Dream Date: Modern Magic, #1

Prologue

Early March

With a small yet wistful smile, Jillian Morgan placed the last of her novels on the familiar, old bookshelves with more than a little twinge of heartache.  Unfortunately, her favorite romance novels only took up a tiny fraction of what her grandmother's massive collection of old cookbooks once had.  Just like the rest of her life only took up a tiny fraction of what had once been Fairfield House - a home all but overflowing with joy and love and happiness.

Back in September when she had made the decision to return to Ohio, Jillian had expected that this moment would be filled with joy and happiness.  This was what she wanted, after all.  She was home.  Finally.  But without her beloved Gram and Pop, the house felt empty.  Alone.  Abandoned.  Just like Jillian herself was.  And she was barely hanging on to her roiling emotions by the thinnest of threads.

Looking around the cozy den where her grandmother had once spent so many fruitless hours attempting to teach her how to knit, it was difficult for Jillian to believe that her beloved grandparents, Martha and William Morgan, were both gone, killed in a car crash only six months ago.  Her heart ached at the loss, but she knew they wouldn't want her to mourn for them forever.  After all, they had raised her to be a strong and confidant woman, one who could stand on her own and make her own choices - good or bad.  They had taught her to think for herself and had supported her when she had announced her decision to move to Indianapolis and start her own ad agency.  They hadn't even chastised her when she broke her engagement to Indianapolis millionaire and playboy Randall Griffith.  Instead, they had simply offered her love and acceptance and a place to return to if she ever felt the need.

Two years ago after the breakup, she hadn't felt that need, but last summer when a large corporation had offered to buy out her small, boutique ad agency - along with her rather elite client list - for a very generous price, Jillian had taken Gram and Pop up on their offer without hesitation.  There was nothing tying her to Indianapolis any longer and even though they never admitted much of anything, Jillian knew all too well that her grandparents were aging and could use some help around the house.  After all they had done for her when she was a child, she was more than happy to do anything she could to ease their Golden Years as much as possible.

However, she also had an ulterior motive, one borne of purely selfish reasons. Jillian had just turned thirty and her life was still as empty as it had been at twenty-one.  It was time to go home.

So she had sold her company and made plans to return to the little suburb of Pickerington, Ohio, just outside of Columbus.  Her grandparents had been thrilled, even though they still insisted that they didn't need the help.  Jillian, however, knew that they did, especially trying to manage the massive Victorian home, and the sprawling estate grounds that went with it, on their own.

Plans made, Jillian had been happy for the first time in recent years.  She was going home - back to the grandparents who had raised her when her own parents had flown off on an International Doctors Association mission and not come home, disappearing into the jungles of Africa, never to be heard from again.  For a time, she even forgot about how much of a soap opera her life seemed to be at times.  Especially when Randall announced his engagement to a new woman - which seemed to be about every third week - and the press' interest in Jillian rekindled.  However, at the thought of going home, none of that mattered.  Instead, she was simply happy.

Then, the week before she had been scheduled to leave Indianapolis, the fateful call had come.  Her grandparents had been coming home from an event in downtown Columbus when they were hit and killed by a drunk driver.  And suddenly, Jillian's world was upended once more.  Only this time, there was nothing to anchor her.  No place to call home.  She was truly adrift and fighting to regain some sort of stability.

Instead of crumbling into a weeping, crying heap of tears, however, Jillian had squared her shoulders and continued on with her plans, determined to move back to Ohio and start over - just the way Gram and Pop would have wanted her to do.  No matter that her heart was so shattered that she didn't think it would ever be whole again.

The first few months back in Pickerington had been the worst, in particular Christmas, when she didn't even have the energy to put up a single strand of holiday lights, let alone a Christmas tree.  But over time, as she moved her things into Fairfield House, sold off a few of the older pieces of furniture that either held no meaning to her or had been in storage for nearly three decades, she found that the comforting presence of her grandparents was still within the walls of the house.  Their physical bodies might be gone, but their spirits lived on and little by little, Jillian found, if not the peace and happiness she had come here to find, then some sort of normalcy.  She had long ago decided that was probably the best she could hope for, especially when her heart still refused to begin to heal.

Now, moving her grandmother's cookbooks into storage and replacing them with her own small collection of romance novels, Jillian finally believed that Fairfield House - which her grandparents left to her in their will - was truly hers.  Or mostly hers anyway.  Only it didn't feel quite the way she had anticipated that it would.  There was very little satisfaction, and instead she felt a yawning emptiness open up inside of her.

However, she shoved those feelings aside, telling herself that she would deal with them later.  When the time was right.  Which wasn't now.  Jillian was nothing if not practical and she knew she needed to keep moving forward.  No matter how numb she felt deep inside and no matter how much her destroyed heart still ached with the loss.

This was her home now and she had to start thinking of it that way.  No matter how much it hurt.

There was still the small matter of her grandfather's office to deal with, and until today, Jillian hadn't quite had the heart to disturb anything in what had been affectionately referred to as Pop's inner sanctum by Gram and just about everyone else.  In fact, Jillian had only been in his office twice since she had returned home, but today, with the gloomy, rainy Saturday afternoon stretching out before her, she knew she couldn't really avoid the room much longer.  She had to at least look in the old office and see what he had left behind, no matter how much it hurt.  Delaying the inevitable might only make things worse in the end.

Despite Fairfield House's massive size, the third floor and the attic were only minimally heated, leaving only the first and second floor rooms suitable for occupation - at least at the moment.  In time, Jillian hoped to renovate the home's heating system completely and allow the other two floors to be put into use.  It was silly, she supposed, since she was the only one living in the house and likely to be the only occupant for the foreseeable future.  However, it had always been her grandfather's dream to reopen those floors, just as they had been when he was younger, so she supposed that was why she was so committed to the idea as well.

For a moment, Jillian considered calling her friend Emily to see if the other woman was interested in going to a movie or perhaps shopping that afternoon.  She and Em had been friends since they were both five and neither time nor distance had dissolved the bonds of their fast friendship.  Then Jillian remembered that Emily was away for the weekend with her new boyfriend, Thomas, and wouldn't be back until the next day.  Jillian supposed there were a handful of other acquaintances she could call, but she hadn't been back in town long enough to really fell close enough to confide in any of them about the way she was feeling at the moment.  In fact, most of them would probably only want to discuss her life and relationship with Businessman Glam Randall Griffith and that was a chapter in her life that Jillian had no intention of rehashing again.

So faced with the prospect of yet another made-for-TV-move for the afternoon or finally at least looking inside her grandfather's old office to see what needed to be done to make it useable as her own space, Jillian picked the office.

While she had no idea if she was ever going to open another ad agency, she also knew that it was not in her nature to simply sit around for the rest of her life and do nothing, no matter how wealthy the sale of her old business had made her.  Coupled with her inheritance from her grandparents, in theory, she would never have to work again if she didn't want to.  Still, even if she wasn't working, she did want to move her computer and her sketching materials out of the old bedroom they were currently occupying and into a lighter, more airy space.  There might be a way to move a few things around in the office that would allow her more time to deal with the memories while still taking advantage of the old office space - and its numerous electrical outlets.

Armed with something of a plan, Jillian made her way up the sweepingly dramatic spiral staircase that was the centerpiece of the main hallway and down the upstairs hall until she came to the exquisitely carved door that led her to her grandfather's old office.  There, she halted, placing her hand on the door for the moment, almost as if she expected to hear him admonishing her for lurking outside his door.  Just as he had when she was younger.  For a moment, she wished she could hear his voice again, maybe joking on the phone with a client or spinning those tall tales of his to whoever would listen.

With a sigh of resignation, she swung open the door, almost expecting to see him sitting there in his antique desk chair, his glasses perched on the edge of his nose, his sketch pad in front of him, a pack of artists' pencils spread out before him, and his ever-present cup of coffee beside his left elbow.  But he wasn't there and never would be again.  However, the remnants of his life still were.

Jillian had dealt with the pain of losing Gram almost from the moment she came back, the empty kitchen that was no longer filled with the scent of something delicious baking impossible to ignore.  However, for some reason, confronting the ghost of her grandfather was harder than she had imagined.  So she hadn't.  Perhaps part of it was because in many ways, he had been larger than life, especially to a parent-less little girl who longed to follow in his footsteps.

William Morgan had been a lot of things - businessman, artist, and community leader, just to name a few.  To Jillian, he had been simply Pop, the man who had taught her how to ride a bike and held her when she cried after numerous teenaged dates gone wrong.  However to the vast majority of Americans, William Morgan had been the man who had single-handedly brought Daniel the Dream Date Doll to life and spawned the fantasies of innumerable girls around the globe - Jillian included.

Designed to compete with other fashion dolls that were incredibly popular at the time, the vinyl version of the eleven and a half inch high Daniel doll never quite lived up to its promise, instead looking more like a vacant-eyed mannequin rather than a toy filled with life.  However, the paper dolls, coloring books, storybooks, and all other licensed products relating to the Daniel doll sold incredibly well, so popular that most stores had difficulty keeping them in stock.  Adults and children alike clamored for items depicting the handsome doll in various poses and fashions, the sales spurred on simply by the quality of the artwork that made Daniel seem more like a flesh and blood dream date of a man and less like a cheap piece of plastic.

And those sales were possible only because of William Morgan's magnificent, utterly realistic artwork.

Already well off from his years as a freelance artist for various corporations, Jillian's grandfather had taken on the Daniel Project as he referred to it simply as a favor to an old friend.  Hardin Deerfield, whose toy manufacturing company had created the original Daniel doll, was at a loss as to why their product wasn't selling.  Desperate to save his investment, Hardin had called up his old friend William Morgan and practically begged him to redesign just about everything relating to the Daniel doll.  The dolls themselves couldn't be changed, but everything else - from lunch boxes to child's watches - could be.

Given the freedom to create, Jillian's grandfather had spent nearly a week locked in his office, emerging only to eat and sleep upon occasion - a time that Jillian remembered very well.  When he did finally poke his head out of his office door and announced that he was finished, everyone, including Hardin Deerfield, had been in awe of the results.

Gone were the cartoonish sketches of a gawky teenage boy who was, quite honestly, nobody's idea of a dream date.  In his place were innumerable drawings of an older, sexy, sophisticated brown-haired man with obvious good taste, good breeding, and a smoldering, dark-eyed stare that was hot enough to give living, breathing women the chills.  William Morgan had handed his friend the sketches and told him that if he sold that vision of the doll, sales would triple.  If not quadruple.  And he had, of course, been right.

Suddenly, Daniel the Dream Date Doll was a household name and there was even a series of early adult novels that tied into the new marketing scheme, allowing the company to target a college-aged audience and beyond.  Deerfield's company prospered and along with it, so did the Morgan family's fortunes.  The money was enough to allow Jillian to attend the college of her choice without a thought as to how she might paid for the tuition.  Repairs and improvements were made to Fairfield House and Gram had finally been able to retire from her job at the Pickerington Community Library.

Jillian had always hoped that her grandparents would be able to live to a ripe old age and enjoy a leisurely life made possible by the profits from the Daniel artwork.  Sadly, that was not to be, and now, all that was left of her grandfather's final - and arguably best - project were his sketches.  And, of course, the money his work had brought in.

Crossing to his desk, Jillian was surprised to see that Pop had kept one of the old Daniel dolls, still in the box adorned with his magnificent artwork, on his desk, along with several paper doll books, some of the early adult novels, and a smattering of other licensed products adorned with the infamous artwork.

Reaching down, she picked up one of the paper doll books and flipped through it, seeing her grandfather's strong, masterful pencil strokes in each sketch.  Even now, she could understand why these books had been so extremely popular.  In them, Daniel looked every inch the virile, seductive male and for a moment, Jillian had to again wonder why her grandfather had taken a child's toy and turned him into a heartthrob with leading-man good looks meant for a young, adult woman instead of a child.  There was marketing to parents and then there was the marketing of Daniel.  After all of her years in advertising, Jillian still couldn't figure out what her grandfather had been doing.  Even as a young girl, she herself had never really understood his reasoning and now, she doubted that she ever would.

Because William Morgan was gone.  And he wasn't coming back.

Jillian was truly alone for the first time in her life.  All she had left of her beloved Pop was her memories and his legacy, including stacks and stacks of drawings of a man who wasn't real - but seemed like he should be.

Once more, she traced the lines of the Daniel artwork with her fingertips, as if willing the glossy paper to give her the answers she was seeking.  Oh, Daniel.  Why couldn't you be real? she asked softly.  Why do I have to be alone?  Then she sniffed, even though she knew it was a pitiful thing to do.  Then again, she was pitiful, talking to a paper doll as if she expected a response.  You're all I have left of him and you're just a paper doll.  How pathetic is that?  Her words were met with the distant rumble of thunder as an early spring storm pelted the house with more rain.

For the first time since she had returned to Fairfield House, Jillian allowed her tears to fall, no longer holding them back and forcing them to go away.  Cradling the paper doll book to her chest, she sank down into her grandfather's chair and allowed the enormity of her loss to finally sink in.  She was alone.  Really and truly this time.  There was no magic to swoop in and save her.  Gram and Pop weren't coming back.  All she had were her memories and this house.  In that moment, she was certain she would never be whole or happy again.  And the last remnants of her broken heart shattered with that realization.

Chapter One

Early June

So are you finally having fun?  Emily Tussing teased her best friend Jillian Morgan on an unseasonably warm Friday night as they walked through the local street fair, one of the many in the Pickerington, Ohio, area that were lead-ups to the big Violet Festival the following month.

I might be, Jillian responded with a smile, drawing in a deep breath and letting the warm, sweetly scented night air fill her lungs.  A few months ago, Jillian didn't think she would ever be happy again.  And while she still wasn't exactly happy, she was...content.  And that was more than she had ever dreamed she could hope for even a few months ago.

When Jillian had finally broken down that cold March day, the deaths of her grandparents had ended up hitting her far harder than she had expected.  In the months that followed, she had kept herself locked away at Fairfield House, only seeing Emily and her other old friend Angie Wright a few times a week as she worked through her seemingly endless grief.  Rarely did she do anything on weekends, not yet willing to embrace the celebratory atmosphere that spring in this part of the country usually brought with it on warm winds and new blooms.

Instead, Jillian had used the time alone to finish renovations on her stately old Victorian-era home, one of the few still left standing in the town, and restored the grounds to their former glory.  Unfortunately, she had also been forced to install a new front gate and security system after Randall's latest fiancée had dumped him and Jillian once again became a person of interest to the gossip rags.  That incident, more than anything else, had proven to Jillian that while she could run from her past, she couldn't hide from it.  And that realization, finally, had allowed her to begin to rebuild the pieces of her shattered life.

Little by little, Jillian had started to emerge from her mourning until not even Emily nagged her any longer about getting out and having fun.  As Jillian had reminded everyone numerous times, she was content and that was going to have to be enough.  So far, both Emily and Angie had agreed with that philosophy.  Except, of course, when it came to Jillian's dating life.  Or rather her lack of one.

Even though Emily refused to believe her, Jillian had very little desire to date.  She still felt a little burned after her disastrous relationship with Randall and had yet to meet a man who inspired her enough to want to take a chance on romance again.  It wasn't that she was opposed to the idea of dating.  It was simply that she had yet to meet a guy that made her heart flutter and her bones melt.  Well, that and she was terrified of re-entering the dating pool at thirty years old.  There was that consideration, too.

Having enough fun to meet a friend of Thomas' now? Emily asked hesitantly but hopefully as they strolled along the crowded street, pausing every so often to take a peek into the vendor booths.  I know I said that I wouldn't press, but Sean is a nice guy and he's in advertising, too.  I thought you might have something in common.  He's a little younger, but I think you might enjoy his company.  It would be a place to start.  By now, Emily was talking so fast that her words were all rushing together, making it difficult for Jillian to truly understand what her friend was saying.

She did understand enough, however, to put up her hand, stopping her friend before she could continue as Emily paused to draw in a breath.  Em, no.  I'm sorry, but I'm just not ready.  She shook her head.  And I'm sure Sean is a nice guy, but two advertising people?  Really?  Besides, you know I was thinking about doing something different with my life.

Emily paused to admire a handcrafted leather satchel-style bag.  You mean that kid's book you've been talking about for the last few weeks?  There was a dismissive tone to her voice as she slipped the bag over her shoulder and took a quick look in a nearby mirror to see if the bag worked with her usual laid-back style.

Yes.  That kid's book.  Jillian, whose style ran more to the classically sophisticated, looked around the booth but found that the artist's bohemian style didn't really suit her tastes.  Not to mention that she was more than a little annoyed with Emily for dismissing her dream so quickly.  I know you think I'm being silly, Em, but with the wealth of publishing options out there today, even if I can't find a publishing house, I can do it on my own.  I even have most of the artwork done, even if I am struggling with the story part a little bit.  Or rather, a lot.  Not that she would ever admit that to anyone, and especially not to Emily.

Reaching into her purse to retrieve her wallet so she could pay for the bag, Emily considered that for a moment.  And that means you can't date a guy who's in advertising?  She handed her money over to the vendor who quickly wrapped the new purse in tissue paper before sliding it into a bag and handing it back.  I'm not sure I understand.  I really think you're just being too picky, as always.  There is no perfect guy, my friend.  You let Pop and his stupid doll drawings brainwash you when you were a kid.

Do not bring up Daniel, Jillian snapped before easing her tone a bit.  It just means that I'm not ready.  Together she and Emily stepped back out onto the street where the scents of kettle corn and funnel cakes mixed with cotton candy and fried dough.  And even if I was, I'm not sure Sean is the guy for me.  He might be nice, but he probably also wants to pick my brain about advertising.  All I want is to leave that world behind.

Emily was silent for a moment, plucking a piece of sticky cotton candy from the bag she had tucked under her arm.  For as slim and trim as she was, Emily often ate like a professional football linebacker, including gorging herself on junk food at events like this and never, ever appearing to gain an ounce.

Maybe you're right, Jilly, Emily finally agreed, using the old childhood nickname to soften her next words.  And Sean is the one who approached Thomas about meeting you.  I'd hate to think he was trying to use you, though.  He seems so nice.

And maybe he is, Jillian said quickly, "but right now, I'm still just so raw from everything that I don't want to be hurt again.  I'm not sure I could take another broken heart.  If this