Chapter 1Cassidy waited. Mrs. Sommerson tossed athird rejected dress into her arms. " Simply won t do，" the woman mutteredand scowled at a midnight-blue linen. Aftera moment s consideration this， too， wasdumped into the pile over Cassidy s arms.Valiantly Cassidy held on to her patience. After three months as a sales clerk in TheBest Boutique， she felt she d learned pa-tience， but it hadn t been easy. Dutifully shefollowed the solid bulk of Mrs. Sommersonto another display of dresses. After twenty-seven minutes of standing around like a

#1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts is "a word artist, painting her story and characters with vitality and verve," according to the Los Angeles Daily News. She has published over 140 novels, and her work has been optioned and made into films, excerpted in Good Housekeeping, and has been translated into over twenty-five different languages and published all over the world.

In addition to her amazing success in mainstream, Nora has a large and loyal category romance audience, which took her to their hearts in 1981 with her very first book, a Silhouette Romance novel.

With over 200 million copies of her books in print worldwide and more than eighty-seven New York Times bestsellers as of 2002, twenty-two of them reaching #1, she is truly a publishing phenomenon.