The Invitation

by Jude Deveraux

  More, Sam thought, but she didn’t answer him. She was glad he was going to be around people.

  Chapter Two

  You know what’s guaranteed to turn a man off? No, it’s not laughing at him when he’s in the throes of passion. The guaranteed, absolute, sure-bet turnoff is to tell a man you earn more money than he does.

  Men seem to think it’s okay for some daffy, brainless little lady to inherit millions—after all, some man earned that money. But let me tell you, men do not like to hear that a female pulled down 1.4 million last year and that, what’s more, she manages all that money all by her itty-bitty self, with no help from any man anywhere.

  Five years ago, when I was twenty-five, I was in a boring, dead-end job—the less said about it the better—and living in a boring, nowhere midwestern town, of which I want to say less than nothing. As I have always done, to occupy myself and keep my mind from stagnating, I told myself stories. I know, that’s about a quarter inch away from having a split personality, but at an early age I found it was either take myself away or lose my mind altogether. My father was terrified of his own shadow and so demanded absolute obedience from his family at all times. I had to wear what he dictated, eat what he decided I was to eat, like what he decreed, move to his specifications. He controlled every bit of my life until I escaped at eighteen, but before that time I found out that there was one part of me he couldn’t control: my mind. I may have been forced to wear blue when I wanted to wear red, and I may have been denied ginger ale because the ol’ man hated ginger ale, but inside my head I was free. In my thoughts I did what I wanted, went where I wanted, said all the clever things I thought, and was praised for saying them. (My father had a tendency to smack smart mouths, which was very effective in making one keep one’s thoughts to oneself.)

  When I was twenty-five and living a few miles from my parents and doing my best to save enough money for a one-way ticket out, I wrote one of my stories down on paper. It was a murder mystery, and the killer was a young woman who’d done away with her tyrant of a father. After I wrote it, I thought, What the heck, and mailed it to a publishing house, never thinking they’d accept it. I guess a lot of people are sick of fathers and husbands who run their lives for them because twenty-eight days later I received a letter asking if they could please publish my book and send me a lot of money.

  I thought, and still do, What a scam! These people were willing to pay me to do something I’d been doing all my life.

  With the money they sent me, I moved to New York. I’d never been to the big city before, but it seemed to be where writers went—that’s what I was now, not just a bored nobody who was on the verge of a split personality—and I rented a tiny apartment and bought a computer.

  For the next four years I hardly looked up from the keyboard as I wrote one story after another. I killed off an uncle I didn’t like. I killed off several co-workers who’d snubbed me, and in my mega-seller I killed off the entire cheerleading team of my high school.

  During these four years I got a glimpse of a very different world from the one where I’d grown up. People were impressed by how competent I was. I’m sure I mentioned that my father was a tyrant, but did I also mention that he was the laziest creature alive? As far as I could figure out, at work he was a real wimp, afraid to stand up for himself, so he let others bully him. Then, when he got home, he took his rage out on me. My mother had long ago escaped to some never-never land of her own, and she was no fun for him to rage at. I, on the other hand, gave him a great deal of satisfaction because I cried and suffered and smoldered and felt all the injustice of it.

  But for all of my father’s flaws, he made me into a competent, fearless person. After you’ve lived with a man like my father, trust me, nothing anyone else ever says or does to you can hurt you in exactly the way he could. Sadists make a study of their victims, whereas most people are too self-absorbed to care enough. So, thanks to the training I’d received in childhood, I was a very competent businesswoman. I wrote incessantly, I negotiated my own contracts, I invested the money I made without the help of a manager, and at the end of the four years I bought myself a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue. I had made it—and made it in a big way.

  So what was my personal life like? Think nonexistent. My editor took me out now and then, and when I was writing without a break for days on end she’d even bring me food. But editors don’t bring you dates. Authors who fall in love, authors who are social, don’t write. I think if it were left up to publishing houses, they’d lock all their best-selling writers in Park Avenue towers and send them food and never allow them out.

  So, after five years of writing, after making millions, after becoming a household name all over the world, I decided to accept Ruth Edwards’ invitation to go on a two-week-long trail ride in the wilds of Colorado.

  Ruth’s boss had seen the movie City Slickers and had decided that it would be a good life-experience for his top male managers to go on a trail ride and deliver a calf or whatever, so of course they went. Unfortunately the boss decided at the last minute that his marriage was of utmost importance, so he went off to Bermuda with his wife and left his male employees to tough it out on beans and overcooked beef. Of course when they returned, all the men said they’d had a marvelous life-enhancing experience, and the boss never saw the dartboard covered with a horse’s head smack in the middle of a map of Colorado.

  After the men’s return, the boss said all of his female executives should go on the same trip and experience the same deep, mind-altering peace the men had found. Since all of his females who weren’t secretaries—and who had run the company for the two weeks the men were in Colorado—consisted of Ruth, she was told to choose three friends and go with them.

  That’s when Ruth called me. Not by any stretch of the imagination could Ruth and I be called friends. We were in college together and during our freshman year our dorm rooms were across the hall from each other. Ruth had grown up rich, with adoring parents who made it their goal in life to give their daughter anything she wanted, while I was going to school on government loans and went to my father’s house every weekend to do things like cut the grass and wash the clothes and satisfy my father’s insatiable need to belittle someone. Our backgrounds did not give us a great deal of common ground to talk about.

  Also, there was Ruth herself. She was tall, with lots of thick, dark hair that always obeyed her, gorgeous clothes—she was one of those girls who, even if she wore a sweatshirt, tucked a Hermès scarf at her throat—and she had an entourage of bad-skinned, overweight, gaga-eyed girls following her. These girls constantly changed as they got tired of fetching for Ruth and adoring Ruth, and were replaced by others.

  Since I always had my nose in a book and only watched Ruth from afar—okay, so I watched her with envy, fantasizing that I was an ugly duckling and that someday I was going to grow a foot, my hair was going to start curling, and I was going to become a social success instead of always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time—I had no idea she knew I existed.

  I underestimated Ruth. Any woman who could claw her way to the top of her field by the time she hit thirty should never be underestimated.

  She called me and told me how proud she was of my success, how she’d been following my career for years, and how she had envied me so much in college.

  “Really?” I heard myself asking, as wide-eyed as a kid. “You envied me?”

  Even while part of me was telling myself that everything she was saying was a crock, I was flattered. She told me how she used to watch me at school and used to see how respected I was by the other students, although what I remember is people trying to get me to write their papers for them. But Ruth seemed to be willing to go on and on with her praise, so I let her. What people don’t understand about writers is that they desperately want approval. There’s a saying, If you want to write, have the worst childhood you can survive. When I was a kid I tried everything in the world to get my father’s approval: I made straight A�
��s, I did ninety percent of the household chores, I was clever when I thought he wanted me to be clever, and I tried to figure out when I was supposed to be quiet. His joy was in changing the rules and not telling me he’d changed them. I used to visualize my life as one of those little ducks at a fairground shoot. I’d travel by and sometimes I’d get shot by the man with the rifle and sometimes I’d survive unscathed. It made for an exciting childhood, but it also made for an adult who’d do almost anything for praise. Money couldn’t buy me, people yelling at me never made me do anything I didn’t want to do, but give me six words of praise and I’m yours.

  So Ruth told me lots of great things about myself and how she’d read all my books. Oddly enough, her favorite was one in which the victim was modeled on her. I’d even had her killer shave her head, eyebrows, and lashes so she looked dreadful in her coffin.

  Anyway, Ruth told me she had to go on this trip to Colorado and wanted me to go with her so we could “renew” our friendship.

  I hate to say that all of this went to my head. I thought that now that I was successful and rich, women like Ruth considered me their equal. No more small-town nobody for me. Now I was Somebody.

  Unfortunately, I once again underestimated Ruth, or maybe I overestimated her, because as soon as I got to Colorado I realized she’d invited me to impress her boss. When she returned to her New York office she could tell him she’d invited her good, dear, longtime friend, the best-selling author Cale Anderson.

  It didn’t take any sleuthing to figure this out. As I disembarked from the tiny toy plane propelled by a fat rubber band outside a place called Chandler, Colorado, Ruth ran across the tarmac and threw her arms around me. Great. I got a face full of suspiciously firm boobs and a mouthful of silk scarf, as well as my carefully applied makeup smeared across my face. Behind her, just as in college, were two women looking at Ruth with adoring eyes.

  “Cale,” Ruth said, “meet Maggie and Winnie.”

  I wasn’t told which was which, but one was fat and winked at me, and the other was short and thin and I just knew she was going to lecture me on the value of herbal medicines.

  I smiled hello and thought about running back to the plane, but the pilot had already retwisted its rubber band and it was chugging down the runway. There were a couple of hangars there, one closed and one containing—I swear to God this is true—a World War I biplane. I looked back at Ruth and decided she and her satellites weren’t so bad after all.

  But then Ruth said, smiling over her shoulder, “Cale darling, you wouldn’t mind being a dear and carrying my blue bag, would you? I just can’t seem to manage by myself.”

  How come I can negotiate multimillion dollar contracts and get what I want, and I can write about women who stand up for themselves, but when faced with a woman like Ruth all I can do is smolder and pick up her damned suitcase for her? Was it because my mother didn’t love me? Hell, my mother didn’t know I was alive unless the toilet needed cleaning, so you’d think that would make me despise women. Instead it makes me do most anything to get one of them to like me.

  So there I am, the inside of me sane and enraged, and the outside of me schlepping Ruth’s bloody suitcase along with three of my own, following her two soldiers, also laden with Ruth’s luggage, while her royal highness breezed ahead of us toward God knows where. We were the foot soldiers and she the general leading the charge.

  By the time we got to the edge of the runway—this was a private field so there was no nice, comfortable lounge—Ruth halted and vaguely waved her hand for us to set her luggage down.

  Oh, thank you, kind mistress, I thought, and dropped her medium-expensive case and sat on it.

  Ruth, her two puppies looking up at her—as far as I knew, she never had an acolyte who was as tall as or taller than she; she liked them short and homely—said, “Someone was supposed to be here to meet us.” She was frowning as she looked up and down the tarmac. Not a person was in sight and I somehow doubted that Ruth had ever had much experience in being kept waiting.

  I had been told very little about the trip. Ruth’s instructions had been vague to say the least, but at the time she’d been telling me in detail how much she’d loved No More Pep Rallies. It was one of my best plots: a high school student is sick of always missing her Friday afternoon chemistry class to sit in the gym and cheer for a bunch of bozos chasing a ball around, so she blew up all the cheerleaders, proving once and for all that chemistry is more useful than football. Anyway, I was basking in Ruth’s praise, and when she said, “Leave everything to me,” I did so gladly. After all, by that time I was convinced that she was one of the great geniuses of our time.

  So now here I was sitting in the Colorado sun. My only consolation was that I was sure to get a book out of this experience. Maybe I’d make a mystery writer the killer. She’d do in a tall brunette named Edwina Ruthan, and she’d never be caught. Or maybe at the end the detective would say, “I know you did it, but having dated Edwina, I know you did the world a favor. You’re free to go. Just don’t do it again.”

  Of course that would never happen because the only people who adored Ruth more than no-life-of-their-own women were men. Short men, tall men, ugly men, gorgeous men, whatever—they all adored her. Somehow, all five feet eight inches of Ruth could make men believe she was little and cute and desperately needed help. Like King Kong needed help. Like Cybill Shepherd didn’t have a date for the prom.

  About two minutes after I had decided that I was going to leave this state forever, a blue pickup came screeching to a halt in front of us. I mean “us” euphemistically. The pickup stopped so the driver could look at Ruth. The rest of us—hot, tired, bored, sitting on Ruth’s suitcases—were staring at the tires and the scraped paint of the truck bed.

  I looked up at Ruth, and when I saw her face change, I knew the driver must be somewhere between puberty and male menopause, because that frown disappeared immediately and was replaced with a flirtatious look as she leaned into the passenger side of the truck.

  “Are you Mr. Taggert?” she purred.

  I wish I could purr. Had Mel Gibson Himself driven up, I still probably would have said, “You’re late.”

  A male voice rumbled out of the truck, and even I could feel the masculinity of it. Either the driver was a heap-big male stud cowboy or they’d trained one of the bulls to drive.

  Ruth batted her eyelashes and said, “No, of course you’re not late. We’re early.”

  Gag me with a spoon.

  “Of course we forgive you, don’t we, girls?” Ruth asked, looking at us with adoring eyes. I hadn’t been called a girl in so many years I almost liked it.

  The driver’s door opened, and I saw the big tire in my face—truck tires, mud tires, man tires—relieved of weight. They had sent the big one. Still bored, wondering if there was any place in this podunk town that took American Express so I could get out of here, I watched his feet as he walked around the truck. He was wearing cowboy boots, but they weren’t made of exotic leather, and they looked as though they’d been used a great deal. Kicking cow pies?

  Just as he walked around the tail of the truck, I sneezed, so I got to see him last. What I saw first was the open-mouthed speechlessness of Maggie and Winnie—or was it Winnie and Maggie?

  Great, I thought, blowing my nose, they sent some pretty cowboy to bedazzle the city ladies.

  I am ashamed to say that when I finally did look up at him, I reacted as badly as the duo and worse than our fearless leader. His name was Kane Taggert, and he was gorgeous: black curly hair, black eyes, sun-browned skin, shoulders an elk would envy, and a sweet, gentle expression on his face that made my knees weak. If I hadn’t been sitting down, I might have fallen.

  Ruth, still fluttering her lashes, introduced us, and he held out his hand to shake mine. I just sat there looking at him.

  “We’re all a little tired,” Ruth explained and glared at me before grabbing her largest suitcase and attempting to toss it in the back of the truck. She’d le
arned long ago that the fastest way to make most men notice you is to start to do man’s work.

  Instantly, Cowboy Taggert left off staring at me as though trying to remember his sign language skills and turned to help dear Ruth with her bag. Personally, I was surprised she knew where the handle was—before then I hadn’t seen her touch it.

  It was at that moment that we all heard a sound we’d heard a million times in movies but had never wanted to hear in real life: the rattling of a rattlesnake. Mr. Taggert had the big heavy suitcase in his arms, and Ruth, standing so close to him I hoped she was using some sort of birth control, was to his left. Six inches away from her foot was a coiled rattler that looked as though it meant business.

  Very slowly, Mr. Taggert spoke to me because I was farthest away from the snake and nearest the truck door. “Open the door,” he said calmly, patiently. “Under the driver’s seat is a pistol. Get it out and very slowly come around the far side of the truck and give it to me.”

  If I do say so myself, my mind works quickly in an emergency. I’m not one of those people who freeze, and right now I saw lots of things wrong with this plan. One, how was this man going to shoot if his arms and hands were full of Ruth’s seventy-five-pound suitcase? And two, it would take me a long time to walk around the truck, longer maybe than the snake intended to give Ruth.

  Slowly, I opened the door to the truck. I was the only thing moving except the rattles of the snake, which sounded awfully loud on that windswept field. Also slowly, I leaned into the truck, and when I pulled out the pistol, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was hoping it wasn’t one of those heavy revolvers that take the hands of a lumberjack to fire. It was a nice, neat little nine-millimeter, and all one had to do was pull the slide back, aim, and shoot.

  Which is what I did. I was shaking some, so I didn’t quite blow the head clean off the poor snake—after all, it’d probably only wanted the warmth of Ruth’s suitcase—but I certainly killed it.