by Leslie Kelly
“What about Grace?” he couldn’t help asking.
“She’s a liar, that’s what I think,” Mrs. Coltrane said, her tone nasal.
He didn’t have to look over his shoulder—and wouldn’t have for the single winning lottery ticket in the biggest Powerball jackpot in history—to see the woman’s chin jutting up and out, and her nostrils flaring with patrician arrogance. He was familiar with the expression, having seen it on the faces of a lot of his rich, female clients.
Of course, most of them were clothed when they got all haughty and pretentious. Wrinkly nudity probably ruined the effect—not that he wanted to find out.
“I never was certain whether the stories she wrote about you were true—that any man could be as sexually potent and addictive. Now I’m quite sure they’re not.” The woman grunted. “Some sexual fiend you are—a naked woman standing a foot away and you couldn’t even manage a quick game of hide-the-joystick.”
He didn’t know whether to be relieved that she’d given up her seduction attempt, or offended that she thought him incapable of, uh, playing her game. But since the only place he wanted to hide his joystick was behind his own zipper, maybe her interpretation wasn’t such a bad thing.
Then the rest of her words sunk in. Sex fiend? “What stories? What, exactly, are you talking about?”
She was silent for a moment. If he had had a whole lot more nerve, he would have turned around to see if she was wearing a guilty expression at spilling some kind of secret. He wasn’t that brave, however, so he settled for prompting her. “Mrs. Coltrane?”
“You’ll know soon enough, I suppose.” Her voice sounded farther away, meaning she was back in the passenger cabin, hopefully getting dressed. “The book comes out this fall. And there’s talk of a story in the Star or the Globe or something.”
“Book?”
“Grace’s autobiography. Huh! As if that woman is interesting enough to need a whole book. If not for the scandals, it would be nothing more than a page.”
An autobiography. Grace Wellington—spoiled socialite turned scandalous widow after her bribe-taking politician husband had eaten the muzzle of a gun—had written her memoirs. And included him. Damn.
Almost afraid to hear the answer, he asked, “What exactly did Grace have to say about me in this book?”
The woman snorted an inelegant laugh. He realized she’d returned to the cockpit and was right behind him. When she moved her arm within view, he saw the sleeve of her designer blouse and breathed a deep sigh of relief.
“There’s a whole chapter devoted to you, my boy, and it’s been making the rounds. The lurid details are enough to make even the most risqué piece of erotica look tame.”
His stomach rolled over. It hadn’t done that in a cockpit since the first time he’d sat in an F-15 during his Air Force days…the early ones, before an unplanned pregnancy and a fucked-up marriage had derailed his plans to complete the pilot training program. “I can’t believe this.”
He didn’t want to believe it, but Mrs. Coltrane seemed sure of herself. Grace had written a bunch of raunchy stuff about him and circulated it among her highbrow friends. Which explained why he’d become the flavor of the month among the Beverly Hills set.
“The book’s coming out in hardcover in November.”
His temple began to throb as the full implication hit him. A book with a chapter full of sordid stories about him was about to go public. Now. Right when he was entering negotiations to take his company to the next level with a major merger.
God, how he wished he’d never laid eyes—or hands—on Grace Wellington.
“This is wrong.”
His passenger seemed unaware of his dismay. “If the rumors of an accompanying tabloid article are true, I imagine the book will sell well.”
Tabloid article. He felt like throwing up.
“Well, if you’re really not going to provide me with any form of entertainment, you may as well turn around. I want to go home,” Mrs. Coltrane said, her voice sharp with annoyance.
Max didn’t have to be asked twice. Within a half hour they were on the ground and Mrs. Coltrane was flouncing toward the terminal used by the private airlines. Max, meanwhile, stood on the tarmac, cell phone in hand, dialing a familiar number.
His brother Morgan—who lived in New York managing the family assets when he wasn’t off on some wildlife photographic safari—would know what to do. Or at least, who to call. But the minute Morgan answered the phone, Max heard a surprising note of excitement in his normally calm and collected older sibling’s voice.
“Max. You heard?”
“I heard.” He covered his free ear as a small Lear roared to life nearby. “Who’s the best literary attorney you know?”
“Literary?” A crackle of static interrupted, then Max thought Morgan said, “…a real estate attorney!”
Jogging toward the terminal entrance to get better reception, he spoke loudly so his brother could understand. “I don’t want to buy the woman’s house, I want to stop her damn book.” Speaking as he stepped inside, his raised voice garnered the attention of a number of people. This was so not his day.
“A book? Max, I’m talking about Trouble.”
Max strode into the private pilot’s lounge, which was, thankfully, deserted. “Tell me about it. I know I’m in trouble.”
“You are? You’re there? Then you’ve seen him?”
“Seen who?”
“Grandfather.”
Grandfather. Ah…that explained Morgan’s excited mood. If anything could send his level-headed older brother into a tailspin, it was their wildly flamboyant grandfather, the elderly man who’d raised them after their parents died. “Where is he and what has he done now?”
“I just told you, he’s in Trouble.”
“Yeah. I got it. He’s gotten himself into another mess.”
“No.” His brother’s voice was impatient. “You don’t get it. Grandfather is in a small town called Trouble.”
Max had to laugh. Because if there was anywhere Mortimer Potts was destined to be, it was in a town with that dubious name. “Okay. So he’s visiting a weird town. That’s nothing new.”
“He’s not on vacation,” Morgan said. “He owns it, Max.”
“Huh?”
“Our grandfather has purchased an entire town. He now officially owns Trouble, Pennsylvania. One of us has to fly there right away to get him out of this mess.”
One of us. Max could tell by his brother’s voice which one of us he meant. And it sure wasn’t Morgan—or their younger brother, Mike.
He was about to refuse, knowing there was too much at stake with the merger to take off on an unexpected vacation. Then he thought it over. Maybe getting out of town for a while would be a good thing. He could disappear—away from more crazy, horny old moneybags like Mrs. Coltrane. And in the meantime, get the best attorney he could find to stop publication of Grace’s book.
Besides, his grandfather was always a lot of fun. Right now, he could use some fun…not to mention the distraction. A false identity wouldn’t hurt, either, at least until this book thing was taken care of.
Neither would a sip of alcohol.
Forget it. He didn’t do that anymore—couldn’t do that anymore. Not ever.
If the eccentric old man who’d raised him was in a bad way, well, there wasn’t much Max wouldn’t do for him. Wasn’t much his brothers wouldn’t do for him, either. They were family, after all, the four of them. Had been for eighteen years, since Max, Morgan and Mike had lost their dad to the first Gulf War and their mom to cancer.
“All right. I’ll do it,” he said, trying to look on the bright side. “It’s not a bad time for me to get out of Dodge.”
“What’s wrong? Is there a problem?”
Max suddenly didn’t want to talk to his brother about the Grace Wellington situation. Considering his older sibling had been hounding him since they were young about the scrapes Max got into with women, he couldn’t give the other man t
he satisfaction.
He had to laugh at the irony. His grandfather’s new town was aptly named for Max, too. Though he’d done everything he could to stay out of trouble for the past few years, he just seemed destined to keep landing in it.
“I’m okay,” he finally replied. “After I make some arrangements here, I’ll be getting the old man out of trouble. Figuratively and literally.”
Two weeks later
SABRINA CAVANAUGH had heard the old saying about a place being so small you’d miss it if you blinked. But she’d never realized it could really be true of an entire town.
She couldn’t have driven through Trouble and not realized it, could she? That awkward conglomeration of falling-down houses, boarded-up businesses and doleful people hadn’t been her destination, right? Because she came from a dinky little Ohio town, population twelve, and it still seemed bigger than this.
Pulling her rented car over, she parked on the side of the dusty, two-lane road on which she’d been traveling since leaving the interstate. The road that had none of the shady trees, rolling hills or charming scenery she’d seen since leaving Philadelphia this morning. Then she reached for her map.
“Darn.” She had missed it. That small cluster of buildings she’d barely noticed out of the corner of her eye must have been the town she was looking for.
Maybe it wasn’t so surprising. The closer she’d gotten to Trouble, the more her mind had filled with doubt. The whole idea for this trip had seemed ridiculous when she and her senior editor at Liberty Books had conceived it, and it was much more so now.
“Yeah, right,” she muttered, “a rich, hot pilot is really going to fall down with desire for a small-town minister’s granddaughter turned junior book editor.”
Why on earth had she ever gone to her boss and convinced her that she could do this? That she could stop a womanizing playboy from suing them for libel by proving he was a womanizing playboy?
She really needed to stop watching old movies—this was so Rock Hudson/Doris Day. Maybe it would have worked for Doris, but no way was it going to for Sabrina Cavanaugh.
She was in way over her head. Unless wanting it to happen was enough. Because Sabrina did. She desperately wanted Max Taylor to fall crazy in lust with her. Not so she could have wild, passionate sex with the man—liar, liar—but so she could nail him for the womanizing deviant Grace Wellington’s book made him out to be. The book that was right now in jeopardy since the rich, slimy playboy had hired a shark lawyer to threaten a lawsuit.
“What man wouldn’t want to have his wickedly erotic sexual exploits glorified in a well-written memoir?” she mused.
Okay…sort of well written.
Apparently not this man. He, it seemed, had pulled out an angel costume and hired the best lawyer he could. Taylor’s lawyer was demanding that publication be stopped, threatening a libel lawsuit over Grace’s descriptions of their wild and kinky affair, her subsequent heartbreak and Max’s jaded lifestyle. And in the post–James Frey era of memoirs, Liberty was threatening to pull the book altogether.
“Oh, no, you will not ruin this for me,” Sabrina muttered, determined all over again to out the man for the reprobate he really was.
It was only because of the book—because of how important the success of that book would be for Sabrina. It had absolutely nothing—zero, zilch—to do with the man himself.
Keep telling yourself that, kid.
Sabrina never had been able to lie well, despite having a lot of experience with it as a kid. Lying had been a necessity for a troublemaking rebel trapped in the body of a small-town minister’s granddaughter who wasn’t allowed to wear jeans and had been called a harlot by her grandfather the first time she wiped a streak of pink lipstick across her mouth.
God help her if the old man had ever found out Sabrina was the one who’d put twenty packets of red Kool-Aid mix in the fountain outside his church. And had thrown one of her grandmother’s old wigs in with it so the whole thing resembled a murder scene.
She’d had a vivid imagination as a child.
Glancing in her rearview mirror, Sabrina noticed the buildings a few hundred yards back—a gas station, and a sagging, cone-shaped hut that had once either sold ice cream or developed film. Farther back, she thought she remembered driving by a restaurant, a drug store and a small courthouse supported by a ring of dirty cement columns, pitted with age spots and faintly green with mildew. There had also been an overgrown playground with swings that would require a child to get a tetanus shot before climbing aboard.
It seemed exactly the kind of place that would be called Trouble. Especially considering that the barren landscape surrounding it was too marshy for farming and too rocky for developing. Reportedly there was no coal in the three mountains ringing the small valley or even a decent slope for skiing.
Just one sorry little town with a cocky name, her home for the next week or two. Or as long as it took to track down Mr. Taylor and get him to come out of hiding as Prince Charming and put on his Hugh Hefner robe.
She was about to swing the car around and head back when she got a welcome distraction. Grabbing her cell phone out of her purse, she recognized the number on the caller ID.
“Nancy, I don’t know anything yet, I just got here,” she said. Her boss, senior editor Nancy Carazzi, had called for hourly updates all morning.
“Are you sure he’s there?”
“How could I be sure of that when I’m still in my car?”
“By the trail of women lying in satisfied puddles of lust around the town square?”
Sabrina chuckled at Nancy’s droll tone. She wasn’t surprised by the question. Though her boss—and friend—had no use for men, in or out of the bedroom, even she had been intrigued by the stories about one Maxwell Taylor, the stud of southern California—at least according to Grace Wellington’s book.
Neither of them had seen a decent picture of the man, since his airline Web site only featured a group shot taken from a distance. Posed beside a fleet of planes, the owner of Taylor Made Air Charters had been indistinguishable from his staff. All of them wearing dark glasses against the sun, they had formed a solid block of blue-uniformed flyboys.
But Grace’s descriptions had been evocative to say the least. And Sabrina could picture him in her mind.
He was suave. Sophisticated. James Bond in a pilot’s cap, with an elegant, lean body and smoothed-back dark hair. He had high cheekbones, a strong chin, and deep, knowing eyes. She just knew it. Because she’d seen him in her dreams. A lot.
“You still there?”
Sabrina cleared her throat and pulled her thoughts off the book. That part of it, anyway. “I haven’t spied any women stripping and throwing themselves naked at a man’s feet.”
“Is that your plan?”
“I’m not the least bit…”
“Can it,” Nancy said. “You think I didn’t notice the dreamy look you got on your face when you were reading the Max chapter of the book? You were intrigued, Sabrina. Hell, I haven’t had any use for a penis since I decided as a kid that Betty should end up with Veronica instead of Archie, and I was intrigued.”
Laughing, Sabrina mentally admitted she’d been more than intrigued. She wouldn’t say so out loud, but in her mind she could acknowledge that her curiosity about Grace Wellington’s former lover had become all-consuming.
“It’s just curiosity,” she insisted, not sure which of them she was trying harder to convince. “Plus a lot of skepticism. And a little bit of disgust.” Okay, she could mentally admit it was titillated disgust when it came to some of the seedier details of the wicked pleasures Max had introduced Grace to.
Wiping her brow with the back of her hand, she wasn’t surprised to find moisture there. Even with the car’s air-conditioning, memories of those scenes made her break out in a sweat. But she gamely declared, “I’d never get involved with someone like that.”
“Who said anything about getting involved? That man was born to inspire clothes to drop, n
ot dreams of wedding rings.”
Unfortunately, sex did mean getting involved for Sabrina—she couldn’t help it. Some fire and brimstone had remained burning deep inside her long after she’d shaken off the dust of her hometown and upbringing, and taken off to the big city to go to college. Her single one-night stand a few years ago had left her feeling so guilty that she’d thrown out the sexy pair of slut shoes she’d worn to the bar that night.
Racked with guilt…hmm, her grandfather would be so proud. After he condemned her for the one-night-stand thing.
She shuddered at the thought of the old man with whom she, her mother and her younger siblings had lived since Sabrina was twelve. But, hey, she was lucky. Only one-third of her childhood had sucked. Her first twelve years had been wonderful. Her sister Allie had also been old enough to remember the good times, and they’d talked often about how fortunate they were because of that.
Sadly, their brother and youngest sister had never even known what their real family life had been like, back when they’d lived in New York and Dad was alive. Since he died when they were babies, all they’d ever known was the judgmental narrow-mindedness of their mother’s father. Which might explain why Sabrina and Allie were so much alike—rebellious and anxious to escape—while the younger two were the models of proper youthful behavior.
God, she felt so sorry for them.
“You’re supposed to be tempting the man into misbehaving. At least that’s what you said when you came to me with this whole harebrained scheme.”
“Don’t remind me,” Sabrina said, shaking off the dark thoughts. “I’m still wondering if I had some kind of psychotic break.”
Nancy snickered. “Don’t sell yourself short. You can do it…you’re just his type.”
“Alive and breathing?”
“Yes. But also beautiful, vulnerable…So why not misbehave yourself while you’re at it?” Nancy asked.
“I’m not looking for a fling with a playboy,” she insisted.
