We often sit on our balcony with a bottle of local Douro red wine or vino verde or, the speciality of the region, vintage port, overlooking the beautiful Douro Valley remembering all the special times.

Sorry for such a long delay. I just didn’t feel like writing. Do you like the new image? It seems more appropriate for the last half of the story: Dawn.

Stone

Chapter 27 – Home again

Chapter Two -- Fleur De Lis

With the help of her uncle and his contacts, Gillian begins to work her way up the ladder of criminality into respectability.

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Chapter 1
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Grace. Some people walked with it, some people flew with it. Julian barely dreamed with it.

Swimming lessons for P.E. went on, and he sat to the side with his classmates while a girl dove off the high board. It was a beautiful dive. Julian sat in awe.

Of course, the boys sitting around Julian cheered for a different kind of beauty that she too possessed. It was that age where boys started to look at girls a certain way. Julian, however, didn’t care about all of that at the moment.

It was just a Walmart, not a Belk or something, and I was probably just getting basic underwear, not anything I could show off at school like a skirt or dress. But it was my first time shopping for girl clothes and I was determined to enjoy it. I’d read a million scenes like this in various stories since I first got past the nanny software a couple of years ago, and now I was going to live it.

[October 1927 – Chicago]
Vincent ‘Bugsy’ Stallone came into his office in a bad mood.
“Those bastards from Justice are getting to be a real pain in the arse. We just lost another shipment of beer between the Port and the Warehouse. It is that agent Ford again. He gets everywhere, the bastard. He must have informants on almost every street corner.”

The blonde-haired woman sitting next to his big polished oak desk looked up from filing her nails.

“What are we going to do? We have customers who rely on us. That’s the fourth this month.”

“Doll, don’t I just know it. Now that Big John and the rest are out of action it is down to the likes of us to keep this city drinking.

“Won’t this just blow over?” asked the woman.