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 phonesex 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 phonesex 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.