How Sweet It is

by Sophie Gunn

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

" How Sweet It Is will set your heart on fire" -- Robyn Carr, New York Times bestselling author "One sweet read! Everything I love best: humor, warmth, emotions that pull at the heartstrings, characters that step off the page, and a wonderful love story." -- Mariah Stewart, New York Times bestselling author How Sweet It Is Single mom Lizzie Bea Carpenter learned long ago that no white knight was coming to save her. A hardworking waitress at the local diner, she's raising her daughter to be like the independent women in her "Enemy Club"--high school rivals turned best friends, promising to always tell each other the whole truth and nothing but! Yet part of Lizzie wishes she did have a man's help, just for small stuff, like fixing up the house. Her fairy godmother must have been listening, because Dante "Tay" Giovanni soon appears. He's sexy, kind, and offering assistance--no strings attached. Slowly, steadily, Lizzie's heart opens. But the grip of the past is fierce, and nothing in life is ever really free. Tay has his own tragedies to overcome, but if he can, he'll fix more than Lizzie's home. He'll show her just how sweet it is to be loved by him.

Release date: January 1, 2011

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

For over a week the envelope sat on the dining room table unnoticed, buried under a stack of birdseed catalogues and household
bills like a bomb waiting to go off.


Life went on around it. Work, grocery shopping, and housework for Lizzie Bea Carpenter. School, babysitting, and friends for
her fourteen-year-old daughter, Paige.


Tick tick tick.

Normal life. A good life. Maybe not great, but fine. Galton, New York, centrally isolated, the locals liked to say, wasn’t exactly the kind of town where momentous things happened.


Until Saturday, September 8, 8:22 in the evening, when Lizzie’s world turned upside down.

“Who do we know in Geneva?” Paige asked, coming into the kitchen, holding up an envelope covered in foreign stamps. It had
been Paige’s turn to clean the dining room after dinner. She’d swept the crumbs under the threadbare Turkish rug, pushed around
the ragtag assortment of antique chairs until they looked more or less orderly, and tossed most of the pile of mail, including an ominous-looking letter from her middle school, into the overflowing recycling
bin with a quick, guilty second glance.


Lizzie turned off the faucet, put down the mac-and-cheese pan she was scrubbing in the sink, saw the handwriting, and said,
“Ratbastard.” She backtracked quickly, her throat constricting. “I mean, Geneva? Ha! No one. Let me see that.” She grabbed
for the letter, but Paige was too quick. Lizzie’s heart was pounding. Her throat was dry with dread.


“Who?” Paige tore the letter open while dodging around the counter.

“Don’t,” Lizzie said, but the word came out listlessly because she knew it was too late. Everything was about to change, and
there was nothing she could do to stop it.


“It’s addressed to both of us,” Paige said, unfolding the single sheet.

Lizzie didn’t know that she knew anyone in all of Europe, much less Geneva, but apparently she did, because she recognized
that handwriting at a glance, even after fourteen years. Her traitorous body knew it, too, and was responding as if it were
still sixteen and stupid. This couldn’t be happening. Oh, Paige…

Paige read the letter. She stopped, frozen, on the other side of the counter. “Oh. I see,” she said, letting the letter fall
to the counter. “Ratbastard.” She said it as if it were an ordinary name like Steve or Joe.


Lizzie wiped her hands on the dishrag, trying to look like a mother in control. “Well. He could have changed,” she said as
carefully as she could. “We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions.”


“He wants to come here, Mom.”

Lizzie cleared her throat. “That’s lovely,” she managed to get out.


“On Christmas Day.”

“Ratbastard! Sorry. Lovely. Hell.” Nice work. Lizzie needed a few minutes to pull herself together. She needed to sit and to breathe and definitely not to cry. She wanted
to hit something but she couldn’t. Not now, in front of Paige. At least, not anything that would break. Not that there was
much left to break in their kitchen, which was clean, but failing. Two burners were dead on the stove. The icemaker had quit
eleven months ago. The radio worked when you banged it. Hard. Couldn’t do much damage in here, even if she tried.


But that letter had done damage.

Paige looked as if she’d already been pummeled. Her face was blank and pale. Her new black, chin-length Cleopatra haircut
made her face seem rounder and her brown eyes even huger than usual. She looked like an eight-year-old and an eighteen-year-old
simultaneously, a special effect in a bad after-school movie about girls growing up too fast.


Lizzie picked up the letter. She imagined Ratbastard walking into a store and asking for the stationery that screamed I’m rich and arrogant the loudest. The cream-colored paper was heavy and stamped with a fancy watermark. The handwriting was neat, the tone straightforward.
He spelled realize like a Brit, even though he had been born and bred in Michigan—I realise this is out of the blue. But I’d like to meet my daughter. I’ll be in the States over the holidays, and will stop
by then. Twelve o’clock Christmas day? I hope she’ll be willing to see me. There was no return address, no phone number, no e-mail contact, nothing but a breezy signature—Ethan Pond. Then, in parentheses, Dad.

Lizzie excused herself, climbed the stairs, turned on the water in the bathroom sink to muffle the noise, and threw up.

Ethan Pond, Paige’s father, the boy who’d changed Lizzie’s life forever in the back of his Lexus during her senior year of
high school, was coming back.


This was a matter for the Enemy Club.



Tay Giovanni sipped his coffee, wishing he could taste it. It was 7:27 in the morning, and he was hunkered down on a stool
in a chrome-and-mirrors diner in a nowhere town waiting for Candy Williams, the woman who hated him most in this vast, frozen
world.


Was this bottom?

A hum of activity from four women at the end of the counter distracted him from his dark thoughts. The buzz grew until it
exploded into shouts.


“Ratbastard.”

“Pondscum.”

“Ninnyhammer.”

“Ninnyhammer?”

“What’s wrong with ‘ninnyhammer’?”

“Fuckface is better.”

“You know I won’t say that word.”

“Face? Why not? We all have one. C’mon. Just once? For Lizzie? This is Ethan Pond we’re talking about.”

“He’s a fartface, Liz.”

“Oooh! She said ‘face’!”


A wrinkled, gray-haired man on the stool next to Tay nodded to indicate the women. “That’s the Enemy Club.”

Was the man talking to him? Tay looked around, hoping someone else was nearby.

No such luck.

The old man went on. “I come in Wednesday mornings just to watch them.” The man’s baseball hat read John Deere Tractors. He was missing two fingers on his right hand. These two facts combined rocked Tay’s already rocky stomach. The man lowered
his voice as if telling a juicy secret. “They used to be the worst of enemies. Now they’re the best of friends. But friends
with a difference. They tell each other the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth the way only natural-born enemies
can. I could sell tickets!”


Natural-born enemies.

The words stuck in Tay’s gut. If any words described his relationship to Candy—to the world in general—those about nailed
it. He wondered if the Enemy Club had openings.


The old man elbowed Tay good-naturedly, then chomped into his chocolate-covered doughnut with pink sprinkles. “But now look
at them. Best friends forever. Right, Lizzie Bea?”


The waitress had come down the counter to top off their coffees. “Best enemies forever. Leave that poor man alone, Mr. Zinelli.” She poured more coffee into Tay’s mug, even though he’d barely touched
it. “Ignore him.”


One of the women stuffed a cream-colored piece of paper into a matching envelope and held it above her head. The address was
handwritten, Elizabeth and Paige Carpenter, 47 Pine Tree Road. “I say we burn it.”


The waitress hurried back down the counter. “Put that lighter away, Jill!”


Tay tried not to watch, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. Were they really enemies? They certainly didn’t look like they
had anything in common, but they were completely at ease, the way they moved, touched, threatened to burn each other’s possessions.


The old man leaned in close, pointing as he spoke. “The princess, the oddball, and the brainiac. Oh, and the waitress—she’s
the good girl gone bad. All leaders of their packs back in the day. Look close, and you’ll see. They don’t look like normal
friends, right?”


Tay didn’t need a close look; it was obvious they didn’t have anything in common without a second glance.

Jill, the woman with the lighter, was a bottle blonde, her hair pulled back in a brain-pinching bun, her earlobes dripping
with diamonds. She drank from a takeout coffee cup that read Brewhaha, the hopping, trendy coffee joint across the street that Tay had gladly passed by for the quiet neglect of the diner. Friends don’t let friends bring takeout to other friends’ restaurants.

A pixie of a woman in an orange flouncy sweater, coral beads, and short-cropped, orangish hair snatched the blonde’s lighter
and slipped it into her canvas bag. Her nose was covered in orange freckles.


“I have to go,” a third woman in itchy-looking tweed said, obviously annoyed by the other two’s jostling. She was short, her
brown shoes nowhere near reaching the ground. How she’d gotten herself up on the stool, Tay couldn’t imagine. The muscles
in his arms twitched, jonesing to help her down.


He clenched his teeth until the urge passed.

Ever since the accident, he’d been like this, possessed by the soul of a souped-up Boy Scout, needing to jump in and save
the world, or at least the part in front of him. When the urge hit him, it was like an epileptic fit, unexpected and uncontrollable.


As if a million good deeds would even out his karma.

Not that he believed in karma.

Or, in his case, in the possibility of even.

Hell, he had no idea what he believed in anymore.

“Wait, you can’t go, Georgia,” the waitress said. “Not yet.” The other women treated the waitress with deference, as if she
were the leader of the group, or maybe it just seemed that way because she was standing, moving, while they sat and watched.
Tendrils of wavy brown hair had escaped her bun, softly framing her round cheeks. Her waitress uniform was simple, with no
necklace or earrings or any adornment to make it appear anything more than what it was. Minimal makeup, just a bit of faded
color on her lips, a touch of blush on her cheeks. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…

The blonde caught him staring at the waitress, so he trained his eyes back on his coffee. The old man had taken up with his
doughnut, and the Enemy Club quieted to a low murmur. Tay tried to focus on his situation. He glanced at his watch: 7:28.
Candy would be here in two minutes.


Or not.

The women’s conversation drifted in and out until the freckled one’s calm tone silenced the others so that Tay could hear
clearly, no matter how hard he tried not to. “Lizzie, if you want something, you have to face it, admit it, then wish for
it with all your soul. That’s how the universe works. It will hear your wish, and if it’s sincere, it will answer.”


The waitress crossed her arms, leaned back against the service counter, and said, “Don’t get me started on the universe granting
wishes. I love you, Nina, but that’s nuts.”


Tay tried not to smile. He liked that waitress.

“But if it could?” the freckled one persisted.

“Then I wish for the perfect man.”

Despite the blackness that was numbing him, Tay stilled, hoping to hear better.

The blonde said, “No such thing,” and they all exploded into an uproar over the possibility of a half-decent man ever appearing
in Galton, New York.


The waitress held up her hand for silence. “The perfect man is one who’ll show up once a week, fix stuff around my house,
and then split. That, O great universe, is what I wish for.”


And they were off again. Tay looked down at his mug, trying to clear his head of waitresses and wishes. Candy would walk through
those doors any second.


… if you want something, you have to face it, admit it, then wish for it with all your soul…

He agreed with the waitress—nuts. But he couldn’t help himself.

He wished he wasn’t in this Podunk college town in the middle of nowhere, waiting for Candy to rip him to shreds.

But that was a coward’s wish, so he tried again: He wished with the few pieces left of his soul that Candy would show up and
take the money and then maybe, just maybe, he could taste his coffee again, feel the cold, sleep at night.


The old man was staring intently at him, his gray eyes narrowed. Tay wondered for a sickening second if he’d said his wish
out loud.


The blonde threw her arms out and proclaimed, “I wish for the perfect man—one with good pecs!” She lowered her voice and looked
right at Tay. “And beautiful green eyes.” He concentrated on the pies in the case across from him. Cherry, key lime, banana
cream. There was a time when he’d have been plenty interested in a beautiful blonde dripping in diamonds eyeing him as if
he was dinner, a time when he’d have been completely at home shooting the shit with a friendly old man over coffee and doughnuts.
But now, he just wanted to be out of here and on his way back to Queens. This small town where everyone knew a person’s business
wasn’t his kind of place. Tay could imagine what the old man would whisper about him to some stranger the next stool over.
There’s that man who was in that tragic accident. The woman in the other car died, you know. He hasn’t been the same since.
I come in every Wednesday just to keep an eye on him… could sell tickets…

Seven-thirty-one. Tay watched the women joke and cajole, and despite his worry, a tiny sliver of hope snuck into his consciousness.
Enemies can be forgiven, can become friends. There was a connection between the four women that mesmerized him. The freckled one touched the blonde lightly on the shoulder
and secretly passed her the lighter under the counter. The tweedy one sloshed her coffee distractedly and the waitress wiped
it up without a word. They all watched the waitress carefully, warily, concern evident in the way they licked their lips, pursed their mouths, caught and held one another’s eyes. They leaned in
across the counter that separated them from her as if it was all they could do to keep from leaping over it and whisking her
away to safety.


Was it really possible to befriend your enemies? What did it take? Telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth? I am Dante Giovanni. I went through a red light and hit another car. No excuses, just a dumb accident, a distracted moment
that I can never take back. A woman died. There’s no way to make it right. No way to fix it. But she left behind a daughter
who needs help. I will find a way to help that girl.

For an instant, the smell of coffee, eggs, and toast hit Tay full on.

Then Candy walked in the door, and his senses went dry.



It was shocking to see Candy in person after carrying around her picture clipped from the paper for so many months. Not that
Tay had expected that she’d be made up of a million tiny printer’s dots or still dressed in black funeral mourning. But he
hadn’t expected her to look so normal in her skinny jeans and layers of tight shirts, like every other college student in
the town.


Only the hatred in her eyes signified otherwise.

Candy eyed Tay as if he was the devil. Hell, she had probably only seen him in his black-and-white mug shot–like picture in
the paper, too. He had come to her mother’s funeral, but he had stood in the back under an umbrella in the pouring rain, his
hat pulled low. The etiquette of coming to the funeral of the stranger he’d killed escaped him. Emily Post wouldn’t go near
that one with a ten-foot pole.


Candy stiffened and marched toward him, her waist-length black hair swinging. She sat on the stool on the other side of him.
The old man, fortunately, had finished up the stray crumbs of his doughnut and moved off, waving good-bye to everyone in the place.


Candy stared straight ahead at the pies in their refrigerated case behind the counter.

“What do you want?” she asked.

He felt her hatred crashing off the Formica, shaking the doughnuts under their glass dome, vibrating the chrome napkin holders.
He figured he had about two minutes before the whole place came crashing down around him. He had known this would be hard,
but he hadn’t guessed he’d feel paralyzed. He hadn’t planned to be abrupt. He had wanted to hear her story, to tell her his.


I’m sorry. So very, very sorry…

But he saw now that his fantasy of a connection was just that—fantasy. Forgiveness. Wishes. Enemies becoming friends. Softheaded nonsense. He nodded at the bag at his feet. “Enough to get you through school. Take it. It’s yours.” His grip
tightened on his coffee mug until his fingers were white.


Candy glanced down at the bag, her long black hair skittering off her back like a waterfall. She shook her hair back into
place. “Is that what this is all about? Money? You’re such an asshole.”


“I wish it had been me,” he said.

“That makes two of us,” Candy said. Her ice-blue eyes met his and the effect was suffocating. Tay looked down the counter
at the Enemy Club disbanding, leaving behind the waitress and her letter. She looked almost as mad as Candy, scrubbing an
invisible spot on the counter with gusto. Maybe it wasn’t as easy as the old man made out to hang with your natural-born enemies.


“I won’t take your money,” Candy said. “I don’t want it.”


There was nothing else to say. Candy was a kid, and he didn’t know a thing about kids. What he did know was that she needed
the money and he had it to give. He tossed a five-dollar bill onto the counter and made for the exit.


“Hey! You forgot your bag,” Candy called after him.

“It’s your bag.” He was five steps from the door.

“I’m going to throw it off a cliff,” she called. “Into a gorge.”

Four, three, two, one…

“I don’t want your stupid money! I only came here to tell you to leave me alone or I’ll call the cops—”

The closing door cut off the rest of her words. He was outside in the crisp fall day and he could breathe again.

A woman in a blue jacket searched her pockets for change for the meter. A fit, determined mother pushed an oversize baby carriage
past. Two college students in Galton U. sweatshirts walked together, ignoring each other while they texted.


Tay’s red truck waited by the curb, his sheltie, Dune, in the driver’s seat. His cat, White, was curled up in the sunspot
on the dash.


Well, the cat wasn’t exactly his.

The beast had inexplicably taken a liking to him and Dune at a rest stop off Route 81, or was it Route 79? The roads had become
a blur. Or rather, since he drove so slowly after the accident, a never-ending asphalt river of curses from angry drivers
or offers of mechanical assistance from kinder, curious ones.


The cat didn’t mind his slow driving.

But Tay minded the cat. He’d expected the creature to be gone somewhere around Binghamton. Instead, it refused to leave, and to Tay’s dismay, he had developed a maddening superstition
around the animal—that she’d leave when his debt was paid off. It was ridiculous, he knew. Just another sign that he was losing
his grip, trying to find meaning where there was just a mangy, flea-bitten cat just as he was trying to find meaning in four
women at the end of a diner counter, or in a terrible, inexplicable tragedy on a dry road at four on a sunny afternoon almost
a year ago to the day.


He wished he could give it a rest. Go back to his old life taking care of the two apartment buildings he used to own in Queens.
But it ate at him like a cancer, from the inside out.


Anyway, what was left of his property was gone. Or rather, after the sale and paying off the mortgage and lawyers and expenses,
then giving a hefty sum away to charities, causes, vagrants, and unsuspecting people who caught his eye, what was left of
his livelihood was on the shiny floor of the diner in a duffel bag. He’d saved his whole life to buy those properties, had
hoped soon to buy the building next door. But then the accident happened, and he lost his taste for business, for expansion,
for success—for any kind of happiness. His easy success with women, with business, with life in general suddenly seemed wrong.
It was impossible to enjoy anything anymore without a blackness rising in him that canceled out any pleasure.


“Go.” He held the driver’s door open for the cat. “I gave her the money, so scram.”

Dune looked stricken.

“No, not you.” He scratched Dune between the ears. “You’re stuck with me, buddy. Oh, don’t look at me that way. You’re the one who should have chased her off in the first place.”
Dune was a herding dog, and instead of chasing White, he seemed determined to keep her close. Talk about natural-born enemies
behaving badly.


White stared at him, refusing to budge. So Tay cursed and climbed in, chiding himself for believing in signs, in wishes, in
some kind of control, when he knew deep down that life was what was hurled at you at seventy miles an hour when you let your
guard down for a split second. It was his job to deal with the consequences, to make things right.


It was his job to stop talking out loud to animals.

Especially rogue cats.

Dune hopped dutifully to the passenger side and Tay nudged White to her spot in the middle of the bench, no easy feat. He
pulled out his keys, fired up the old truck, and cursed again.


He shut down the engine.

In front of him was a store window stuffed with Galton University paraphernalia. T-shirts, hats, and a bumper sticker that
read, “Galton Is Gorges.”


Gorges? The slogan was printed on T-shirts, hats, even maroon boxers.

I’m going to throw it off a cliff… into a gorge.

This town was famous for cliffs?

Had Candy been serious?

She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She needed that money more than a kid her age could understand. The newspaper article had reported
that her father was “absent” and that her mother had left behind piles of debt. But what was debt to a kid until she was kicked
out of school or her car was repossessed by some stranger on a cold winter night?


Galton is gorges.

She’s a kid. Doesn’t know a thing about real life.

He raced back to the diner, but a quick glance through the plate-glass window told him that she and the money were gone. The
waitress was still behind the counter, reading from her letter, her head down, looking so sad he had to force himself not
to bust into the diner and offer whatever help she needed.


Lizzie and Paige Carpenter, 47 Pine Tree Road…

He drove his truck slowly up and down the steep streets of the gray town crawling with identical students like a Where’s Waldo? picture book. Where’s Candy? Jeans, T-shirts, long black hair…


It was as if she had thrown herself into a gorge.

Great, now he was getting morbid. He felt sick. He had to keep his head on straight.

He had thought giving Candy the money would make him feel at least a little better.

But it didn’t. He gave her the money, and not a damn thing had changed.

How did a person know when he was forgiven?

When he could taste his coffee again?

When he could sleep through the night?

When the cat left?

He looked down at White. The light ahead changed to yellow and he rolled to a gentle stop. The car behind honked angrily,
skidding to a stop behind him, just touching his rear bumper. He rolled down the window and said to the cat, “Out. For your
own good.”


White looked up at him, then went back to sleep.

He rolled up the window, put his truck in gear, and kept searching for Candy, stupid cat dozing as if everything were going
just according to plan.


Twenty minutes later, he spotted Candy on campus, heading toward a big stone building. He jammed the truck to the curb, slammed
on the emergency brake, and jumped out, the door hanging open behind him. “Candy! Please! Just one minute more. I swear.”


She looked back at him and smiled. It was the first time he’d ever seen her smile and it knocked him backward.

The coldest smile he’d ever experienced.

“Done. It’s fish food. At the bottom of a gorge.” She held her hands out to show him the bag was gone. “Now, I never, ever
want to see you again.”


And with that, she walked into the building and disappeared.



Why had she made that wish?


Lizzie stroked red paint onto the roof of the bird feeder that she’d set on a bed of newspaper on the dining room table. It
was almost midnight, but Lizzie couldn’t sleep, thinking about what it meant that she had wished for a man to come and help
her impress another man. It was infuriating that she still wished for a Prince Charming to come to her rescue. Especially
after fourteen years of making it on her own, not relying on anyone. What did it mean that such a wimpy wish had popped out
of her mouth at a critical time like this?


Paige’s footsteps on the stairs startled her from her thoughts. She had thought Paige had been asleep for hours.

Paige came into the room, her eyes glued to her cell phone, texting as she walked. Somehow, she didn’t bonk into the doorframes
or trip on the edge of the rug. Paige could walk across a four-lane highway, texting the whole time with four different people,
and not even feel the breeze of the cars zipping by her. “Geneva is in Switzerland,” Paige said.


Lizzie had sometimes considered wearing a clown wig around the house, just to see how long it took Paige to look away from
whatever screen her eyes were fixed on. But one good thing about Paige’s distraction was that it let Lizzie study her daughter’s
face closely. She had caught herself doing this with an obsessive intensity since Ethan’s letter had come, as if it were possible
to soak up as much of the girl as she could now, before it was too late and Paige left for the bigger things her father and
Geneva might be able to offer. Her daughter’s beauty, her flawless skin, her shiny, pin-straight hair, the just-forming sophistication
of her bone structure—it all took Lizzie’s breath away. And yet she said, “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”


Paige didn’t need to know that her mother was comin. . .