Chapter 1. Cherry pie

The great guy Lily meets at her company’s St. Patrick’s Day party doesn’t own half of Microsoft, but he isn’t a leprechaun either, so he has that going for him…

Lily half-heartedly flipped through the clothes hanging in her closet. Blue, blue, blue—yellow. White. Pink. Pink. Pink. Black. Lots of black. There wasn’t a darn green top in the whole closet, and she knew it, but she kept looking anyway. Why was it every St. Patrick’s Day she had this lack of green thing going on in her wardrobe? Was there a law somewhere against department stores putting a green sequined top on sale?  Of course, there were green tops on the full-price racks, but what woman would pay forty or fifty bucks for a green sequined top if she didn’t live in Dublin? Or unless she was trying to catch an Irish geek—who owned half of Microsoft—and was a real hunk. Lily had a nagging hunch if there were any rich, Irish hunks at Microsoft, they’d already been spoken for by women who had a lot more going for them than she did. That was okay. She could settle for just hunky. Hunky could be good.

Well, she’d just have to run through the mall on her way home from work and pick up a green scarf or a pair of green rhinestone earrings. She was in no mood to spend a bundle on something she wouldn’t wear again until next year. She’d rather spend her money on a new twelve-megapixel camera she had her eye on. Not only was it a better camera than the one she had now, but it had a viewfinder in addition to an LCD monitor and took longer videos. The viewfinder was necessary for her outside shots. The monitor didn’t work for her when the sun was shining.  She didn’t know why; no one else she knew had any trouble. She’d found the perfect camera at a photography store near her work for three hundred dollars. It wasn’t something a professional would drool over, but it had every feature she was looking for plus it had the added bonus of being as small as the camera she had now, so it would still fit into her purse. Lily resisted the obvious option: buy a bigger purse.

Because she really wanted the camera, even a green sequin top on sale probably wouldn’t have tempted her. Besides, if this year was like the last, there wasn’t much incentive to spend a lot of money and effort for this event. She knew from the last St. Patrick’s Day company party the men there would be the same men she saw at work during the day, only drunk. And still married. It was a pretty sure bet she’d end up spending the night talking to the other single women on her floor, eating stale cookies with foul-tasting green sprinkles, and drinking green beer out of a paper cup. No wonder St. Patty’s Day was her least favorite holiday. Wardrobe stress, green beer, and no eligible men, even if they were leprechauns. What was there to love? The year before last, when she was still in college, the little tavern off campus at least served free hotdogs with their green beer. She hoped this wasn’t a sign she was moving down in the world instead of up.

Actually, Lily’s frustrated mood had nothing to do with sequined tops or green beer or even leprechauns. Her real problem was she was lonely. In her thirties, she was anxious to move on with her life. At every company function, she looked at the executives from out of town, hoping in vain to see someone who looked promising. Luckily, she liked her job and it took her mind off the other areas of her life that weren’t as fulfilling. Still, if she were ever going to have a family, she needed to get started. She’d already looked in the usual places like the local grocery stores, community events, churches, and social clubs without any luck. Since she didn’t hit the bars like some of the other single women, there wasn’t any place else to look except the Internet. She had no interest in picking out the father of her future children on a dating website. Lots of women had been successful and found wonderful men using an Internet dating service, but Lily made her living with computers, and she knew how easy it was to make a donkey look like a racehorse on a computer screen.

After work that night, Lily strolled past the photography shop to look at the camera she wanted. It was still in the window, and she knew there was no shortage of that particular model; she just liked to look at it. Then, she grabbed a slice of pizza at the Italian kiosk and headed for the jewelry section at her favorite department store. She was on her way to the sale table when she spotted a pair of green rhinestone earrings edged in clear crystals on a shiny glass counter. She yelped out loud when she turned them over and saw the price tag. “Forty-three dollars?” she said out loud. “For rhinestones?”

“Oh, they’re not rhinestones, they’re real Austrian crystals,” said a helpful clerk.

They’re glass, Lily thought. Crystals are just glass. And they’re not even set in vermeil, but some kind of mystery pot metal…maybe salvaged from some old World War II submarine.

The clerk, sensing one of her last chances to sell the earrings was slipping away, said, “Wouldn’t they be great to wear tomorrow night?”

What? Almost fifty dollars to go to the company lunchroom and watch everyone drink too much green beer and fall all over themselves? Not going to happen. Even so, she slipped the back of one of the earrings off and tried it on. Oh, she thought to herself when she looked into the mirror. They are gorgeous. The bottom half of the earring was set with a big, tear-shaped stone that caught the light with every movement and lit up her face with tiny flashes of green light whenever her head moved…

New cover!

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