihood on the line to find him a match. He seemed so in need of a happy ending.

“A happy ending,” she mused aloud. The words echoed in the tiny bathroom, taunting her.

Cameron Foley had accused Maddie of being a fraud, and perhaps she was. At the very least, she knew she was guilty of living vicariously. There would be no happy ending for her.

She glanced at her left hand, which was ringless now. The sad truth was that as hard as she worked to find matches and mates for her clients, at twenty-eight, Maddie Daniels was divorced, broken and alone. And she had long since given up any hope of knowing or deserving the kind of true love that caused Cameron Foley to still mourn a wife who’d been dead three years.

Chapter Two

Thursday dawned clear and bright, the perfect weather for a drive. The roads were dry, the sun a warm, glowing orb climbing higher in the eastern sky. Even so, Maddie’s footsteps were hesitant as she walked to the parking lot behind the souvenir shop. Her slow pace had nothing to do with the stiffness in her leg and hip. In addition to her trepidation about seeing Cameron Foley again, she hated to drive.

Biting her lip, she slid onto the front seat of her car and fastened the safety belt even before inserting the key into the ignition. Since the accident fifteen months earlier, she’d gotten past the paralyzing fear of being in an automobile, but not the passionate dislike of operating one.

Driving five miles under the posted speed limit, she pulled onto Highway 22 and headed north toward the tiny, artsy town of Suttons Bay. To her right, sunlight danced on the calm waters of the west arm of Grand Traverse Bay. To her left, vacation homes dotted the hillside. The farther she drove, however, the more rural the landscape became. She smiled as row after row of cherry trees replaced man-made structures on the rolling countryside. The trees were heavy with fruit now, their boughs seeming to bend under the weight of sweet cherries that already looked ripe and inviting. This was cherry country, and despite the constant development pressure farmers felt to sell off the prime land their orchards occupied, the local people were proud of their crop. Eighty percent of the nation’s cherries were grown here and in a handful of other Michigan counties.

Recalling the statistic, Maddie wasn’t surprised when five miles outside of Suttons Bay, she spotted the big red sign that read Foley Cherry Farm.

“Of course.”

She might have guessed Cameron’s occupation. His tanned face and forearms, as well as the well-worn denim that had hugged his powerful build, had all hinted at time spent outdoors.

Gravel crunched under her tires when she turned the car onto Mockingbird Lane, nothing but a plume of dust visible through her rearview mirror. It had been a dry spring, and summer wasn’t promising to be any wetter. Cherry trees lined either side of the road as far as she could see, lush with fruit and postcard perfect. Finally, a large farmhouse came into view. It was set back from the road on the crest of a hill, its lowest level partially built into the slope. A big bay window jutted from the stone facade, above it two cedar-shingled gables gazed cheerfully out over the orchards.

It was a beautiful home, a serene setting, but Maddie’s pulse throbbed in her temples as she parked the car and gathered her briefcase. What kind of mood would Cameron Foley be in today?

Shrugging off her nerves, she walked to the front door. It was yanked open before she could knock. A girl of about six stood in front of her. She wore denim overall shorts and a pink shirt. Her dark hair was pulled into a pair of adorably crooked pigtails. There were matching bandages on her knees and a smudge of something that looked like flour on one of her chubby cheeks.

She eyed Maddie speculatively before asking, “Who are you?” The words whistled out from the darling gap between her two front teeth.

Maddie leaned forward at the waist. When she was nearly eye level with the girl, she replied, “I’m Maddie Daniels. And who might you be?”

“I’m Caroline Foley. I live here.”

“You’re lucky. It’s a nice house.”

The girl shrugged, then her pixie face scrunched comically. “Are you the know-it-all I heard Daddy telling Mrs. Haversham about?”

The insult, delivered so earnestly in the child’s squeaky voice, caused Maddie to chuckle. “Yes, that would be me.”

So, Cameron Foley had a daughter, a delightful little imp of a girl who apparently had inherited her father’s gift for being blunt. The envy she felt was instantaneous and accompanied by a painful mental chorus of “if onlys.”

“Oh, Miss Daniels!” a woman called, rushing into the foyer behind Caroline. She was about sixty and as plump as a Thanksgiving turkey. “I’m Mrs. Haversham, Cam’s housekeeper. He told me to expect you.”

Maddie shook off her melancholy and sent Caroline a wink as she straightened. “So I hear. And call me Maddie, please.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Maddie.” Mrs. Haversham wiped a pair of thick hands on the apron she wore and glanced over her shoulder when a timer chimed.

“I hope I haven’t come at a bad time. Mr. Foley did tell me noon.”

“Not at all. That will be my apple pie. Cam is in the orchard. He said to send you out when you got here.” She turned to Caroline, surreptitiously wiping the flour from the little girl’s cheek with a grandmotherly pat. “Dearie, why don’t you show Maddie the way?”

Maddie followed Caroline around the side of the house, across the lawn and into the orchard, falling farther behind with each tentative step she took. Walking on a sidewalk often proved a trial, but walking on an uneven dirt path littered with nature’s debris had Maddie wishing she’d brought the cane she’d relegated to the back of her closet. She hated the thing and the way it advertised her disability, but using it would have been far less humiliating than what happened to her next. She stumbled, her foot twisting on an exposed root, and her world tilted. Windmilling her arms like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon did nothing to restore her precarious balance, but it did send her briefcase flying. To her utter mortification, Maddie landed with a jarring thud on her backside in the middle of Cameron Foley’s orchard.

“Caroline!” she called. The little girl had danced several yards ahead, propelled by the boundless energy of youth, but she bulleted back now, eyes huge at the sight of an adult sprawled on the ground.

“Gosh, are you hurt?”

“No.” Unless she counted her pride, Maddie thought wryly. “But I think I’ll just rest for a moment. Could you, um, go find your father and ask him to meet me here?”

Maddie watched Caroline shoot down a row of trees, envying the girl’s surefootedness. When she was alone, she put dignity aside and crawled on all fours to the briefcase and the smattering of papers that had tumbled out of its exterior pockets. She gathered them up, stuffed them back in and was preparing to use the case as leverage to help her stand when an incredulous deep voice stopped her cold.

“What the heck happened to you?”