Blue Clouds

by Patricia Rice

  The possibility of enduring the anarchy he’d just suffered for weeks, maybe months, drove Seth to run after her.

  “We got off on the wrong foot,” Seth apologized as he nearly fell over her in his haste. He grabbed the post and regained his balance while searching for the best means of intimidating her.

  Scanning the magnificent view from the porch, Pippa paid her host little heed. The isolation out here appealed strongly to her need for escape. The locked gate at the bottom of the drive offered badly needed security. This fortress would be protection beyond her wildest dreams. She liked this place. The towering cliff she had seen beyond the balcony appealed to her sense of the dramatic. She could push Billy off it if she liked.

  “I’m certain we can come to terms, Miss Cochran,” the terrifying man beside her said. “I’ll send my regular driver in for you every day. If you can give me eight hours a day, I might survive. I’m prepared to pay you well.”

  He certainly would if her job entailed taming that spoiled wildcat inside. The kid would have been a stubborn handful if healthy. Caged by his useless legs, the child had become a volcano of raw energy ready to explode at any excuse. She didn’t relish finding an outlet for that energy. And she didn’t relish working for a man who bullied his employees.

  “We discussed a thousand a week,” she replied absently, still debating the wisdom of this move. Actually, they’d discussed nothing of the sort. His original offer had been considerably lower. That had been before the maniac driver and volcanic kid.

  “Of course, but I’ll need you seven days a week,” he countered.

  “Even God took a day off.” Shocked by his easy acceptance of her outrageous proposal, Pippa turned to him with a wry look. The expression on those dark, brooding features should terrify her. She couldn’t find an ounce of kindness in the grim set of his mouth, or compassion in the forbidding stance of muscular arms crossed over powerful chest. He’d grabbed her arm and tried physically hauling her around. Experience screamed for her to run like crazy.

  That he still stood there discussing her ridiculous demands showed his desperation. She could understand his point. Trapped in that madhouse all day, she’d want some form of comic relief, too.

  “Fine, Sundays off, then.” He waved his hand impatiently. “How soon can you start?”

  She liked the feeling of having a bully under her thumb for a change. The man truly was desperate. No matter how he tried hiding it, she could see it in the way he avoided her gaze.

  With a sudden sense of mischief, she stared over his immaculately landscaped lawn and replied in her best Kentucky accent. “Way-el-l-l, Ah guess Ah could start oncet I get muh trailer up here. Cain’t see makin’ that drive ever’ day.”

  Shock glazed his eyes, and Pippa noted that they were shades of gray and not shards of stone. He recovered rapidly, and frost froze his features and coated his words. “A trailer is completely out of the question. It’s against building codes.”

  Liar, she murmured spitefully to herself. According to everything she’d heard, he determined the building code around here. If he wanted an entire trailer park on this mountain, not a soul would object. Aloud.

  “Way-el-l-l, that’s a pity. Don’t cotton to sharin’ a room with a kid lahk Ah’m doin’ now. Don’t much cotton to ridin’ with none of yer crazy drivers either. Looks like we reached an impasse, Mr. Wyatt.”

  A hint of something resembling humor momentarily warmed his expression before he schooled his harsh features into coldness again. “I don’t much cotton to my son talking like a hick either, Miss Cochran. If this is your strategy to get out of an unpalatable job, you didn’t reckon on my determination.”

  Unpalatable. She liked a man who could throw words like that around. She grinned at his bad mimicry. “I don’t suppose you cotton to teaching your son manners either, Mr. Wyatt. Not that you have many to teach him. Let me introduce myself.” She held out her hand. “I’m Phillippa Cochran. Nice place you have here.”

  He glanced suspiciously at her hand, back to her cheerful grin, and very, very reluctantly unbent sufficiently to shake her fingers. “Miss Cochran, I’m Seth Wyatt. I apologize for your rude reception.”

  “Very good, Mr. Wyatt. Your mother did teach you a thing or two, then.” She waited patiently, still smiling.

  He hesitated. Gradually, his gaze drifted from her implacable smile to the smashed auto in the drive, then back to the sprawling house behind them.

  “If it would not be an imposition, you might take one of the rooms in the guest wing,” he suggested stiffly.

  “One at least a mile away from you and your son,” she agreed. Meg would kill her. Pippa thought she had possibly breathed in too much California air and lost her mind. She had the distinct feeling she was selling her soul to the devil.

  Still, this hell of his was damned attractive from her perspective, considering what she’d left behind.

  Chapter 5

  “You know, it’s always those men who live alone, the ones neighbors describe as loners, who end up blowing away their families or bombing buildings. Look at the Unabomber, and the guy who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma.”

  Sitting at a table in the local cafe after a shopping expedition that had probably maxed out Meg’s credit cards, Pippa listened as the local banker speculated about Garden Grove’s favorite subject—the Wyatt family. She supposed that if Seth Wyatt closed the town’s main industry, the bank would be left with any number of uncollectible loans.

  “I think it’s only poor loners who blow up buildings,” Pippa offered magnanimously in her new employer’s defense. “Rich ones buy armies and blow up countries.”

  Taylor Morgan shifted his California-bronzed, golden- haired head in her direction. Until now, he’d concentrated on Meg and his wife, who were apparently good country club buddies. His glance wasn’t particularly friendly, and Pippa gave him her best Pollyanna smile. She might not much like men right now, but she knew how to charm them. The man seemed to defrost slightly.

  “I don’t think you fully understand the relationship between the Wyatts and this town, Miss Cochran. Maxim Wyatt came here during the Depression, bought up every acre of land he could lay hands on, and successfully prevented any meaningful economic development for decades.”

  “He wouldn’t use Taylor’s bank,” Meg whispered in explanation from behind her fingers.

  The banker continued. “After Maxim Wyatt bankrupted the remainder of the valley’s inhabitants, he used them as slave labor to build that monstrosity of a house out there. People had to put food in the mouths of their children somehow. They took whatever he offered. Wyatts have controlled this town ever since, kept us in poverty and repression simply by their ownership of every valuable piece of land in the county.”

  “We could put in an industrial park where he tore down the printing plant,” Lisa, Taylor’s wife, added, “but Seth won’t sell the land. There’s good farm acreage out there, but he just rents it to sharecroppers. He has an absolute stranglehold on the economy. I think he enjoys holding an ax over our heads.”

  “A scythe,” Pippa muttered to herself, but the others were so engrossed in their topic that they didn’t hear.

  “He’s dangerous,” Taylor said. “You really should reconsider your decision, Miss Cochran. They say he keeps his only son a prisoner, and his few employees are all slightly deranged. That black driver of his terrifies the shopkeepers. They only accept Mrs. Jones because she’s been around forever. She once broke a chair over a man’s head. Seth has had the grounds wired and runs the current so strong that some of the kids have received severe shocks. They kept the court session quiet, but his wife countersued in the divorce for abuse. I’ve friends down in Orange County, where they used to live. They say she’s a broken woman.”

  Pippa stirred her Coke with a straw. “Mrs. Jones?” she asked casually, wondering if he could possibly mean the stooped old lady she’d met yesterday.

  “The housekeeper.” Impatiently, Tayl
or scraped his chair back from the table. “I have to get back to the office. It was good meeting you, Miss Cochran. I wish you well on your search for employment here, but I recommend that you don’t accept Wyatt’s offer.”

  Fat chance. As if she could turn down an offer of a thousand a week with free room and board. Pippa bit into her hamburger. The driver she’d seen looked like a nutcase, but he wasn’t black in any coloring book she knew. Maybe Seth Wyatt was the kind of man around whom legends grew. Admittedly, she found him physically terrifying, but in her present frame of mind, she didn’t like Taylor Morgan all that much either.

  “I understand Mr. Wyatt is an attractive man,” Lisa Morgan said conversationally after her husband’s departure. If Pippa was any judge of character at all, the light in the other woman’s eyes was almost predatory as she opened this topic. Wearing a chic fawn silk tunic top to complement her blond good looks, she dangled more gold jewelry than Pippa had seen in the Gold Nugget back home.

  “If you like Grim Reapers, I suppose,” Pippa replied offhandedly. She was used to gossip. She was just uncomfortable discussing a man she’d barely met, a man who looked dangerous but defended his son with all the ferocity of a wild wolf.

  “Pippa doesn’t notice men,” Meg offered in explanation for her friend’s reticence. “I swear, in high school, she had half the football team breathing down her neck, and you know what she did with them? Set them to decorating the gym for the prom. And she went to the dance with the class nerd.”

  “He owns his own software company now,” Pippa offered with a shrug. “And except for the receding hairline, he’s quite handsome. He started working out in college while the football team filled up on beer and got paunchy. I’m not entirely stupid when it comes to men.”

  “If you’re not stupid, why didn’t you marry him?” Meg demanded, pursuing one of her favorite topics.

  Pippa grinned and wiped the ketchup off her fingers with a paper napkin. “He didn’t ask me. He wasn’t stupid either.”

  Meg laughed but Lisa merely looked bored.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two to catch up on old times. If you do decide to accept Mr. Wyatt’s offer, Phillippa, I hope you’ll do everything in your power to make him see reason. If he’d only come into town and talk with us, we might make some progress around here.”

  Pippa smiled automatically and waved farewell. Like, sure, an ant could move a mountain. She’d do well to avoid being crushed by runaway boulders.

  As soon as Lisa departed, Meg’s expression changed to a worried frown. “I don’t like this, Pippa. If you must take the job, at least stay in town. With that much money, you could buy a car and rent an apartment.”

  Pippa couldn’t explain why she felt safer in a madman’s fortress than in the openness of her friend’s community. Billy had stolen something from her she couldn’t get back so readily—security.

  “I like it out there,” she answered carelessly, scraping up the last French fry. Both Meg and Lisa, in their California health- consciousness, had been appalled by her choice of meal. She hadn’t explained she’d needed the familiarity of comfort foods right now. Once she adapted to this odd new world, she’d learn their ways.

  Meg nodded slowly. “It’s hilly and reminds you of home, maybe. That’s why I was so glad I could see the mountains in the distance. But that’s not sufficient reason for risking your life.”

  Pippa grinned and considered the ice cream selection. “I doubt if I’m risking my life. If he hasn’t killed his insane driver by now, I’ll survive.”

  “Doug? Doug’s not insane. Frightening, maybe, but not insane. I think he was in the National Football League until his drinking interfered with his career. Don’t let Lisa scare you about Doug. He’s the most harmless person out there. If the shopkeepers are intimidated by him, it’s because he’s big and black. We grow bigots out here as well as anywhere.”

  Pippa instructed the waitress on the amount of fudge syrup and nuts she wanted on her mocha sundae, then returned her attention to Meg. “Black? Football player? That’s not the driver I met. Maybe Wyatt has killed someone, after all. The driver I met was a grinning dwarf maniac.”

  Meg sat back in her chair and relaxed, lifting her mineral water in salute. “Durwood lives, then. I’d wondered. He used to be our gardener, but he wouldn’t take a word of instruction. George would tell him to plant roses in the left corner of the backyard, and Durwood would line the driveway with them. I’d ask him to remove those horrible yuccas, and he’d stick them in between the roses and plant peppers in their place. Peppers! We could have supplied half the valley with them. I’m not certain he even speaks English.”

  A drunken football player, a maniac gardener, and a Nazi nanny. Quite a household, Pippa mused as she dug into her sundae. Could it be any worse than working with the administrative vultures at home? She’d certainly get paid more here, and have fewer bosses to work around. She could handle Seth Wyatt.

  ***

  She felt less sure of that later that day when Miss MacGregor arrived to pick her up.

  Wyatt’s current assistant stood nearly six feet tall and wore a business suit like a suit of armor. Pippa had the urge to pinch the shiny gray material and see if it squished or clanked. How could she compare with a monster of efficiency like this?

  “If you’ll drive me to the airport in the morning, Miss Cochran, I’ll leave you the use of my car while I’m gone. You’ll need one living out there. Doug isn’t reliable, and Mr. Wyatt won’t let anyone else drive his vehicles.”

  Considering what Durwood had done to the BMW, Pippa could understand his reluctance. He had trouble hiring qualified employees, it seemed. She wondered how he’d kept Miss MacGregor.

  As if hearing her unspoken question, MacGregor supplied the answer. “I would have left the place long ago if he hadn’t bought me this car and offered a pension plan. I’m near retirement age, and it’s quite a temptation, believe me. I could have worked for any major corporation in the country. I’ve had them inquire often enough. But I’m accustomed to doing things my own way now and don’t think I could change.”

  Oh, swell, another neo-Nazi with no loyalty whatsoever. Wyatt certainly knew how to pick them. Or maybe his employees just reflected his own character. She didn’t have any difficulty believing that.

  “I’ll show you my filing system this evening. I hope you’re familiar with Microsoft. It’s the only software Mr. Wyatt uses. I understand you’ll have some charge over the child also. I wish you well. He’s completely uncontrollable. I hope Mr. Wyatt is paying you well for the extra duty while I’m gone. I’m certain the boy will be your main duty when I return.”

  Pippa was beginning to suspect she wasn’t paid half so well as Miss MacGregor, or even half as much as she deserved if she survived. No wonder the cad had agreed to her terms so easily.

  “I dislike leaving Mr. Wyatt when he’s so close to deadline, but the circumstances can’t be changed. Supply him with plenty of coffee and don’t let anyone disturb him until he’s done for the day. He’s quite irrational when disturbed. You won’t need a strong grasp of grammar and spelling for your editing duties. The software is quite good and Mr. Wyatt knows his business well. You’ll learn his few idiosyncrasies after a chapter or two. You can learn from the work I’ve already completed.”

  A chapter or two? Pippa stared at the lantern-jawed woman expertly guiding her candy-red Mazda coupe up the road. “A chapter or two of what?” she inquired politely, hoping the question wasn’t too stupid.

  It was. Miss MacGregor turned and gave her a disbelieving stare. “Of his book, of course. Why do you think he hired you? We’re halfway through it now. He writes one a year, but he always waits until the last minute. It’s due the first of June, but he’s hit his usual midbook slump. It would help if he could bounce ideas off you. Once he’s back in stride, you won’t hear anything out of him for days at a time. You’ll just find the pages on your desk in the morning.”

  “I thought he was in t
he publishing business,” Pippa answered weakly. Actually, now that she thought about it, they had never discussed precisely what business he was in. Meg’s letter about the printing plant had led her astray.

  “Oh, he is,” Miss MacGregor replied airily, navigating the last hairpin turn with surprising speed. “He owns an independent publishing house for small-press books and magazines here in California, another in Tokyo, and he’s negotiating for one in Boston. He has printing plants and warehouses across the country. He’s in a position to compete with the big houses, but he spends so much time on his writing career that he neglects his father’s business.”

  Writing career? She didn’t have a lot of time for reading, but she belonged to the Book of the Month Club and knew the current best-sellers. She couldn’t remember ever hearing the name of Seth Wyatt in that context.

  “Does he write under his own name?” she asked tentatively.

  This time, Miss MacGregor’s look contained scorn and a certain amount of pity. “Of course not. He likes his privacy. He writes as Tarant Mott, Miss Cochran. His horror novels make the New York Times list regularly.”

  Tarant Mott. Pippa couldn’t believe it. Mitchell had collected all Tarant Mott’s books for years. She saw them everywhere: on the library’s new release shelf, in the front of bookstores, in the Book-of-the-Month Club catalog. She’d never read one. She saw enough horror and gore at the hospital. But Tarant Mott... !

  Miss MacGregor may as well have said she worked for God. No one knew anything about Tarant Mott. He didn’t make personal appearances. He didn’t include his bio or photo in his books. He just sold humongous numbers of novels to impatient buyers waiting in line for his latest release.