Sugar Pine Trail

Fly in an airplane.

How humiliating that she even had to write that one down. She had more than three decades on the planet, for heaven’s sake, and a long list of places she wanted to go.

Her family had taken vacations when she was young, but her father never had much time away from his business, so they usually only traveled places they could drive to in a day.

She had always dreamed of seeing India, China, Paris.

The Ukraine.

She should have gone home with Maksym.

Old, long-familiar regrets haunted her. How different her life might have been if she had followed the instincts of her twenty-one-year-old heart and chosen love over obligation.

If only she had taken a chance, once in her life.

“Okay,” Roxy said. “Only five more minutes. You need to be wrapping things up now.”

Julia gazed down at her mostly blank paper. She wasn’t writing a stupid novel here. No one else needed to see it. She only needed to write down a few of the many things she longed to do. How hard was that?

She took a long, fortifying drink of sangria and wrote quickly, forcing herself not to self-edit.

Try escargot.

Kiss someone special under the mistletoe.

Get a puppy.

That one made her stop. Why didn’t she get a puppy? Her parents had never wanted one when they were alive, but they were gone now. There was nothing really stopping her, was there?

“Okay, one more minute. You’ve got time to add one, maybe two more things to your list.”

All the possibilities crowded through her mind, and she quickly wrote one that seemed bigger than the rest.

Make a difference in someone’s life.

“I know I said we were done, but now I want you to add one more.”

Everyone groaned, but Roxy just gave an evil grin.

“I want you to write the very next thing that comes into your mind. Don’t edit it or run it through any internal filters. Just write it.”

Julia stared at the page, her mind a jumbled mix of the book they had read—of the author’s heated relationship with a hot-blooded Spaniard she met on her journey of self-discovery—all tangled up with memories of Maksym and her own brief time with him, when she had been too young and naive to know herself and what she needed.

She swallowed the last of her sangria and wrote quickly, before she could change her mind.

Have an orgasm, with someone else.

The moment she wrote the words, she wanted to cross them out, but it was too late. Besides, they were written in purple Sharpie. She folded her paper, hoping like hell nobody else saw it.

“Now, wasn’t that fun?” Roxy beamed at them all.

“Sure,” Megan muttered. “Next time, let’s all go get colonoscopies together.”

“Anybody want to share something off her list? Remember, this is a no-judgment zone.”

Barbara Serrano was the first to break the silence. “I want to stay home this Christmas Eve and not have to cook a single thing for anyone.”

“Hear, hear,” Charlene Bailey said enthusiastically. “And I’d like to go on another cruise, one to Alaska this time.”

Everyone seemed inclined to share something on her list. Julia was going to remain quiet and let them have all the fun, but on impulse, when the conversation began to wane, she blurted out the least embarrassing thing on her list.

“I’d like to get a puppy. I’ve always loved dogs, but my parents never wanted one. My mom always had cats and my dad thought dogs were too big of a mess and bother.”

“Oh, you should!” Andie Bailey exclaimed. “We adore our dog.”

“What’s stopping you?” Katrina asked.

Julia shrugged and poured another drink. She wasn’t driving home, so why not?

“I live alone and I work long hours. I don’t have time to give a puppy the attention it deserves—to train it and walk it and play with it. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Get two puppies,” Eppie Brewer suggested. “That way they can entertain each other.”

And chew up every antique in the house, too.

“I think I’ll stick with one of the other items on my list.”

She would stick to driving her car on the freeway or trying escargot.

Right now, anything more seemed wholly out of reach.

* * *

THE REST OF the book club meeting was much more enjoyable. Roxy—clever girl—brought out more sangria to go with the potluck meal. By the time everyone decided to pick up their lists and go home, Julia realized that for the first time since McKenzie Kilpatrick’s bachelorette party a few years before, she was more than a little tipsy.

The best kind of guests always cleaned up after themselves. And her friends were the absolute best. Julia looked around her gleaming kitchen, touched that she didn’t have hours of dishes ahead of her. The only thing left was to take out the last bag of trash.

She opened the door to her guest bedrooms, where she had contained the cats for the evening so they didn’t bother her company, then picked up the garbage bag and headed out, propping her door behind her.

Outside, a cold November wind blew through her sweater, making her shiver. They were supposed to have a few inches of snow that night, and the air had that funny, expectant, heavy feeling to it.

A black SUV was in her driveway, and she gazed at it for about five seconds, wondering if one of the book club guests might be in the bathroom, before she remembered it belonged to Jamie Caine.

Her tenant was home. Somehow in all the commotion of the party, she had missed his return.

Not that she had been watching for him or anything.

She shivered again, more from the lie she was telling herself this time than from the cold. Of course she had been watching for him. She had a man living in her house, and this was the first night he had spent under the same roof.