Honeymoon Hotel

by Bretton, Barbara

  Maggie extricated herself from the hug and wiped her butter- and bacon-stained hands on her apron. Rachel's words had tumbled over one another so quickly that Maggie needed a translator.

  "Whoa!" she said, laughing. "Slow it down, Rachel. I didn't understand a word you said." Then it hit her. "Did you say free publicity?"

  "I knew that would get you." Rachel thrust the newspaper into Maggie's hands. "Read it and see. I must say that's some picture of you, honey."

  "At last! I've been waiting six months for my publicity photo to run," Maggie said, spreading the newspaper out on the counter. "After all the business I've tossed to Kraemer at the Bugle, it's about time he – Oh, my God!"

  It wasn't her publicity photo.

  There, for the entire world to see, was a prone John Adams Tyler on the floor of the Bronze Penguin with a very agile Maggie sitting astride him with her skirt hiked up well beyond the comfort zone.

  Maggie buried her head in her hands. "I'm humiliated."

  "Because you're showing a little thigh?" Rachel laughed and ruffled Maggie's hair. "We're on the verge of the twenty-first century, honey."

  "Look at this!"Maggie pointed at the picture. "I look like I'm enjoying myself."

  "What's not to enjoy? He's a gorgeous man, not Quasimodo. If George wasn't the jealous sort, I wouldn't mind posing for a picture myself."

  Rachel's eyes gleamed with mischief, and Maggie gave her a swat with a dish towel. "I was saving his life, Rachel, not seducing him. This picture makes it look like something it wasn't."

  "Spare me the details," her mother-in-law said, cupping her hands over her ears. "Let me dream."

  Maggie tried to scan the article, but her eyes were drawn repeatedly to the black-and-white photo on the center of the front page.

  She could still feel the soft scratch of his perfectly pressed pants against her inner thighs, the heat of his flesh when she rested her cheek against his chest.

  The photo was blatantly sexy, and she found it difficult to look at it and breathe at the same time.

  "Margo Wayne will have a field day with this," she said, turning the paper over so she could think. "She'll probably pass this around as a handout at the next hotel owners' meeting."

  "Margo Wayne is a dried-up old prune with iced water in her veins."

  Maggie looked at her mother-in-law and laughed out loud. "Margo is forty-two years old, five times married, and busier than Joan Collins."

  She had to hand it to Rachel. The truth didn't faze her at all. "Who cares what Margo or any of them has to say? This is the best free publicity for The White Elephant that I've ever seen. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up in next week's People magazine."

  People magazine? That was national exposure on a scale even Modern Bride couldn't compete with. The full-page ad that had cost her her Egyptian earrings wouldn't reach one-tenth of –

  Alistair.

  The Modern Bride ad that wasn't.

  Her promise to keep a low profile until after the Summit Meeting.

  "He's going to kill me."

  Rachel's pale blond brows lifted. "Who's going to kill you?"

  "Alistair."

  "Your uncle?"

  Obviously when she'd left PAX she'd also left behind her talent for discretion "He, um, he hates to take a back seat to anyone" She picked up the Pocono Bugle and scanned the article again. "See? They didn't mention him once." At least she hadn't lost her facility for covering her tracks.

  Rachel didn't look convinced. "I would have figured Holland for the publicity hound. Your uncle seems more the understated type."

  "Looks can be deceiving," Maggie said with a shrug. When in doubt, reach for a cliché.

  "What an interesting turn of phrase," her mother-in-law said dryly. "May I quote you on that?"

  "Come on, Rae, it's early. You know I only come up with my good stuff after five."

  "Excuses, excuses. Why don't you –"

  Angie, one of the servers, popped up in the kitchen doorway. "They're starting to eat the flower arrangements," she said, grabbing a slice of toast from the counter near the door. "Where's the food?"

  Maggie pushed a tray of strawberry-filled cantaloupe halves toward the young girl. "Here, feed them this." She glared at her mother-in-law. "I thought you said honeymooners had other things on their minds."

  "They did in my day," Rachel said, manning the huge twelve-square waffle iron "I don't know what's becoming of this younger generation."

  Maggie, who had a few ideas of her own on that subject, kept them to herself. There were omelets to make, hash browns to fry and a thousand excuses to come up with before Alistair saw the front page of the Pocono Bugle.

  #

  The delivery boy stood in the center of John Tyler's office and stared at the stack of boxes piled up and ready to go.

  "Let me see if I've got it," he said, scratching his head with the tip of his pencil. "I deliver 'em. You follow me."

  "You got it," said John, signing the invoice. "Not so hard, is it?"

  "Never said it was hard. It's weird is what it is."

  John's assistant, Shawna Campbell, stifled a laugh and he shot her a dirty look.

  "Don't worry about it," he said. "Everything's on the up-and-up."

  The kid still looked suspicious. "This isn't some kind of test, is it? I do my job right, and I don't need nobody checking up on me."

  "This hasn't anything to do with you."

  The kid shrugged and headed for the door. "Suit yourself. I got another delivery to make before yours, so let's get moving."

  John saluted the boy's skinny back. "Damn kid isn't even dry behind the ears yet," he said in amazement. "He tosses off orders better than I do."

  "I noticed," said Shawna. "Better watch it. Your soft heart is showing."

  She's right, he thought as he headed for his car.

  Normally he could buy and sell ten million dollars' worth of property and not blink an eye.

  Yet there he was, fumbling to get his key into the ignition of the Jag and praying his Right Guard had the right stuff.

  Love, he thought, as he eased the car onto the main road.

  The older you get, the harder you fall.

  And he was getting older by the minute.

  #

  "Someday . . . " Maggie mumbled two hours later as she faced a roomful of dirty pans, filthy pots, egg-encrusted dishes and lipstick-smeared glassware. "Someday . . ."

  Rachel brushed a lock of pale blond hair off her forehead and continued rewrapping a Virginia ham the size of an underdeveloped nation. "Don't tell me," she said, reaching for another square of plastic wrap, "let me guess. Someday you'll learn not to give the kitchen crew the month of August off."

  "I had to give them August off," said Maggie, scraping plates into the garbage disposal. "I couldn't afford to pay them."

  "You should have at least hired a temporary cook." Rachel eyed the remnants of an aborted breakfast quiche. "In case you haven't noticed, honey, we're not exactly Julia Child."

  "No one stormed the kitchen," Maggie pointed out.

  "They didn't have the energy. They were weak from hunger."

  Maggie wielded a butter knife in a Zorro-like X. "They feared my wrath."

  "I must say I'd never noticed you had such a knack with knives. We could have used you at Thanksgiving dinner last year."

  Maggie laughed and put the knife in the dishwasher. "And deprive the Douglass men of their biological rights? Perish the thought."

  "They do take it seriously, don't they," Rachel mused. "I'm almost afraid to consider the psychological ramifications. Some swashbuckling Scotsman in their background, no doubt."

  Rachel's bawdy chatter about Errol Flynn and the obvious merits of pirate movies starring men in waist-slashed shirts kept Maggie laughing, and before she knew it, the kitchen was in order.

  "Terrific," Maggie said, glancing up at the huge clock hanging over the double sink. "Just twenty minutes until they start clamoring for lunch."

/>   "Ah, yes." Rachel untied her apron and tossed it into the basket near the door to the laundry room. "Amazing what a ruckus twelve hungry newlyweds can make."

  Ten hungry newlyweds, Maggie thought. Not that she was counting.

  "It's the slow season, Rachel. Business will pick up in September." She bit back a smile. "After the publicity surrounding the Summit Meeting, she should be doing turn-away business.

  "Have you driven past Hideaway Haven lately?" Rachel, who liked to live dangerously, asked. "Business isn't slow up there."

  "I'm getting sick to death of hearing about Hideaway Haven! First Alistair throws it in my face, then Holland, and now you." She tossed her own apron into the basket and reached for a clean one. "Would you tell me how the Poconos ever managed to get along before that bastion of bad taste opened?"

  "Competition is good for the economy."

  "Not for my economy it isn't. Do you know he actually bribed Claude for the best seat in the house?"

  "My kind of man," said Rachel. "He knows what he wants and he's not afraid to buy it." She picked up the Pocono Bugle from the counter and let out a long, slow whistle. "Is he really this gorgeous?" Rachel, forty years married and still in love with her husband, feigned a swoon over the top of the dishwasher. "He's the talk of the beauty shop. Alice says he's the best thing to come along since Tom Selleck."

  Alice Niedermeyer had owned the beauty shop in town for over a quarter century and had her Clairol-stained finger on the pulse of all that happened within a ten-mile radius.

  "He's attractive enough, I guess. I really didn't pay that much attention to him." Maggie was amazed her nose didn't grow a yard after a whopper like that one.

  Rachel, wise woman that she was, wasn't buying any of it. "You can tell me, honey." She fixed Maggie with a look whose meaning she knew all too well. "No one on earth wants to see you happy more than I do."

  "You really want to see me happy?"

  "Of course," said Rachel.

  Maggie picked up another clean apron and tossed it at her mother-in-law. "Then help me with lunch."

  "Sorry, honey," Rachel said, grabbing her pocketbook from the hook outside the pantry closet, "but I have an appointment with Alice and dark roots wait for no woman."

  "You're a traitor, Rachel Douglass!" Maggie called out as her mother-in-law disappeared out the back door. "A traitor!"

  Alistair was bound to pop up any minute, filled with righteous indignation and British hellfire, and Maggie had been banking on her mother-in-law's considerable charm to take some heat off her.

  She leaned against the dishwasher and took another look – a long one this time – at the picture on the front page of the Bugle.

  Unless she missed her guess, Rachel was dead-on. This was exactly the kind of picture that went whizzing through the wire services to all the people-watching magazines hungry for new faces.

  She could see that Olympic-sized heated swimming pool going up in smoke before her very eyes.

  Alistair had been there at the Bronze Penguin, hadn't he? He'd seen the whole thing happen. He'd even been the one to call 911 when they still believed Tyler was having a heart attack right there on the floor.

  So what if she got a little bit of publicity? There certainly wouldn't be an instant replay of the situation between now and the Summit Meeting. After all, how many men's lives did you save in an average month in East Point, Pennsylvania?

  By tonight the excitement would be over, and she and The White Elephant could sink gracefully back into the obscurity to which they had become accustomed and hide bide their collective time.

  No more front-page photos.

  No more publicity.

  No mysterious strangers bearing gifts or romantic entanglements.

  The sound of car tires crunching through the loose gravel of her employees' parking lot could be heard through the kitchen window, followed by the thud of footsteps climbing the stairs.

  Alistair certainly hadn't wasted time. She'd expected to have at least until midafternoon to put together her defense.

  Well, if he wanted The White Elephant as much as she suspected he did, he'd just have to look the other way.

  After all, didn't today's news line the bottom of tomorrow's bird cage? It wouldn't be long before she and the gorgeous Mr. Tyler were staring up at Groucho from the bottom of his chrome-and-plastic split-level.

  She opened the back door and, instead of her aristocratic uncle, she found herself looking into the face of the lanky delivery boy from one of the local courier offices.

  "Shipment for you, Ms. Douglass." He pointed toward a stack of four huge boxes resting on the redwood porch.

  "If this is apple-cinnamon bubble bath, you can just send it right back to Margo Wayne and –"

  The delivery boy thrust a clipboard at her chest. "Sign here."

  She grabbed his Bic pen and scribbled her name. "This is from Margo Wayne, isn't it?" It was just like Margo to pull a grandstand stunt like this – especially after that photo in the Bugle.

  The boy shrugged and jammed the ballpoint back into his ink-stained shirt pocket. "I just deliver 'em," he said, looking strangely uneasy. "I don't ask no questions."

  He bolted down the steps and roared off in his battered van before she could ask to see his shipping order.

  She could just imagine Margo and Ernie and the rest of them sitting at breakfast that morning, having a good laugh over this. They probably expected her to send the packets of bubble bath flying right back to them by return courier along with an outraged note.

  "You're in line for a surprise this time, guys," she muttered as she tore off the heavy brown paper. Tonight when the lights were off and their swimming pools were empty, she'd –

  But this time the surprise was on her.

  The boxes were filled with money.

  Chapter Six

  A weaker woman might have fainted dead away at the sight of a king's ransom in twenty-dollar bills, but not Maggie Douglass.

  Part of the McBride gift was an uncanny facility with numbers, and it took her all of two seconds to figure out that she was staring at over one million dollars.

  Visions of a new guest wing and a private airstrip danced before her eyes like sugarplums at Christmas. She had to admit Alistair had really out done himself this time. The Summit Meeting must mean an awful lot to PAX for her staid uncle to do something so extravagant, so totally out of character.

  Holland's influence was more far-reaching than Maggie had ever imagined.

  She pulled the buff-colored band from one stack of bills and savored the feel of them in her hand. Strange. Why hadn't she ever noticed just how handsome Andrew Jackson was?

  With that chiseled jawline and those eyes and that gorgeous head of dark hair –

  Wait a minute.

  Ol' Andy Jackson didn't have a gorgeous head of dark hair.

  He didn't have a dimple just west of his mouth, or a lower lip so sexy it was just this side of perverse.

  No, that wasn't the seventh president of the United States looking up at her from fifty-thousand oblong pieces of paper.

  It was John Adams Tyler.

  Her dreams of a stable of full-time gardeners with a bouquet of green thumbs sputtered, then died, and to her utter amazement, Maggie began to laugh.

  "I like that."

  She turned in the direction of a masculine voice at the other end of the porch.

  He spoke again. "It sounds promising."

  John Adams Tyler, in the glorious flesh, was leaning against the railing, foot propped on the top step, watching her. He wore another Savile Row wonder, a sleek-fitting, charcoal-grey suit her uncle would kill for. Another man would look ridiculous dressed like that in the middle of a Poconos summer.

  He didn't.

  And although GQ cover boys usually didn't do a thing for her, she suddenly wished she'd combed her hair and bothered with mascara and worn a bra beneath the clingy tank top that barely reached the waistband of her white shorts.

&nbs
p; "I asked for a million dollars," she said, blessing the years with PAX where she'd learned to roll with the punches. "Should I count it, or can you be trusted?"

  That aristocratic face of his broke into a surprisingly streetwise grin.

  "I'd count it," he said, his hair glinting with amber highlights in the late-morning sun. "When it comes to money, it never hurts to double-check."

  She examined one of the clever counterfeits. "Since these aren't exactly coin of the realm, I guess I can take your word for it."

  He plucked a handful of fakes from the open box and riffled them like playing cards. "Had you going for a minute, didn't they?"

  She dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand. "I wasn't fooled for a second."

  "The hell you weren't. You'd spent half of it before I walked up the path."

  The man was too perceptive. She opted for righteous indignation. "I value my privacy, Mr. Tyler. You should have let me know you were standing there."

  "So you could put on your business face? No," he said, shaking his head, "this way was a lot more informative."

  "So that's how you've clawed your way to the top, is it?" She folded one of the counterfeit bills and pushed it into the back pocket of her shorts,. "No wonder you were able to renovate the Love Cottages in record time. When you're not spying on your competition, you're printing up your own capital in the basement."

  A deep rolling laugh rumbled up from his impressively flat belly. "Keep it to yourself, will you? We're going public in a few weeks, and Forbes would have a field day with that."

  She shook her head ruefully as her eyes flickered over the main building of The White Elephant. Two of the ruby-red shutters on the third floor dangled lopsidedly on their hinges, and great curls of faded white paint were peeling off the clapboard siding. "Forbes would put The White Elephant on the endangered –" She brought herself up short. "I must be crazy. You're the competition."

  That streetwise grin reappeared. "I'm not worried if you're not."