Smart Move

The spark was undeniable the night Sandy Burke met the devastatingly handsome Jake. Conversation flowed easily, so after they parted, she waited eagerly for his call. It never came. A high-powered career woman at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, Sandy feels she has had her heart broken one too many times, and now the redheaded trendsetter is facing a major quarter-life crisis. After some introspection, Sandy determines that helping others may be the key to helping herself. When she's presented with a job offer in Washington, DC, as the director of New Horizons, a nonprofit organization benefiting women in poverty, it seems providential. But now that she's moved, two major obstacles threaten the success of her first assignment: The first is her mother and her constant fog of less-than helpful New Age advice. Secondly, plans to build another New Horizons outreach center have come to a screeching halt, thanks to the interference of a pesky lawyer and his attempts to reverse zoning approval for the building project. After weeks of verbal sparring over the phone, Sandy is in for a shock when she comes face-to-face with her foe. The smooth voice at the other end of the line is a heartwrenching blast from the past. In this twist of fate, Sandy sees the perfect opportunity to ensure the success of the outreach center and to enact a little payback on this man she thought she'd left behind. And so the battle of wits begins. Will Sandy's flirt-to-convert plot sway her nemesis's determination to block the center, or will his charming and undeniably attractive ways convince the sassy redhead to give love a second chance?

Melanie Jacobson is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she grew up in a rich tradition of storytellers. After graduating from Brigham Young University, she enjoyed a career in fashion retail before pursuing her true passion: teaching literature and writing. Realizing she was still missing something, Melanie tried Internet dating for a few years. She now considers herself a retired Internet dating expert after searching the World Wide Web to find her husband, who only lived forty-five minutes away. The live with their three children in Orange County, California.