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perfectly still.
    “Tell me this is not the most beautiful dog you ever saw in your life,” Tate said softly, scratching the dog’s chin.
    “Oh, he’s beautiful, all right,” Val agreed. “And your viewers are going to go crazy for him when this new season starts to air. I mean, a dog sidekick. It’s brilliant television.”
    “And so original, too,” Tate said dryly.
    “It hasn’t been done on a cooking show before, so as far as I’m concerned, it is original,” Val insisted. “Anyway, you know, your demographics skew amazingly female for Southern Outdoors. Something like forty-five percent. And thirty percent of those are women under thirty-five. That’s one reason TCC is so hot to take a look at our show. They know you not only deliver the NASCAR guys their other shows don’t draw, but the women too. And that’s golden.”
    “The NASCAR guys I understand. Every man who lives in the South likes to think he’s some kind of rugged outdoorsman, even if his idea of roughing it is a night without a remote control in his hand,” Tate said. “It’s the women part I don’t get. I mean, what’s that all about? Why are all these chicks under thirty watching a show about hunting, fishing, and cooking? And on the Southern Outdoor Network, of all places? You know, I was at Bargain Mart this morning, buying a spool of monofilament line, and when I looked up, there were half a dozen girls—none of ’em could have been drinking age—following me to the cash register. Honest to God, Val, one of ’em asked me to autograph her tattoo. And it wasn’t on her arm, either.”
    He bent over and wrapped his arms around Moonpie, who responded by lavishly licking his hero’s chin. “It’s crazy, isn’t it, little buddy?”
    Valerie took another deep drag on her cigarette, admiring, as she did always, the view of her star’s backside.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It all depends on how you look at things.”

Chapter 7
    H er cell phone started to chirp at six o’clock. After a night of much angst but little sleep, Gina was already mostly awake. She looked at the caller ID screen on the phone. Scott.
    “Pig,” she muttered, burying her head in the pillow.
    Five minutes later he called again, this time on her house phone. And five minutes after that he tried her cell. The chirping and ringing kept up, intermittently, all morning. When she emerged from the shower, dripping wet, she saw that he’d left three messages on the answering machine. She erased them all without listening, grinning sadistically as she stabbed the machine’s delete button over and over again.
    Let him call, she thought as she blew her hair dry. He could rationalize, apologize, strategize. He could cry, he could grovel. She and Scott were over. But somehow, she had to get through these last shows as best she could, head held high. Dignity intact.
    “I will survive,” she vowed, remembering the single girl’s disco anthem. She might be jobless, washed up at thirty. She might end up living in a double-wide in the Piney Grove trailer court back home, but she would survive. And she would do it without Scott Zaleski. The pig.
    At seven o’clock, Regina stumbled into the studio’s makeup room, a coffee mug clutched in one hand and her shooting script in the other.
    “Uh-oh,” said the six-foot-seven man with skin the color of cinnamon. He got up from the makeup chair and put down the issue of Allure he’d been reading. His head, which had been shaven clean,gleamed in the bright overhead light, and his immaculate starched white dress shirt and tight white jeans gave him the appearance of an African-American Mr. Clean, an effect he was not unaware of.
    “Did we have a bad night last night?” he asked, gingerly touching her face. “Girl, the size of the circles under your eyes, we gonna need some industrial-strength concealer today!”
    “Just do what you have to do,” Gina said, settling into the chair with a sigh. She managed