The Stranger
The Stranger
Kathleen O'Brien
It seems as if Tyler Balfour's mother was the only woman in town his father didn't marry. So he's as surprised as anyone when he discovers Anderson left him a third of everything he owned.Tyler doesn't plan on sticking around. After all, the good people of Heyday already believe he's responsible for ruining their town. Not that he cares what they think. He was only doing his job.Now that he's back in Heyday, he's starting to realize his job just might be finding out what Mallory Rackham–one of the town's favorite daughters–is so desperately trying to hide.Three brothers with different mothers. Brought together by their father's last act. The town of Heyday, Virginia, will never be the same–and neither will they.
Come back to Heyday.
Tyler thought of the silly little city, where everything, even the coed prostitutes, had a circus theme. He thought of the old bastard Anderson McClintock, who had run the city like a feudal overlord. He thought of his brothers, Kieran and Bryce, whom Tyler had seen occasionally on the streets or in the stores, but had otherwise avoided.
Now that he’d committed to writing this book, he was going to have to return to Heyday sooner or later. He was a good reporter, and he wouldn’t leave all those stones unturned.
But he remembered the Heyday residents who hated his guts. He particularly remembered Mallory Rackham, who had run the Ringmaster Café, where the Heyday Eight had gathered to make their dates and count their profits.
Mallory, who had let Tyler spend so many hours there, chatting her up and complimenting her coffee, never guessing that he was gathering notes for his exposé.
Mallory, beautiful and ridiculously naive, whose husband had been one of the Heyday Eight’s best customers. Mallory, who had tossed a plate of French fries, complete with ketchup, into Tyler’s face when she found out who he really was.
Mallory, who for some strange reason was the only person in ten years to put Tyler’s disciplined objectivity and emotional distance in jeopardy.
“All right,” he said, ignoring the wriggle of doubt. “I’ll come back to Heyday.”
Dear Reader,
It’s not easy being the older sister. I should know—I’ve got one, and I’ve spent most of my life driving her crazy!
My sister is only two years older than I am, but in our family she’s called the “mother pretend.” At five, I was afraid to go upstairs alone, so she trotted up into the darkness at my side. At ten, I broke the priceless Oriental vase, but she told our parents she did it. Later she pierced my ears, cut my hair and taught me that sometimes less is more, especially in bad boys and blue eye shadow. She played ambassador (“Let her go, he’s a nice guy”), counselor (“let him go, he’s a jerk”) and cheerleader (“look at her go, isn’t she super?”). I didn’t ask her to do these things. I didn’t have to.
So when I had to write the story of Mallory Rackham, who suddenly finds that protecting her troubled younger sister will be both frightening and expensive, I knew where to go for inspiration. All I had to ask myself was—what would my sister do to save me? The answer was simple. Anything.
A woman like that deserves a special man, someone who understands all about love and loyalty. But sexy Tyler Balfour hardly fits that description. The third brother in the complicated McClintock clan, Tyler is a confirmed outsider. He has no interest in getting involved.
Then he meets Mallory.
I hope you enjoy their story. And if you have older sisters or brothers like mine, give them a hug today. They’ve undoubtedly earned it!
Warmly,
Kathleen O’Brien
P.S. I love to hear from readers! Please write me at P.O. Box 947633 or stop by my Web site, KathleenOBrien.net.
The Stranger
Kathleen O’Brien
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Three-time finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA
Award, Kathleen is the author of more than twenty novels for Harlequin Books. After a short career as a television critic and feature writer, Kathleen traded in journalism for fiction—and the chance to be a stay-at-home mother. A native Floridian, she and her husband live just outside Orlando, only a few miles from their grown children.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
MALLORY RACKHAM LOVED many things about owning a bookstore in Heyday, Virginia, but balancing the bank accounts wasn’t one of them.
Balance? What a joke! Watching the numbers on her computer screen cling to the “plus” column was as nerve-racking as watching an acrobat bicycle across the high wire without a net.
And she hadn’t even entered this month’s sales-tax payment. She typed a few keys, and, sure enough, the dollar total tumbled off the tightrope and somersaulted straight into the red.
She put her head in her hands and groaned. Apparently living your whole life in Heyday did things to your mind. Heyday had been built around a circus legend, and from the Big Top Diner to the Ringmaster Parade it was a one-theme town. And now she was even going bankrupt in circus metaphors.
“Mallory?” Wally Pierson, the teenager she’d hired to work the cash register in the afternoons, stuck his head through her office door. “The guy from the place is here. He wants to know if you need some more thingies.”
She looked at Wally, wondering when teenagers had stopped using nouns. She was only twenty-eight, but Wally always made her feel old, with his tattoo and his piercings and his multicolored hair.
“You mean the sales rep? About the bookmarks?”
“Yeah.” Wally clicked his tongue stud against his teeth. “So you want some?”
She stared at the computer screen. She wanted some, all right. They sold well, and the markup was extremely advantageous, much better than some of the books. But how was she going to pay for them?
“Yes. But tell him just to replace what’s sold. Nothing new until next month.”
Wally nodded and disappeared, leaving her alone with the computer screen, which was still blinking bright red.
She was going to have to borrow money from her personal account again this month. She began typing. Goodbye to the haircut, even though she’d put it off three months now and her “breezy, low-maintenance” cut stood up in spikes that made her look slightly electrified. Goodbye to the steak dinner she’d been going to cook for Roddy Friday night—he’d have to settle for pasta, though if ever a man was a born carnivore, it was Roddy Hartland.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. When she saw the final number in the home account, she grimaced. Not even enough for pasta. She felt herself sliding toward self-pity, so she closed her folder of bills briskly and wiggled her fingers to shake it off. Roddy was a millionaire. She’d make him take her out to dinner.
“Mallory?” Wally’s head was in the door again, so she arranged her face in a calm smile. He knew she was doing the books, and of course he knew business had been off lately. Wally’s weekly paycheck wasn’t huge, but it was important to him. No need to make the kid wonder where his next Whopper was coming from.
“Phone’s for you. Some rude guy, won’t give his name. Just said to tell you it’s about your sister’s wedding.”
Mindy’s wedding. Oh, hell. Mallory had completely forgotten that the first check was due to the country club at the end of the month, to reserve the room. Her eyes instinctively darted back to the computer screen. If she typed that entry in right now, the whole thing would probably explode in a storm of flying red numbers.
“Another salesman, do you think?” The minute Mindy’s engagement had hit the papers, the phone had started ringing. Apparently people assumed that when you married a state senator’s son, you had a fortune to spend on satin and lace and geegaws. They seemed to forget that the bride’s family paid for the wedding.
“Doesn’t sound like a salesman,” Wally said, toying with the silver ring in his eyebrow. “Sounds like a weirdo, actually. Voice like Darth Vader.”
Great. Just what she needed. Darth Vader peddling pink votives and silver-tasseled chair shawls.
“Thanks, Wally,” she said. “I’ll handle it.”
He ducked out, clearly relieved that she hadn’t asked him to get rid of the caller.
“Good morning,” Mallory chirped as she pulled the phone toward her. You’ve reached the offices of Maxed Out and Dead Broke. But when she picked up the receiver, sanity reasserted itself, and she merely said, “Rackham Books. This is Mallory Rackham.”
“Good morning, Miss Rackham,” a strange, electronic voice said slowly.
Mallory’s hand tightened around the telephone. How bizarre. The voice didn’t even sound quite human, and yet it managed to convey all kinds of unpleasant things with those four simple words. Everything from an unwanted familiarity to a subtle threat.
That was ridiculous, of course. A threat of what? She was a small-town bookstore owner, not James Bond. And yet this voice was mechanically altered. Why would anyone do that?
“Who is this?”
“I want you to listen to me carefully. I have some instructions for you.”
“Instructions for me? Who is this?”
He ignored her question again. “I want you to go to the bank this afternoon. I want you to get fifty twenty-dollar bills and wrap them in a plastic baggie.”
Oh, good grief. This was ridiculous, like something out of a gangster movie. Did she recognize anything about this voice? Could it be a joke? Roddy loved jokes.
But the hard kernel of anxiety in the pit of her stomach said no. She didn’t begin to understand what was going on here, but she somehow knew it was no joke.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t like your tone. I’m going to hang—”
“I’m only going to say this once, Mallory, so you’d better listen.” The metallic voice had an implacable sound, a cruel sound. She felt her spine tingle and go soft. She leaned back against her chair and tried to think clearly. Who would dare take this tone with her?
“Put the baggie in a small brown lunch bag and close it with packing tape. Then take the bag to the Fell’s Point Ferry tomorrow morning.”
In spite of her confusion, in spite of her outrage that anyone would talk to her this way, she instinctively reached for a pencil and began to make notes.
“Buy a ticket for the 11:00 a.m. trip,” he continued. “The Green Diamond Ferry. When you get on, go immediately to the front. Put the bag under the first seat on the left, the one closest to the bow. And then get off the boat and go home.”
She scribbled, her mind racing. Not because she had any intention of taking orders from an anonymous blackmailer, but because, at the very least, she should have some concrete record to show the police.
“Did you get that, Mallory? Do you know what you’re supposed to do?”
“Yes,” she said. She put down her pencil. “What I don’t know is why you think I would agree to do it.”
He chuckled. It was a terrible sound, full of unnatural metallic reverberations, like laughter emanating from a steel casket.
“You’ll do it because you’re a good sister. You’ll do it because you love that spoiled brat Mindy, and you wouldn’t want to see anything happen to that classy wedding of hers.”
Mallory scalp tingled. “Her wedding?”
“Yes. You wouldn’t want me to ruin her wedding, would you? Senator Earnshaw’s son…Frederick, isn’t it? He’s such a good catch. So handsome, so—”
“How could you do that?” She reached out blindly and clicked off the computer screen, her body on autopilot while her mind struggled to figure out what was going on. What was he getting at? What exactly was he threatening to do? “How could you possibly ruin my sister’s wedding?”
He laughed again. “Easy,” he said. “I’d just tell the senator and his son about Mindy’s nasty little secret.”
For a second Mallory couldn’t answer. She was suddenly aware that her heart was thumping, hard and erratic, like a fish struggling on a wooden dock.
This wasn’t possible. This couldn’t be happening. No one knew about…that. Not even Tyler Balfour, big-time, muckraking, investigative journalist, had discovered Mindy’s part in the whole—
“Are you there, Mallory?” The voice slowed, no doubt savoring her shock. “Are you thinking about it? About the scandal? Mindy’s always been a little weak, hasn’t she? Not too stable. God only knows what she’d do if her fancy wedding fell apart.”
Mallory opened her mouth, but in place of her normal voice she heard only a strange, thin sound, so she shut it again.
The electronic voice hardened. “Be on that ferry, Mallory. Or I’ll have to tell poor Freddy Earnshaw that his lovely bride is nothing but a two-bit prostitute.”
FOR AS LONG AS she could remember, when things got a little bumpy, Mallory had turned to her smart, sensible mother for advice and comfort.
Elizabeth Rackham had a straightforward approach to life. She called it “Eliminate Step B.” Life was as simple as ABC, she said. Everyone faced problems—that was Step A. Most people dithered and worried and agonized, which she called Step B. Then they reacted, which was Step C. Elizabeth’s theory was that, if you could just discipline yourself to eliminate Step B, you’d make much better decisions about Step C. And save yourself a lot of grief in the process.
So naturally, as soon as Mallory closed down the bookstore that night, with the ugly echoes of the metallic voice still ringing in her ears, she headed straight for a visit with her mother.
The Heyday Chronic Care Center was brightly lit and welcoming, though it was late by the time Mallory arrived. The nurse at the front desk smiled and waved her back to the private rooms. No one bothered to make Mallory sign in anymore. They all knew her too well. She’d been coming through those double glass doors almost every night for two years now.
Her mother’s room was dim, and the satellite television was set to a classical music station. Small white letters inched their way up the black screen. Verdi, the letters said. Rigoletto.
In spite of everything, now that she was here, Mallory felt herself begin to relax. Her mother always had that effect on her. Even now.
Dropping her heavy purse on the floor, she plopped down onto the bedside chair, kicked off her sandals and took her mother’s hand in a warm hello squeeze.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Mom,” she said. She leaned her head back against the soft headrest and shut her eyes. Verdi washed over her like a bath, cleaning away the dirty feeling that had clung to her ever since she’d spent five minutes on the telephone with a blackmailer. “It was a crazy day.”
But where should she begin? Ordinarily, on these visits, she kept the conversation light and upbeat. She didn’t burden her mother with the petty problems of everyday life. She didn’t mention the overdue bills or the crummy book sales. She didn’t mention that Dan, her bum ex-husband, who had never forked over the last installment of the divorce settlement, was now dating a teenager and said it was “serious.” Not that Mallory cared, except that apparently this teenager was expensive, which meant that Dan was even less likely to get around to paying up.
And, of course, she never, ever mentioned what she had discovered about Mindy. How could she? They’d all been so horrified when Tyler Balfour had uncovered a prostitution ring at Moresville College. And when they had learned that the Rackhams’ own little café had been the headquarters, the rendezvous point for the girls and their customers, her mother had been furious and mortified.
Then, about three months later, one of the betrayed wives whose husband had been “outed” in Balfour’s story had thrown a gasoline can through the front window of the café and followed it with a lighted match. Heyday firefighters had done their best, but the place, which Elizabeth Rackham had built from scratch after her own divorce twelve years ago, had burned to the ground.
“I’ve got a big problem, Mom.” Mallory didn’t open her eyes. She just held on to her mother’s soft, graceful hand. Elizabeth Rackham was fifty-five, but she didn’t look a day over forty. Everyone said she was the most beautiful woman they had ever met.
“It’s about Mindy. She’s fine right now—the wedding is only eight weeks away. Frederick is crazy about her, it’s really sweet to see them together. But there’s someone—someone who would like to spoil things. I think I can stop this guy, but I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do.”
She felt hot moisture pushing at her eyelids, so she squeezed her eyes even more tightly. She would not cry. Crying over a problem fell into Step B, and strong women never indulged in Step B.
“What should I do, Mom? Should I protect Mindy, no matter what it takes? I just don’t know what she’d do if she lost Frederick now. She’s better, really she is. It’s not like before, when she…when she didn’t even want to go on living.”
Her throat closed painfully as she remembered that horrible time. The blood all over the bathroom, spilling over Mindy’s pale wrists like red lace cuffs.
Finally she opened her eyes, letting the tears fall silently down her cheeks. She looked at her mother. If only she would answer her. If only she would give her some advice, tell her what to do.
But she wouldn’t, not ever again. Elizabeth Rackham looked as if she were peacefully sleeping, but it was nothing as natural as that. She’d had a stroke two years ago, and the doctors told Mallory that, according to all the tests, her mother wasn’t aware that her daughter was in the room.
The next morning, Mallory got in the car, a brown paper package on the seat beside her, and drove carefully through the silver spring rain. She passed the police station. She passed Roddy’s house. She passed the Heyday Chronic Care Center. She found the sign that said “Maryland—Fell’s Point Harbor” and she hit the gas. She’d have to hurry if she was going to be on that ferry before eleven.
CHAPTER TWO
TYLER BALFOUR WAS running late, and he didn’t like that. He refused to spend all day playing catch-up, so he pulled out his cell phone, called his assistant and, after about two seconds’ hesitation, told her to cancel his lunch with Sally.
The two seconds were because Sally, a beautiful blonde with the temper of a blazing redhead, had warned him that the next time he canceled a date she would assume he was canceling the whole relationship.
She didn’t mean it, of course. It probably wouldn’t take him more than another two seconds to sweet-talk her out of her snit. But he realized suddenly that he probably wouldn’t bother. Sally was gorgeous, but the thrill was gone. She was too high-maintenance anyhow. Two seconds here, two seconds there…it added up.
On the spur of the moment, he also told his assistant to ditch his three-o’clock interview. That interview was worthless. The guy might be a U.S. Senator, but he wouldn’t ever talk on the record, and Tyler hated anonymous sources.
Besides, he needed to free up some serious time. The man he was on his way to meet right now might be a lot less exalted, but he was a whole hell of a lot more interesting.
Dilday Merle was the chair of academic affairs at tiny Moresville College in Heyday, Virginia, which meant that, in the grand scheme of things, he was pretty much nobody.
But when Professor Merle had called Tyler yesterday and asked for an hour to talk about the Heyday Eight, Tyler hadn’t even hesitated. Hell, yes, he had time. He’d make time. The Heyday Eight had won Tyler a Pulitzer when he broke the story a few years ago, and they were expected to make him a couple of million dollars next year, when he published his detailed hardback version of the scandal.
He’d taken his time finding the right publisher, though several houses had been interested. He wanted to find someone who would let him tell the story straight, not just as pure exploitation. And, of course, he’d wanted a lot of money.
It was ironic, really. Eight ditzy blond college girls who spanked grown men with toy whips, then bedded them for fun and profit, had done what a decade of serious investigative reporting couldn’t do. They had set Tyler free from the underpaid grind of life at a daily newspaper.
No clock-punching for Tyler anymore. Mostly he worked on the upcoming book, which the publisher wanted to call Shenandoah Sex Circus, though Tyler was fighting to keep it simple. The Heyday Eight was good enough.
If he wrote anything else these days, he did it for magazines. In-depth and on his own schedule. In fact, his New Yorker piece should have hit the stands today. He had arranged to meet Dilday Merle in front of Bennie’s News Stand on M Street. If he hurried, he might get there early enough to grab a copy before the professor showed up.
Bennie had been selling Tyler newspapers and magazines for more than ten years, ever since Tyler was a senior at Georgetown and working on the school paper. Back then, Tyler had bought the Washington Post the way some men might buy a lottery ticket, just holding it reverently and praying that maybe, someday, it would be his byline on the front page.
“Hey, there, big shot! Who’s the man?” Bennie hailed Tyler with enthusiasm from the shadows of his crowded counter. Though it was a muggy spring day in D.C., Bennie wore his usual uniform, a pair of black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt with a hood pulled up over his balding head. He held up a copy of the New Yorker. “Who’s famous today?”
Tyler pulled out a couple of bills and traded them for the magazine. “I believe that would be me,” he said with a smile. He leafed through the pages to his story, scanned it to make sure they hadn’t cut him too much or spelled his name wrong. Good—they’d given him great play. Six pages, with full color.
Snapping it shut, he looked back at Bennie. “Did you read it?”
No one ever actually ever saw Bennie reading the merchandise, but he was the best-informed man in Washington, so Tyler assumed he must be doing it on the sly.
“Yeah,” Bennie said. “You’re slick, man. Real slick. You did a tap dance on that oil boy. You fishing for another Pulitzer?”
Tyler rolled up the magazine and stuffed it in his pocket. “It’s the Ellies when it’s magazines. But no, I’m not fishing for anything. I just tell the truth. I just tell it like it is.”
Bennie stuffed a sweet-smelling slab of gum into his mouth and eyed Tyler speculatively. “So you say. But is it really as easy as that? You gonna sleep okay when oil boy’s busting rocks in the slammer?”
Tyler thought of oil boy and his bankrupt company, his laid-off employees, his creditors who were basically screwed, and his investors who were suddenly destitute. One of them, an eighty-year-old man, had already shot himself to death rather than end up a burden to his children.
“You bet I will,” Tyler said. “Like a baby.”
Bennie looked as if he might enjoy a good debate, but Tyler, who had, as always, been subtly scanning the other customers—just in case the vice president’s wife had chosen this spot to rendezvous with her boyfriend, or the local minister was shoplifting a copy of Penthouse—realized that one of the old guys reading in the back of the store looked vaguely familiar.
He narrowed his eyes. Who was it? Thin, stooped, with shaggy white hair. Even from the back, the man was obviously not a local. His clothes were too ill fitting and tweedy for D.C.
Finally, the light went on. It had been almost three years since Tyler had seen him, but this had to be Dilday Merle.
He cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, Professor.”
Bennie’s store was small enough that Tyler didn’t even have to raise his voice. Which meant, of course, that Merle must have been able to hear every word Tyler had said since he walked into the newsstand. Tyler wondered why the old man had kept silent so long. The last time they’d met, when Merle had been trying to talk Tyler out of printing his story on the Heyday Eight, he hadn’t exactly been shy.
Merle turned around with a smile, and Tyler saw that the professor was holding the current copy of the New Yorker.
“Hello, Tyler. I’ve just been reading your latest article.” Merle glanced down. “Still chasing the bad guys, I see. Your style hasn’t changed much.”
A small chuckle came from Bennie’s side of the counter. “Perhaps not,” Tyler said neutrally, watching as Merle walked toward him. “But then, the bad guys don’t change much, either.”
Merle gazed at him through his thick glasses, which made his eyes seem large and owlish, as if they didn’t miss much. “And you’re still not losing sleep over it,” he said. He glanced at Bennie. “Or so I hear.”
Bennie laughed outright at that. “If you’re looking for a bleeding heart, man, you better look somewhere else. Mr. Tyler here, he traded his heart in ten years ago. Got himself a bigger brain instead.”
Tyler shot Bennie a hard look. Surely he knew better than to bring up that ancient history. What happened ten years ago was none of Dilday Merle’s business. It wasn’t any of Bennie’s business, either, but unfortunately Tyler had been young at the time, and emotional. He’d talked too much.
But Merle obviously wasn’t interested in Tyler’s past. He stopped, set down the magazine and held out his hand. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Because I don’t need a heart this time. I need a brain.”
“Oh, yeah?” Tyler shook Merle’s hand, noting with surprise how firm the grip was. “Why is that?”
Merle looked at Bennie, and seemed relieved that the vendor was fully absorbed with another customer.
“Because I’m being blackmailed. And I want you to catch the bastard who’s doing it.”
Twenty minutes later, when they were settled at Tyler’s favorite café, and the waiter had taken their order and departed, Tyler knocked back some scalding black coffee and turned to the man beside him.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start over. Slowly. From the beginning. Because I’m having a little trouble believing I heard you right.”
“You did.” Dilday Merle had ordered bottled water, and he was carefully decanting it into the empty glass the waiter had provided. “I’m being blackmailed.”
This time, Tyler was better able to control his shock. But still…it was insane. Seventy-something-year-old Dilday Merle, with his old-fashioned etiquette and his bow ties, and his owl eyes?
This stuffy, ivory-tower academic was being blackmailed?
Though it was the lunch hour, and dozens of people thronged the quaint little café, the anonymity of the crowd provided its own privacy.
“What the hell could anyone blackmail you about?”
“Hell is the perfect word for it.” Merle’s voice carried some heat. He might be close to eighty, but there wasn’t anything frail about him. “Some bastard has been calling me up, ordering me to pay him a thousand dollars every two weeks or else he’ll tell the board of regents that I was mixed up with the Heyday Eight.”
Tyler, who had just lifted his coffee cup, froze in place. He felt the steam moisten his lips, but he was too distracted to drink.
Dilday Merle and the Heyday Eight?
He didn’t want to fall into stale clichés about old people, but come on. His mind tried to picture Greta Swinburne or Pammy Russe straddling this elegant, elderly man, snapping their little black whips across his bony backside.
No way.
“For God’s sake, son, get that look off your face.” Merle tightened his mouth. His high forehead wrinkled in an intense scowl. “It isn’t true.”
As if the projector of his life had started rolling again, Tyler blinked back to reality. He sipped at his coffee, trying to look unfazed.
“Of course it’s not true,” he said. “Greta gave me the complete list of their customers when I broke the story. You definitely weren’t on that list. I would have noticed.”
“And plastered my name all over your story, no doubt.”
Tyler shrugged. He was used to this attitude. He hadn’t made those stupid college girls buy rhinestone-studded sex-whips, and he hadn’t made those pathetic men buy their services. He’d just let the world—including the girls’ parents, the men’s wives, and the local police—know what was going on.
You’d think they might even be grateful that he’d brought an end to something so fundamentally unhealthy for all concerned. But about ninety percent of the people in Heyday had automatically hated Tyler Balfour’s guts.
Oh, well, it was an occupational hazard for journalists. Everyone liked to shoot the messenger.
Still, he wondered what the huffy Heydayers had thought when they’d learned who journalist Tyler Balfour really was. When they learned that he was a McClintock by birth and had inherited a third of their precious little town.
But that was another story.
Merle was still frowning. “Wouldn’t you?”
“What? Publish your name?” Tyler returned Merle’s gaze without flinching. “You are a high-profile community leader. You worked with those girls at the college, in a position of trust. At least part of your salary comes from public funds. So yeah, I probably would have put your name front and center.”
Merle snorted softly. He managed to make even that sound elegant. “Fair enough. Well, anyhow, this accusation is a bunch of baloney. But the blackmailer obviously knows that, in my position, I can’t afford to have charges like that leveled at me. The school can’t afford it, not after the scandals it’s already been through.”
Tyler nodded. “The guy sounds pretty clever. He’s made the payment just small enough that it’ll hurt less to pay it than to fight it. That’s what usually trips blackmailers up. They get greedy and they ask for too much. Their victim is left with no choice but to call in the police.”
Merle offered him a one-sided smile. “Two thousand dollars a month hurts plenty,” he said. “Not all of us just inherited a small town, you know. In fact, I have to tell you it still seems positively feudal that anyone can inherit a town.”
Tyler chuckled, then leaned back as the waiter arrived with their meals. It did sound ridiculous, which was why he didn’t intend to touch this inheritance with a ten-foot pole. He had left a standing order to sell everything, as soon as there was a legitimate buyer. So far he hadn’t been able to unload any of it. Property in Heyday, Virginia, wasn’t exactly in high demand.
Neither of them spoke until the waiter had gone through the requisite frills and flourishes, asking them three times if they needed anything further.
Finally they were alone. Merle looked at his dark green and yellow salad as if he’d never seen anything like it before. Then he put his fork down and gave Tyler another of those appraising stares. Tyler had to smile. He could just imagine how effective that glare had been in the classroom.
“I’ve always wanted to ask you something,” Merle said. “When you came to Heyday and uncovered the prostitution ring, no one had any idea you had a connection to the town.”
While Tyler waited for Merle to continue, he chewed a mouthful of sprouts and spinach. Georgetown college students were way too health-conscious. Even the dressing was clear and artery-friendly. The damn thing tasted like wet grass.
Merle was still staring at him. “No one knew you were related to the McClintock family.”
“Right.” Tyler washed his grass down with coffee. “But you said you wanted to ask me something. I haven’t heard a question yet.”
“I’m asking if it was just coincidence. Because I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that you just happened to be passing through the very town where your natural father lived. I don’t believe that, out of all the insignificant little burgs on the map, you stumbled by accident onto Heyday.”
“Of course I didn’t. I went there to check out McClintock. I had just found out about him. My father—”
Tyler paused. It had been several years now since he’d learned the truth, but it still caught him by surprise to think that Jim Balfour was merely his adopted father. It still disappointed him, too. Jim Balfour was a great man, quiet and introverted, but more decent and loyal than anyone Tyler had ever met. Anderson McClintock, on the other hand, had been something completely different. Fiery, self-indulgent, opinionated, arrogant. The classic rich SOB.
He started over. “The man I considered my father, Jim Balfour, decided that I ought to know. My mother had just died. She was the one who had been determined to keep it all a secret. I think she was ashamed. She and Anderson hadn’t ever married.” He forked another clump of grass. “Although, when I did my research, I discovered that she was probably the only woman in Virginia he didn’t marry.”
Merle smiled. “That’s overstating it, but not by much.”
“Whatever. So I went to Heyday to get a look at the guy. I didn’t announce myself, obviously. I wanted anonymity, in case I—”
“Hated him?”
Tyler chuckled softly. “Now that’s an overstatement. You can’t hate a total stranger. And frankly I don’t waste energy hating anybody. I like to keep things simple, that’s all. The whole thing—second father, second family, second set of entanglements—sounded far too complicated. I thought it quite likely I wouldn’t want to get involved.”
Merle had an infuriatingly unconvinced expression on his face, as if he didn’t believe a word Tyler was saying. Well, too bad. Ten years ago Tyler had learned to keep a safe distance from messy emotional situations, and once he learned a lesson, he never forgot it.
“Must have come as a shock, then,” Merle observed dryly, “when Anderson put you in his will. Inheriting almost a full third of Heyday, just like his other sons. Your brothers, who were, of course, just as shocked as you were, I’m sure. Kind of hard to keep your distance from that.”
Tyler put his napkin on the table and gave up all pretence of eating. “Look, Merle, I don’t mean to be rude, but maybe we should get to the point. You didn’t come here to talk about the complexities of life as Anderson McClintock’s secret baby.”
Merle tilted his head. “No. You’re right. I didn’t.”
“So let me tell you what I think this is all about. You obviously heard I’m writing a book on the Heyday Eight. You knew I’d be interested—more than interested—to learn there are new developments in that situation. A blackmailer operating nearly three years after the girls were put out of business is definitely great copy.”
Merle smiled wryly. “I hadn’t thought of it quite like that, but—” He nodded. “Yes. I was hoping your curiosity would be piqued. I’m checkmated here, Tyler. If I don’t pay him, he’ll smear me, I’ll be ruined, and the police won’t ever expose him. They won’t even have enough incentive to try very hard. But you might. Naming the blackmailer. Having an arrest. That would make even better copy, right?”
“Right.”
Merle sighed heavily, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “Then you’ll find out who this guy is? You’ll come back to Heyday?”
Come back to Heyday.
Tyler thought of the silly little city, where everything, even the co-ed prostitutes, had a circus theme. He thought of the old bastard Anderson McClintock, now dead, who had run the city like a feudal overlord. He thought of his brothers, Kieran and Bryce, whom Tyler had met, but had deliberately avoided getting close to.
Obviously, now that he’d committed to writing this book, he was going to have to return to Heyday sooner or later. He was a good reporter, and he wouldn’t leave all those stones unturned.
But he remembered the Heyday residents, who hated his guts. He particularly remembered Mallory Rackham Platt, the sexy young woman who had run the Ringmaster Café, where the girls had concocted the Heyday Eight and had gathered to make their dates and count their profits.
Mallory, who had let Tyler spend so many hours there, chatting her up and complimenting her coffee, never guessing that he was gathering notes for his exposé.
Mallory, beautiful and ridiculously naive, unaware of what was going on under her nose. Mallory, whose husband had been one of the Heyday Eight’s best customers. Mallory, who had tossed a plate of French fries, complete with ketchup, into Tyler’s face when she found out who he really was.
Mallory, who for some strange reason was the only person in ten years to put Tyler’s disciplined objectivity and emotional distance in jeopardy.
“All right,” he said, ignoring the wriggle of doubt. “I’ll come back to Heyday.”
CHAPTER THREE
MINDY RACKHAM’S turquoise bikini was the most fantastic article of clothing she had ever owned. She had maxed out her MasterCard to buy it. She had almost been able to hear Mallory’s shocked disapproval as she signed the charge slip.
But the minute she saw Freddy’s face, she knew it had all been worth it.
“Wow,” he said as he wrapped his arms around her. “You’re absolute dynamite today, lady. You’ve just guaranteed Dad the vote of every male under ninety.”
She nuzzled into his shoulder happily. He was wearing his own swim trunks, and his strong, bronze, beautifully shaped torso was pretty marvelous, too. He might have been a statue of a god, except that his skin was velvety warm from the sun.
His curly blond hair was wet, dangling adorably into his forehead, and he smelled of suntan oil and cocktails. Of course, he’d already been at this party for hours. She’d had to work half a day, so she’d had to arrive alone.
That was one of the main reasons she’d indulged in this designer swimsuit and cover-up. She knew she was probably the only nine-to-five working gal here. Every other female was either the wife of a rich man, or the daughter of one—or a self-made woman who wouldn’t stoop to punching clocks or filing papers.
If the women here had jobs, they were high-powered positions with glassy offices, six-figure salaries and secretaries of their own. They were public-relations specialists and college professors and museum curators. They were speechwriters, magazine editors, airline pilots and congresswomen.
Mindy Rackham, low-level secretary at the corporate offices of a snack-cracker company, already felt inferior enough without having to arrive at this elite affair looking shabby and off-the-rack.
Freddy kissed the top of her head, and a honeyed calm slid down, from the contact point of his lips all the way to her pink-painted toes. Much better. With Frederick Earnshaw’s arms around her, how could any woman feel insecure? She could already feel the jealous eyes of the other women boring a hole into her bare back.
Everyone knew Freddy was the hunkiest guy in Richmond. And the sweetest. And the richest.
He could have had any girl he wanted. So why on earth, they whispered to each other, had he chosen little Mindy Rackham, a nobody from nowhere? From Heyday, which was actually even worse. When Freddy introduced her to people, they always seemed surprised that she could speak in complete sentences and didn’t have hayseeds falling from her hair.
The truth was, she didn’t understand it herself. Which was why she dreamed every night that Freddy took back his ring, and every morning awakened, heart pounding, with tears in her eyes, thanking God that it had only been a nightmare.
“Come on, honey, let’s get you a Coke, and there’s somebody I want you to meet.”
Freddy put his warm hand against the small of her back and guided her toward the others. The Olympic-size pool was as turquoise as her bikini, and shimmered under the beautiful afternoon sun. The people who stood around it were tall and elegant, murmuring to one another in low, laughing tones, making a collective sound that Mindy had come to associate with money.
White-coated waiters braided through them with trays of cocktails, and constantly refilled the beautiful tables piled high with pyramids of fruit and clear crystal vases of orchids.
For a minute, Mindy was afraid her feet wouldn’t move, but somehow she forced herself to be steered into the crowd. She couldn’t ever admit to Freddy that she was afraid. A politician’s wife had to be good with people. Outgoing, glib and graceful.
He had told her that when he asked her to marry him. He loved her, he’d said, but he couldn’t ask her to share his life without being completely honest about the responsibilities that came with the job.
Completely honest…
Her face had burned as if someone had lit a fire under her skin when he’d said that. She’d almost told him the truth right then. But of course she had chickened out, as always.
How could she take the piece of heaven he’d just handed her, and give it back? How could she resist the joyous security of being the cherished fiancée of Mr. Frederick Earnshaw—and go back to being poor little screwed-up Mindy, who had no future and way too much past?
“Jill, I’d like you to meet Mindy. Mindy, this is Jill Sheridan-Riley. Judge Sheridan-Riley,” he added with a teasing smile at the other woman.
Mindy smiled, too, without the teasing, and held out her hand, trying to remember, among all the things she needed to remember, that she had to shake firmly enough to look confident, but not so tightly as to seem absurd.
How could Freddy feel comfortable calling such an imposing woman “Jill”? She must be almost six feet tall, six feet of elegant, dramatic bones—collarbones, jawbones, wrist bones, cheekbones—every inch of her was jutting and determined. Dark hair and dark, intelligent eyes. Not yet forty. Still beautiful, but an uncompromising, unconventional beauty.
Judge Sheridan-Riley was one of those women who always made Mindy feel ridiculous, as if being short and blond was a character flaw. As if wearing lip gloss was a sign of weakness. Jill Sheridan-Riley hadn’t spent two hours getting ready this morning. She hadn’t needed to. She’d been born ready.
“Hi, Mindy,” Jill said. Her voice was dark, too, thick and elegant, but it held a surprising warmth. “I’ve been telling Freddy that if he didn’t introduce you soon I’d hold him in contempt.” She laughed and patted Freddy’s arm. “I’ve been dying for a chance to say that.”
She turned back to Mindy with twinkling eyes. “I’ve only been a judge about a week.”
Her laughter was infectious, and as Mindy chuckled she felt the knot in her stomach relax a millimeter. Maybe she could do this after all.
But just then, in the depths of the clever turquoise macramé drawstring purse Mindy had purchased to match her bikini, her cell phone began to ring.
Freddy shot a quick glance at her, and, her cheeks heating up, she shrugged helplessly. Dumb, dumb. She should have put it on mute.
She squeezed her hand over the purse, hoping to muffle the sound, but Freddy shook his head. “Go ahead, answer it,” he said in an understanding voice. “It might be Mallory. It might be about your mother.”
She nodded gratefully. He was such a special guy. He always seemed concerned about her mother’s health. He didn’t even seem to mind that his new fiancée came with so much baggage.
She excused herself from the other two as she dug out the small, silver phone. The caller ID showed that he’d been right. It was Mallory.
Mindy found a quiet corner, between an untended bar and a trash can, the least picturesque square foot of the entire party. She clicked the green answer button.
“Hi, Mallory,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
“Mom’s fine,” Mallory said. That was the first sentence of every conversation they had. “I just wanted to talk to you for a minute.”
Mal sounded a little edgy, Mindy thought. Her own guilty conscience pictured the overpriced bikini. But there was no way Mallory could know about that. Mindy had bought it with her own credit card, and she’d pay for it with her own paycheck. Somehow.
“Okay. What’s up?”
“I just—” Mallory stopped. She sounded uncertain, which was unlike her. She was the big sister. Now that their mother was…sick…Mallory was the boss, and the job suited her. Just like Mom, Mallory had always been completely sure of herself and her decisions. Of all the Rackham women, only Mindy was tormented with self-doubt.
“I just wondered,” Mallory said slowly, “if you’ve thought any more about when you’re going to tell Freddy.”
God, that again? At a time like this? They’d just had this conversation three days ago, and Mindy had promised to think about it, to look for the perfect moment. They both knew she was going to have to tell him. Even in Mindy’s most selfish dreams, she didn’t imagine that she had the right to marry him without telling him the truth. It was just a matter of when.
“Mal, it’s a little awkward to discuss this right now. I’m at a party. With Freddy. It’s a political thing.”
“Oh. Oh…well.”
“What’s wrong?” Mindy could tell that Mallory was upset. “Can’t we talk about this later?” She lowered her voice to a near-whisper. “You know this kind of thing intimidates me, Mal. But I’m doing pretty well, I think. I just can’t let myself get upset now.”
“Yes, of course, later is fine.” Mallory’s voice resumed its normal, brisk, cheerful tones. “I’m sorry. I didn’t remember that the party was today. Good for you, honey. I’m really proud of you for deciding to go after all.”
Mindy remembered sheepishly that she’d told Mallory she might plead a headache, or the flu, and skip the party. She was so afraid of letting Freddy down. She was so afraid that someday, at one of these functions, the mist would fall from his eyes and he’d see her as she really was.
Too young, too gauche, too shy. Pretty enough to be a trophy wife, but not worthy in any other way.
In the end, a liability.
“Thanks,” she said self-consciously. “Well, I guess I’d better go see what Freddy’s up to.”
“Of course.” Mallory was back in cheerleader mode. “I’ll bet you look like a million bucks, kiddo. Now you go out there and just be yourself. Show them how sweet and smart you are. Before this party is over, they’ll all love you just as much as Freddy does.”
As Mindy put her phone away, she watched Freddy and his friend the judge, who had been joined by three other suave people with drinks in their hands and clever laughter on their lips. She tried to convince herself that Mallory was right. They would love her, too…love her just as much as Freddy did.
But that was the question, really, wasn’t it? How much did Freddy love her? When the time came, would it be enough?
FORGET FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH, Mallory thought as she opened the last of the day’s mail. Thursday the twenty-second was every bit as evil.
So far her day had consisted of two obnoxious publisher’s reps, one carton of damaged books, three hefty returns, one irate mother who apparently didn’t know that a CD called All Night Long might contain sexual content, and a call from Valley Pride Property Management Inc., notifying her that they planned to raise her rent.
But she could handle all that. She’d been a bookseller for almost two years now, and she could count on one hand the days that hadn’t included similar frustrations.
In fact, ever since last week’s call from the blackmailer, she’d decided that, as long as she didn’t hear from him, every day was a good day.
But the piece of mail she held in her hand clearly hadn’t come from any blackmailer. This new insult was even more personal. It shouldn’t really upset her at all—she’d been half expecting it for weeks. And yet, strangely, it did, if only because it reminded her what a fool she’d once been.
She slid her forefinger under the flap of the big, showy, pink-flowered envelope, already sure what it was. It was a supertacky wedding invitation—the kind Mallory would never encourage Mindy to select—and it was addressed in an almost illegible curlicue calligraphy.
Which meant that her ex-husband Dan and his pretty fiancée, Jeannie, who was nineteen but clearly had the taste of a middle-schooler, were actually getting married.
And they wanted Mallory to show up and watch.
The arrogant bastard. Mallory tossed the invitation, which was embossed with silver wedding bells that looked like scratch-off squares on lottery tickets, onto the counter. She’d show up, all right. She’d sit in the front, and when they asked if anyone knew any reason why these two should not be joined together, she’d stand up and say, I do! Dan Platt is a hard-core sleazeball, she’d say, and even this ditzy little airhead deserves better.
Out of nowhere, a new suspicion skittered across her mind. Her blackmailer with the metallic voice couldn’t have been Dan, could it? When they’d been married, Dan had never had enough money. And he had always resented the way her family spoiled Mindy. He’d called her “the little princess.”
And, since he was one of the Heyday Eight’s customers, he might have known about Mindy’s involvement.
But this was ridiculous. Dan was definitely a jerk, but he wasn’t a blackmailer. She was just getting paranoid. She’d noticed it the very first day. Every male customer—or female customer, for that matter, if she had a deep voice—made her nervous. Everyone from the postman to the sales reps, from the mayor to the cop who patrolled Hippodrome Circle looked suspicious.
Was it you, she’d ask mentally? Or you? Or you?
“Mallory, stop daydreaming and get me a copy of The Great Gatsby.” Aurora York was suddenly standing in front of the counter, the blue feather on her pill-box hat trembling, which always meant Aurora was in a temper. “I need to show that fool Verna Myers something.”
Mallory smiled at her favorite customer, glad to have something fun to take her mind off the annoyances of the day. And any meeting of Aurora’s book club, Bookish Old Broads Incorporated, or Bobbies, as they called themselves, was bound to be fun.
The group met here every Thursday at six, for cookies and coffee and spirited debate. Last Thursday, Verna Myers, who worshipped at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary feet, had been so enraged when Aurora criticized Tender is the Night that she had stood up, sputtering indignantly, and yanked the feather right out of Aurora’s hat.
A hush had fallen over the entire bookstore. No one, but no one, touched Aurora’s feathers. Wally said later that he’d been expecting a catfight. But Aurora was a lady. Instead of scratching Verna’s eyes out, she had merely taken her copy of Tender is the Night, torn out a page from the middle, and used it to wipe the cookie crumbs from her mouth.
Frankly, Mallory had been surprised to see Verna show up again this week. But Verna probably enjoyed the rows as much as Aurora did. And, since the wealthy old ladies always paid for anything they ruined, it was lucrative for Mallory, so everybody came out a winner.
“Gatsby? I’ll go look,” Mallory said obediently. No one who knew Aurora really minded her bossy tone. Underneath the haughty Queen Victoria exterior beat one of the kindest hearts in Heyday.
But wouldn’t you know it? She was completely out of Gatsby. The high-school seniors were writing research papers on Fitzgerald this year, and they’d all come rushing in at the last minute and picked her shelves clean.
She had her own copy upstairs. Rather than disappoint Aurora, Mallory decided to go get it.
“Wally, will you watch the register for a minute?”
Wally, who was shelving CDs, his favorite task, frowned. He was an artist—a budding film director, at least in his own mind—and he thought handling money was crass. But he was deeply in hock to the photography store down the street, so he didn’t dare annoy the one employer in town who would put up with his attitudes, not to mention his multicolored hair.
“Sure,” he mumbled, and began to shuffle in her direction.
Mallory’s shop was actually two storefronts combined into one large bookstore on the bottom. On the upper floor, though, the building was divided into two snug but charming apartments with porches overlooking the tree-lined, curving Hippodrome Circle. Mallory lived in one. The other had been empty ever since Christmas, when her neighbor, a local chef, had taken a job at a fancy restaurant in Richmond. She still missed the great aromas that had always seeped from his apartment to hers.
Both apartments were accessed by the same outside staircase, so Mallory exited the bookstore, drank in a little of the sparkling Virginia spring air, and then climbed up to see if she could hunt down Gatsby in the jungle of books in her living room.
She kept admirable order downstairs—customers had to be able to find books before they could buy them. But up here, where she stored everything that wouldn’t fit in the shop, as well as her own ever-growing collection of books, the situation was a mess.
Gatsby…Gatsby… When had she last read Gatsby? Probably around the holidays…which meant it would be beneath the “summer reading list” books that had just been delivered, but not so far down as the “back to school” books from last fall.
It took forever, so she wasn’t surprised when she heard footsteps on the outside staircase. Wally, undoubtedly panicked by being stranded with the Bobbies, must have left the register untended—the ultimate no-no—and come up here to drag her back downstairs.
She grabbed Gatsby, knocking over three Pilchers and a du Maurier in the process, and hurried to the door. “Darn it, Wally, I’m coming,” she called. “Now get back down there before someone robs us blind.”
But it wasn’t Wally.
The lovely spring sunlight, so bright in her many-windowed living room, didn’t quite penetrate this narrow hallway that ran behind both apartments. She blinked as her pupils tried to adjust, but she couldn’t make out the person’s face.
His back was to the open stairway door, and the sun haloed around him, leaving just a black silhouette, like a moving shadow. Still, she saw that he was tall, much taller than Wally. More substantial. Wally had a boy’s shoulders. This squared-off breadth belonged to a man.
With no warning, fear tingled across her scalp, and she instinctively took a step backward, toward the shelter of her own doorway. This was Heyday, where dim corridors rarely posed a threat to anyone, and she was no coward, but ever since that call…
Things had changed.
Once again she asked herself…could this be the man, the faceless blackmailer with a distorted metallic voice?
But then the man spoke and the fear disappeared, replaced by a sudden, flaring fury.
He said just one word. Just her name.
“Mallory.” The word was uttered softly, almost apologetically, as if he knew how she would hate seeing him and wished he could spare her the pain.
“Mallory,” he said again.
No, this wasn’t the blackmailer—it was someone she despised even more.
At least the blackmailer was ashamed enough to hide his true identity. This was someone who made money by exploiting other people’s misery, but did it right out in the open, as if it were something to be proud of. The blackmailer at least announced right up front that he was just trying to weasel something out of you. This man masqueraded as a friend, drank your coffee and pretended to care about your problems.
And then, like a kick to the gut, he betrayed you.
This was Tyler Balfour.
CHAPTER FOUR
WOW. TYLER PAUSED in the half-open doorway. Three years hadn’t softened Mallory Rackham’s heart much, had they?
The hall in front of him was dim, but the afternoon light behind him streamed in over his shoulders in two bright bands, one of which caught Mallory’s face and illuminated it. The venom with which she eyed him now was just as potent and undiluted as it had been the day she read his first story about the Heyday Eight and saw her husband’s name.
At least she wasn’t holding a plate of greasy French fries this time. He glanced at the book in her hand. A small paperback. Good. He probably wouldn’t even bruise if she decided to chuck it at him.
He guessed he had at least a few seconds before that happened. For the moment she seemed paralyzed with shock and the slow awakening of long-buried anger. So he slung his suit bag over his shoulder and moved carefully toward the apartment that would be his temporary lodgings, all the while fingering his keys, trying to locate the right one.
When he reached the door, which was only about four feet from her own, she finally spoke. “What the hell are you doing here, Tyler?”
Okay, that was a start. She had used profanity, which he knew she rarely did, and her voice was pointed and frosty, like a dagger of ice, but at least she hadn’t tossed the book. And she’d used his first name.
About a six, he figured, on the hostility scale. Nothing he couldn’t handle. He’d once investigated a senator who’d been taking bribes, and though that guy had been hostile enough to consult a hit man, Tyler had still managed to get the story.
He’d get this one, too, including her part of it. He couldn’t leave her out, even if he wanted to. She’d owned the café. She’d been married to one of the johns. Her little sister had gone to school with the Eight. He needed her in the book, and he’d get her.
At first, Tyler had wondered if moving into the apartment next to her was the best plan. He’d been afraid she might feel crowded. But now he saw that his instincts had been right. He was going to need the proximity, the frequent meetings, to break down long-entrenched barriers like these.
“Well?” She was gripping her book so tightly the pages curled into a circle. “Tell me. Why are you back?”
“I’m going to be staying here for a while.” He held up his key. “I inherited the building, as I’m sure you’ve heard.”
“Yes.” She still clenched her jaw, which distorted her normally musical voice. “But I also heard you were trying to sell it.”
He smiled. “Did you want to make me an offer?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I just want to know why you’re back in Heyday. God. Haven’t you done enough damage already?”
“Damage?” He looked her straight in the eye. “Are you sure you don’t have me confused with someone else?”
The light in the hallway wasn’t great, but he could tell she flushed. Deep inside, she must know he was right. She must know that Tyler hadn’t caused her husband’s infidelity. He’d just exposed it.
But clearly she wasn’t planning to admit it.
“Don’t pull that crusading white knight routine with me,” she said, her voice a shade too loud in the empty hall. “You didn’t write your series to rescue the sad little girls of the Heyday Eight. You wrote it to make yourself famous. And you have absolutely no idea what kind of wreckage you left behind. You were too busy scurrying out of town to collect your Pulitzer.”
Man, she really was furious. Tension crackled off her like electricity. He wondered what fed it, kept it throbbing and vital all these years. Surely she wasn’t still breaking her heart over that no-good bastard ex-husband of hers.
The guy hadn’t ever deserved her, but Tyler was well aware that love was illogical and unpredictable.
Which was why he always steered his own life a hundred miles in the other direction.
“I know you got divorced,” he said. “And I know that, however embarrassing it must have been to discover he’d cheated on you, you’re smart enough to realize you’re better off without that scum bucket.”
She didn’t respond at first, though her flush deepened. Maybe the word had been too harsh. But Dan Platt was a scum bucket. What kind of sleazy moron paid for kinky thrills with a silly teenage hooker while a woman like Mallory waited for him at home?
Mallory was one of the few natural beauties Tyler had ever known. Even better, she was—or had been—lighthearted and full of life. She had smiled a lot, and laughed a lot, and let her short blond hair tumble all over itself in a way that was somehow ten times sexier than anything he’d seen at a White House ball or a Kennedy Center gala.
Some of that vibrant energy had been dampened, he saw now. It wasn’t that she looked older, for the three years had hardly touched her in that way. The difference was more subtle. She looked subdued, as if her colors had faded. This face was still lovely, but it had new shadows.
He felt an odd prick of guilt, knowing that his series had helped to put some of those shadows there.
Finally she found her voice. “I am not going to discuss Dan with you. But if you think my divorce was the worst thing that happened around here in the wake of the great Tyler Balfour, you’re very wrong.”
He gave her a half smile. “You underestimate me, Mallory,” he said. “I’m a journalist. I know all about the developments of the past few years. I know that eighty students pulled out, and the college almost closed. I know there were six divorces, including yours, one suicide attempt, one illegitimate baby and two county commissioners ousted in the next election.”
He paused, in case she wanted to break in, but she didn’t speak. She just looked at him, as if she were hypnotized by his litany of misery.
“I know that Sander Jacobson’s loony wife set fire to the Ringmaster Café, illogically blaming your family for her husband’s sins. And I know that, after the fire, your mother had a stroke. A stroke from which she hasn’t yet recovered.”
Again he paused.
Mallory’s eyes were bright, but her chin was high. “Is that all?”
He thought about Dilday Merle and the mysterious blackmailer. But he wasn’t free to talk about that. “Seems like enough, doesn’t it?”
Was it his imagination, or did she seem relieved? She certainly took a deep breath, and when she spoke, her voice was steadier.
“Impressive,” she said. “I knew you spied on us when you were in Heyday. I had no idea you had continued to do so from Washington, D.C.”
“I just followed the story. I follow all my stories. And this one is particularly important to me.”
She laughed harshly. “Why? I hope you aren’t going to say it’s because of me, because we were ‘friends.’ I quit believing in that fairy tale three years ago. Although I have to admit you had me fooled pretty thoroughly for a while there.”
Again that slight sting of conscience. Had he gone too far back then, while he was digging for the story he suspected was buried in her innocent little café? Had he played the role of friend and confidant so convincingly that he had actually hurt her?
He hadn’t meant to. Ordinarily he knew just where the ethical lines were drawn. Sometimes, though, he had forgotten it was a role. Sometimes, while he sat at the counter late at night and ate her amazing blueberry pie, he had forgotten that he was a reporter. Sometimes, when she had hinted at how unhappy her home life was, he had been forced to fight the urge to take her hand across the counter.
Sometimes he had almost forgotten to take notes.
Almost.
But he’d done plenty of soul-searching back when it happened. And he’d decided that, though he might have touched the line with his toe once or twice, he hadn’t ever actually crossed it.
He wasn’t going to cross it now, either. Even if it made the reporting more difficult, he was going to play it straight with her this time.
“No, it’s not because of you,” he said. “It’s because I’m writing a book about the Heyday Eight. For that, I’m going to need all the information I can get.”
“You’re writing a—” She swallowed, and, as if her fingers had gone limp, the book dropped to the wooden floor. She didn’t seem aware that she no longer held it. “A book? About those poor girls? Why?”
He retrieved the mangled paperback, which he saw was a copy of The Great Gatsby. “It’s what I do, Mallory,” he said quietly. “I’m a writer.”
She looked at him. She opened her mouth, as if she were about to say something. And then, without another word, without even taking her book from his hand, she moved past him and went out the side door. He heard her footsteps disappearing fast along the stairs.
Well, hell. What exactly was that all about?
He’d known that seeing her again would be awkward. He’d expected her to be angry that he was going to tear up her town again when the book came out.
And she had been angry, damn angry, at first. But then, after he mentioned the book…
He stared at the empty rectangle of light for a long moment, trying to sort through the signals his instincts were sending him. He had talked to a lot of people about a lot of difficult things, and he had learned to read them pretty well.
Unless he had completely lost his touch, Mallory Rackham wasn’t merely angry anymore.
She was flat-out scared.
A WEEK LATER, Mallory was on her way to the Windjammer Golf and Country Club. She was going too fast, and her thoughts were so agitated she almost drove her Volkswagen into the faux-marble haunches of one of the zebra statues that stood guard over the winding, green-bordered entry.
A caddy working the seventh hole glared at her, shocked that anyone would disrupt the pastoral harmony of this elite club.
But Mallory didn’t care. She almost wished she had hit them. Those zebra statues were stupid.
Not as stupid, however, as she was.
Yessir, Mallory Rackham took the blue ribbon in Abject Stupidity.
She shook her head, muttering to herself as she guided the car more carefully up toward the clubhouse. What fantasy world had she been living in? Had she really believed the blackmailer would just send her a nice thank-you note for the thousand-dollar payment and then scratch her off his list? Hadn’t she ever read a detective novel, or watched a crime show on TV? Heck, a five-year-old could probably tell you that, once you paid a blackmailer, he’d just keep coming back for more.
But not Mallory. Idiot that she was, she’d actually been stunned to hear the man’s electronic voice on her telephone again this afternoon.
He’d told her he wanted another thousand dollars. Only two weeks after the first payment.
When she’d asked him where he thought a small-town, small-business owner was going to get that kind of money, he had laughed—that horrible, tinny laugh she remembered so well.
Maybe, he’d said, she should consider taking up where Mindy had left off. Mallory might not be a teenager anymore, but she was still a good-looking woman. Did she know how to handle a whip?
Without thinking, Mallory had slammed down the phone, too furious to calculate the wisdom of such a move. But almost instantly she regretted it. During the long two or three minutes she’d waited to see if he’d call back, she was racked with fear that he might not, that the next call he made might be to Freddy Earnshaw.
Or what if he’d heard that Tyler Balfour was writing a book? How much, she wondered, would Tyler pay for juicy information like this?
Finally, the phone had run again. She picked it up, her fingers trembling. The metallic voice was colder and harder than ever. That little insult had cost her, he’d said slowly. Double the pain. This time he wanted two thousand dollars. Tomorrow.
But she didn’t have two thousand dollars. And, because she was a shortsighted fool, she hadn’t made any provisions for getting it. She could have taken another loan on the business, maybe, if she could persuade Doug Metzler at the bank to stretch the income/debt ratios a little. Or she could have accepted one of the offers for credit cards that clogged her mailbox daily. She could have sold some of her own collection of antique books—well, all her collection, probably.
But the point was, if she hadn’t been such an idiot, she could have done something.
Instead, she was going to have to get desperate. She was going to have to borrow the money from Roddy.
Not that Roddy cared. Roddy had been born middle-class, with a curious mind that got him into a ton of trouble as a child but had made him several million dollars as an adult. Roddy was always inventing things—things that weren’t necessarily sensible enough to make it to the market, but which were just interesting enough to bring in huge option purchases from big businesses.
His latest idea had been a “flip-flop clip,” which kept the cuff of your slacks from tucking under when you wore sandals. Even his best friend, Kieran McClintock, had laughed at that one, but when a major beachwear company had paid him a hundred thousand dollars for it, Roddy had thrown a bikini-beach party at the country club and invited the entire town of Heyday.
So, after running around mentally like a rat in a maze for a couple of hours, she’d finally called Roddy on his cell, taken a deep breath, and asked if she could borrow two thousand dollars. Today.
“Okay,” he said in his typical laid-back style. He was the only man she’d ever known who wouldn’t ask why. “Want to come get it now? I’d come there, but I can’t leave for another hour or two.”
She knew where he was, of course. He was always at the country club’s bar, the Gilly Wagon, after four o’clock, when he finished his last hole of golf for the day. He played poker, flirted with the married women, watched CNN and drank ginger ale for at least three hours every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday and Saturdays he switched to beer and single women.
And no one could tell him to leave. He’d single-handedly built the Gilly Wagon with the proceeds from his crazy idea for fake fingernails made of candy.
“You’ve got that much money on you?”
He chuckled. “Well, you know. In case I have to flee the country unexpectedly, that kind of thing. Come on over.”
“I guess I could,” she’d said. Wally could close up. “But, are you alone?”
“No. But I am amazingly discreet. Never fear, Mallory dear. The hand is quicker than the eye.”
And so here she was, parking the car at the country club and heading into the Gilly Wagon, which at this hour would, she hoped, be mostly empty.
It was. Other than a foursome in the corner arguing about how many strokes it had taken one of them at the ninth hole, Roddy and Kieran were the only ones there.
She said hi to the bartender, who doubled as the waiter and was hurrying over to seat her. She waved him off, pointing toward Roddy. The man nodded gratefully and went back behind the bar to finish washing the glasses for the coming rush.
“Hi, guys,” she said as she approached the table. Kieran, that handsome, golden-haired sweetie, half rose immediately and gave her a kiss.
She hugged him briefly. “Where’s Claire?”
Kieran chuckled. “She said she’d rather stick bamboo shoots under her fingernails than be a part of this little adventure of Roddy’s. But I assume she’s not actually doing that. She’s probably rolling Stephanie around the park, trying to get her to go to sleep.”
“Roddy’s little adventure?” Mallory turned to Roddy with a smile, noticing that he hadn’t bothered to rise, leaving the graceful manners to Kieran.
Roddy Hartland was nowhere nearly as classically handsome as the McClintocks, with his freckles and his unruly brown curls, but he was pretty darn sexy, once you saw the intelligent laughter in his eyes and the easy tolerance in his smile. And he had a wonderful, strong body.
Mallory and Roddy dated each other more often than either of them dated anyone else, but they both understood it would never come to anything. Though no words had ever been spoken on the subject, she knew that he’d always been half in love with Mindy. Sadly, the ten-year age difference had proved fatal. Roddy wasn’t willing to declare himself and risk rejection. Mindy, young and self-absorbed, had never even guessed.
“What trouble are you trying to stir up today?”
Roddy blinked innocently. “Trouble? Gosh, you say that like I do it all the time.”
“That’s because you do,” Kieran put in, his mouth full of ice. He held out his empty drink. The bartender nodded and turned to retrieve the bottle of imported single malt Scotch whiskey they kept on hand solely for the McClintocks, who might not be the only ones in Heyday who could appreciate it, but were just about the only ones who could afford it.
Kieran turned his gorgeous blue eyes toward Mallory. “Don’t tell Claire I was drinking. But this is one stunt I just can’t pull sober.”
“You’re not pulling it, you coward.” Roddy shook his head. “I am.”
Mallory growled. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Kieran waved the question to Roddy, who grinned happily and sucked down some ginger ale, clearly just to prolong the suspense.
“Roddy Hartland…”
“Okay, okay. So you know Doug Metzler, right?”
Mallory frowned. “Yeah. Of course.”
“And you know he’s an unmitigated stuffed shirt, right?”
Mallory smiled. “Um…he holds three loans of mine, Roddy, so I’m not sure I want to call him that out loud.”
“I do. He’s a pompous zebra’s ass, and I’ve decided to give him the apoplectic fit he so richly deserves.”
Kieran began to chuckle. “He will have a fit.” He drank some of his new Scotch. “Really. When he sees you, he’ll have a fit and turn purple.”
Mallory still didn’t understand a thing. She glowered at Roddy, who was trying so hard to hold back his laughter that he was getting a little color in his own cheeks.
“Okay, look. Here’s the deal. Metzler is the current president of the country club. And frankly, the man’s got a stick up his—” Roddy wrinkled his nose guiltily. “I mean, he’s so uptight nobody can stand him. Yesterday he had the nerve to issue a dress code for the club. No sandals. No T-shirts. According to Doug-God-complex-Metzler’s official memo, you won’t be served if you aren’t wearing closed shoes and a shirt with a collar. “
Mallory shrugged. “Well, you are wearing a shirt with a collar.”
Kieran, who had just swallowed, choked on his expensive liquor. “Yeah, but that’s not all he’s wearing.”
“What?” Mallory narrowed her eyes. Roddy leaned back, looking insufferably smug, delighted with his own ingenuity.
And then she finally caught on. What else was he wearing? Scooting her chair back, she ducked her head under the tablecloth and took a peek.
Oh, my God.
A skirt.
An honest-to-God, bonafide skirt, the kind the Heyday cheerleaders wore. The navy-blue pleats folded gracefully around Roddy’s tanned, athletic thighs. His muscular calves were bare and a little hairy above his sneakers.
She started to laugh as she lifted her head, and in her helpless mirth she banged it noisily on the underside of the table. Still, she had to thank him. He had not only agreed to loan her a fortune, he had made her laugh on a day when she hadn’t thought that was possible.
“Oh, Roddy,” she said. “You goof.”
Roddy was back to looking innocent. “What? I read the official memo word for word. It didn’t say anything about skirts.” He reached out and gave her hand a tap. “But actually, sweetie, you might want to scram before Doug gets here. Things are likely to get ugly.”
“Hell, yeah, they will,” Kieran said to Mallory earnestly. “I’ve seen him standing up in that skirt. The man’s so bowlegged it’s tragic.”
Still smiling, Mallory gave Roddy a hesitant glance. “But—” She tried to think of a subtle way to remind him why she was here.
“Go,” he said firmly, and squeezed her hand. “I’m sure you have at least two thousand more important things to do than messing with Doug Metzler’s mind.”
The grip was unusually firm. He was trying to tell her something. She glanced down at her purse, which, she saw, now had a bright white envelope sticking out of it.
The money was already there. How had he done that? When had he done it? Perhaps when she and Kieran had been kissing each other hello? Roddy really was a magician. And she could use a magician right about now. If he could make a treasure appear out of nothing, maybe he could make Mindy’s past disappear…
She smiled at him, hoping he could see her heart in her eyes. She wished she could tell him this was for Mindy. But he had no idea that Mindy had been involved in the Heyday Eight, and she’d never disillusion him about the girl he silently adored.
“All right,” she said. “If you dorks really are going to start a brawl in here, I guess I would rather be someplace else.”
She reached over and gave him a kiss. Usually they pecked on the cheek, but this seemed to call for something more heartfelt. She pressed her lips to his, and as she straightened up she whispered, “Thanks.”
He winked and grinned. “No problem, sweetie. But look. Here comes our resident stranger. I hear he’s your new landlord.”
She turned quickly. It was true. Tyler Balfour had entered the Wagon. She hadn’t expected him, and, unprepared, she caught her breath, struck anew with his good looks. How had she not realized he was a McClintock the last time he was in town? Only the McClintock genes produced men this dangerously virile.
“Oh, yeah.” Kieran was nodding, motioning Tyler over. “He’s here to see me. We’ve got business to do.”
Maybe that was true, but as Tyler approached his gaze seemed locked on Mallory. He was probably a great poker player, she thought. His handsome face was as blank as a mannequin’s. Clearly he had been trained to observe, and not to care.
Well, fine, she didn’t care, either. She had been humiliatingly gullible the last time he was in Heyday. Emotionally tangled in a failing marriage, she’d been so grateful for the calm sympathy he had projected. Over the weeks, she’d even begun to dream about him, about his comfort turning to something warmer…
He’d kissed her once. Only once. She was still married, on paper anyhow. And the next day his story had come out.
As he drew nearer, she gave him a deliberately fake smile. He must know she wasn’t pleased to see him. She’d managed to avoid him for a full week now, even though sometimes she was piercingly aware that they were just inches away from each other, with only a piece of drywall between them.
Sometimes at night she could hear him on the phone in his apartment, though she could never quite make out the words. She filed that information away, though. If she could hear him, he could hear her.
“Hi, Tyler,” Kieran said, smiling and rising. “Thanks for coming over. I’ll be ready to leave soon, but I promised Roddy I’d wait a few more minutes. He’s going to put on a fireworks show for us.”
Kieran seemed to remember suddenly that Tyler was a relative stranger to Heyday. “Oh, sorry. Have you had the chance to meet Roddy Hartland?”
“I don’t think so.” Tyler held out his hand. “Our paths didn’t cross when I was here before.”
Which was a polite, secret-code way of saying Roddy hadn’t been listed as a client of the Heyday Eight. Mallory felt a flush of indignation. As if Roddy, with his muscles and his millions, would ever need to buy sex from anyone! She put her hand on his arm, instinctively protective, though he obviously had no need of protection from Tyler or any man.
Tyler saw the touch. She felt the flick of his eyes like the tip-touch of a whip. Yes, she told him with her own gaze. I was lonely back then, and you played me for a fool. Yes, I wanted to trust you. I even wanted to kiss you. But he’s the one I’m kissing now.
Roddy must have felt the currents of tension, but with his usual composure he took her hand and, holding it, he rose and held out his other hand to Tyler.
“No, we never met,” he said, grinning. “You were in Heyday looking for secrets, and frankly I haven’t got any. With me, what you see is what you get.”
Tyler’s focus fell slowly to Roddy’s ridiculous skirt. It barely skimmed his knees.
“So it would seem,” Tyler said. “If only that were true of everyone, my job would be a whole lot easier.”
He smiled when he spoke the words, but Mallory couldn’t help thinking the comment had been directed at her. She hugged her purse to her side and smiled right back.
She wasn’t afraid of him. She had the money she needed. She would buy the blackmailer’s silence for another couple of weeks.
And during that time, somehow she’d find a way to keep her little sister’s name out of this son of a bitch’s sleazy book.
CHAPTER FIVE
TWO HOURS SPENT in the company of Kieran and Bryce McClintock only confirmed what Tyler had suspected about his “family.”
They were nuts.
First, Kieran had been sitting at the country club bar with a guy wearing a miniskirt, which apparently they had arranged for the express—and somewhat juvenile—purpose of annoying a balding guy who came in later wearing neon-green pants. If you asked Tyler, it was a toss-up who looked stupider, the guy in drag or Mr. Greenpants, who began sputtering convulsively the minute he caught a glimpse of the skirt.
Now, though the three of them had arrived at the Valley Pride real estate offices and were trying to review an offer Kieran wanted to make on one of Tyler’s properties, they kept getting interrupted. Apparently every single tenant insisted on seeing the McClintock brothers personally, about everything from busted sewer pipes to leaky window caulking.
If Tyler had run this ship, he would have fired Elton Fletcher, the prissy pencil pusher at the front desk, who clearly didn’t want to get his hair mussed by tangling with the clients. None of these lunatics should ever have made it past the first pair of double doors.
Especially not this new one, a fifty-something, wild-eyed tenant named Mrs. Milligan, who had entered ranting five minutes ago, and, as far as Tyler could tell, hadn’t drawn a breath yet.
She seemed to focus her wrath on Bryce, and was leaning over him, wagging her finger in his face.
“And if you think you can scare me just because you have a reputation for shooting anyone who crosses you, you’re quite mistaken, my boy. I’ve got a Doberman who’s been waiting a long time for a nice dish of McClintock stew. He’d have you by the throat before you could get your finger on the trigger.”
Bryce looked over at Kieran with a tilted smile. “Is that really my new reputation? Gunslinger? What happened to the trashy man-slut thing? I think I liked that one better.”
Kieran shrugged. “Now you’ve got both. Congratulations.”
Bryce sighed and returned his gaze to the wild woman standing over him. “I don’t shoot women, Mrs. Milligan. Not unless they’re coming right for me. It’s just that you’ve had two and a half years of living rent-free—”
She drew herself erect, in clear offence. “There were extenuating circumstances.”
“Yeah. I know. Your sister was kidnapped, and you had to pay the ransom. Your dog needed extensive psychiatric help.” Bryce shot a quick look at Kieran, but somehow both of them managed to keep straight faces. “So what is it this month?”
“It’s…it’s classified.” She pursed her lips and lifted her chin haughtily. “If I told you, good men would die.”
Kieran made a strange sound, but he quickly buried his head in a file and wouldn’t look at anyone. Bryce sighed again, shut his eyes and put his hand up to massage his forehead.
While both of them were distracted, Mrs. Milligan turned abruptly to Tyler and gave him an unmistakable wink, a theatrical expression so broad it screwed up one entire half of her face.
The old scamp! This was just a game to her. Tyler wondered if the McClintock brothers knew that, or whether they really thought she was insane.
Without thinking, Tyler winked back. And then Bryce opened his eyes. Smiling, Mrs. Milligan returned to staring him down.
“Well?”
“Well,” Bryce said slowly. “I wouldn’t want anyone to actually die.”
“That’s what I thought.” She picked up her purse. “You have enough blood on your hands already, don’t you?”
Bryce held his palms up, obviously outmatched. “Yes,” he said. “I mean, no. I mean…forget about the rent, Mrs. Milligan. If the time ever comes that you’re in a position to pay, you know where to send the check.”
“Of course I do.” She turned from the doorway. “But don’t hold your breath.”
When she was gone, both brothers leaned back in their chairs, shaking their heads and chuckling.
Kieran turned to Tyler. “Sorry about that. I didn’t realize she’d be here today. Wouldn’t you just know it? After we waited all this time for you to get here, I had hoped—” He dropped the file on the desk. “We certainly can’t be making a very good impression on you, can we?”
“This is how it is,” Bryce said dryly. “This is life in Heyday. Tyler might as well know that from the get-go. That way, if he decides to run for his life, he can at least get a head start.”
“Run?” Kieran’s face sobered. “Surely you’re not leaving right away, are you? We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
Tyler took a moment to frame his answer. He was eager to liquidate his inheritance and get out of here. He’d spent the past week visiting his new holdings, working with Elton Fletcher, the front-desk neatnik, and a real estate agent he’d brought in from Richmond.
Things didn’t look promising. Though months ago he’d left instructions to sell anything at almost any price, so far he’d been able to dispose of only two properties. Some guy named Slip-something who owned a bar just outside the city limits had wanted to expand, so he’d bought the Black and White Lounge. And now Kieran wanted one of Tyler’s empty lots by the river.
At this rate Tyler would be free in about, oh, ten years.
Too bad he didn’t have more empty lots. They’d be a lot easier to unload. This town, with its circus fetish, was just too kitschy for words, and the architecture was a nightmare. He had one lovely plot at the edge of town, but the house on it had been designated a historical building. He wasn’t allowed to pull down the ridiculous ringmaster statue by the front gate or replace the hideous stained-glass windows depicting leaping zebras.
“Maybe you could give it a little time,” Kieran said. “Believe it or not, Heyday kind of…grows on you.”
God forbid. Tyler shifted his feet, as if he could already feel weeds and vines trying to wrap themselves around him, rooting him to this eccentric little backwater.
Still, Bryce and Kieran seemed to love the place, and there was no need to be callous. They weren’t such bad guys, actually. They clearly wanted to reach out to him, which was a little awkward. He’d dodged their phone calls and dinner invitations for a full week, determined to make it clear he wasn’t interested in being drawn into the bosom of the family, hailed as the beloved long-lost brother.
But inevitably they’d met in town from time to time. He’d pegged their types right away, a knack he’d developed over the course of about a thousand interviews. Kieran was the solid one, the brother who couldn’t bear the thought of hurting anybody, the one who would be a bad liar and would do the right thing if it killed him. He was probably buying this lot just to be nice.
Bryce was only about half as cynical as he pretended to be, but that was plenty. He prided himself on being a dark, sardonic devil with attitude to spare.
So yeah, Tyler understood them. He even liked them. It wasn’t their fault he felt no real sense of connection, no call of blood to blood. How could he? He wasn’t a McClintock, whatever the DNA might say. He was a Balfour. And he had no interest in being anything else.
Bryce, who clearly wasn’t the patient type, cut through the stretching silence. “So what’s the answer, Tyler? Do you intend to cut and run?”
“Not run, exactly,” Tyler said with one his most neutral smiles. “I told you about the Heyday Eight book. I’ve got a lot of interviews to do before I can leave. But I don’t have any plans to stay longterm, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Kieran looked somber, almost disappointed, but Bryce just laughed. He had been casually tossing a small football-shaped paperweight from one hand to the other. Suddenly, without warning, he lobbed it over to Kieran, who caught it as easily as if the whole thing had been scripted.
“No one ever plans to stay in Heyday, my friend.” Bryce stood and, loosening his tie, moved toward the door. He paused by Tyler’s chair long enough to give him a brotherly pat on the shoulder.
“But somehow, in the end, you just do.”
WHEN MALLORY APPROACHED the ferry at Fell’s Point Harbor that stormy Friday morning, dressed in dark jeans, black T-shirt and hooded gray raincoat, she felt strangely excited. Almost happy, in spite of the fact that it was a dreary day, and she’d hadn’t slept all night.
She looked at the choppy water, which was the unappealing color of tarnished silver. Little frothy white-caps promised the ferry customers a bumpy ride.
But yes, in spite of all that, she felt happy.
Because the blackmailer didn’t know it, but the rules of this game were about to change.
Last night, when she had wrapped up Roddy’s money in plain brown paper according to the blackmailer’s ridiculous specifications, she had included a little something extra.
She had included a note saying that he’d simply have to ease up, that she wouldn’t be able to make payments every two weeks like this. She couldn’t afford it. Period.
She had no idea how he’d react. Yesterday, on the phone, it had required very little to antagonize him. But she had to take the chance. Her note was nothing but the simple truth. She could not afford this.
Besides, she had hopes that this might be the last payment she’d ever have to make. Mindy was coming for a weekend visit, and they’d finally have time alone to talk. Somehow, she’d make Mindy see that honesty and courage were their only real protection. They couldn’t rewrite the past. And obviously they weren’t going to be able to bury it.
When Tyler had shown up, Mallory had considered telling Mindy to stay away. But then she realized that Tyler’s arrival made Mindy’s decision that much more urgent. At any moment, the blackmailer might decide Tyler had deeper pockets and was the better customer for this information.
She gripped her package, which was starting to get soggy from the rain, and stepped onto the ferry, her stride much more confident, in spite of the rocking water, than the last time she made this miserable trip.
Funny how strong it made you feel to assert yourself a little.
She’d thought the ferry might be deserted, given the weather. But to her surprise it was crowded with row upon row of gray figures with ducked heads, anonymous bodies hunkered down inside hoods, under umbrellas, beneath the dripping rims of Gore-Tex rain hats.
She went to the front of the ferry and bent down to slide the package under the bench seat, following her instructions to the letter even though the seat was full. No one seemed to notice her. Even the person whose feet her package nearly touched didn’t look up.
And that’s when she got the idea.
A crazy idea. It made her heartbeat zigzag oddly with excitement, and she inhaled softly, tasting rain.
Maybe, in this kind of weather, she could blend into the crowd herself. Maybe she could pretend to exit the ferry, as instructed, but turn at the last minute and remain on board. Maybe she could watch the package quietly from the protection of her own hood…and eventually discover the identity of the blackmailer.
It was risky. It might even be downright dangerous. But once the idea presented itself, she couldn’t seem to banish it. She wanted to know who was tormenting her like this. She wanted to know who would dare to threaten Mindy’s future.
She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d do with the information. But, as the blackmailer had so well illustrated, knowledge was power.
So she went through her paces. She moved toward the ramp again, pretending to leave the boat, but at the last minute she took a right turn and went through the outer walkway back toward the rows of benches.
As she wedged herself into a seat three rows back from her little package, but with a clear view of its sodden brown contours, the boat began to pull away from the dock. Too late to change her mind now. Her pulse must have been going about a hundred beats a minute. She tried to swallow, but her throat was bone-dry and wouldn’t cooperate.
She glanced at the shining black raincoat of the man next to her and had the sudden, heart-stopping thought that she might have sat down right next to the blackmailer.
How on earth would she ever know?
Oh, God, she hadn’t thought this through far enough. All along, for no good reason, she’d been assuming that the blackmailer must be someone she knew. Someone from Heyday, someone she’d actually recognize when she spotted him.
But what if he wasn’t? What if he was a total stranger? Even if she saw him pick up the packet, how would that help her? She wasn’t a professional spy. She didn’t have a tiny camera in the pull tab of her jacket zipper. She couldn’t transmit a grainy photo back to Double-O headquarters, where they’d computer-scan for known perverts and then send the ID to her through a radio hidden in her barrette.
And besides, at some point a lot of these riders were going to get off the ferry. At each destination the crowd would thin, until she would stick out here like a sore thumb. Unless the blackmailer planned to pick up his money very soon, she’d have to get off, too, just to keep from being spotted herself.
Another anonymous, cloaked man walked by. His path seemed headed straight for the money. Mallory held her breath until he turned left and sat down next to a woman who smiled up at him, then leaned her head gratefully against his shoulder.
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Kathleen O'Brien
It seems as if Tyler Balfour's mother was the only woman in town his father didn't marry. So he's as surprised as anyone when he discovers Anderson left him a third of everything he owned.Tyler doesn't plan on sticking around. After all, the good people of Heyday already believe he's responsible for ruining their town. Not that he cares what they think. He was only doing his job.Now that he's back in Heyday, he's starting to realize his job just might be finding out what Mallory Rackham–one of the town's favorite daughters–is so desperately trying to hide.Three brothers with different mothers. Brought together by their father's last act. The town of Heyday, Virginia, will never be the same–and neither will they.
Come back to Heyday.
Tyler thought of the silly little city, where everything, even the coed prostitutes, had a circus theme. He thought of the old bastard Anderson McClintock, who had run the city like a feudal overlord. He thought of his brothers, Kieran and Bryce, whom Tyler had seen occasionally on the streets or in the stores, but had otherwise avoided.
Now that he’d committed to writing this book, he was going to have to return to Heyday sooner or later. He was a good reporter, and he wouldn’t leave all those stones unturned.
But he remembered the Heyday residents who hated his guts. He particularly remembered Mallory Rackham, who had run the Ringmaster Café, where the Heyday Eight had gathered to make their dates and count their profits.
Mallory, who had let Tyler spend so many hours there, chatting her up and complimenting her coffee, never guessing that he was gathering notes for his exposé.
Mallory, beautiful and ridiculously naive, whose husband had been one of the Heyday Eight’s best customers. Mallory, who had tossed a plate of French fries, complete with ketchup, into Tyler’s face when she found out who he really was.
Mallory, who for some strange reason was the only person in ten years to put Tyler’s disciplined objectivity and emotional distance in jeopardy.
“All right,” he said, ignoring the wriggle of doubt. “I’ll come back to Heyday.”
Dear Reader,
It’s not easy being the older sister. I should know—I’ve got one, and I’ve spent most of my life driving her crazy!
My sister is only two years older than I am, but in our family she’s called the “mother pretend.” At five, I was afraid to go upstairs alone, so she trotted up into the darkness at my side. At ten, I broke the priceless Oriental vase, but she told our parents she did it. Later she pierced my ears, cut my hair and taught me that sometimes less is more, especially in bad boys and blue eye shadow. She played ambassador (“Let her go, he’s a nice guy”), counselor (“let him go, he’s a jerk”) and cheerleader (“look at her go, isn’t she super?”). I didn’t ask her to do these things. I didn’t have to.
So when I had to write the story of Mallory Rackham, who suddenly finds that protecting her troubled younger sister will be both frightening and expensive, I knew where to go for inspiration. All I had to ask myself was—what would my sister do to save me? The answer was simple. Anything.
A woman like that deserves a special man, someone who understands all about love and loyalty. But sexy Tyler Balfour hardly fits that description. The third brother in the complicated McClintock clan, Tyler is a confirmed outsider. He has no interest in getting involved.
Then he meets Mallory.
I hope you enjoy their story. And if you have older sisters or brothers like mine, give them a hug today. They’ve undoubtedly earned it!
Warmly,
Kathleen O’Brien
P.S. I love to hear from readers! Please write me at P.O. Box 947633 or stop by my Web site, KathleenOBrien.net.
The Stranger
Kathleen O’Brien
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Three-time finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA
Award, Kathleen is the author of more than twenty novels for Harlequin Books. After a short career as a television critic and feature writer, Kathleen traded in journalism for fiction—and the chance to be a stay-at-home mother. A native Floridian, she and her husband live just outside Orlando, only a few miles from their grown children.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
MALLORY RACKHAM LOVED many things about owning a bookstore in Heyday, Virginia, but balancing the bank accounts wasn’t one of them.
Balance? What a joke! Watching the numbers on her computer screen cling to the “plus” column was as nerve-racking as watching an acrobat bicycle across the high wire without a net.
And she hadn’t even entered this month’s sales-tax payment. She typed a few keys, and, sure enough, the dollar total tumbled off the tightrope and somersaulted straight into the red.
She put her head in her hands and groaned. Apparently living your whole life in Heyday did things to your mind. Heyday had been built around a circus legend, and from the Big Top Diner to the Ringmaster Parade it was a one-theme town. And now she was even going bankrupt in circus metaphors.
“Mallory?” Wally Pierson, the teenager she’d hired to work the cash register in the afternoons, stuck his head through her office door. “The guy from the place is here. He wants to know if you need some more thingies.”
She looked at Wally, wondering when teenagers had stopped using nouns. She was only twenty-eight, but Wally always made her feel old, with his tattoo and his piercings and his multicolored hair.
“You mean the sales rep? About the bookmarks?”
“Yeah.” Wally clicked his tongue stud against his teeth. “So you want some?”
She stared at the computer screen. She wanted some, all right. They sold well, and the markup was extremely advantageous, much better than some of the books. But how was she going to pay for them?
“Yes. But tell him just to replace what’s sold. Nothing new until next month.”
Wally nodded and disappeared, leaving her alone with the computer screen, which was still blinking bright red.
She was going to have to borrow money from her personal account again this month. She began typing. Goodbye to the haircut, even though she’d put it off three months now and her “breezy, low-maintenance” cut stood up in spikes that made her look slightly electrified. Goodbye to the steak dinner she’d been going to cook for Roddy Friday night—he’d have to settle for pasta, though if ever a man was a born carnivore, it was Roddy Hartland.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. When she saw the final number in the home account, she grimaced. Not even enough for pasta. She felt herself sliding toward self-pity, so she closed her folder of bills briskly and wiggled her fingers to shake it off. Roddy was a millionaire. She’d make him take her out to dinner.
“Mallory?” Wally’s head was in the door again, so she arranged her face in a calm smile. He knew she was doing the books, and of course he knew business had been off lately. Wally’s weekly paycheck wasn’t huge, but it was important to him. No need to make the kid wonder where his next Whopper was coming from.
“Phone’s for you. Some rude guy, won’t give his name. Just said to tell you it’s about your sister’s wedding.”
Mindy’s wedding. Oh, hell. Mallory had completely forgotten that the first check was due to the country club at the end of the month, to reserve the room. Her eyes instinctively darted back to the computer screen. If she typed that entry in right now, the whole thing would probably explode in a storm of flying red numbers.
“Another salesman, do you think?” The minute Mindy’s engagement had hit the papers, the phone had started ringing. Apparently people assumed that when you married a state senator’s son, you had a fortune to spend on satin and lace and geegaws. They seemed to forget that the bride’s family paid for the wedding.
“Doesn’t sound like a salesman,” Wally said, toying with the silver ring in his eyebrow. “Sounds like a weirdo, actually. Voice like Darth Vader.”
Great. Just what she needed. Darth Vader peddling pink votives and silver-tasseled chair shawls.
“Thanks, Wally,” she said. “I’ll handle it.”
He ducked out, clearly relieved that she hadn’t asked him to get rid of the caller.
“Good morning,” Mallory chirped as she pulled the phone toward her. You’ve reached the offices of Maxed Out and Dead Broke. But when she picked up the receiver, sanity reasserted itself, and she merely said, “Rackham Books. This is Mallory Rackham.”
“Good morning, Miss Rackham,” a strange, electronic voice said slowly.
Mallory’s hand tightened around the telephone. How bizarre. The voice didn’t even sound quite human, and yet it managed to convey all kinds of unpleasant things with those four simple words. Everything from an unwanted familiarity to a subtle threat.
That was ridiculous, of course. A threat of what? She was a small-town bookstore owner, not James Bond. And yet this voice was mechanically altered. Why would anyone do that?
“Who is this?”
“I want you to listen to me carefully. I have some instructions for you.”
“Instructions for me? Who is this?”
He ignored her question again. “I want you to go to the bank this afternoon. I want you to get fifty twenty-dollar bills and wrap them in a plastic baggie.”
Oh, good grief. This was ridiculous, like something out of a gangster movie. Did she recognize anything about this voice? Could it be a joke? Roddy loved jokes.
But the hard kernel of anxiety in the pit of her stomach said no. She didn’t begin to understand what was going on here, but she somehow knew it was no joke.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t like your tone. I’m going to hang—”
“I’m only going to say this once, Mallory, so you’d better listen.” The metallic voice had an implacable sound, a cruel sound. She felt her spine tingle and go soft. She leaned back against her chair and tried to think clearly. Who would dare take this tone with her?
“Put the baggie in a small brown lunch bag and close it with packing tape. Then take the bag to the Fell’s Point Ferry tomorrow morning.”
In spite of her confusion, in spite of her outrage that anyone would talk to her this way, she instinctively reached for a pencil and began to make notes.
“Buy a ticket for the 11:00 a.m. trip,” he continued. “The Green Diamond Ferry. When you get on, go immediately to the front. Put the bag under the first seat on the left, the one closest to the bow. And then get off the boat and go home.”
She scribbled, her mind racing. Not because she had any intention of taking orders from an anonymous blackmailer, but because, at the very least, she should have some concrete record to show the police.
“Did you get that, Mallory? Do you know what you’re supposed to do?”
“Yes,” she said. She put down her pencil. “What I don’t know is why you think I would agree to do it.”
He chuckled. It was a terrible sound, full of unnatural metallic reverberations, like laughter emanating from a steel casket.
“You’ll do it because you’re a good sister. You’ll do it because you love that spoiled brat Mindy, and you wouldn’t want to see anything happen to that classy wedding of hers.”
Mallory scalp tingled. “Her wedding?”
“Yes. You wouldn’t want me to ruin her wedding, would you? Senator Earnshaw’s son…Frederick, isn’t it? He’s such a good catch. So handsome, so—”
“How could you do that?” She reached out blindly and clicked off the computer screen, her body on autopilot while her mind struggled to figure out what was going on. What was he getting at? What exactly was he threatening to do? “How could you possibly ruin my sister’s wedding?”
He laughed again. “Easy,” he said. “I’d just tell the senator and his son about Mindy’s nasty little secret.”
For a second Mallory couldn’t answer. She was suddenly aware that her heart was thumping, hard and erratic, like a fish struggling on a wooden dock.
This wasn’t possible. This couldn’t be happening. No one knew about…that. Not even Tyler Balfour, big-time, muckraking, investigative journalist, had discovered Mindy’s part in the whole—
“Are you there, Mallory?” The voice slowed, no doubt savoring her shock. “Are you thinking about it? About the scandal? Mindy’s always been a little weak, hasn’t she? Not too stable. God only knows what she’d do if her fancy wedding fell apart.”
Mallory opened her mouth, but in place of her normal voice she heard only a strange, thin sound, so she shut it again.
The electronic voice hardened. “Be on that ferry, Mallory. Or I’ll have to tell poor Freddy Earnshaw that his lovely bride is nothing but a two-bit prostitute.”
FOR AS LONG AS she could remember, when things got a little bumpy, Mallory had turned to her smart, sensible mother for advice and comfort.
Elizabeth Rackham had a straightforward approach to life. She called it “Eliminate Step B.” Life was as simple as ABC, she said. Everyone faced problems—that was Step A. Most people dithered and worried and agonized, which she called Step B. Then they reacted, which was Step C. Elizabeth’s theory was that, if you could just discipline yourself to eliminate Step B, you’d make much better decisions about Step C. And save yourself a lot of grief in the process.
So naturally, as soon as Mallory closed down the bookstore that night, with the ugly echoes of the metallic voice still ringing in her ears, she headed straight for a visit with her mother.
The Heyday Chronic Care Center was brightly lit and welcoming, though it was late by the time Mallory arrived. The nurse at the front desk smiled and waved her back to the private rooms. No one bothered to make Mallory sign in anymore. They all knew her too well. She’d been coming through those double glass doors almost every night for two years now.
Her mother’s room was dim, and the satellite television was set to a classical music station. Small white letters inched their way up the black screen. Verdi, the letters said. Rigoletto.
In spite of everything, now that she was here, Mallory felt herself begin to relax. Her mother always had that effect on her. Even now.
Dropping her heavy purse on the floor, she plopped down onto the bedside chair, kicked off her sandals and took her mother’s hand in a warm hello squeeze.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Mom,” she said. She leaned her head back against the soft headrest and shut her eyes. Verdi washed over her like a bath, cleaning away the dirty feeling that had clung to her ever since she’d spent five minutes on the telephone with a blackmailer. “It was a crazy day.”
But where should she begin? Ordinarily, on these visits, she kept the conversation light and upbeat. She didn’t burden her mother with the petty problems of everyday life. She didn’t mention the overdue bills or the crummy book sales. She didn’t mention that Dan, her bum ex-husband, who had never forked over the last installment of the divorce settlement, was now dating a teenager and said it was “serious.” Not that Mallory cared, except that apparently this teenager was expensive, which meant that Dan was even less likely to get around to paying up.
And, of course, she never, ever mentioned what she had discovered about Mindy. How could she? They’d all been so horrified when Tyler Balfour had uncovered a prostitution ring at Moresville College. And when they had learned that the Rackhams’ own little café had been the headquarters, the rendezvous point for the girls and their customers, her mother had been furious and mortified.
Then, about three months later, one of the betrayed wives whose husband had been “outed” in Balfour’s story had thrown a gasoline can through the front window of the café and followed it with a lighted match. Heyday firefighters had done their best, but the place, which Elizabeth Rackham had built from scratch after her own divorce twelve years ago, had burned to the ground.
“I’ve got a big problem, Mom.” Mallory didn’t open her eyes. She just held on to her mother’s soft, graceful hand. Elizabeth Rackham was fifty-five, but she didn’t look a day over forty. Everyone said she was the most beautiful woman they had ever met.
“It’s about Mindy. She’s fine right now—the wedding is only eight weeks away. Frederick is crazy about her, it’s really sweet to see them together. But there’s someone—someone who would like to spoil things. I think I can stop this guy, but I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do.”
She felt hot moisture pushing at her eyelids, so she squeezed her eyes even more tightly. She would not cry. Crying over a problem fell into Step B, and strong women never indulged in Step B.
“What should I do, Mom? Should I protect Mindy, no matter what it takes? I just don’t know what she’d do if she lost Frederick now. She’s better, really she is. It’s not like before, when she…when she didn’t even want to go on living.”
Her throat closed painfully as she remembered that horrible time. The blood all over the bathroom, spilling over Mindy’s pale wrists like red lace cuffs.
Finally she opened her eyes, letting the tears fall silently down her cheeks. She looked at her mother. If only she would answer her. If only she would give her some advice, tell her what to do.
But she wouldn’t, not ever again. Elizabeth Rackham looked as if she were peacefully sleeping, but it was nothing as natural as that. She’d had a stroke two years ago, and the doctors told Mallory that, according to all the tests, her mother wasn’t aware that her daughter was in the room.
The next morning, Mallory got in the car, a brown paper package on the seat beside her, and drove carefully through the silver spring rain. She passed the police station. She passed Roddy’s house. She passed the Heyday Chronic Care Center. She found the sign that said “Maryland—Fell’s Point Harbor” and she hit the gas. She’d have to hurry if she was going to be on that ferry before eleven.
CHAPTER TWO
TYLER BALFOUR WAS running late, and he didn’t like that. He refused to spend all day playing catch-up, so he pulled out his cell phone, called his assistant and, after about two seconds’ hesitation, told her to cancel his lunch with Sally.
The two seconds were because Sally, a beautiful blonde with the temper of a blazing redhead, had warned him that the next time he canceled a date she would assume he was canceling the whole relationship.
She didn’t mean it, of course. It probably wouldn’t take him more than another two seconds to sweet-talk her out of her snit. But he realized suddenly that he probably wouldn’t bother. Sally was gorgeous, but the thrill was gone. She was too high-maintenance anyhow. Two seconds here, two seconds there…it added up.
On the spur of the moment, he also told his assistant to ditch his three-o’clock interview. That interview was worthless. The guy might be a U.S. Senator, but he wouldn’t ever talk on the record, and Tyler hated anonymous sources.
Besides, he needed to free up some serious time. The man he was on his way to meet right now might be a lot less exalted, but he was a whole hell of a lot more interesting.
Dilday Merle was the chair of academic affairs at tiny Moresville College in Heyday, Virginia, which meant that, in the grand scheme of things, he was pretty much nobody.
But when Professor Merle had called Tyler yesterday and asked for an hour to talk about the Heyday Eight, Tyler hadn’t even hesitated. Hell, yes, he had time. He’d make time. The Heyday Eight had won Tyler a Pulitzer when he broke the story a few years ago, and they were expected to make him a couple of million dollars next year, when he published his detailed hardback version of the scandal.
He’d taken his time finding the right publisher, though several houses had been interested. He wanted to find someone who would let him tell the story straight, not just as pure exploitation. And, of course, he’d wanted a lot of money.
It was ironic, really. Eight ditzy blond college girls who spanked grown men with toy whips, then bedded them for fun and profit, had done what a decade of serious investigative reporting couldn’t do. They had set Tyler free from the underpaid grind of life at a daily newspaper.
No clock-punching for Tyler anymore. Mostly he worked on the upcoming book, which the publisher wanted to call Shenandoah Sex Circus, though Tyler was fighting to keep it simple. The Heyday Eight was good enough.
If he wrote anything else these days, he did it for magazines. In-depth and on his own schedule. In fact, his New Yorker piece should have hit the stands today. He had arranged to meet Dilday Merle in front of Bennie’s News Stand on M Street. If he hurried, he might get there early enough to grab a copy before the professor showed up.
Bennie had been selling Tyler newspapers and magazines for more than ten years, ever since Tyler was a senior at Georgetown and working on the school paper. Back then, Tyler had bought the Washington Post the way some men might buy a lottery ticket, just holding it reverently and praying that maybe, someday, it would be his byline on the front page.
“Hey, there, big shot! Who’s the man?” Bennie hailed Tyler with enthusiasm from the shadows of his crowded counter. Though it was a muggy spring day in D.C., Bennie wore his usual uniform, a pair of black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt with a hood pulled up over his balding head. He held up a copy of the New Yorker. “Who’s famous today?”
Tyler pulled out a couple of bills and traded them for the magazine. “I believe that would be me,” he said with a smile. He leafed through the pages to his story, scanned it to make sure they hadn’t cut him too much or spelled his name wrong. Good—they’d given him great play. Six pages, with full color.
Snapping it shut, he looked back at Bennie. “Did you read it?”
No one ever actually ever saw Bennie reading the merchandise, but he was the best-informed man in Washington, so Tyler assumed he must be doing it on the sly.
“Yeah,” Bennie said. “You’re slick, man. Real slick. You did a tap dance on that oil boy. You fishing for another Pulitzer?”
Tyler rolled up the magazine and stuffed it in his pocket. “It’s the Ellies when it’s magazines. But no, I’m not fishing for anything. I just tell the truth. I just tell it like it is.”
Bennie stuffed a sweet-smelling slab of gum into his mouth and eyed Tyler speculatively. “So you say. But is it really as easy as that? You gonna sleep okay when oil boy’s busting rocks in the slammer?”
Tyler thought of oil boy and his bankrupt company, his laid-off employees, his creditors who were basically screwed, and his investors who were suddenly destitute. One of them, an eighty-year-old man, had already shot himself to death rather than end up a burden to his children.
“You bet I will,” Tyler said. “Like a baby.”
Bennie looked as if he might enjoy a good debate, but Tyler, who had, as always, been subtly scanning the other customers—just in case the vice president’s wife had chosen this spot to rendezvous with her boyfriend, or the local minister was shoplifting a copy of Penthouse—realized that one of the old guys reading in the back of the store looked vaguely familiar.
He narrowed his eyes. Who was it? Thin, stooped, with shaggy white hair. Even from the back, the man was obviously not a local. His clothes were too ill fitting and tweedy for D.C.
Finally, the light went on. It had been almost three years since Tyler had seen him, but this had to be Dilday Merle.
He cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, Professor.”
Bennie’s store was small enough that Tyler didn’t even have to raise his voice. Which meant, of course, that Merle must have been able to hear every word Tyler had said since he walked into the newsstand. Tyler wondered why the old man had kept silent so long. The last time they’d met, when Merle had been trying to talk Tyler out of printing his story on the Heyday Eight, he hadn’t exactly been shy.
Merle turned around with a smile, and Tyler saw that the professor was holding the current copy of the New Yorker.
“Hello, Tyler. I’ve just been reading your latest article.” Merle glanced down. “Still chasing the bad guys, I see. Your style hasn’t changed much.”
A small chuckle came from Bennie’s side of the counter. “Perhaps not,” Tyler said neutrally, watching as Merle walked toward him. “But then, the bad guys don’t change much, either.”
Merle gazed at him through his thick glasses, which made his eyes seem large and owlish, as if they didn’t miss much. “And you’re still not losing sleep over it,” he said. He glanced at Bennie. “Or so I hear.”
Bennie laughed outright at that. “If you’re looking for a bleeding heart, man, you better look somewhere else. Mr. Tyler here, he traded his heart in ten years ago. Got himself a bigger brain instead.”
Tyler shot Bennie a hard look. Surely he knew better than to bring up that ancient history. What happened ten years ago was none of Dilday Merle’s business. It wasn’t any of Bennie’s business, either, but unfortunately Tyler had been young at the time, and emotional. He’d talked too much.
But Merle obviously wasn’t interested in Tyler’s past. He stopped, set down the magazine and held out his hand. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Because I don’t need a heart this time. I need a brain.”
“Oh, yeah?” Tyler shook Merle’s hand, noting with surprise how firm the grip was. “Why is that?”
Merle looked at Bennie, and seemed relieved that the vendor was fully absorbed with another customer.
“Because I’m being blackmailed. And I want you to catch the bastard who’s doing it.”
Twenty minutes later, when they were settled at Tyler’s favorite café, and the waiter had taken their order and departed, Tyler knocked back some scalding black coffee and turned to the man beside him.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start over. Slowly. From the beginning. Because I’m having a little trouble believing I heard you right.”
“You did.” Dilday Merle had ordered bottled water, and he was carefully decanting it into the empty glass the waiter had provided. “I’m being blackmailed.”
This time, Tyler was better able to control his shock. But still…it was insane. Seventy-something-year-old Dilday Merle, with his old-fashioned etiquette and his bow ties, and his owl eyes?
This stuffy, ivory-tower academic was being blackmailed?
Though it was the lunch hour, and dozens of people thronged the quaint little café, the anonymity of the crowd provided its own privacy.
“What the hell could anyone blackmail you about?”
“Hell is the perfect word for it.” Merle’s voice carried some heat. He might be close to eighty, but there wasn’t anything frail about him. “Some bastard has been calling me up, ordering me to pay him a thousand dollars every two weeks or else he’ll tell the board of regents that I was mixed up with the Heyday Eight.”
Tyler, who had just lifted his coffee cup, froze in place. He felt the steam moisten his lips, but he was too distracted to drink.
Dilday Merle and the Heyday Eight?
He didn’t want to fall into stale clichés about old people, but come on. His mind tried to picture Greta Swinburne or Pammy Russe straddling this elegant, elderly man, snapping their little black whips across his bony backside.
No way.
“For God’s sake, son, get that look off your face.” Merle tightened his mouth. His high forehead wrinkled in an intense scowl. “It isn’t true.”
As if the projector of his life had started rolling again, Tyler blinked back to reality. He sipped at his coffee, trying to look unfazed.
“Of course it’s not true,” he said. “Greta gave me the complete list of their customers when I broke the story. You definitely weren’t on that list. I would have noticed.”
“And plastered my name all over your story, no doubt.”
Tyler shrugged. He was used to this attitude. He hadn’t made those stupid college girls buy rhinestone-studded sex-whips, and he hadn’t made those pathetic men buy their services. He’d just let the world—including the girls’ parents, the men’s wives, and the local police—know what was going on.
You’d think they might even be grateful that he’d brought an end to something so fundamentally unhealthy for all concerned. But about ninety percent of the people in Heyday had automatically hated Tyler Balfour’s guts.
Oh, well, it was an occupational hazard for journalists. Everyone liked to shoot the messenger.
Still, he wondered what the huffy Heydayers had thought when they’d learned who journalist Tyler Balfour really was. When they learned that he was a McClintock by birth and had inherited a third of their precious little town.
But that was another story.
Merle was still frowning. “Wouldn’t you?”
“What? Publish your name?” Tyler returned Merle’s gaze without flinching. “You are a high-profile community leader. You worked with those girls at the college, in a position of trust. At least part of your salary comes from public funds. So yeah, I probably would have put your name front and center.”
Merle snorted softly. He managed to make even that sound elegant. “Fair enough. Well, anyhow, this accusation is a bunch of baloney. But the blackmailer obviously knows that, in my position, I can’t afford to have charges like that leveled at me. The school can’t afford it, not after the scandals it’s already been through.”
Tyler nodded. “The guy sounds pretty clever. He’s made the payment just small enough that it’ll hurt less to pay it than to fight it. That’s what usually trips blackmailers up. They get greedy and they ask for too much. Their victim is left with no choice but to call in the police.”
Merle offered him a one-sided smile. “Two thousand dollars a month hurts plenty,” he said. “Not all of us just inherited a small town, you know. In fact, I have to tell you it still seems positively feudal that anyone can inherit a town.”
Tyler chuckled, then leaned back as the waiter arrived with their meals. It did sound ridiculous, which was why he didn’t intend to touch this inheritance with a ten-foot pole. He had left a standing order to sell everything, as soon as there was a legitimate buyer. So far he hadn’t been able to unload any of it. Property in Heyday, Virginia, wasn’t exactly in high demand.
Neither of them spoke until the waiter had gone through the requisite frills and flourishes, asking them three times if they needed anything further.
Finally they were alone. Merle looked at his dark green and yellow salad as if he’d never seen anything like it before. Then he put his fork down and gave Tyler another of those appraising stares. Tyler had to smile. He could just imagine how effective that glare had been in the classroom.
“I’ve always wanted to ask you something,” Merle said. “When you came to Heyday and uncovered the prostitution ring, no one had any idea you had a connection to the town.”
While Tyler waited for Merle to continue, he chewed a mouthful of sprouts and spinach. Georgetown college students were way too health-conscious. Even the dressing was clear and artery-friendly. The damn thing tasted like wet grass.
Merle was still staring at him. “No one knew you were related to the McClintock family.”
“Right.” Tyler washed his grass down with coffee. “But you said you wanted to ask me something. I haven’t heard a question yet.”
“I’m asking if it was just coincidence. Because I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that you just happened to be passing through the very town where your natural father lived. I don’t believe that, out of all the insignificant little burgs on the map, you stumbled by accident onto Heyday.”
“Of course I didn’t. I went there to check out McClintock. I had just found out about him. My father—”
Tyler paused. It had been several years now since he’d learned the truth, but it still caught him by surprise to think that Jim Balfour was merely his adopted father. It still disappointed him, too. Jim Balfour was a great man, quiet and introverted, but more decent and loyal than anyone Tyler had ever met. Anderson McClintock, on the other hand, had been something completely different. Fiery, self-indulgent, opinionated, arrogant. The classic rich SOB.
He started over. “The man I considered my father, Jim Balfour, decided that I ought to know. My mother had just died. She was the one who had been determined to keep it all a secret. I think she was ashamed. She and Anderson hadn’t ever married.” He forked another clump of grass. “Although, when I did my research, I discovered that she was probably the only woman in Virginia he didn’t marry.”
Merle smiled. “That’s overstating it, but not by much.”
“Whatever. So I went to Heyday to get a look at the guy. I didn’t announce myself, obviously. I wanted anonymity, in case I—”
“Hated him?”
Tyler chuckled softly. “Now that’s an overstatement. You can’t hate a total stranger. And frankly I don’t waste energy hating anybody. I like to keep things simple, that’s all. The whole thing—second father, second family, second set of entanglements—sounded far too complicated. I thought it quite likely I wouldn’t want to get involved.”
Merle had an infuriatingly unconvinced expression on his face, as if he didn’t believe a word Tyler was saying. Well, too bad. Ten years ago Tyler had learned to keep a safe distance from messy emotional situations, and once he learned a lesson, he never forgot it.
“Must have come as a shock, then,” Merle observed dryly, “when Anderson put you in his will. Inheriting almost a full third of Heyday, just like his other sons. Your brothers, who were, of course, just as shocked as you were, I’m sure. Kind of hard to keep your distance from that.”
Tyler put his napkin on the table and gave up all pretence of eating. “Look, Merle, I don’t mean to be rude, but maybe we should get to the point. You didn’t come here to talk about the complexities of life as Anderson McClintock’s secret baby.”
Merle tilted his head. “No. You’re right. I didn’t.”
“So let me tell you what I think this is all about. You obviously heard I’m writing a book on the Heyday Eight. You knew I’d be interested—more than interested—to learn there are new developments in that situation. A blackmailer operating nearly three years after the girls were put out of business is definitely great copy.”
Merle smiled wryly. “I hadn’t thought of it quite like that, but—” He nodded. “Yes. I was hoping your curiosity would be piqued. I’m checkmated here, Tyler. If I don’t pay him, he’ll smear me, I’ll be ruined, and the police won’t ever expose him. They won’t even have enough incentive to try very hard. But you might. Naming the blackmailer. Having an arrest. That would make even better copy, right?”
“Right.”
Merle sighed heavily, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “Then you’ll find out who this guy is? You’ll come back to Heyday?”
Come back to Heyday.
Tyler thought of the silly little city, where everything, even the co-ed prostitutes, had a circus theme. He thought of the old bastard Anderson McClintock, now dead, who had run the city like a feudal overlord. He thought of his brothers, Kieran and Bryce, whom Tyler had met, but had deliberately avoided getting close to.
Obviously, now that he’d committed to writing this book, he was going to have to return to Heyday sooner or later. He was a good reporter, and he wouldn’t leave all those stones unturned.
But he remembered the Heyday residents, who hated his guts. He particularly remembered Mallory Rackham Platt, the sexy young woman who had run the Ringmaster Café, where the girls had concocted the Heyday Eight and had gathered to make their dates and count their profits.
Mallory, who had let Tyler spend so many hours there, chatting her up and complimenting her coffee, never guessing that he was gathering notes for his exposé.
Mallory, beautiful and ridiculously naive, unaware of what was going on under her nose. Mallory, whose husband had been one of the Heyday Eight’s best customers. Mallory, who had tossed a plate of French fries, complete with ketchup, into Tyler’s face when she found out who he really was.
Mallory, who for some strange reason was the only person in ten years to put Tyler’s disciplined objectivity and emotional distance in jeopardy.
“All right,” he said, ignoring the wriggle of doubt. “I’ll come back to Heyday.”
CHAPTER THREE
MINDY RACKHAM’S turquoise bikini was the most fantastic article of clothing she had ever owned. She had maxed out her MasterCard to buy it. She had almost been able to hear Mallory’s shocked disapproval as she signed the charge slip.
But the minute she saw Freddy’s face, she knew it had all been worth it.
“Wow,” he said as he wrapped his arms around her. “You’re absolute dynamite today, lady. You’ve just guaranteed Dad the vote of every male under ninety.”
She nuzzled into his shoulder happily. He was wearing his own swim trunks, and his strong, bronze, beautifully shaped torso was pretty marvelous, too. He might have been a statue of a god, except that his skin was velvety warm from the sun.
His curly blond hair was wet, dangling adorably into his forehead, and he smelled of suntan oil and cocktails. Of course, he’d already been at this party for hours. She’d had to work half a day, so she’d had to arrive alone.
That was one of the main reasons she’d indulged in this designer swimsuit and cover-up. She knew she was probably the only nine-to-five working gal here. Every other female was either the wife of a rich man, or the daughter of one—or a self-made woman who wouldn’t stoop to punching clocks or filing papers.
If the women here had jobs, they were high-powered positions with glassy offices, six-figure salaries and secretaries of their own. They were public-relations specialists and college professors and museum curators. They were speechwriters, magazine editors, airline pilots and congresswomen.
Mindy Rackham, low-level secretary at the corporate offices of a snack-cracker company, already felt inferior enough without having to arrive at this elite affair looking shabby and off-the-rack.
Freddy kissed the top of her head, and a honeyed calm slid down, from the contact point of his lips all the way to her pink-painted toes. Much better. With Frederick Earnshaw’s arms around her, how could any woman feel insecure? She could already feel the jealous eyes of the other women boring a hole into her bare back.
Everyone knew Freddy was the hunkiest guy in Richmond. And the sweetest. And the richest.
He could have had any girl he wanted. So why on earth, they whispered to each other, had he chosen little Mindy Rackham, a nobody from nowhere? From Heyday, which was actually even worse. When Freddy introduced her to people, they always seemed surprised that she could speak in complete sentences and didn’t have hayseeds falling from her hair.
The truth was, she didn’t understand it herself. Which was why she dreamed every night that Freddy took back his ring, and every morning awakened, heart pounding, with tears in her eyes, thanking God that it had only been a nightmare.
“Come on, honey, let’s get you a Coke, and there’s somebody I want you to meet.”
Freddy put his warm hand against the small of her back and guided her toward the others. The Olympic-size pool was as turquoise as her bikini, and shimmered under the beautiful afternoon sun. The people who stood around it were tall and elegant, murmuring to one another in low, laughing tones, making a collective sound that Mindy had come to associate with money.
White-coated waiters braided through them with trays of cocktails, and constantly refilled the beautiful tables piled high with pyramids of fruit and clear crystal vases of orchids.
For a minute, Mindy was afraid her feet wouldn’t move, but somehow she forced herself to be steered into the crowd. She couldn’t ever admit to Freddy that she was afraid. A politician’s wife had to be good with people. Outgoing, glib and graceful.
He had told her that when he asked her to marry him. He loved her, he’d said, but he couldn’t ask her to share his life without being completely honest about the responsibilities that came with the job.
Completely honest…
Her face had burned as if someone had lit a fire under her skin when he’d said that. She’d almost told him the truth right then. But of course she had chickened out, as always.
How could she take the piece of heaven he’d just handed her, and give it back? How could she resist the joyous security of being the cherished fiancée of Mr. Frederick Earnshaw—and go back to being poor little screwed-up Mindy, who had no future and way too much past?
“Jill, I’d like you to meet Mindy. Mindy, this is Jill Sheridan-Riley. Judge Sheridan-Riley,” he added with a teasing smile at the other woman.
Mindy smiled, too, without the teasing, and held out her hand, trying to remember, among all the things she needed to remember, that she had to shake firmly enough to look confident, but not so tightly as to seem absurd.
How could Freddy feel comfortable calling such an imposing woman “Jill”? She must be almost six feet tall, six feet of elegant, dramatic bones—collarbones, jawbones, wrist bones, cheekbones—every inch of her was jutting and determined. Dark hair and dark, intelligent eyes. Not yet forty. Still beautiful, but an uncompromising, unconventional beauty.
Judge Sheridan-Riley was one of those women who always made Mindy feel ridiculous, as if being short and blond was a character flaw. As if wearing lip gloss was a sign of weakness. Jill Sheridan-Riley hadn’t spent two hours getting ready this morning. She hadn’t needed to. She’d been born ready.
“Hi, Mindy,” Jill said. Her voice was dark, too, thick and elegant, but it held a surprising warmth. “I’ve been telling Freddy that if he didn’t introduce you soon I’d hold him in contempt.” She laughed and patted Freddy’s arm. “I’ve been dying for a chance to say that.”
She turned back to Mindy with twinkling eyes. “I’ve only been a judge about a week.”
Her laughter was infectious, and as Mindy chuckled she felt the knot in her stomach relax a millimeter. Maybe she could do this after all.
But just then, in the depths of the clever turquoise macramé drawstring purse Mindy had purchased to match her bikini, her cell phone began to ring.
Freddy shot a quick glance at her, and, her cheeks heating up, she shrugged helplessly. Dumb, dumb. She should have put it on mute.
She squeezed her hand over the purse, hoping to muffle the sound, but Freddy shook his head. “Go ahead, answer it,” he said in an understanding voice. “It might be Mallory. It might be about your mother.”
She nodded gratefully. He was such a special guy. He always seemed concerned about her mother’s health. He didn’t even seem to mind that his new fiancée came with so much baggage.
She excused herself from the other two as she dug out the small, silver phone. The caller ID showed that he’d been right. It was Mallory.
Mindy found a quiet corner, between an untended bar and a trash can, the least picturesque square foot of the entire party. She clicked the green answer button.
“Hi, Mallory,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
“Mom’s fine,” Mallory said. That was the first sentence of every conversation they had. “I just wanted to talk to you for a minute.”
Mal sounded a little edgy, Mindy thought. Her own guilty conscience pictured the overpriced bikini. But there was no way Mallory could know about that. Mindy had bought it with her own credit card, and she’d pay for it with her own paycheck. Somehow.
“Okay. What’s up?”
“I just—” Mallory stopped. She sounded uncertain, which was unlike her. She was the big sister. Now that their mother was…sick…Mallory was the boss, and the job suited her. Just like Mom, Mallory had always been completely sure of herself and her decisions. Of all the Rackham women, only Mindy was tormented with self-doubt.
“I just wondered,” Mallory said slowly, “if you’ve thought any more about when you’re going to tell Freddy.”
God, that again? At a time like this? They’d just had this conversation three days ago, and Mindy had promised to think about it, to look for the perfect moment. They both knew she was going to have to tell him. Even in Mindy’s most selfish dreams, she didn’t imagine that she had the right to marry him without telling him the truth. It was just a matter of when.
“Mal, it’s a little awkward to discuss this right now. I’m at a party. With Freddy. It’s a political thing.”
“Oh. Oh…well.”
“What’s wrong?” Mindy could tell that Mallory was upset. “Can’t we talk about this later?” She lowered her voice to a near-whisper. “You know this kind of thing intimidates me, Mal. But I’m doing pretty well, I think. I just can’t let myself get upset now.”
“Yes, of course, later is fine.” Mallory’s voice resumed its normal, brisk, cheerful tones. “I’m sorry. I didn’t remember that the party was today. Good for you, honey. I’m really proud of you for deciding to go after all.”
Mindy remembered sheepishly that she’d told Mallory she might plead a headache, or the flu, and skip the party. She was so afraid of letting Freddy down. She was so afraid that someday, at one of these functions, the mist would fall from his eyes and he’d see her as she really was.
Too young, too gauche, too shy. Pretty enough to be a trophy wife, but not worthy in any other way.
In the end, a liability.
“Thanks,” she said self-consciously. “Well, I guess I’d better go see what Freddy’s up to.”
“Of course.” Mallory was back in cheerleader mode. “I’ll bet you look like a million bucks, kiddo. Now you go out there and just be yourself. Show them how sweet and smart you are. Before this party is over, they’ll all love you just as much as Freddy does.”
As Mindy put her phone away, she watched Freddy and his friend the judge, who had been joined by three other suave people with drinks in their hands and clever laughter on their lips. She tried to convince herself that Mallory was right. They would love her, too…love her just as much as Freddy did.
But that was the question, really, wasn’t it? How much did Freddy love her? When the time came, would it be enough?
FORGET FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH, Mallory thought as she opened the last of the day’s mail. Thursday the twenty-second was every bit as evil.
So far her day had consisted of two obnoxious publisher’s reps, one carton of damaged books, three hefty returns, one irate mother who apparently didn’t know that a CD called All Night Long might contain sexual content, and a call from Valley Pride Property Management Inc., notifying her that they planned to raise her rent.
But she could handle all that. She’d been a bookseller for almost two years now, and she could count on one hand the days that hadn’t included similar frustrations.
In fact, ever since last week’s call from the blackmailer, she’d decided that, as long as she didn’t hear from him, every day was a good day.
But the piece of mail she held in her hand clearly hadn’t come from any blackmailer. This new insult was even more personal. It shouldn’t really upset her at all—she’d been half expecting it for weeks. And yet, strangely, it did, if only because it reminded her what a fool she’d once been.
She slid her forefinger under the flap of the big, showy, pink-flowered envelope, already sure what it was. It was a supertacky wedding invitation—the kind Mallory would never encourage Mindy to select—and it was addressed in an almost illegible curlicue calligraphy.
Which meant that her ex-husband Dan and his pretty fiancée, Jeannie, who was nineteen but clearly had the taste of a middle-schooler, were actually getting married.
And they wanted Mallory to show up and watch.
The arrogant bastard. Mallory tossed the invitation, which was embossed with silver wedding bells that looked like scratch-off squares on lottery tickets, onto the counter. She’d show up, all right. She’d sit in the front, and when they asked if anyone knew any reason why these two should not be joined together, she’d stand up and say, I do! Dan Platt is a hard-core sleazeball, she’d say, and even this ditzy little airhead deserves better.
Out of nowhere, a new suspicion skittered across her mind. Her blackmailer with the metallic voice couldn’t have been Dan, could it? When they’d been married, Dan had never had enough money. And he had always resented the way her family spoiled Mindy. He’d called her “the little princess.”
And, since he was one of the Heyday Eight’s customers, he might have known about Mindy’s involvement.
But this was ridiculous. Dan was definitely a jerk, but he wasn’t a blackmailer. She was just getting paranoid. She’d noticed it the very first day. Every male customer—or female customer, for that matter, if she had a deep voice—made her nervous. Everyone from the postman to the sales reps, from the mayor to the cop who patrolled Hippodrome Circle looked suspicious.
Was it you, she’d ask mentally? Or you? Or you?
“Mallory, stop daydreaming and get me a copy of The Great Gatsby.” Aurora York was suddenly standing in front of the counter, the blue feather on her pill-box hat trembling, which always meant Aurora was in a temper. “I need to show that fool Verna Myers something.”
Mallory smiled at her favorite customer, glad to have something fun to take her mind off the annoyances of the day. And any meeting of Aurora’s book club, Bookish Old Broads Incorporated, or Bobbies, as they called themselves, was bound to be fun.
The group met here every Thursday at six, for cookies and coffee and spirited debate. Last Thursday, Verna Myers, who worshipped at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary feet, had been so enraged when Aurora criticized Tender is the Night that she had stood up, sputtering indignantly, and yanked the feather right out of Aurora’s hat.
A hush had fallen over the entire bookstore. No one, but no one, touched Aurora’s feathers. Wally said later that he’d been expecting a catfight. But Aurora was a lady. Instead of scratching Verna’s eyes out, she had merely taken her copy of Tender is the Night, torn out a page from the middle, and used it to wipe the cookie crumbs from her mouth.
Frankly, Mallory had been surprised to see Verna show up again this week. But Verna probably enjoyed the rows as much as Aurora did. And, since the wealthy old ladies always paid for anything they ruined, it was lucrative for Mallory, so everybody came out a winner.
“Gatsby? I’ll go look,” Mallory said obediently. No one who knew Aurora really minded her bossy tone. Underneath the haughty Queen Victoria exterior beat one of the kindest hearts in Heyday.
But wouldn’t you know it? She was completely out of Gatsby. The high-school seniors were writing research papers on Fitzgerald this year, and they’d all come rushing in at the last minute and picked her shelves clean.
She had her own copy upstairs. Rather than disappoint Aurora, Mallory decided to go get it.
“Wally, will you watch the register for a minute?”
Wally, who was shelving CDs, his favorite task, frowned. He was an artist—a budding film director, at least in his own mind—and he thought handling money was crass. But he was deeply in hock to the photography store down the street, so he didn’t dare annoy the one employer in town who would put up with his attitudes, not to mention his multicolored hair.
“Sure,” he mumbled, and began to shuffle in her direction.
Mallory’s shop was actually two storefronts combined into one large bookstore on the bottom. On the upper floor, though, the building was divided into two snug but charming apartments with porches overlooking the tree-lined, curving Hippodrome Circle. Mallory lived in one. The other had been empty ever since Christmas, when her neighbor, a local chef, had taken a job at a fancy restaurant in Richmond. She still missed the great aromas that had always seeped from his apartment to hers.
Both apartments were accessed by the same outside staircase, so Mallory exited the bookstore, drank in a little of the sparkling Virginia spring air, and then climbed up to see if she could hunt down Gatsby in the jungle of books in her living room.
She kept admirable order downstairs—customers had to be able to find books before they could buy them. But up here, where she stored everything that wouldn’t fit in the shop, as well as her own ever-growing collection of books, the situation was a mess.
Gatsby…Gatsby… When had she last read Gatsby? Probably around the holidays…which meant it would be beneath the “summer reading list” books that had just been delivered, but not so far down as the “back to school” books from last fall.
It took forever, so she wasn’t surprised when she heard footsteps on the outside staircase. Wally, undoubtedly panicked by being stranded with the Bobbies, must have left the register untended—the ultimate no-no—and come up here to drag her back downstairs.
She grabbed Gatsby, knocking over three Pilchers and a du Maurier in the process, and hurried to the door. “Darn it, Wally, I’m coming,” she called. “Now get back down there before someone robs us blind.”
But it wasn’t Wally.
The lovely spring sunlight, so bright in her many-windowed living room, didn’t quite penetrate this narrow hallway that ran behind both apartments. She blinked as her pupils tried to adjust, but she couldn’t make out the person’s face.
His back was to the open stairway door, and the sun haloed around him, leaving just a black silhouette, like a moving shadow. Still, she saw that he was tall, much taller than Wally. More substantial. Wally had a boy’s shoulders. This squared-off breadth belonged to a man.
With no warning, fear tingled across her scalp, and she instinctively took a step backward, toward the shelter of her own doorway. This was Heyday, where dim corridors rarely posed a threat to anyone, and she was no coward, but ever since that call…
Things had changed.
Once again she asked herself…could this be the man, the faceless blackmailer with a distorted metallic voice?
But then the man spoke and the fear disappeared, replaced by a sudden, flaring fury.
He said just one word. Just her name.
“Mallory.” The word was uttered softly, almost apologetically, as if he knew how she would hate seeing him and wished he could spare her the pain.
“Mallory,” he said again.
No, this wasn’t the blackmailer—it was someone she despised even more.
At least the blackmailer was ashamed enough to hide his true identity. This was someone who made money by exploiting other people’s misery, but did it right out in the open, as if it were something to be proud of. The blackmailer at least announced right up front that he was just trying to weasel something out of you. This man masqueraded as a friend, drank your coffee and pretended to care about your problems.
And then, like a kick to the gut, he betrayed you.
This was Tyler Balfour.
CHAPTER FOUR
WOW. TYLER PAUSED in the half-open doorway. Three years hadn’t softened Mallory Rackham’s heart much, had they?
The hall in front of him was dim, but the afternoon light behind him streamed in over his shoulders in two bright bands, one of which caught Mallory’s face and illuminated it. The venom with which she eyed him now was just as potent and undiluted as it had been the day she read his first story about the Heyday Eight and saw her husband’s name.
At least she wasn’t holding a plate of greasy French fries this time. He glanced at the book in her hand. A small paperback. Good. He probably wouldn’t even bruise if she decided to chuck it at him.
He guessed he had at least a few seconds before that happened. For the moment she seemed paralyzed with shock and the slow awakening of long-buried anger. So he slung his suit bag over his shoulder and moved carefully toward the apartment that would be his temporary lodgings, all the while fingering his keys, trying to locate the right one.
When he reached the door, which was only about four feet from her own, she finally spoke. “What the hell are you doing here, Tyler?”
Okay, that was a start. She had used profanity, which he knew she rarely did, and her voice was pointed and frosty, like a dagger of ice, but at least she hadn’t tossed the book. And she’d used his first name.
About a six, he figured, on the hostility scale. Nothing he couldn’t handle. He’d once investigated a senator who’d been taking bribes, and though that guy had been hostile enough to consult a hit man, Tyler had still managed to get the story.
He’d get this one, too, including her part of it. He couldn’t leave her out, even if he wanted to. She’d owned the café. She’d been married to one of the johns. Her little sister had gone to school with the Eight. He needed her in the book, and he’d get her.
At first, Tyler had wondered if moving into the apartment next to her was the best plan. He’d been afraid she might feel crowded. But now he saw that his instincts had been right. He was going to need the proximity, the frequent meetings, to break down long-entrenched barriers like these.
“Well?” She was gripping her book so tightly the pages curled into a circle. “Tell me. Why are you back?”
“I’m going to be staying here for a while.” He held up his key. “I inherited the building, as I’m sure you’ve heard.”
“Yes.” She still clenched her jaw, which distorted her normally musical voice. “But I also heard you were trying to sell it.”
He smiled. “Did you want to make me an offer?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I just want to know why you’re back in Heyday. God. Haven’t you done enough damage already?”
“Damage?” He looked her straight in the eye. “Are you sure you don’t have me confused with someone else?”
The light in the hallway wasn’t great, but he could tell she flushed. Deep inside, she must know he was right. She must know that Tyler hadn’t caused her husband’s infidelity. He’d just exposed it.
But clearly she wasn’t planning to admit it.
“Don’t pull that crusading white knight routine with me,” she said, her voice a shade too loud in the empty hall. “You didn’t write your series to rescue the sad little girls of the Heyday Eight. You wrote it to make yourself famous. And you have absolutely no idea what kind of wreckage you left behind. You were too busy scurrying out of town to collect your Pulitzer.”
Man, she really was furious. Tension crackled off her like electricity. He wondered what fed it, kept it throbbing and vital all these years. Surely she wasn’t still breaking her heart over that no-good bastard ex-husband of hers.
The guy hadn’t ever deserved her, but Tyler was well aware that love was illogical and unpredictable.
Which was why he always steered his own life a hundred miles in the other direction.
“I know you got divorced,” he said. “And I know that, however embarrassing it must have been to discover he’d cheated on you, you’re smart enough to realize you’re better off without that scum bucket.”
She didn’t respond at first, though her flush deepened. Maybe the word had been too harsh. But Dan Platt was a scum bucket. What kind of sleazy moron paid for kinky thrills with a silly teenage hooker while a woman like Mallory waited for him at home?
Mallory was one of the few natural beauties Tyler had ever known. Even better, she was—or had been—lighthearted and full of life. She had smiled a lot, and laughed a lot, and let her short blond hair tumble all over itself in a way that was somehow ten times sexier than anything he’d seen at a White House ball or a Kennedy Center gala.
Some of that vibrant energy had been dampened, he saw now. It wasn’t that she looked older, for the three years had hardly touched her in that way. The difference was more subtle. She looked subdued, as if her colors had faded. This face was still lovely, but it had new shadows.
He felt an odd prick of guilt, knowing that his series had helped to put some of those shadows there.
Finally she found her voice. “I am not going to discuss Dan with you. But if you think my divorce was the worst thing that happened around here in the wake of the great Tyler Balfour, you’re very wrong.”
He gave her a half smile. “You underestimate me, Mallory,” he said. “I’m a journalist. I know all about the developments of the past few years. I know that eighty students pulled out, and the college almost closed. I know there were six divorces, including yours, one suicide attempt, one illegitimate baby and two county commissioners ousted in the next election.”
He paused, in case she wanted to break in, but she didn’t speak. She just looked at him, as if she were hypnotized by his litany of misery.
“I know that Sander Jacobson’s loony wife set fire to the Ringmaster Café, illogically blaming your family for her husband’s sins. And I know that, after the fire, your mother had a stroke. A stroke from which she hasn’t yet recovered.”
Again he paused.
Mallory’s eyes were bright, but her chin was high. “Is that all?”
He thought about Dilday Merle and the mysterious blackmailer. But he wasn’t free to talk about that. “Seems like enough, doesn’t it?”
Was it his imagination, or did she seem relieved? She certainly took a deep breath, and when she spoke, her voice was steadier.
“Impressive,” she said. “I knew you spied on us when you were in Heyday. I had no idea you had continued to do so from Washington, D.C.”
“I just followed the story. I follow all my stories. And this one is particularly important to me.”
She laughed harshly. “Why? I hope you aren’t going to say it’s because of me, because we were ‘friends.’ I quit believing in that fairy tale three years ago. Although I have to admit you had me fooled pretty thoroughly for a while there.”
Again that slight sting of conscience. Had he gone too far back then, while he was digging for the story he suspected was buried in her innocent little café? Had he played the role of friend and confidant so convincingly that he had actually hurt her?
He hadn’t meant to. Ordinarily he knew just where the ethical lines were drawn. Sometimes, though, he had forgotten it was a role. Sometimes, while he sat at the counter late at night and ate her amazing blueberry pie, he had forgotten that he was a reporter. Sometimes, when she had hinted at how unhappy her home life was, he had been forced to fight the urge to take her hand across the counter.
Sometimes he had almost forgotten to take notes.
Almost.
But he’d done plenty of soul-searching back when it happened. And he’d decided that, though he might have touched the line with his toe once or twice, he hadn’t ever actually crossed it.
He wasn’t going to cross it now, either. Even if it made the reporting more difficult, he was going to play it straight with her this time.
“No, it’s not because of you,” he said. “It’s because I’m writing a book about the Heyday Eight. For that, I’m going to need all the information I can get.”
“You’re writing a—” She swallowed, and, as if her fingers had gone limp, the book dropped to the wooden floor. She didn’t seem aware that she no longer held it. “A book? About those poor girls? Why?”
He retrieved the mangled paperback, which he saw was a copy of The Great Gatsby. “It’s what I do, Mallory,” he said quietly. “I’m a writer.”
She looked at him. She opened her mouth, as if she were about to say something. And then, without another word, without even taking her book from his hand, she moved past him and went out the side door. He heard her footsteps disappearing fast along the stairs.
Well, hell. What exactly was that all about?
He’d known that seeing her again would be awkward. He’d expected her to be angry that he was going to tear up her town again when the book came out.
And she had been angry, damn angry, at first. But then, after he mentioned the book…
He stared at the empty rectangle of light for a long moment, trying to sort through the signals his instincts were sending him. He had talked to a lot of people about a lot of difficult things, and he had learned to read them pretty well.
Unless he had completely lost his touch, Mallory Rackham wasn’t merely angry anymore.
She was flat-out scared.
A WEEK LATER, Mallory was on her way to the Windjammer Golf and Country Club. She was going too fast, and her thoughts were so agitated she almost drove her Volkswagen into the faux-marble haunches of one of the zebra statues that stood guard over the winding, green-bordered entry.
A caddy working the seventh hole glared at her, shocked that anyone would disrupt the pastoral harmony of this elite club.
But Mallory didn’t care. She almost wished she had hit them. Those zebra statues were stupid.
Not as stupid, however, as she was.
Yessir, Mallory Rackham took the blue ribbon in Abject Stupidity.
She shook her head, muttering to herself as she guided the car more carefully up toward the clubhouse. What fantasy world had she been living in? Had she really believed the blackmailer would just send her a nice thank-you note for the thousand-dollar payment and then scratch her off his list? Hadn’t she ever read a detective novel, or watched a crime show on TV? Heck, a five-year-old could probably tell you that, once you paid a blackmailer, he’d just keep coming back for more.
But not Mallory. Idiot that she was, she’d actually been stunned to hear the man’s electronic voice on her telephone again this afternoon.
He’d told her he wanted another thousand dollars. Only two weeks after the first payment.
When she’d asked him where he thought a small-town, small-business owner was going to get that kind of money, he had laughed—that horrible, tinny laugh she remembered so well.
Maybe, he’d said, she should consider taking up where Mindy had left off. Mallory might not be a teenager anymore, but she was still a good-looking woman. Did she know how to handle a whip?
Without thinking, Mallory had slammed down the phone, too furious to calculate the wisdom of such a move. But almost instantly she regretted it. During the long two or three minutes she’d waited to see if he’d call back, she was racked with fear that he might not, that the next call he made might be to Freddy Earnshaw.
Or what if he’d heard that Tyler Balfour was writing a book? How much, she wondered, would Tyler pay for juicy information like this?
Finally, the phone had run again. She picked it up, her fingers trembling. The metallic voice was colder and harder than ever. That little insult had cost her, he’d said slowly. Double the pain. This time he wanted two thousand dollars. Tomorrow.
But she didn’t have two thousand dollars. And, because she was a shortsighted fool, she hadn’t made any provisions for getting it. She could have taken another loan on the business, maybe, if she could persuade Doug Metzler at the bank to stretch the income/debt ratios a little. Or she could have accepted one of the offers for credit cards that clogged her mailbox daily. She could have sold some of her own collection of antique books—well, all her collection, probably.
But the point was, if she hadn’t been such an idiot, she could have done something.
Instead, she was going to have to get desperate. She was going to have to borrow the money from Roddy.
Not that Roddy cared. Roddy had been born middle-class, with a curious mind that got him into a ton of trouble as a child but had made him several million dollars as an adult. Roddy was always inventing things—things that weren’t necessarily sensible enough to make it to the market, but which were just interesting enough to bring in huge option purchases from big businesses.
His latest idea had been a “flip-flop clip,” which kept the cuff of your slacks from tucking under when you wore sandals. Even his best friend, Kieran McClintock, had laughed at that one, but when a major beachwear company had paid him a hundred thousand dollars for it, Roddy had thrown a bikini-beach party at the country club and invited the entire town of Heyday.
So, after running around mentally like a rat in a maze for a couple of hours, she’d finally called Roddy on his cell, taken a deep breath, and asked if she could borrow two thousand dollars. Today.
“Okay,” he said in his typical laid-back style. He was the only man she’d ever known who wouldn’t ask why. “Want to come get it now? I’d come there, but I can’t leave for another hour or two.”
She knew where he was, of course. He was always at the country club’s bar, the Gilly Wagon, after four o’clock, when he finished his last hole of golf for the day. He played poker, flirted with the married women, watched CNN and drank ginger ale for at least three hours every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday and Saturdays he switched to beer and single women.
And no one could tell him to leave. He’d single-handedly built the Gilly Wagon with the proceeds from his crazy idea for fake fingernails made of candy.
“You’ve got that much money on you?”
He chuckled. “Well, you know. In case I have to flee the country unexpectedly, that kind of thing. Come on over.”
“I guess I could,” she’d said. Wally could close up. “But, are you alone?”
“No. But I am amazingly discreet. Never fear, Mallory dear. The hand is quicker than the eye.”
And so here she was, parking the car at the country club and heading into the Gilly Wagon, which at this hour would, she hoped, be mostly empty.
It was. Other than a foursome in the corner arguing about how many strokes it had taken one of them at the ninth hole, Roddy and Kieran were the only ones there.
She said hi to the bartender, who doubled as the waiter and was hurrying over to seat her. She waved him off, pointing toward Roddy. The man nodded gratefully and went back behind the bar to finish washing the glasses for the coming rush.
“Hi, guys,” she said as she approached the table. Kieran, that handsome, golden-haired sweetie, half rose immediately and gave her a kiss.
She hugged him briefly. “Where’s Claire?”
Kieran chuckled. “She said she’d rather stick bamboo shoots under her fingernails than be a part of this little adventure of Roddy’s. But I assume she’s not actually doing that. She’s probably rolling Stephanie around the park, trying to get her to go to sleep.”
“Roddy’s little adventure?” Mallory turned to Roddy with a smile, noticing that he hadn’t bothered to rise, leaving the graceful manners to Kieran.
Roddy Hartland was nowhere nearly as classically handsome as the McClintocks, with his freckles and his unruly brown curls, but he was pretty darn sexy, once you saw the intelligent laughter in his eyes and the easy tolerance in his smile. And he had a wonderful, strong body.
Mallory and Roddy dated each other more often than either of them dated anyone else, but they both understood it would never come to anything. Though no words had ever been spoken on the subject, she knew that he’d always been half in love with Mindy. Sadly, the ten-year age difference had proved fatal. Roddy wasn’t willing to declare himself and risk rejection. Mindy, young and self-absorbed, had never even guessed.
“What trouble are you trying to stir up today?”
Roddy blinked innocently. “Trouble? Gosh, you say that like I do it all the time.”
“That’s because you do,” Kieran put in, his mouth full of ice. He held out his empty drink. The bartender nodded and turned to retrieve the bottle of imported single malt Scotch whiskey they kept on hand solely for the McClintocks, who might not be the only ones in Heyday who could appreciate it, but were just about the only ones who could afford it.
Kieran turned his gorgeous blue eyes toward Mallory. “Don’t tell Claire I was drinking. But this is one stunt I just can’t pull sober.”
“You’re not pulling it, you coward.” Roddy shook his head. “I am.”
Mallory growled. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Kieran waved the question to Roddy, who grinned happily and sucked down some ginger ale, clearly just to prolong the suspense.
“Roddy Hartland…”
“Okay, okay. So you know Doug Metzler, right?”
Mallory frowned. “Yeah. Of course.”
“And you know he’s an unmitigated stuffed shirt, right?”
Mallory smiled. “Um…he holds three loans of mine, Roddy, so I’m not sure I want to call him that out loud.”
“I do. He’s a pompous zebra’s ass, and I’ve decided to give him the apoplectic fit he so richly deserves.”
Kieran began to chuckle. “He will have a fit.” He drank some of his new Scotch. “Really. When he sees you, he’ll have a fit and turn purple.”
Mallory still didn’t understand a thing. She glowered at Roddy, who was trying so hard to hold back his laughter that he was getting a little color in his own cheeks.
“Okay, look. Here’s the deal. Metzler is the current president of the country club. And frankly, the man’s got a stick up his—” Roddy wrinkled his nose guiltily. “I mean, he’s so uptight nobody can stand him. Yesterday he had the nerve to issue a dress code for the club. No sandals. No T-shirts. According to Doug-God-complex-Metzler’s official memo, you won’t be served if you aren’t wearing closed shoes and a shirt with a collar. “
Mallory shrugged. “Well, you are wearing a shirt with a collar.”
Kieran, who had just swallowed, choked on his expensive liquor. “Yeah, but that’s not all he’s wearing.”
“What?” Mallory narrowed her eyes. Roddy leaned back, looking insufferably smug, delighted with his own ingenuity.
And then she finally caught on. What else was he wearing? Scooting her chair back, she ducked her head under the tablecloth and took a peek.
Oh, my God.
A skirt.
An honest-to-God, bonafide skirt, the kind the Heyday cheerleaders wore. The navy-blue pleats folded gracefully around Roddy’s tanned, athletic thighs. His muscular calves were bare and a little hairy above his sneakers.
She started to laugh as she lifted her head, and in her helpless mirth she banged it noisily on the underside of the table. Still, she had to thank him. He had not only agreed to loan her a fortune, he had made her laugh on a day when she hadn’t thought that was possible.
“Oh, Roddy,” she said. “You goof.”
Roddy was back to looking innocent. “What? I read the official memo word for word. It didn’t say anything about skirts.” He reached out and gave her hand a tap. “But actually, sweetie, you might want to scram before Doug gets here. Things are likely to get ugly.”
“Hell, yeah, they will,” Kieran said to Mallory earnestly. “I’ve seen him standing up in that skirt. The man’s so bowlegged it’s tragic.”
Still smiling, Mallory gave Roddy a hesitant glance. “But—” She tried to think of a subtle way to remind him why she was here.
“Go,” he said firmly, and squeezed her hand. “I’m sure you have at least two thousand more important things to do than messing with Doug Metzler’s mind.”
The grip was unusually firm. He was trying to tell her something. She glanced down at her purse, which, she saw, now had a bright white envelope sticking out of it.
The money was already there. How had he done that? When had he done it? Perhaps when she and Kieran had been kissing each other hello? Roddy really was a magician. And she could use a magician right about now. If he could make a treasure appear out of nothing, maybe he could make Mindy’s past disappear…
She smiled at him, hoping he could see her heart in her eyes. She wished she could tell him this was for Mindy. But he had no idea that Mindy had been involved in the Heyday Eight, and she’d never disillusion him about the girl he silently adored.
“All right,” she said. “If you dorks really are going to start a brawl in here, I guess I would rather be someplace else.”
She reached over and gave him a kiss. Usually they pecked on the cheek, but this seemed to call for something more heartfelt. She pressed her lips to his, and as she straightened up she whispered, “Thanks.”
He winked and grinned. “No problem, sweetie. But look. Here comes our resident stranger. I hear he’s your new landlord.”
She turned quickly. It was true. Tyler Balfour had entered the Wagon. She hadn’t expected him, and, unprepared, she caught her breath, struck anew with his good looks. How had she not realized he was a McClintock the last time he was in town? Only the McClintock genes produced men this dangerously virile.
“Oh, yeah.” Kieran was nodding, motioning Tyler over. “He’s here to see me. We’ve got business to do.”
Maybe that was true, but as Tyler approached his gaze seemed locked on Mallory. He was probably a great poker player, she thought. His handsome face was as blank as a mannequin’s. Clearly he had been trained to observe, and not to care.
Well, fine, she didn’t care, either. She had been humiliatingly gullible the last time he was in Heyday. Emotionally tangled in a failing marriage, she’d been so grateful for the calm sympathy he had projected. Over the weeks, she’d even begun to dream about him, about his comfort turning to something warmer…
He’d kissed her once. Only once. She was still married, on paper anyhow. And the next day his story had come out.
As he drew nearer, she gave him a deliberately fake smile. He must know she wasn’t pleased to see him. She’d managed to avoid him for a full week now, even though sometimes she was piercingly aware that they were just inches away from each other, with only a piece of drywall between them.
Sometimes at night she could hear him on the phone in his apartment, though she could never quite make out the words. She filed that information away, though. If she could hear him, he could hear her.
“Hi, Tyler,” Kieran said, smiling and rising. “Thanks for coming over. I’ll be ready to leave soon, but I promised Roddy I’d wait a few more minutes. He’s going to put on a fireworks show for us.”
Kieran seemed to remember suddenly that Tyler was a relative stranger to Heyday. “Oh, sorry. Have you had the chance to meet Roddy Hartland?”
“I don’t think so.” Tyler held out his hand. “Our paths didn’t cross when I was here before.”
Which was a polite, secret-code way of saying Roddy hadn’t been listed as a client of the Heyday Eight. Mallory felt a flush of indignation. As if Roddy, with his muscles and his millions, would ever need to buy sex from anyone! She put her hand on his arm, instinctively protective, though he obviously had no need of protection from Tyler or any man.
Tyler saw the touch. She felt the flick of his eyes like the tip-touch of a whip. Yes, she told him with her own gaze. I was lonely back then, and you played me for a fool. Yes, I wanted to trust you. I even wanted to kiss you. But he’s the one I’m kissing now.
Roddy must have felt the currents of tension, but with his usual composure he took her hand and, holding it, he rose and held out his other hand to Tyler.
“No, we never met,” he said, grinning. “You were in Heyday looking for secrets, and frankly I haven’t got any. With me, what you see is what you get.”
Tyler’s focus fell slowly to Roddy’s ridiculous skirt. It barely skimmed his knees.
“So it would seem,” Tyler said. “If only that were true of everyone, my job would be a whole lot easier.”
He smiled when he spoke the words, but Mallory couldn’t help thinking the comment had been directed at her. She hugged her purse to her side and smiled right back.
She wasn’t afraid of him. She had the money she needed. She would buy the blackmailer’s silence for another couple of weeks.
And during that time, somehow she’d find a way to keep her little sister’s name out of this son of a bitch’s sleazy book.
CHAPTER FIVE
TWO HOURS SPENT in the company of Kieran and Bryce McClintock only confirmed what Tyler had suspected about his “family.”
They were nuts.
First, Kieran had been sitting at the country club bar with a guy wearing a miniskirt, which apparently they had arranged for the express—and somewhat juvenile—purpose of annoying a balding guy who came in later wearing neon-green pants. If you asked Tyler, it was a toss-up who looked stupider, the guy in drag or Mr. Greenpants, who began sputtering convulsively the minute he caught a glimpse of the skirt.
Now, though the three of them had arrived at the Valley Pride real estate offices and were trying to review an offer Kieran wanted to make on one of Tyler’s properties, they kept getting interrupted. Apparently every single tenant insisted on seeing the McClintock brothers personally, about everything from busted sewer pipes to leaky window caulking.
If Tyler had run this ship, he would have fired Elton Fletcher, the prissy pencil pusher at the front desk, who clearly didn’t want to get his hair mussed by tangling with the clients. None of these lunatics should ever have made it past the first pair of double doors.
Especially not this new one, a fifty-something, wild-eyed tenant named Mrs. Milligan, who had entered ranting five minutes ago, and, as far as Tyler could tell, hadn’t drawn a breath yet.
She seemed to focus her wrath on Bryce, and was leaning over him, wagging her finger in his face.
“And if you think you can scare me just because you have a reputation for shooting anyone who crosses you, you’re quite mistaken, my boy. I’ve got a Doberman who’s been waiting a long time for a nice dish of McClintock stew. He’d have you by the throat before you could get your finger on the trigger.”
Bryce looked over at Kieran with a tilted smile. “Is that really my new reputation? Gunslinger? What happened to the trashy man-slut thing? I think I liked that one better.”
Kieran shrugged. “Now you’ve got both. Congratulations.”
Bryce sighed and returned his gaze to the wild woman standing over him. “I don’t shoot women, Mrs. Milligan. Not unless they’re coming right for me. It’s just that you’ve had two and a half years of living rent-free—”
She drew herself erect, in clear offence. “There were extenuating circumstances.”
“Yeah. I know. Your sister was kidnapped, and you had to pay the ransom. Your dog needed extensive psychiatric help.” Bryce shot a quick look at Kieran, but somehow both of them managed to keep straight faces. “So what is it this month?”
“It’s…it’s classified.” She pursed her lips and lifted her chin haughtily. “If I told you, good men would die.”
Kieran made a strange sound, but he quickly buried his head in a file and wouldn’t look at anyone. Bryce sighed again, shut his eyes and put his hand up to massage his forehead.
While both of them were distracted, Mrs. Milligan turned abruptly to Tyler and gave him an unmistakable wink, a theatrical expression so broad it screwed up one entire half of her face.
The old scamp! This was just a game to her. Tyler wondered if the McClintock brothers knew that, or whether they really thought she was insane.
Without thinking, Tyler winked back. And then Bryce opened his eyes. Smiling, Mrs. Milligan returned to staring him down.
“Well?”
“Well,” Bryce said slowly. “I wouldn’t want anyone to actually die.”
“That’s what I thought.” She picked up her purse. “You have enough blood on your hands already, don’t you?”
Bryce held his palms up, obviously outmatched. “Yes,” he said. “I mean, no. I mean…forget about the rent, Mrs. Milligan. If the time ever comes that you’re in a position to pay, you know where to send the check.”
“Of course I do.” She turned from the doorway. “But don’t hold your breath.”
When she was gone, both brothers leaned back in their chairs, shaking their heads and chuckling.
Kieran turned to Tyler. “Sorry about that. I didn’t realize she’d be here today. Wouldn’t you just know it? After we waited all this time for you to get here, I had hoped—” He dropped the file on the desk. “We certainly can’t be making a very good impression on you, can we?”
“This is how it is,” Bryce said dryly. “This is life in Heyday. Tyler might as well know that from the get-go. That way, if he decides to run for his life, he can at least get a head start.”
“Run?” Kieran’s face sobered. “Surely you’re not leaving right away, are you? We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
Tyler took a moment to frame his answer. He was eager to liquidate his inheritance and get out of here. He’d spent the past week visiting his new holdings, working with Elton Fletcher, the front-desk neatnik, and a real estate agent he’d brought in from Richmond.
Things didn’t look promising. Though months ago he’d left instructions to sell anything at almost any price, so far he’d been able to dispose of only two properties. Some guy named Slip-something who owned a bar just outside the city limits had wanted to expand, so he’d bought the Black and White Lounge. And now Kieran wanted one of Tyler’s empty lots by the river.
At this rate Tyler would be free in about, oh, ten years.
Too bad he didn’t have more empty lots. They’d be a lot easier to unload. This town, with its circus fetish, was just too kitschy for words, and the architecture was a nightmare. He had one lovely plot at the edge of town, but the house on it had been designated a historical building. He wasn’t allowed to pull down the ridiculous ringmaster statue by the front gate or replace the hideous stained-glass windows depicting leaping zebras.
“Maybe you could give it a little time,” Kieran said. “Believe it or not, Heyday kind of…grows on you.”
God forbid. Tyler shifted his feet, as if he could already feel weeds and vines trying to wrap themselves around him, rooting him to this eccentric little backwater.
Still, Bryce and Kieran seemed to love the place, and there was no need to be callous. They weren’t such bad guys, actually. They clearly wanted to reach out to him, which was a little awkward. He’d dodged their phone calls and dinner invitations for a full week, determined to make it clear he wasn’t interested in being drawn into the bosom of the family, hailed as the beloved long-lost brother.
But inevitably they’d met in town from time to time. He’d pegged their types right away, a knack he’d developed over the course of about a thousand interviews. Kieran was the solid one, the brother who couldn’t bear the thought of hurting anybody, the one who would be a bad liar and would do the right thing if it killed him. He was probably buying this lot just to be nice.
Bryce was only about half as cynical as he pretended to be, but that was plenty. He prided himself on being a dark, sardonic devil with attitude to spare.
So yeah, Tyler understood them. He even liked them. It wasn’t their fault he felt no real sense of connection, no call of blood to blood. How could he? He wasn’t a McClintock, whatever the DNA might say. He was a Balfour. And he had no interest in being anything else.
Bryce, who clearly wasn’t the patient type, cut through the stretching silence. “So what’s the answer, Tyler? Do you intend to cut and run?”
“Not run, exactly,” Tyler said with one his most neutral smiles. “I told you about the Heyday Eight book. I’ve got a lot of interviews to do before I can leave. But I don’t have any plans to stay longterm, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Kieran looked somber, almost disappointed, but Bryce just laughed. He had been casually tossing a small football-shaped paperweight from one hand to the other. Suddenly, without warning, he lobbed it over to Kieran, who caught it as easily as if the whole thing had been scripted.
“No one ever plans to stay in Heyday, my friend.” Bryce stood and, loosening his tie, moved toward the door. He paused by Tyler’s chair long enough to give him a brotherly pat on the shoulder.
“But somehow, in the end, you just do.”
WHEN MALLORY APPROACHED the ferry at Fell’s Point Harbor that stormy Friday morning, dressed in dark jeans, black T-shirt and hooded gray raincoat, she felt strangely excited. Almost happy, in spite of the fact that it was a dreary day, and she’d hadn’t slept all night.
She looked at the choppy water, which was the unappealing color of tarnished silver. Little frothy white-caps promised the ferry customers a bumpy ride.
But yes, in spite of all that, she felt happy.
Because the blackmailer didn’t know it, but the rules of this game were about to change.
Last night, when she had wrapped up Roddy’s money in plain brown paper according to the blackmailer’s ridiculous specifications, she had included a little something extra.
She had included a note saying that he’d simply have to ease up, that she wouldn’t be able to make payments every two weeks like this. She couldn’t afford it. Period.
She had no idea how he’d react. Yesterday, on the phone, it had required very little to antagonize him. But she had to take the chance. Her note was nothing but the simple truth. She could not afford this.
Besides, she had hopes that this might be the last payment she’d ever have to make. Mindy was coming for a weekend visit, and they’d finally have time alone to talk. Somehow, she’d make Mindy see that honesty and courage were their only real protection. They couldn’t rewrite the past. And obviously they weren’t going to be able to bury it.
When Tyler had shown up, Mallory had considered telling Mindy to stay away. But then she realized that Tyler’s arrival made Mindy’s decision that much more urgent. At any moment, the blackmailer might decide Tyler had deeper pockets and was the better customer for this information.
She gripped her package, which was starting to get soggy from the rain, and stepped onto the ferry, her stride much more confident, in spite of the rocking water, than the last time she made this miserable trip.
Funny how strong it made you feel to assert yourself a little.
She’d thought the ferry might be deserted, given the weather. But to her surprise it was crowded with row upon row of gray figures with ducked heads, anonymous bodies hunkered down inside hoods, under umbrellas, beneath the dripping rims of Gore-Tex rain hats.
She went to the front of the ferry and bent down to slide the package under the bench seat, following her instructions to the letter even though the seat was full. No one seemed to notice her. Even the person whose feet her package nearly touched didn’t look up.
And that’s when she got the idea.
A crazy idea. It made her heartbeat zigzag oddly with excitement, and she inhaled softly, tasting rain.
Maybe, in this kind of weather, she could blend into the crowd herself. Maybe she could pretend to exit the ferry, as instructed, but turn at the last minute and remain on board. Maybe she could watch the package quietly from the protection of her own hood…and eventually discover the identity of the blackmailer.
It was risky. It might even be downright dangerous. But once the idea presented itself, she couldn’t seem to banish it. She wanted to know who was tormenting her like this. She wanted to know who would dare to threaten Mindy’s future.
She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d do with the information. But, as the blackmailer had so well illustrated, knowledge was power.
So she went through her paces. She moved toward the ramp again, pretending to leave the boat, but at the last minute she took a right turn and went through the outer walkway back toward the rows of benches.
As she wedged herself into a seat three rows back from her little package, but with a clear view of its sodden brown contours, the boat began to pull away from the dock. Too late to change her mind now. Her pulse must have been going about a hundred beats a minute. She tried to swallow, but her throat was bone-dry and wouldn’t cooperate.
She glanced at the shining black raincoat of the man next to her and had the sudden, heart-stopping thought that she might have sat down right next to the blackmailer.
How on earth would she ever know?
Oh, God, she hadn’t thought this through far enough. All along, for no good reason, she’d been assuming that the blackmailer must be someone she knew. Someone from Heyday, someone she’d actually recognize when she spotted him.
But what if he wasn’t? What if he was a total stranger? Even if she saw him pick up the packet, how would that help her? She wasn’t a professional spy. She didn’t have a tiny camera in the pull tab of her jacket zipper. She couldn’t transmit a grainy photo back to Double-O headquarters, where they’d computer-scan for known perverts and then send the ID to her through a radio hidden in her barrette.
And besides, at some point a lot of these riders were going to get off the ferry. At each destination the crowd would thin, until she would stick out here like a sore thumb. Unless the blackmailer planned to pick up his money very soon, she’d have to get off, too, just to keep from being spotted herself.
Another anonymous, cloaked man walked by. His path seemed headed straight for the money. Mallory held her breath until he turned left and sat down next to a woman who smiled up at him, then leaned her head gratefully against his shoulder.
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Kathleen OBrien
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: It seems as if Tyler Balfour′s mother was the only woman in town his father didn′t marry. So he′s as surprised as anyone when he discovers Anderson left him a third of everything he owned.Tyler doesn′t plan on sticking around. After all, the good people of Heyday already believe he′s responsible for ruining their town. Not that he cares what they think. He was only doing his job.Now that he′s back in Heyday, he′s starting to realize his job just might be finding out what Mallory Rackham–one of the town′s favorite daughters–is so desperately trying to hide.Three brothers with different mothers. Brought together by their father′s last act. The town of Heyday, Virginia, will never be the same–and neither will they.