She wanted to get back to it, to dive headlong into Jack O’Hara’s world of cons and scams and life on the lam. Between the tour and the pretour rounds, she hadn’t had a full hour to write. And she was due.

But she wasn’t going straight to work. She wasn’t going to think about work for at least forty-eight blissful hours. She was going to dump her bags, and she might just burn everything in them. She was going to lock herself in her own wonderful, quiet house. She was going to run a bubble bath, open a bottle of champagne.

She’d soak and she’d drink, then she’d soak and drink some more. If she was hungry, she’d buzz something up in the AutoChef. She didn’t care what it was because it would be her food, in her kitchen.

Then she was going to sleep for ten hours.

She wasn’t going to answer the telelink. She’d contacted her parents, her brother, her sister, her grandparents from the air, and told them all she was going under for a couple of days. Her friends and business associates could wait a day or two. Since she’d ended what had passed for a relationship over a month before, there wasn’t any man waiting for her.

That was probably just as well.

She sat up when the car veered toward the curb. Home! She’d been drifting, she realized, lost in her own thoughts, as usual, and hadn’t realized she was home.

She gathered her notebook, her travel bag. Riding on delight, she overtipped the driver when he hauled her suitcase and carry-on to the door for her. She was so happy to see him go, so thrilled that he’d be the last person she’d have to speak to until she decided to surface again, she nearly kissed him on the mouth.

Instead, she resisted, waved him off, then dragged her things into the tiny foyer of what her grandmother liked to call Sam’s Urban Doll House.

“I’m back!” She leaned against the door, breathed deep, then did a hip-shaking, shoulder-rolling dance across the floor. “Mine, mine, mine. It’s all mine. Baby, I’m back!”