Read the FIRST 3 CHAPTERS of Kristi's USA TODAY Bestselling debut Romantic Comedy, "ESCAPING PURGATORY" below!

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CHAPTER 1
​The antiquated calculator chirped in protest as I punched ‘enter’ again. The number had not changed. Even with the added cash from the tourist influx, at the rate James was spending money – we wouldn’t make it to the holiday season, just a few short months away.

Rain hammered the corrugated green steel roof of our East Tennessee farmhouse, roaring down metal gutters and splashing to the ground in an angry torrent. I sighed and stared out the window. From our dining room table, I could hardly see our barn or restaurant beyond, cloaked as it was in the heavy gray morning fog.

The storm rolled across the valley, but I finally caught it, another sound blended with the thunder and rain:  the unmistakable thumping as boxes of books hit the floor upstairs. Which could only mean one thing. My respite was over and my brother would start yelling any minute. He didn’t disappoint.

“Molly! Is my breakfast ready yet? It’s gonna take me nearly four hours to get to Nashville and I need to get going,” James hollered from upstairs.

I stared a hundred daggers at him through our pressed-tin ceiling tiles before trudging into our commercial-grade kitchen and poured myself the first of what would be many cups of coffee.  One morning, I swore under my breath, I would make good on my promise to tell him if he wanted a hot breakfast so badly – he could light his freaking Cheerios on fire.

“James, when you get down here we really need to talk.”

“Yea, yea, just help me get ready ok?” he growled down the stairwell.

I may as well have been talking to the wind and I knew it.

But I had to at least try.

Our restaurant’s GM position was still vacant, three weeks after James had fired the last one in spectacular fashion. The base salary was great, but word travels fast in a small town and no one would touch that vacancy now with a ten-foot pole. At this point, I was seriously entertaining going to the local hardware store to solicit one of the enterprising un-documented, because I was about ready to drop.

What neither of us knew that fateful late-September morning, was that a storm of a different variety was headed our way. A confluence of events brewed just beyond the horizon that would set tensions off like a powder keg and leave our restaurant in shambles – the story splashed across the headlines and a pending lawsuit. And that it would be a small miracle if no one was killed at the end of it all.

Had James known that, maybe he would’ve listened to me.

Maybe I would’ve listened to him.

I yanked two skillets onto our 8-burner Viking cooktop, doused one with cooking spray and minutes later the air was fragrant with the smell of frying eggs and Benton’s bacon. The eggs were just ready to flip when our old farmhouse stairs creaked and James huffed into the kitchen, struggling to see over a box of books.

“Are you going to help me load these in the truck or not?”

“Do you want a hot breakfast or not?”

He groaned theatrically as he walked past, as if he were carrying the world’s heaviest sack of concrete. It took him three more trips to get everything downstairs and loaded, and he made sure to emit a prehistoric groan each time he came through the kitchen.

“Do you have to do this book signing? Today?” I said, and slid a plate of bacon and eggs down the stainless steel counter to him. “We need to have a serious talk. About money. Again.”

“That’s exactly why I should do the signing today,” he said, and began wolfing down his food. “More signings equal more book sales and more money,” he mumbled with a mouthful of food.

I pointed at ten neatly stacked wooden crates behind him, each stamped in green lettering, ‘Honeycrisp’. “We just got a shipment of four hundred pounds of apples yesterday for our preserve line. And that’s just one batch!”

“What do you expect me to do? Just cancel on the morning of an event? A no-show doesn’t bode well in the press you know.”

“Might I remind you, that you were supposed to help me this week?”

He looked at his watch and gulped down the rest of his orange juice. “We’ll talk tonight when I get back. Promise.”

And without so much as a thank you, rocketed out the door.

A powerful muscle cramp worked its way across my shoulders before spreading down my spine and knocking hard on my lower back. I drained the rest of my coffee, pulled on an apron, donned my work gloves and cracked open the first crate.

My sous-chef, Tropical Storm Tina, blew in thirty minutes later tracking a swirl of damp September leaves in with her.

“Molly!” she said breathlessly, giving me a half-hug as she slung her bag on a barstool and aproned up. “I am so sorry I’m late. Himself was having a proper fit this morning about Mam coming to visit.”

Instantly, my bad mood started melting away, like the sun breaking through the morning clouds. I’d loved Tina the minute we met. Her bubbling personality and Irish accent was half the reason I’d hired her. Getting to hear the daily sagas of Himself – her husband, was an added bonus.

I was just about to pry her for details when my phone buzzed across the countertop like an angry hornet, cutting our hoots of laughter short. I wiped apple slush from my hands on a dishtowel and jabbed the screen with my finger to answer it.

“Oh great! You’re there.”

Where else would I be? I thought, and rolled my eyes at the disembodied voice warbling through the Bluetooth speaker of James’s Dodge Ram.

“What do you need James?”

“Uh, I forgot to tell you, I was supposed to have an interview with a lifestyle reporter from The Tennessee Sun today.”

“Oh no. You are NOT dumping another reporter on me!”

“Well …” Five seconds of dead silence passed.

Son of a bitch! My insides churned. “They’re already on their way aren’t they?”

“Probably.”

Tina took one look at the crates of Honeycrisps, her shocked expression matching my own.
​
“Tina! Lock the doors – we have a reporter coming,” I said, then hung up on James.

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CHAPTER 2
​But it was too late. Headlights gleamed across our waist-to-ceiling white-paned kitchen windows, tracing patterns of light across the cabinets and angling toward the living room – in the definitive pattern that meant someone had just pulled into the circular drive in front of our farmhouse. A set of car doors clunked shut, and within seconds the doorbell rang. And rang. And rang again.

Tina and I locked eyes across the small mountain of apples we had just started to work on, shaking our heads in disbelief. Contempt radiated off us like heat shimmering above a summer sidewalk. The crates of apples loomed large against the wall.

“Does the eejit think we’re deaf, I wonder?” Tina snapped. “Reporter indeed.”

She was right. There was so much to do this week, we didn’t have time for this. Over James’s protests, I made the decision to close the restaurant for the last half of August. Not only would it give the staff a few days of much needed rest, the closure should have given us time to switch from a summer menu into fall. I did keep the store open, with limited hours, to help move the last of our seasonal inventory. Understandably, the tourists had grumbled upon discovering the restaurant was closed, but seemed to take some solace in the fact the store was still open – allowing them to purchase signed copies of James’s latest book, and other trinkets.   

Until five minutes ago, I’d been looking forward to precisely three things during our brief closure.

Getting away from the circus that descended upon us virtually overnight.
  
Working with Tina as we tested recipes in the kitchen for a new fall menu.
​
And apples.

Out of all it, I had looked forward to apple prep the most. To listening to Tina’s never-ending supply of stories. To hearing what Himself had gotten up to now. To the freedom of letting my mind wander as muscle memory took over and set my hands to autopilot.

During apple prep, there were no pressing decisions to be made. No dealing with the fall-out from a server who didn’t show up for a shift. No apologizing to diners when a dish was eighty-sixed. Just stories and laughter as mornings melted into warm fall afternoons, and apples transformed from crate, to cooking, to neat little jars of copper-colored preserves and specialty-blended butters.

The doorbell-ringer shattered that dream and had now taken the liberty of opening the screen door to rap sharply on the front door.

 “Maybe if we ignore them, they’ll go away?” Tina offered hopefully, shearing a large peel off with a satisfying flick, then reaching for another apple. She inspected it quickly before setting to work.

Resigned to my fate, I wiped apple slush from my hands on a dishtowel and slung the towel on the counter. “I bet you dollars to donuts I know exactly who is on the other side of that door. And if we ignore her, she’s just gonna come crawling in through a window.”

“Oh … that one,” Tina said.
​
“Yep.” I offered Tina a final glare, then trudged out of the kitchen and clicked the foyer lights on. A tower of teased blonde hair wobbled in and out of view from the front door’s half-panel of inlaid stained glass. The wobble of someone teetering on sky-high heels and still not being tall enough to see over the top pane of glass.
​
Steeling myself, I took a deep breath and placed my hand on the knob. I swore I could already smell the cloud of perfume before I even opened the door.   

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CHAPTER 3
​Danae Dawson. She was one of two, platinum bottle-dyed, white trash swampcats that prowled the foothills of the Smoky Mountains; the other being her equally revolting sister, Ranae, who had a knack for selling over-priced vacation homes in the area to tourists. And neither of whom I wanted to see darkening my front doorstep at any hour.

Danae was wearing a low-cut tight red blouse that threatened to produce a wardrobe malfunction at any moment. Although she was just a few years older than James and myself, the tanning beds along with an endless proclivity for sniffing out the local drink specials had not been kind to her. And although the Botox helped a bit, she still resembled a permanently surprised owl who struggled to blink.

“Molly!” she drawled, adding several consonants to my name as she peered around my shoulders. “Always good to see you love,” she said, and moved in for a hug and an air-kiss to my cheek before I could stop her.

A gangly young man whom I didn’t recognize, trailed in behind her clutching a tripod and a dark gray camera bag. Taking a color cue from the University of Tennessee, THE TENNESSEE SUN glowed in crisp orange lettering across the bag. “Uh, where do you think we might want to set up?” he asked.

I straightened my spine until a satisfying crack rippled across my shoulders. What I wanted to do was yank that tripod out of his hands, and smack Danae Dawson right into the next county with it.

However, seeing as we were both members of the same church, albeit infrequent parishioners, I could do no such thing. Not only would my grandmother have rolled in her grave at me even contemplating such unladylike behavior, it was a dangerous business pissing off a Southern woman. Particularly one who wielded the power of the pen in a handful of nearby small towns. Towns like Purgatory, where everyone seemed to know your business before you did.  

“I tell you, we were all just tickled pink when James came back home from the Army, and y’all ended up buying the old King’s Hill Farm here,” she said, flicking her hands in the air as if she were advertising products on a game show.

“Danae, if you might remember, he was in the Air Force, not the Army.”

“Right,” she chirped on. “Like I said, same thing – in the military. Anyway,” she paused, before starting to meander toward the kitchen and staircase, “I’m guessing James is still getting ready?” She pressed her lips together, and glanced up the stairs, craning her neck skyward as if she could divine James through the pressed-tin ceiling tiles.

Tina peeked around the corner long enough to assess the situation and shoot Danae a warning glance, signaling that the kitchen was strictly off-limits before ducking back out of sight. While Tina may have been out of sight, she most certainly wasn’t out of earshot. Her apple-peeling pace had changed from her trademark rapid-fire snick-snick-snick, to something that sounded like a three-year-old practicing Morse code.  
​
“Danae, I’m sure sorry to tell you this, but I’m afraid you’ve wasted a trip. James isn’t here this morning,” I said, stepping between her and the kitchen. An extended sn-iiiiiii-ck echoed from the kitchen and I could almost hear the smirk playing across Tina’s face.     

Danae’s perma-smile wilted a bit at the edges. “Oh? Are you sure? I mean – I just double-checked with him the end of last week.”

“He said to tell you he was sorry, but he accidentally double-booked himself with a signing over in Nashville.” I hated the lie as I said it, but I also wanted to soften the disappointment enough to nudge Danae to re-schedule. I had zero intention of letting her know James was expecting me to fill in for him and do the interview instead. He could tell her that himself if he cared so much about reporters. 

“Well shoot,” she muttered, looking to her camera … man? boy?, for answers.

I seized the moment and stepped towards the door, willing her to take a hint. “Like I said, sorry you had to waste a trip. But, maybe you could come back in a few weeks – we’ll have the new fall menu going, plus we’ll have lots of new seasonal products in the store, and you can set up a time with James then.”

But she didn’t budge. Instead, she glanced around the living room as if contemplating the best place to settle in and wait. Her shoulders slumped, and if I didn’t know better, she seemed to radiate genuine disappointment.  

“I guess I was just really hoping to get a jump on The Knoxville Herald, because I mean I know they’ve got the big story next week,” she sighed. “And well, I guess it makes sense – that they would get the story – I guess I was just hoping James might want to give his hometown paper first dibs.”

And with that, she did sit down, as she looked up at me with her moist brown eyes, her expression was expectant. Like a pouting child counting on their charm to come roaring in to save the day.  

Something did come roaring in. A wave of confusion at what she had just said.

“What big story next week?” I asked. A very long sn-iiiiiiiii-ck reverberated from the kitchen before Tina gave up all pretense and stepped into the living room beside me.

“Oh you two!” Danae giggled, swatting her hand at us as if shooing away the absurdity of the question. She cupped perfectly manicured fingertips against her cheek, whispering loudly, “The new store?” She tried to wink, but instead was only able to pull off something that vaguely resembled a nervous twitch.

I was suddenly so afraid … so dumbstruck, that I couldn’t bring myself to speak. To utter aloud any one of the swirling questions forming in my mind and give the situation power to materialize.

“I tell you what, you ladies are certainly good actors – I’d give you both an Academy Award. Look at you two, trying to keep the big scoop secret,” Danae giggled again, this time adding air quotes with her hands to “secret”. “It really is ok, everybody already knows. That’s why I was hoping to catch James this morning.”

Tina grabbed my arm, pulling me toward her as we both clutched each other for support. “Molly, I think we can spare some time and coffee this morning for Danae and do a sneak-peek interview with her? Don’t you think?”

​And that was all the encouragement Danae needed. She shot off the couch as if launched from a cannon and bear-hugged us both.

“Oh I knew you guys wouldn’t let me down, I just knew it!” she screeched, her body restless with renewed energy. She snapped her fingers at her camera man. “Roy! Go get that folder out of the car.” He nodded and quickly came back with a thicket of papers held together in a crisp white folder. ‘Roth Contracting and Architects – A family company since 1992’ glittered in gold script across the folder.
​
“Now, I promise y’all – I’ll keep everything hush-hush, but I am just dying to talk about these new sketches!”

​“I think we can safely say that makes three of us,” I said, and ushered us into the apple-strewn kitchen, and shot Tina a look of blue-murder. 

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