Mystery Man
Mystery Man
Diana Palmer
Tycoon Canton Rourke, was beset and besieged - and all because of his neighbor, Janine Curtis. The woman was out to get him, he was sure of it. He'd come to Cancun, Mexico, with his daughter to relax, not catch bandits, track kidnappers…or save the woman from any other fine mess she landed herself in!Her neighbor's opinion was not a secret to Janine. So she was determined to live down to his image of her…while trying to ignore how her knees buckled every time he rescued her. Was she falling in love? The man was a mystery…would a lifetime of love prove an answer?
Tycoon Canton Rourke, was beset and besieged—and all because of his neighbor, Janine Curtis. The woman was out to get him, he was sure of it. He’d come to Cancun, Mexico, with his daughter to relax, not catch bandits, track kidnappers…or save the woman from any other fine mess she landed herself in!
Her neighbor’s opinion was not a secret to Janine. So she was determined to live down to his image of her…while trying to ignore how her knees buckled every time he rescued her. Was she falling in love? The man was a mystery…would a lifetime of love prove an answer?
Mystery Man
Diana Palmer
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Chapter One (#u5398895b-4743-5d74-9b8d-a7f7a1047d83)
Chapter Two (#ua3d19d76-2b1b-5e59-a11b-91e4f1e03bef)
Chapter Three (#ua69832ad-e105-5949-a817-f0783d22303f)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
“It was a dark and stormy night…”
A pair of green eyes glared at the twelve-year-old boy by the window who intoned the trite words in a ghostly voice.
He shrugged. “Well, everybody starts a murder mystery that way, Janie,” Kurt Curtis told his older sister with a grin.
Janine ran restless fingers through her short black hair, muttering at the few words on her computer screen. “I don’t,” she murmured absently. “That’s why I sell so many of them.”
“Diane Woody,” he intoned, “bestselling authoress of the famous Diane Woody Mystery series.” He scowled. “Why do you use your pen name for your main character’s name? Isn’t that redundant?”
“It was the publisher’s idea. Could you ask questions later?” she mumbled. “I’m stuck for a line.”
“I just gave you one,” he reminded her, grinning wider. He was redheaded and blue-eyed, so different from her in coloring that most people thought he was someone else’s brother. He was, however, the image of their maternal grandfather. Recessive genes will out, their archaeologist parents were fond of saying.
Their parents were on a new dig, which was why Janine was in Cancñaun working, with Kurt driving her nuts. Dan and Joan Curtis, both professors at Indiana University, were in the Yucatñaan on a dig. There had been several other archaeologists on the team, most of whom had to return to take classes. Since this was a newly discovered, and apparently untouched, Mayan site, the Curtises had taken a temporary leave of absence from their teaching positions to pursue it. It wasn’t feasible to take Kurt, who was just getting over a bad case of tonsillitis, into the jungles. Neither could they leave him in the exclusive boarding school he attended.
So they’d taken him out of his boarding school for two months—with the proviso that Janine tutor him at home. They’d rented this nice beach house for Janine, where she could meet her publisher’s deadline and take care of her little brother. He was well now, but she had him for the duration, which could easily mean another month, and she had to juggle his homebound school assignments with her obligations. The dig was going extremely well, Professor Curtis had said in his last E-mail message through the computer satellite hookup at their camp, and promised to be a site of international importance.
Janine supposed it would be. The benefit of it all was that they had this gorgeous little villa in Cancñaun overlooking the beach. Janine could write and hear the roar of the ocean outside. It gave her inspiration, usually. When Kurt wasn’t trying to “help” her, that was.
She was just slightly nervous, though, because it was September and the tail end of hurricane season, and this had been a year for hurricanes. One prognosticator called it the year of the killer winds. Poetic. And frightening. So far there hadn’t been too much to worry them here. She prayed there wouldn’t be any more hurricanes. After all, it was almost October.
“Did you notice the new people next door?” Kurt asked. “There’s a tall, sour-looking man and a girl about my age. He’s never home and she sits on their deck just staring at the ocean.”
“You know I don’t have time for neighbors,” she murmured as she stared at the screen.
“Don’t you ever stop and smell the flowers?” he asked with disgust. “You’ll be an old maid if you keep this up.”
“I’ll be a rich old maid,” she replied absently as she scrolled the pages up the screen. “Besides, there’s Quentin.”
“Quentin Hobard,” he muttered, throwing up his hands. “Good Lord, Janie, he teaches ancient history!”
She glared at him. “He teaches medieval history, primarily the Renaissance period. If you’d listen to him once in a while, you might discover that he knows a lot about it.”
“Like I can’t wait to revisit the Spanish Inquisition,” he scoffed.
“It wasn’t as horrible as those old movies suggest,” she said, sitting up to give him her undivided attention.
“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Monty Python,’” he drawled, naming his favorite classic television show. He got up and struck a pose. “Nobody escapes the Spanish Inquisition!”
She threw up her hands. “You can’t learn history from a British comedy show!”
“Sure you can.” He leaned forward, grinning. “Want to know the real story of the knights? They used coconut shells for horses—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said, and covered her ears. “Let me work or we’re both going to starve.”
“Not hardly,” he said with confidence. “There’s always royalties.”
“Twelve, and you’re an investment counselor.”
“I learned all I know from you. I’m precocious on account of the fact that I’m the youngest child of scientists.”
“You’d be precocious if you were the youngest child of Neanderthals.”
“Did you know that the h in Neanderthals is silent and unpronounced? It was written wrong. It’s a German word,” he continued.
She held up a hand and her glare grew. “I don’t need lessons in pronunciation. I need peace and quiet!”
“Okay, I get the message! I’ll go out and fish for sea serpents.”
She didn’t even glance his way. “Great. If you catch one, yell. I’ll take photos.”
“It would serve you right if I did.”
“Yes. With your luck, if you caught one, it would eat you, and I’d spend the rest of my life on this beach with a lantern like Heathcliff roaming the moors.”
“Wrong storyline. I’m your brother, not your girlfriend.”
“Picky, picky.”
He made a face and opened the sliding glass door.
“Close it!” she yelled. “You’re letting the cold air out!”
“God forbid!” he gasped. He turned back toward her with bright eyes. “Hey, I just had an idea. Want to know how we could start global cooling? We could have everybody turn on their air conditioners and open all their doors and windows…”
She threw a legal pad in his general direction. Not being slow on the uptake, he quickly closed the sliding door and walked down the steps of the deck onto the sugar-white sand on the beach.
He stuck his hands into his pockets and walked toward the house next door, where a skinny young girl sat on the deck, wearing cutoffs with a tank top and an Atlanta Braves hat turned backward. Her bare feet were propped on the rail and she looked out of sorts.
“Hey!” he called.
She glared at him.
“Want to go fishing for sea serpents?” he asked.
Her eyebrows lifted. She smiled, and her whole face changed. She jumped up and bounced down the steps toward him. She was blond and blue-eyed with a fair complexion.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Ever seen anyone catch a sea serpent around here?”
“Not since we got off the plane,” she said.
“Great!” He grinned at her, making his freckles stand out.
“Great?”
“If nobody’s caught it, it’s still out there!” he whispered, gesturing toward the ocean. “Just think of the residuals from it. We could sell it to one of the grocery store tabloids and clean up!”
Her eyes brightened. “What a neat idea.”
“Sure it is.” He sighed. “If only I knew how to make one.”
“A mop,” she ventured. “A dead fish. Parts of some organ meat. A few feathers. A garden hose, some shears and some gray paint.”
A kindred soul. He was in heaven. “You’re a genius!”
She grinned back. “My dad really is a genius. He taught me everything I know.” She sighed. “But if we create a hoax, I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life. So I guess I’ll pass, but…”
He made a face. “I know what you mean. I’d never live it down. My parents would send me to military school.”
“Would they, really?”
“They threaten me with it every time I get into trouble. I don’t mind boarding school, but I hate uniforms!”
“Me, too, unless they’re baseball uniforms. This year is it, this is the third time, this is the charm. This time,” she assured him, “the Braves are going to go all the way!”
He gave her a long, thoughtful look. “Well, we’ll see.”
“You a Braves fan?” she asked.
He hadn’t ever cared much for baseball, but it seemed important to her. “Sure,” he said.
She chuckled. “My name is Karie.”
“I’m Kurt.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Same here.”
They walked along the beach for a minute or two. He stopped and looked back up the deserted stretch of land. “Know where to find a mop?” he asked after a minute.
Blissfully unaware that her young brother had just doubled his potential for disaster, Janine filled her computer screen with what she hoped was going to be the bare bones of a new mystery. Some books almost wrote themselves. Others were on a par with pulling teeth. This looked like one of those. Her mind was tired. It wanted to shape clouds into white horses and ocean waves into pirate ships.
“What I need,” she said with a sigh, “is a good dose of fantasy.”
Sadly there wasn’t anything on television that she wanted to watch. Most of it, she couldn’t understand, because it was in Spanish.
She turned the set off. The one misery of this trip was missing her favorite weekly science fiction series. Not that she didn’t like all the characters on it; she did. But her favorite was an arrogant, sometimes very devious alien commander. The bad guy. She seemed to be spending all her productive time lately sighing over him instead of doing the work that she got paid to do. That was one reason she’d agreed to come to Cancñaun with her parents and Kurt, to get away from the make-believe man who was ruining her writing career.
“Enough of this!” she muttered to herself. “Good heavens, you’d think I was back in grammar school, idolizing teachers!”
She got up and paced the room. She ate some cookies. She typed a little into the computer. Eventually the sun started going down and she noticed that she was short one twelve-year-old boy.
She looked at her watch. Surely he hadn’t gotten the time confused? It was earlier here than in Bloomington, Indiana, where Kurt lived with their parents. Had he mistaken the time, perhaps forgotten to reset his watch? Janine frowned, hoping that she hadn’t forgotten to set her own. It would be an hour behind Kurt’s, because her apartment in Chicago was in a different time zone from Kurt and her parents’ in Indiana.
He was in a foreign country and he didn’t speak any more Spanish than she did. Their parents’ facility for languages had escaped them, for the most part. Janine spoke German with some fluency, but not much Spanish. And while English was widely spoken here in the hotels and tourist spots, on the street it was a different story. Many of the local people in Cancñaun still spoke Mayan and considered Spanish, not English, a second language.
She turned off her computer—it was useless trying to work when she was worried, anyway—and went out to the beach. She found the distinctive tread of Kurt’s sneakers and followed them in the damp sand where the tide hadn’t yet reached. The sun was low on the horizon and the wind was up. There were dark clouds all around. She never forgot the danger of hurricanes here, and even if it was late September, that didn’t mean a hurricane was no longer a possibility.
She shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun, because she was walking west across the beach, stopping when Kurt’s sneakers were joined by another, smaller pair, with no discernible tread. She knelt down, scowling as she studied the track. She’d worked as a private eye for a couple of years, but any novice would figure out that these were the footprints of a girl, she thought. The girl Kurt had mentioned, perhaps, the one who lived next door. In fact, she was almost in front of that beach house now.
The roar of the waves had muffled the sound of approaching footsteps. One minute, she was staring down at the tracks. The next, she was looking at a large and highly polished pair of black dress shoes. Tapered neatly around them were the hem of expensive slacks. The legs seemed to go up forever. Far above them, glaring down at her, were pale blue eyes under a jutting brow in a long, lean face. The lips were thin. The top one was long and narrow, the lower one had only a hint of fullness. The cheekbones were high and the nose was long and straight. The hairline was just slightly receding around straight brown hair.
Two enormous lean hands were balled into fists, resting on the hips of the newcomer.
“May I ask what you’re doing on my beach?” he asked in a voice like raspy velvet.
She stood up, a little clumsy. How odd, that a total stranger should make her knees weak.
“I’m tracking my…” she began.
“Tracking?” he scoffed, as if he thought she were lying. His blue eyes narrowed. He looked oddly dangerous, as if he never smiled, as if he could move like lightning and would at the least provocation.
Her heart was racing. “His name is Kurt and he’s only twelve,” she said. “He’s redheaded and so high.” She made a mark in the air with her flat hand.
“That one,” he murmured coolly. “Yes, I’ve seen him prowling around. Where’s my daughter?”
Her eyebrows rose. “You have a daughter? Imagine that! Is she carved out of stone, too?”
His firm, square chin lifted and he looked even more threatening. “She’s missing. I told her not to leave the house.”
“If she’s with Kurt, she’s perfectly safe,” she began, about to mention that he’d been stranded once in the middle of Paris by their forgetful parents, and had found his way home to their hotel on the west bank. Not only had he maneuvered around a foreign city, but he’d also sold some of the science fiction cards he always carried with him to earn cab fare, and he’d arrived with twenty dollars in his pocket. Kurt was resourceful.
But long before she could manage any of that, the man moved a step closer and cocked his head. “Do you know where they are?”
“No, but I’m sure…”
“You may let your son run loose like a delinquent, but my daughter knows better,” he said contemptuously. His eyes ran over her working attire with something less than admiration. She had on torn, raveled cutoffs that came almost to her knee. With them she was wearing old, worn-out sandals and a torn shirt that didn’t even hint at the lovely curves beneath it. Her short hair was windblown. She wasn’t even wearing makeup. She could imagine how she looked. What had he said—her son?
“Now, just wait a minute here,” she began.
“Where’s your husband?” he demanded.
Her eyes blazed. “I’m not married!”
Those eyebrows were really expressive now.
She flushed. “My private life is none of your business,” she said haughtily. His assumptions, added to his obvious contempt, made her furious. An idea flashed into her mind and, inwardly, she chuckled. She struck a pose, prepared to live right down to his image of her. “But just for the record,” she added in purring tones, “my son was born in a commune. I’m not really sure who his father is, of course…”
The expression on his face was unforgettable. She wished with all her heart for a camera, so that she could relive the moment again and again.
“A commune? Is that where you learned to track?” he asked pointedly.
“Oh, no.” She searched for other outlandish things to tell him. He was obviously anxious to learn any dreadful aspect of her past. “I learned that from a Frenchman that I lived with up in the northern stretches of Canada. He taught me how to track and make coats from the fur of animals.” She smiled helpfully. “I can shoot, too.”
“Wonderful news for the ammunition industry, no doubt,” he said with a mocking smile.
She put her own hands on her hips and glared back. It was a long way up, although she was medium height. “It’s getting dark.”
“Better track fast, hadn’t you?” he added. He lifted a hand and motioned to a man coming down toward the beach. “¿Sabe donde estñaan?” he shot at the man in fluent Spanish.
“No, lo siento, señtnor. ¡Nadie los han visto!” the smaller man called back.
“Llame a la policñaia.”
“Sñai, señtnor!”
Police sounded the same in any language and her pulse jumped. “You said police. You’re going to call the police?” she groaned. That was all she needed, to have to explain to a police officer that she’d forgotten the time and let her little brother get lost.
“You speak Spanish?” he asked with some disbelief.
“No, but police sounds the same in most languages, I guess.”
“Have you got a better idea?”
She sighed. “No, I guess not. It’s just that…”
“Dad!”
They both whirled as Karie and Kurt came running along the beach with an armload of souvenirs between them, wearing sombreros.
“Gosh, Dad, I’m sorry, we forgot the time!” Karie warbled to her father. “We went to the mercado in town and bought all this neat stuff. Look at my hat! It’s called a sombrero, and I got it for a dollar!”
“Yeah, and look what I got, S—mmmmffg.” Kurt’s “Sis” was cut off in midstream by Janine’s hand across his mouth.
She grinned at him. “That’s fine, son,” she emphasized, her eyes daring him to contradict her. “You know, you shouldn’t really scare your poor old mother this way,” she added, in case he hadn’t gotten the point.
Kurt was intrigued. Obviously his big sister wanted this rather formidable-looking man to think he was her son. Okay. He could go along with a gag. Just in case, he stared at Karie until she got the idea, too, and nodded to let him know that she understood.
“I’m sorry…Mom,” Kurt added with an apologetic smile. “But Karie and I were having so much fun, we just forgot the time. And then when we tried to get back, neither of us knew any Spanish, so we couldn’t call a cab. We had to find someone who spoke English to get us a cab.”
“All the cabdrivers speak enough English to get by,” Karie’s father said coldly.
“We didn’t know that, Dad,” Karie defended. “This is my friend Kurt. He lives next door.”
Karie’s dad didn’t seem very impressed with Kurt, either. He stared at his daughter. “I have to stop Josñae before he gets the police out here on a wild-goose chase. And then we have to leave,” he told her. “We’re having dinner with the Elligers and their daughter.”
“Oh, gosh, not them again,” she groaned. “Missy wants to marry you.”
“Karie,” he said warningly.
She sighed. “Oh, all right. Kurt, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sure thing, Karie.”
“Maybe we can find that garden hose,” she added in a conspiratorial tone.
He brightened. “Great idea!”
“What the hell do you want with a hose?” Karie’s father asked as they walked back up the beach, totally ignoring the two people he’d just left.
“Whew!” Kurt huffed. “Gosh, he’s scary!”
“No, he isn’t,” Janine said irritably. “He’s just pompous and irritating! And he thinks he’s an emperor or something. I told him we lived in a commune and you’re my son and I don’t know who your father is. Don’t you tell him any differently,” she added when he tried to speak. “I want to live down to his image of me!”
He chuckled. “Boy, are you mad,” he said. “You don’t have fights with anybody.”
“Wait,” she promised, glaring after the man.
“He reminds me of somebody,” he said.
“Probably the devil,” she muttered. “I hear he’s got blue eyes. Somebody wrote a song about it a few years ago.”
“No,” he mumbled, still thinking. “Didn’t he seem familiar to you?”
“Yes, he did,” she admitted. “I don’t know why. I’ve never seen him before.”
“Are you kidding? You don’t know who he is? Haven’t you recognized him? He’s famous enough as he is. But just think, Janie, think if he had gray makeup on.”
“He could pass for a sand crab,” she muttered absently.
“That’s not what I meant,” he muttered. “Listen, they call this guy Mr. Software. Good grief, don’t you ever read the newspapers or watch the news?”
“No. It depresses me,” she said, glowering.
He sighed. “Mr. Software just lost everything. For the past year, he’s been involved in a lawsuit to prevent a merger that would have saved his empire. He just lost the suit, and a fortune with it. Now he can’t merge his software company with a major computer chain. He’s down here avoiding the media so he can get himself back together before he starts over again. He’s already promised his stockholders that he’ll recoup every penny he lost. I bet he will, too. He’s a tiger.”
She scowled. “He, who?”
“Him. Canton Rourke,” he emphasized. “Third generation American, grandson of Irish immigrants. His mother was Spanish, can’t you tell it in his bearing? He made billions designing and selling computer programs, and now he’s moving into computer production. The company he was trying to acquire made the computer you use. And the software word processing program you use was one he designed himself.”
“That’s Canton Rourke?” she asked, turning to stare at the already dim figure in the distance. “I thought he was much older than that.”
“He’s old enough, I guess. He’s divorced. Karie said her mother ran for the hills when it looked like he was going to risk everything in that merger attempt. She likes jewelry and real estate and high living. She found herself another rich man and remarried within a month of the divorce becoming final. She moved to Greece. Just as well, probably. Her parents were never together, anyway. He was always working on a program and her mother was at some party, living it up. What a mismatch!”
“I guess so.” She shook her head. “He didn’t look like a billionaire.”
“He isn’t, now. All he has is his savings, from what they say on TV, and that’s not a whole lot.”
“That sort of man will make it all back,” she said thoughtfully. “Workaholics make money because they love to work. Most of them don’t care much about the money, though. That’s just how they keep score.”
His eyes narrowed. “You still haven’t guessed why he looks familiar.”
She turned and scowled at him. “You said something about gray makeup?”
“Sure. Think,” he added impatiently. “Those eyes. That deep, smooth voice. Where do you hear them every fourth or fifth week?”
“On the news?”
He chuckled. “Only if they had aliens doing it.”
His rambling was beginning to make sense. Every fourth or fifth week, there was a guest star on her favorite science fiction show. Her heartbeat increased alarmingly. Her breath caught in her throat. She put a hand there, to make sure she was still breathing.
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. She smiled nervously. “No, he doesn’t look like him!”
“He most certainly does,” Kurt said confidently. “Same height, build, eyes, bone structure, even the same deep sort of voice.” He nodded contemplatively. “What a coincidence, huh? We came here to Mexico to get you away from the television so you could write without being distracted by your favorite villain. And his doppelgñuanger turns up here on the beach!”
Chapter Two
“I don’t like having you around that boy,” Canton told his daughter when they were back in their beach house. “His mother is a flake.”
Karie had to bite her tongue to keep from blurting out the truth. Obviously the Curtis duo didn’t want it known that they were little brother and big sister, not son and mother. Karie would keep her new friend’s secret, but it wasn’t going to be easy.
Her eyes went to the new hardcover murder mystery on the coffee table. There was a neat brown leather bookmark holding Canton’s place in it. On the cover in huge red block letters were the title, “CATACOMB,” and the author’s name—Diane Woody.
There was a photo in the back of the book, on the slick jacket, but it was of a woman with long hair and dark glasses wearing a hat with a big brim. It didn’t even look like their neighbor. But it was. Karie knew because Kurt had told her, with some pride, who his sister was. She was thrilled to know, even secondhand, a big-time mystery writer like Diane Woody. Her father was one of the biggest fans of the bestselling mystery author, but he wouldn’t recognize her from that book jacket. Maybe it was a good thing. Apparently she didn’t want to be recognized.
“Kurt’s nice,” she told her father. “He’s twelve. He likes people. He’s honest and kind. And Janine’s nice, too.”
His eyebrows lifted as he glanced at her over his shoulder. “Janine?” he murmured, involuntarily liking the sound of the name on his lips.
“His…mother.”
“You learned all that about him in one day?”
She shrugged. “Actions speak louder than words, isn’t that what you always say?”
His face softened, just a little. He loved his daughter. “Just don’t go wandering off with him again, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And don’t go to his home,” he added through his teeth. “Because even if he can’t help what he’s got for a mother, I don’t want you associating with her. Is that clear?”
“Oh, yes, sir!”
“Good. Get dressed. We don’t have much time.”
In the days that followed, Kurt and Karie were inseparable. Karie, as usual, agreed with whatever her father told her to do and then did what she pleased. He was so busy trying to regroup that he usually forgot his orders five minutes after he gave them, anyway.
So Karie and Kurt concocted their “sea serpent,” piece by painstaking piece, concealing it under the Rourke beach house for safety. Meanwhile, they watched World War III develop between their respective relatives.
The first salvo came suddenly and without warning. Kurt had gone out to play baseball with Karie. This was something new for him. His parents were studious and bookwormish, not athletic. And even though Janine was more than willing to share the occasional game of ball toss, she wasn’t a baseball fanatic. Kurt had grown to his present age without much tutoring in sports, except what he played at the private school where his parents sent him. And that was precious little, because the owners were too wary of lawsuits to let the children do much rough-and-tumble stuff.
Karie had no hang-ups at all about playing tackle football on the beach or smacking a hardball with her regulation bat. She gave the bat to Kurt and told him to do his best. Unfortunately, he did, on the very first try.
Canton Rourke came storming up onto the porch of the beach house and right onto the open patio without a knock. Janine, lost in the fifth chapter of her new book, was so foggy that she saw him without really seeing him. She was in the middle of a chase scene, locked into character and time and place, totally mindless and floating in the computer screen. She stared at him blankly.
He looked furious. The blue eyes under that jutting brow were blazing from his lean face. He had a hardball in one hand. He stuck it under her nose.
“It’s a baseball,” she said helpfully.
“I know what the damned thing is,” he said in a tone that would have affected her if she hadn’t been deep in concentration. “I just picked it up off my living-room floor. It went through the bay window.”
“You shouldn’t let the kids play baseball in the house,” she instructed.
“They weren’t playing in the damned house! Your son slammed it through the window!”
Her eyebrows rose. Things were beginning to focus in the real world. Her mind lost the last thread of connection with her plot. Before she lost her bearings too far, she saved the file before she swung her chair back to face her angry neighbor.
“Nonsense,” she said. “Kurt doesn’t have a baseball. Come to think of it, I don’t think he knows how to use a bat, either.”
He threw the ball up and caught it, deliberately.
“All right, what do you want me to do about it?” she asked wearily.
“I want you to teach him not to hit balls through people’s windows,” he said shortly. “It’s a damned nuisance trying to find a glass company down here, especially one that can get a repair done quickly.”
“Put some plastic over the hole with tape,” she suggested.
“Your son did the damage,” he continued with a mocking smile. “The repair is going to be up to you, not me.”
“Me?”
“You.” He put the ball down firmly on her desk, noticing the computer and printer for the first time. His eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”
“I’m writing a bestselling novel,” she said honestly.
He laughed without humor. “Sure.”
“It’s going to be great,” she continued with building anger. “It’s all about a—”
He held up a big, lean hand. “Spare me,” he said. “I don’t really want to hear the sordid details. No doubt you can draw plenty of material from your years in the commune.”
“Why, yes, I can,” she agreed with a vacant smile. “But I was going to say that this book is about a pompous businessman with delusions of grandeur.”
His eyebrows lifted. “How interesting.” He stuck his hands into his pockets and she fought a growing attraction to him. He really did have an extraordinary build for a man his age, which looked to be late thirties. He was lean and muscular and sensuous. He didn’t have a male-model sort of look, but there was something in the very set of his head, in the way he looked at her, that made her knees go weak.
His eye had been caught by an autographed photo peering out from under her mousepad. She’d hidden it there so that Kurt wouldn’t see it and tease her about her infatuation with her television hero. Sadly when she’d moved the mouse to save her file, she’d shifted the pad and revealed the photo.
His lean hand reached out and tugged at the corner. He didn’t wear jewelry of any kind, she noticed, and his fingernails were neatly trimmed and immaculate. He had beautiful hands, lightly tanned and strong.
“I like to watch the television series he’s in,” she said defensively, because he was staring intently at the photo.
His gaze lifted and he laughed softly. “Do you?” He handed it back and in the process, leaned close to her. “It’s one of my favorite shows, too,” he said, his voice dropping an octave, soft and deep and sensuous. “But this is the villain, you know, not the hero.”
She cleared her throat. He was close enough to make her uncomfortable. “So what?”
“He looks familiar, doesn’t he?” he murmured dryly.
She glared up at him. He really was far too close. Her heart skipped. “Does he?” she asked. Her voice sounded absolutely squeaky.
He stood up again, his hands back in his pockets, his smile so damned arrogant and knowing that she could have kicked him.
“Don’t you have a business empire to save or something?” she asked irritably.
“I suppose so. You can’t get that show down here, at least not in English,” he added.
“Yes. I know. That was the whole purpose of coming here,” she murmured absently.
“Ah, I see. Drying out, are we?”
She stood up. “You listen here…!”
He chuckled. “I have things to do. You’ll see to the window, of course.”
She took a steadying breath. “Of course.”
His eyes slid up and down her slender body with more than a little interest. “Odd.”
“What?”
“Do you mind if I test a theory?”
Her eyes were wary. “What sort of theory?”
He took his hands out of his pockets and moved close, very deliberately, his eyes staring straight into hers the whole while. When he was right up against her, almost touching her, he stopped. His hands remained at his side. He never touched her. But his eyes, his beautiful blue eyes, stared right down into hers and suddenly slipped to her mouth, tracing it with such sensuality that her lips parted on a shaky breath.
He moved again. His chest was touching her breasts now. She could smell the clean, sexy scent he wore. She could feel his warm, coffee-scented breath on her mouth as he breathed.
“How old are you?” he asked in a deep, sultry tone.
“Twenty-four,” she said in a strangled voice.
“Twenty-four.” He bent his head, so that his mouth was poised just above hers, tantalizing but not invasive, not aggressive at all. His breath made little patterns on her parted lips. “And you’ve had more than a handful of lovers?”
She wasn’t listening. Her eyes were on his mouth. It looked firm and hard and very capable. She wondered how it tasted. She wondered. She wished. She…wanted!
“Janine.”
The sound of her voice on his lips brought her wide, curious eyes up to meet his. They looked stunned, mesmerized.
His own eyes crinkled, as if he were smiling. All she saw was the warmth in them.
“If you’re the mother of a twelve-year-old,” he whispered deeply, “I’m a cactus plant.”
He lifted his head, gave her an amused, indulgent smile, turned and walked away without a single word or a backward glance, leaving her holding the ball. In more ways than one.
She got the glass fixed. It wasn’t easy, but she managed. However, she did dare Kurt to pick up a bat again.
“You don’t like him, do you?” he queried the day after the glass was repaired. “Why not? He seems to be good to Karie, and he isn’t exactly Mr. Nasty to me, either.”
She moved restlessly. “I’m trying to work,” she said evasively. She didn’t like to remember her last encounter with their neighbor. Weakness was dangerous around that tiger.
“He’s gone to California,” Kurt added.
Her fingers jumped on the keyboard, scattering letters across the screen. “Oh. Has he?”
“He’s going to talk to some people in Silicon Valley. I’ll bet he’ll make it right back to where he was before he’s through. His wife is going to be real sorry that she ran out on him when he lost it all.”
“No foresight,” she agreed. She saved the file. There was no sense working while Kurt was chattering away. She got up and stretched, moving to the patio window. She paused there, staring curiously. Karie was sitting on the beach on a towel. Nearby, a man stood watching her; a very dark man with sunglasses on and a suspicious look about him.
“Who’s that? Have you seen him before?” she asked Kurt.
He glanced out. “Yes. He was out there yesterday.”
“Who’s watching Karie while her father’s gone?”
“I think there’s a housekeeper who cooks for them,” he said. “He’s only away for the day, though.”
“That’s long enough for a kidnapper,” she said quietly. “He was very wealthy. Maybe someone wouldn’t know that, would make a try for Karie.”
“You mystery writers,” Kurt scoffed, “always looking on the dark side.”
“Dark side or not, he isn’t hurting Karie while I’m around!” She went right out the patio door and down the steps.
She walked toward the man. He saw her coming, and stepped back, looking as if he wasn’t sure what to do.
She went right up to him, aware that her two years of martial arts training might not be enough if he turned nasty. Well, she could always scream, and the beach was fairly crowded today.
“You’re on my property. What do you want?” she asked the man, who was tall and well-built and foreign looking.
His eyebrows rose above his sunglasses. “No hablo inglñaes,” he said, and grinned broadly.
She knew very little Spanish, but that phrase was one she’d had to learn. “And I don’t speak Spanish,” she returned with a sigh. “Well, you have to go. Go away. Away! Away!” She made a flapping gesture with her hand.
“Ah. ¡Vaya!” he said obligingly.
“That’s right. Vaya. Right now.”
He nodded, grinned again and went back down the beach in the opposite direction.
Janine watched him walk away. She had a nagging suspicion that he wasn’t hanging around here for his health.
She went down the beach to where Karie was sitting, spellbound at the scene she’d just witnessed. “Karie, I want you to come and stay with Kurt and me today while your dad’s gone,” she said. “I don’t like the way that man was watching you.”
“Neither do I,” Karie had to admit. She smiled ruefully. “Dad had a bodyguard back in Chicago. I never really got used to him. Down here it’s been quieter.”
“You do have a bodyguard. Me.”
Karie chuckled as she got up and shook out her towel. “I noticed. You weren’t scared of him at all, were you?”
“Kurt and I studied martial arts for two years. I’m pretty good at it.” She’d didn’t add that she’d also worked as a private investigator.
“Would you teach me?”
“That might not be a bad idea,” she considered. “Tell you what, Kurt and I will give you lessons on the sly. You may not want to share that with your dad right now. He’s mad enough about the window at the moment.”
“Dad isn’t mean,” Karie replied. “He’s pretty cool, most of the time. He has a terrible temper, of course.”
“I noticed.”
Karie smiled. “You have one, too. That man started backing up the minute you went toward him. You scared him.”
“Why, so I did,” Janine mused. She grinned with pride. “How about that?”
“I’m starved,” Karie said. “Maria went to the grocery store and she won’t be back for hours.”
“We’ll make sandwiches. I’ve got cake, too, for dessert. Coconut.”
“Wow! Radical!”
Janine smiled. She led the way back to the beach house, where an amused Kurt was waiting.
“Diane Woody to the rescue!” he chuckled.
She made a face at him. “I’m reading too much of my own publicity,” she conceded. “But the man left, didn’t he?”
“Left a jet trail behind him,” her brother agreed.
“What are you working on…oh! It’s him!” Karie gasped, picking up the photo of the television star in makeup that Janine had left on the desk. “Isn’t he cool? It’s my favorite show. I like the captain best, but this guy isn’t so bad. He sort of looks like Dad, you know?”
Janine didn’t say a word. But inside, she groaned.
She was feeding the kids coconut cake from a local store, and milk when a familiar threatening presence came through the patio doors without knocking. She gave him a glare that he simply ignored.
“Don’t you live at home anymore?” he asked his daughter irritably.
“There’s no cake at our place,” Karie said matter-of-factly.
“Where’s the housekeeper? I told her to stay with you.”
“She went shopping and never came back,” Janine said shortly. “Your daughter was on the beach being watched by a very suspicious-looking man.”
“Janine scared him off,” Karie offered, with a toothy grin. “She knows karate!”
The arrogant look that Canton Rourke gave her was unsettling. “Karate, hmmm?”
“I know a little,” she confessed.
“She went right up to that man and told him to go away,” Karie continued, unabashed. “Then she took me home with her.” She glowered at him. “I could have been kidnapped!”
He looked strange for a space of seconds, as if he couldn’t quite get his bearings.
“You shouldn’t have been out there alone,” he said finally.
“I was just lying on my beach towel.”
“Well, from now on, lie on the deck,” he replied curtly. “No more adventures.”
“Okay,” she said easily, and ate another chunk of cake.
“It’s coconut cake,” Kurt volunteered. “That little grocery store has them. Janie gets them all the time for us. They’re great.”
“I’d offer you a slice of cake, Mr. Rourke, but I’m sure you’re in a terrible hurry.”
“I suppose I must be. Come on, Karie.”
His daughter took a big swallow of milk and got up from the table. “Thanks, Janie!”
“You’re very welcome.” She glanced at Canton. “Housekeepers don’t make very good bodyguards.”
“I never meant her to be a watchdog, only a cook and housecleaner. Apparently I’d better look elsewhere.”
“It might be wise.”
His eyes slid down her long legs in worn jeans, down to her bare, pretty feet. He smiled in spite of himself. “Don’t like shoes, hmmm?”
“Shoes wear out. Skin doesn’t.”
He chuckled. “You sound like Einstein. I recall reading that he never wore socks, for the same reason.”
Her eyes lifted to his face and slid over it with that same sense of stomach-rapping excitement that she experienced the first time she saw it. He did so closely resemble her favorite series TV character. It was uncanny, really.
“Are you sure you don’t act?” she asked without meaning to.
He gave her a wry look. “I’m sure. And I’m not about to start, at my age.”
“There go your hopes, dashed for good,” Kurt murmured dryly. “He’s not an illegal alien trying to fit in with humans, Janie. Tough luck.”
She flushed. “Will you shut up!”
“What did you do with that autographed photo?” he asked as he passed the desk.
“Oh, she never has it out when she’s working,” Kurt volunteered. “If she can see it, she just sits and sighs over it and never gets a word on the screen.”
He scowled, interested. “What sort of work do you do?”
“She’s a secretary,” Kurt said for her, gleefully improvising. “Her boss is a real slave driver, so even on vacation, she has to take the computer with her so that she can use the computer’s fax modem to send her work to the office.”
He made an irritated sound. “Some boss.”
“He pays well,” she said, warming to Kurt’s improvisation. She sighed. “You know how it is, living in a commune, you get so out of touch with reality.” She contrived to look dreamy-eyed. “But eventually, one has to return to the real world and earn a living. It really is so hard to get used to material things again.”
His face closed up. He gave her a glare that could have stopped traffic and motioned to Karie to follow him. He stuck his hands into his pockets and walked out the door. He never looked back. It seemed to be a deep-seated characteristic.
Karie grinned and waved, following obediently.
When they were out of sight along the beach, Kurt joined her on the patio deck.
“What if that man wasn’t watching Karie at all?” she wondered aloud, having had time to formulate a different theory. “What if he’s a lookout for the pothunters?”
Kurt scowled. “You mean those people who steal artifacts from archaeological sites and sell them on the black market?”
“The very same.” She folded her arms over her T-shirt. “This is a brand-new site, unexplored and uncharted until now. Mom and Dad even noted that it seemed to be totally undisturbed. The Maya did some exquisite work with gold and precious jewels. What if there’s a king’s ransom located at the dig and someone knows about it?”
Kurt leaned against the railing. “They know it can happen. It did last time they found a site deep in the jungle, over near Chichñaen Itzñaa. But they had militia guarding them and the pothunters were caught.”
“Yes, but Mexico is hurting for money, and it’s hard to keep militia on a site all the time to guard a few archaeologists.”
“Dad has a gun.”
“And he can shoot it. Sure he can. But they can’t stay awake twenty-four hours a day, and even militia can be bribed.”
“You’re a whale of a comfort,” Kurt groaned.
“I’m sorry. I just think we should be on our guard. It could have been someone trying to kidnap Karie, but they’ve just as much incentive to kidnap us or at least keep a careful eye on us.”
“In other words, we’d better watch our backs.”
Janine smiled. “Exactly.”
“Suits me.” He sighed. “What a shame your alien hero can’t beam down here and help us out. I’ll bet he’d have the bad guys for breakfast.”
“Oh, they don’t eat humans,” she assured him.
“They might make an exception for pothunters.”
“You do have a point there. Come on. You can help me do the dishes.”
“Tell you what,” he said irrepressibly. “You do the dishes, and I’ll write your next chapter for you!”
“Be my guest.”
He gave her a wary look. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Wrong. Go for it.”
He was excited, elated. He took her at her word and went straight to the computer. He loaded her word processing program, pulled up the file where she’d left off, scanned the plot.
He sat and he sat and he sat. By the time she finished cleaning up the kitchen, he was still sitting.
“Nothing yet?” she asked.
He gave her a plaintive stare. “How do you do this?” he groaned. “I can’t even think of a single word to put on paper!”
“Thinking is the one thing I don’t do,” she told him. “Move.”
He got up and she sat down. She stared at the screen for just a minute, checked her place in the plot, put her fingers on the keyboard and just started typing. She was two pages into the new scene when Kurt let out a long sigh and walked away.
“Writers,” he said, “are strange.”
She chuckled to herself. “You don’t know the half of it,” she assured him, and kept right on typing.
Chapter Three
Janine was well into the book two days later when Karie came flying up the steps and in through the sliding glass doors.
“We’re having a party!” she announced breathlessly. “And you’re both invited.”
Janine’s mind was still in limbo, in the middle of a scene. She gave Karie a vacant stare.
“Oops! Sorry!” Karie said, having already learned in a space of days that writers can’t withdraw immediately when they’re deep into a scene. She backed out and went to find Kurt.
“What sort of party?” he asked when she joined him at the bottom of the steps at the beach.
“Just for a few of Dad’s friends, but I persuaded him to invite you and Janie, too. He feels guilty since he’s had to leave me alone so much for the past few years. So he lets me have my way a lot, to try and make it up to me.” She grinned at Kurt. “It’s sort of like having my own genie.”
“You’re blackmailing him.”
She laughed. “Exactly!”
His thin shoulders rose and fell. “I wouldn’t mind coming to the party, if you’re having something nice to eat. But Janie won’t,” he added with certainty. “She hates parties and socializing. And she doesn’t like your dad at all, can’t you tell?”
“He doesn’t like her much, either, but that’s no reason why they can’t be civil to each other at a party.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do. He’ll be on his best behavior. Did you know that he reads her books? He doesn’t know who she really is, of course, because I haven’t told him. But he’s got every book she’s ever written.”
“Good grief, didn’t he look at her picture on the book jacket?” Kurt burst out.
“I didn’t recognize her from it. Neither will he. It doesn’t really look like her, does it?”
He had to admit it didn’t. “She doesn’t like being recognized,” he confided. “It embarrasses her. She likes to write books, but she’s not much on publicity.”
“Why?”
“She’s shy, can you believe it?” he chuckled. “She runs the other way from interviews and conventions and publicity. It drove the publishing house nuts at first, but they finally found a way to capitalize on her eccentricity. They’ve made her into the original mystery woman. Nobody knows much about her, so she fascinates her reading public.”
“I love her books.”
“So do I,” Kurt said, “but don’t ever tell her I said so. We wouldn’t want her to get conceited.”
She folded her arms on her knees and stared out to sea. “Does she have a, like, boyfriend?”
He groaned. “Yes, if you could call him that. He’s a college professor. He teaches ancient history.” He made a gagging gesture.
“Is he nice?”
“He’s indescribable,” he said after thinking about it for a minute.
“Are they going to get married?”
He shrugged. “I hope not. He’s really nice, but he thinks Janie should be less flaky. I don’t. I like her just the way she is, without any changes. He thinks she’s not dignified enough.”
“Why?”
“He’s very conservative. Nice, but conservative. I don’t think he really approves of our parents, either. They’re eccentric, too.”
She turned to look at him. “What do they do?”
“They’re archaeologists,” he said. “Both of them teach at Indiana University, where they got their doctorates. We live in Bloomington, Indiana, but Janie lives in Chicago.”
“They’re both doctors?”
He nodded and made a face. “Yes. Even Janie has a degree, although hers is in history and it’s a bachelor of arts. I guess I’ll be gang-pressed into going to college. I don’t want to.”
“What do you want to do?”
He sighed. “I want to fly,” he said, looking skyward as a bird, probably a tern, dipped and swept in the wind currents, paying no attention to the odd creatures sitting on the steps below him.
“We could glue some feathers together,” she suggested.
“No! I want to fly,” he emphasized. “Airplanes, helicopters, anything, with or without wings. It’s in my blood. I can’t get enough of airplane movies. Even space shows. Now, that’s really flying, when you do it in space!”
“So that’s why you like that science fiction show Janie’s so crazy about.”
“Sort of. But I like the action, too.”
She smiled. “I like it because the bad guy looks like my dad.”
He burst out laughing. “He’s not the bad guy. He’s the other side.”
“Right. The enemy.”
“He’s not so bad. He saved the hero, once.”
“Well, so he did. I guess maybe he isn’t all bad.”
“He’s just misunderstood,” he agreed.
She chuckled. They were quiet for a minute or two. “Will you try to get Janie to come to our party?”
He smiled. “I’ll give it my best shot. Just don’t expect miracles, okay?”
She smiled back. “Okay!”
As it turned out, Janine had to go to the Rourke party, because for once her little brother dug in his heels and insisted on going somewhere. He would, he told her firmly, go alone if she didn’t care to go with him.
The thought of her little brother in the sort of company the Rourkes would keep made her very nervous. She didn’t socialize enough to know much about people who lived in the fast lane, and she’d never known any millionaires. She was aware that some drank and used drugs. Her sheltered life hadn’t prepared her for that kind of company. Now she was going to be thrust into the very thick of it, or so she imagined. Actually she had no idea what Canton’s friends were like. Maybe they were down-to-earth and nice.
She hadn’t anything appropriate for a cocktail party, but she scrounged up a crinkly black sundress that, when paired with high heels, pearl earrings and a pearl necklace that her parents had given her, didn’t look too bad. She brushed her flyaway hair, sprayed it down and went to get her black leather purse.
“I didn’t even have enough warning to go and buy a new dress. I hate you,” she told Kurt with a sweet smile.
“You’ll forgive me. I’ll bet when he’s dressed up, he’s really something to look at,” he replied.
“I’ve seen him dressed up.”
“Oh. Well, he’s supposed to be the stuff dreams are made of. Karie says half the women in Chicago have thrown themselves at him over the years, especially since his wife remarried.”
“They live in Chicago?” She tried to sound disinterested.
“Part of the time,” he affirmed. “They have an apartment in New York, too, in downtown Manhattan.”
“He may not ever be super rich again,” she reminded him.
“That doesn’t seem to discourage them,” he assured her. “They’re all sure that any man who could make it in the first place will be able to get it back.”
There was a sort of logic to the assumption, she had to admit. Most men who made that sort of money were workaholics who didn’t spare themselves or any of their employees. Given a stake, there was every reason to believe Canton Rourke could rebuild his empire. But she felt sorry for him. He wouldn’t ever know who liked him for himself and who liked him for what he had.
“I’m glad I’m not rich,” she said aloud.
“What?”
“Oh, I just meant that I know people like me for myself and not for what I’ve got.”
He folded his arms across his neat shirt. “Do go on,” he invited. “Tell me about it. What was that invitation you got back home to come to a cocktail party and explain how to get published to the hostess’s guest of honor, who just happened to have written a book…?”
She sighed.
“Or the rich lady with the stretch limo who wanted you to get her best friend’s book published. Or the mystery writer wannabe who asked for the name of your agent and a recommendation?”
“I quit,” she said. “You’re right. Everybody has problems.”
“So does Mr. Rourke. If you get to know him, you might like him. And there’s a fringe benefit.”
“There is?”
“Sure. If you nab him, you can buy him a plastic appliance like the one your favorite alien wears and make him over to suit you!”
The thought of Canton Rourke sitting still for that doubled her over with laughter. He’d more than likely give her the appliance face first and tell her where she could go with it.
“I don’t really think that would be a good idea,” she replied. “Think how his board of directors might react!”
“I suppose so. We should go,” he prompted, nodding toward the clock on the side table.
She grimaced. “All right. But I don’t want to,” she said firmly.
“You’ll enjoy yourself,” he promised her. “Nobody knows who you are.”
She brightened. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Now you can.”
He opened the door for her with a flourish and they walked down the beach through the sand to the Rourke’s house. It was ablaze with light and soft music came wafting out the open door of the patio. Several people holding glasses were talking. They all looked exquisitely dressed and Janine already felt self-conscious about her own appearance.
Kurt, oblivious, darted up the steps to his friend Karie, wearing a cute little dress with a dropped waistline and a short skirt that probably had cost more than Janine’s summer wardrobe put together. As she went up the steps, she paused to shake the sand out of her high heels, holding onto the bannister for support.
“Need a hand?” a familiar velvety voice asked. A long, lean arm went around her and supported her while she fumbled nervously with her shoe, almost dropping it in the process.
“Here.” He knelt and emptied the sand out of the shoe before he eased it back onto her small foot with a sensuality that made her heart race.
He stood up slowly, his eyes meeting hers when they were on the same level, and holding as he rose to his towering height. He didn’t smile. For endless seconds, they simply looked at each other.
“This was Kurt’s idea,” she blurted breathlessly. “I didn’t even have time to buy a new dress…”
“What’s wrong with this one?” he asked. His lean hand traced the rounded neckline, barely touching her skin, but she shivered at the contact.
“You, uh, seem to have quite a crowd,” she faltered, moving a breath away from him.
“Right now, I wish they were all five hundred miles away,” he said deeply, and with an inflection that made her tingle.
She laughed nervously. “Is that a line? If it is, it’s probably very effective, but I’m immune. I’ve got a son and I’ve lived in a com…”
He held up a hand and chuckled. “Give it up,” he advised. “Kurt is twelve and you’re twenty-four. I really doubt that you conceived at the age of eleven. As for the commune bit,” he added, moving close enough to threaten, “not in your wildest dreams, honey.”
Honey. She recalled dumping a glass of milk on a pushy acquaintance who’d used that term in a demeaning way to her. This man made it sound like a verbal caress. Her toes curled.
“Please.” Was that her voice, that thin tremulous tone?
His fingers touched her cheek gently. “I’m a new experience, is that it?”
She shivered. “You’re a multimillionaire. I’m working for wages.” Not quite the truth, but a good enough comparison, she thought frantically.
He leaned closer with a smile that was fascinating. “I gave up seducing girls years ago. You’re safe.”
Her wide eyes met his. “Could I have that in writing, notarized, please?”
“If you like. But my word is usually considered equally binding,” he replied. His hand fell and caught hers. “As for the multimillionaire bit, that’s past history. I’m just an ordinary guy working his way up the corporate ladder right now. Come in and meet my guests.”
His fingers were warm and strong and she felt a rush of emotion that burst like tangible joy inside her. What was happening to her? As if he sensed her confusion and uncertainty, his fingers linked into hers and pressed reassuringly. Involuntarily her own returned the pressure.
As they gained the top of the steps, a vivacious brunette about Janine’s age came up to them with a champagne glass in her hand. She beamed at Canton until she saw him holding hands with the other woman. Her smile became catty.
“There you are, Canton. I don’t believe I know your friend, do I?” she asked pointedly, glancing at Janine.
“Probably not. Janine Curtis, this is Missy Elliger. She’s the daughter of one of my oldest friends.”
“You’re not that old, darling,” she drawled, moving closer to him. She glared at Janine. “Do you live here?”
“Oh, no,” Janine said pleasantly. “I live in a commune in California with several men.”
The other woman gaped at her.
“Behave,” Canton said shortly, increasing the pressure of his fingers. “This is Janine Curtis. She’s here on vacation with her little brother. That’s him, over there with Karie. His name’s Kurt.”
“Oh.” Missy cleared her throat. “What a very odd thing to say, Miss…Curtsy?”
“Curtis.” Janine corrected her easily. “Why do you say it’s odd?”
“Well, living in a commune. Really!”
Janine shrugged. “Actually it wasn’t so much a commune as it was a sort of, well, labor camp. You know, where they send political prisoners? I voiced unpopular thoughts about the government…”
“In America?!” Missy burst out.
“Heavens, no! In one of the Balkan countries. I seem to forget which one. Anyway, there I was, with my trusty rifle, shooting snipers with my platoon when the lights went out…”
“Platoon?”
“Not in this life, of course,” Janine went on, unabashed. “I believe it was when I was a private in the Czech army.”
Missy swallowed her champagne in one gulp. “I must speak to Harvey Winthrop over there. Do excuse me.” She gave Canton a speaking look and escaped.
Canton was trying not to laugh.
Janine wiggled her eyebrows at him. “Not bad for a spur-of-the-moment story, huh?”
“You idiot!”
She smiled. He wasn’t bad at all. His eyes twinkled even when he didn’t smile back.
“I’m sorry,” she said belatedly. “She’s really got a case on you, you know.”
“Yes, I do,” he replied. He brought up their linked hands. “That’s why I’m doing this.”
All her illusions fell, shattered, at her feet. “Oh.”
“Surely you didn’t think there was any other reason?” he mused. “After all, we’re almost a generation apart. In fact, you’re only a year older than Missy is.”
“So I’m a visual aid.”
He chuckled, pressing her fingers. “In a sense. I didn’t think you’d mind. Enemies do help one another on occasion. I’ll do the same for you, one day.”
“I’m not that much in demand,” she said, feeling stiff and uncomfortable now that she understood his odd behavior. “But you can have anyone you like. I read it in a magazine article.”
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Diana Palmer
Tycoon Canton Rourke, was beset and besieged - and all because of his neighbor, Janine Curtis. The woman was out to get him, he was sure of it. He'd come to Cancun, Mexico, with his daughter to relax, not catch bandits, track kidnappers…or save the woman from any other fine mess she landed herself in!Her neighbor's opinion was not a secret to Janine. So she was determined to live down to his image of her…while trying to ignore how her knees buckled every time he rescued her. Was she falling in love? The man was a mystery…would a lifetime of love prove an answer?
Tycoon Canton Rourke, was beset and besieged—and all because of his neighbor, Janine Curtis. The woman was out to get him, he was sure of it. He’d come to Cancun, Mexico, with his daughter to relax, not catch bandits, track kidnappers…or save the woman from any other fine mess she landed herself in!
Her neighbor’s opinion was not a secret to Janine. So she was determined to live down to his image of her…while trying to ignore how her knees buckled every time he rescued her. Was she falling in love? The man was a mystery…would a lifetime of love prove an answer?
Mystery Man
Diana Palmer
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Chapter One (#u5398895b-4743-5d74-9b8d-a7f7a1047d83)
Chapter Two (#ua3d19d76-2b1b-5e59-a11b-91e4f1e03bef)
Chapter Three (#ua69832ad-e105-5949-a817-f0783d22303f)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
“It was a dark and stormy night…”
A pair of green eyes glared at the twelve-year-old boy by the window who intoned the trite words in a ghostly voice.
He shrugged. “Well, everybody starts a murder mystery that way, Janie,” Kurt Curtis told his older sister with a grin.
Janine ran restless fingers through her short black hair, muttering at the few words on her computer screen. “I don’t,” she murmured absently. “That’s why I sell so many of them.”
“Diane Woody,” he intoned, “bestselling authoress of the famous Diane Woody Mystery series.” He scowled. “Why do you use your pen name for your main character’s name? Isn’t that redundant?”
“It was the publisher’s idea. Could you ask questions later?” she mumbled. “I’m stuck for a line.”
“I just gave you one,” he reminded her, grinning wider. He was redheaded and blue-eyed, so different from her in coloring that most people thought he was someone else’s brother. He was, however, the image of their maternal grandfather. Recessive genes will out, their archaeologist parents were fond of saying.
Their parents were on a new dig, which was why Janine was in Cancñaun working, with Kurt driving her nuts. Dan and Joan Curtis, both professors at Indiana University, were in the Yucatñaan on a dig. There had been several other archaeologists on the team, most of whom had to return to take classes. Since this was a newly discovered, and apparently untouched, Mayan site, the Curtises had taken a temporary leave of absence from their teaching positions to pursue it. It wasn’t feasible to take Kurt, who was just getting over a bad case of tonsillitis, into the jungles. Neither could they leave him in the exclusive boarding school he attended.
So they’d taken him out of his boarding school for two months—with the proviso that Janine tutor him at home. They’d rented this nice beach house for Janine, where she could meet her publisher’s deadline and take care of her little brother. He was well now, but she had him for the duration, which could easily mean another month, and she had to juggle his homebound school assignments with her obligations. The dig was going extremely well, Professor Curtis had said in his last E-mail message through the computer satellite hookup at their camp, and promised to be a site of international importance.
Janine supposed it would be. The benefit of it all was that they had this gorgeous little villa in Cancñaun overlooking the beach. Janine could write and hear the roar of the ocean outside. It gave her inspiration, usually. When Kurt wasn’t trying to “help” her, that was.
She was just slightly nervous, though, because it was September and the tail end of hurricane season, and this had been a year for hurricanes. One prognosticator called it the year of the killer winds. Poetic. And frightening. So far there hadn’t been too much to worry them here. She prayed there wouldn’t be any more hurricanes. After all, it was almost October.
“Did you notice the new people next door?” Kurt asked. “There’s a tall, sour-looking man and a girl about my age. He’s never home and she sits on their deck just staring at the ocean.”
“You know I don’t have time for neighbors,” she murmured as she stared at the screen.
“Don’t you ever stop and smell the flowers?” he asked with disgust. “You’ll be an old maid if you keep this up.”
“I’ll be a rich old maid,” she replied absently as she scrolled the pages up the screen. “Besides, there’s Quentin.”
“Quentin Hobard,” he muttered, throwing up his hands. “Good Lord, Janie, he teaches ancient history!”
She glared at him. “He teaches medieval history, primarily the Renaissance period. If you’d listen to him once in a while, you might discover that he knows a lot about it.”
“Like I can’t wait to revisit the Spanish Inquisition,” he scoffed.
“It wasn’t as horrible as those old movies suggest,” she said, sitting up to give him her undivided attention.
“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Monty Python,’” he drawled, naming his favorite classic television show. He got up and struck a pose. “Nobody escapes the Spanish Inquisition!”
She threw up her hands. “You can’t learn history from a British comedy show!”
“Sure you can.” He leaned forward, grinning. “Want to know the real story of the knights? They used coconut shells for horses—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said, and covered her ears. “Let me work or we’re both going to starve.”
“Not hardly,” he said with confidence. “There’s always royalties.”
“Twelve, and you’re an investment counselor.”
“I learned all I know from you. I’m precocious on account of the fact that I’m the youngest child of scientists.”
“You’d be precocious if you were the youngest child of Neanderthals.”
“Did you know that the h in Neanderthals is silent and unpronounced? It was written wrong. It’s a German word,” he continued.
She held up a hand and her glare grew. “I don’t need lessons in pronunciation. I need peace and quiet!”
“Okay, I get the message! I’ll go out and fish for sea serpents.”
She didn’t even glance his way. “Great. If you catch one, yell. I’ll take photos.”
“It would serve you right if I did.”
“Yes. With your luck, if you caught one, it would eat you, and I’d spend the rest of my life on this beach with a lantern like Heathcliff roaming the moors.”
“Wrong storyline. I’m your brother, not your girlfriend.”
“Picky, picky.”
He made a face and opened the sliding glass door.
“Close it!” she yelled. “You’re letting the cold air out!”
“God forbid!” he gasped. He turned back toward her with bright eyes. “Hey, I just had an idea. Want to know how we could start global cooling? We could have everybody turn on their air conditioners and open all their doors and windows…”
She threw a legal pad in his general direction. Not being slow on the uptake, he quickly closed the sliding door and walked down the steps of the deck onto the sugar-white sand on the beach.
He stuck his hands into his pockets and walked toward the house next door, where a skinny young girl sat on the deck, wearing cutoffs with a tank top and an Atlanta Braves hat turned backward. Her bare feet were propped on the rail and she looked out of sorts.
“Hey!” he called.
She glared at him.
“Want to go fishing for sea serpents?” he asked.
Her eyebrows lifted. She smiled, and her whole face changed. She jumped up and bounced down the steps toward him. She was blond and blue-eyed with a fair complexion.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Ever seen anyone catch a sea serpent around here?”
“Not since we got off the plane,” she said.
“Great!” He grinned at her, making his freckles stand out.
“Great?”
“If nobody’s caught it, it’s still out there!” he whispered, gesturing toward the ocean. “Just think of the residuals from it. We could sell it to one of the grocery store tabloids and clean up!”
Her eyes brightened. “What a neat idea.”
“Sure it is.” He sighed. “If only I knew how to make one.”
“A mop,” she ventured. “A dead fish. Parts of some organ meat. A few feathers. A garden hose, some shears and some gray paint.”
A kindred soul. He was in heaven. “You’re a genius!”
She grinned back. “My dad really is a genius. He taught me everything I know.” She sighed. “But if we create a hoax, I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life. So I guess I’ll pass, but…”
He made a face. “I know what you mean. I’d never live it down. My parents would send me to military school.”
“Would they, really?”
“They threaten me with it every time I get into trouble. I don’t mind boarding school, but I hate uniforms!”
“Me, too, unless they’re baseball uniforms. This year is it, this is the third time, this is the charm. This time,” she assured him, “the Braves are going to go all the way!”
He gave her a long, thoughtful look. “Well, we’ll see.”
“You a Braves fan?” she asked.
He hadn’t ever cared much for baseball, but it seemed important to her. “Sure,” he said.
She chuckled. “My name is Karie.”
“I’m Kurt.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Same here.”
They walked along the beach for a minute or two. He stopped and looked back up the deserted stretch of land. “Know where to find a mop?” he asked after a minute.
Blissfully unaware that her young brother had just doubled his potential for disaster, Janine filled her computer screen with what she hoped was going to be the bare bones of a new mystery. Some books almost wrote themselves. Others were on a par with pulling teeth. This looked like one of those. Her mind was tired. It wanted to shape clouds into white horses and ocean waves into pirate ships.
“What I need,” she said with a sigh, “is a good dose of fantasy.”
Sadly there wasn’t anything on television that she wanted to watch. Most of it, she couldn’t understand, because it was in Spanish.
She turned the set off. The one misery of this trip was missing her favorite weekly science fiction series. Not that she didn’t like all the characters on it; she did. But her favorite was an arrogant, sometimes very devious alien commander. The bad guy. She seemed to be spending all her productive time lately sighing over him instead of doing the work that she got paid to do. That was one reason she’d agreed to come to Cancñaun with her parents and Kurt, to get away from the make-believe man who was ruining her writing career.
“Enough of this!” she muttered to herself. “Good heavens, you’d think I was back in grammar school, idolizing teachers!”
She got up and paced the room. She ate some cookies. She typed a little into the computer. Eventually the sun started going down and she noticed that she was short one twelve-year-old boy.
She looked at her watch. Surely he hadn’t gotten the time confused? It was earlier here than in Bloomington, Indiana, where Kurt lived with their parents. Had he mistaken the time, perhaps forgotten to reset his watch? Janine frowned, hoping that she hadn’t forgotten to set her own. It would be an hour behind Kurt’s, because her apartment in Chicago was in a different time zone from Kurt and her parents’ in Indiana.
He was in a foreign country and he didn’t speak any more Spanish than she did. Their parents’ facility for languages had escaped them, for the most part. Janine spoke German with some fluency, but not much Spanish. And while English was widely spoken here in the hotels and tourist spots, on the street it was a different story. Many of the local people in Cancñaun still spoke Mayan and considered Spanish, not English, a second language.
She turned off her computer—it was useless trying to work when she was worried, anyway—and went out to the beach. She found the distinctive tread of Kurt’s sneakers and followed them in the damp sand where the tide hadn’t yet reached. The sun was low on the horizon and the wind was up. There were dark clouds all around. She never forgot the danger of hurricanes here, and even if it was late September, that didn’t mean a hurricane was no longer a possibility.
She shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun, because she was walking west across the beach, stopping when Kurt’s sneakers were joined by another, smaller pair, with no discernible tread. She knelt down, scowling as she studied the track. She’d worked as a private eye for a couple of years, but any novice would figure out that these were the footprints of a girl, she thought. The girl Kurt had mentioned, perhaps, the one who lived next door. In fact, she was almost in front of that beach house now.
The roar of the waves had muffled the sound of approaching footsteps. One minute, she was staring down at the tracks. The next, she was looking at a large and highly polished pair of black dress shoes. Tapered neatly around them were the hem of expensive slacks. The legs seemed to go up forever. Far above them, glaring down at her, were pale blue eyes under a jutting brow in a long, lean face. The lips were thin. The top one was long and narrow, the lower one had only a hint of fullness. The cheekbones were high and the nose was long and straight. The hairline was just slightly receding around straight brown hair.
Two enormous lean hands were balled into fists, resting on the hips of the newcomer.
“May I ask what you’re doing on my beach?” he asked in a voice like raspy velvet.
She stood up, a little clumsy. How odd, that a total stranger should make her knees weak.
“I’m tracking my…” she began.
“Tracking?” he scoffed, as if he thought she were lying. His blue eyes narrowed. He looked oddly dangerous, as if he never smiled, as if he could move like lightning and would at the least provocation.
Her heart was racing. “His name is Kurt and he’s only twelve,” she said. “He’s redheaded and so high.” She made a mark in the air with her flat hand.
“That one,” he murmured coolly. “Yes, I’ve seen him prowling around. Where’s my daughter?”
Her eyebrows rose. “You have a daughter? Imagine that! Is she carved out of stone, too?”
His firm, square chin lifted and he looked even more threatening. “She’s missing. I told her not to leave the house.”
“If she’s with Kurt, she’s perfectly safe,” she began, about to mention that he’d been stranded once in the middle of Paris by their forgetful parents, and had found his way home to their hotel on the west bank. Not only had he maneuvered around a foreign city, but he’d also sold some of the science fiction cards he always carried with him to earn cab fare, and he’d arrived with twenty dollars in his pocket. Kurt was resourceful.
But long before she could manage any of that, the man moved a step closer and cocked his head. “Do you know where they are?”
“No, but I’m sure…”
“You may let your son run loose like a delinquent, but my daughter knows better,” he said contemptuously. His eyes ran over her working attire with something less than admiration. She had on torn, raveled cutoffs that came almost to her knee. With them she was wearing old, worn-out sandals and a torn shirt that didn’t even hint at the lovely curves beneath it. Her short hair was windblown. She wasn’t even wearing makeup. She could imagine how she looked. What had he said—her son?
“Now, just wait a minute here,” she began.
“Where’s your husband?” he demanded.
Her eyes blazed. “I’m not married!”
Those eyebrows were really expressive now.
She flushed. “My private life is none of your business,” she said haughtily. His assumptions, added to his obvious contempt, made her furious. An idea flashed into her mind and, inwardly, she chuckled. She struck a pose, prepared to live right down to his image of her. “But just for the record,” she added in purring tones, “my son was born in a commune. I’m not really sure who his father is, of course…”
The expression on his face was unforgettable. She wished with all her heart for a camera, so that she could relive the moment again and again.
“A commune? Is that where you learned to track?” he asked pointedly.
“Oh, no.” She searched for other outlandish things to tell him. He was obviously anxious to learn any dreadful aspect of her past. “I learned that from a Frenchman that I lived with up in the northern stretches of Canada. He taught me how to track and make coats from the fur of animals.” She smiled helpfully. “I can shoot, too.”
“Wonderful news for the ammunition industry, no doubt,” he said with a mocking smile.
She put her own hands on her hips and glared back. It was a long way up, although she was medium height. “It’s getting dark.”
“Better track fast, hadn’t you?” he added. He lifted a hand and motioned to a man coming down toward the beach. “¿Sabe donde estñaan?” he shot at the man in fluent Spanish.
“No, lo siento, señtnor. ¡Nadie los han visto!” the smaller man called back.
“Llame a la policñaia.”
“Sñai, señtnor!”
Police sounded the same in any language and her pulse jumped. “You said police. You’re going to call the police?” she groaned. That was all she needed, to have to explain to a police officer that she’d forgotten the time and let her little brother get lost.
“You speak Spanish?” he asked with some disbelief.
“No, but police sounds the same in most languages, I guess.”
“Have you got a better idea?”
She sighed. “No, I guess not. It’s just that…”
“Dad!”
They both whirled as Karie and Kurt came running along the beach with an armload of souvenirs between them, wearing sombreros.
“Gosh, Dad, I’m sorry, we forgot the time!” Karie warbled to her father. “We went to the mercado in town and bought all this neat stuff. Look at my hat! It’s called a sombrero, and I got it for a dollar!”
“Yeah, and look what I got, S—mmmmffg.” Kurt’s “Sis” was cut off in midstream by Janine’s hand across his mouth.
She grinned at him. “That’s fine, son,” she emphasized, her eyes daring him to contradict her. “You know, you shouldn’t really scare your poor old mother this way,” she added, in case he hadn’t gotten the point.
Kurt was intrigued. Obviously his big sister wanted this rather formidable-looking man to think he was her son. Okay. He could go along with a gag. Just in case, he stared at Karie until she got the idea, too, and nodded to let him know that she understood.
“I’m sorry…Mom,” Kurt added with an apologetic smile. “But Karie and I were having so much fun, we just forgot the time. And then when we tried to get back, neither of us knew any Spanish, so we couldn’t call a cab. We had to find someone who spoke English to get us a cab.”
“All the cabdrivers speak enough English to get by,” Karie’s father said coldly.
“We didn’t know that, Dad,” Karie defended. “This is my friend Kurt. He lives next door.”
Karie’s dad didn’t seem very impressed with Kurt, either. He stared at his daughter. “I have to stop Josñae before he gets the police out here on a wild-goose chase. And then we have to leave,” he told her. “We’re having dinner with the Elligers and their daughter.”
“Oh, gosh, not them again,” she groaned. “Missy wants to marry you.”
“Karie,” he said warningly.
She sighed. “Oh, all right. Kurt, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sure thing, Karie.”
“Maybe we can find that garden hose,” she added in a conspiratorial tone.
He brightened. “Great idea!”
“What the hell do you want with a hose?” Karie’s father asked as they walked back up the beach, totally ignoring the two people he’d just left.
“Whew!” Kurt huffed. “Gosh, he’s scary!”
“No, he isn’t,” Janine said irritably. “He’s just pompous and irritating! And he thinks he’s an emperor or something. I told him we lived in a commune and you’re my son and I don’t know who your father is. Don’t you tell him any differently,” she added when he tried to speak. “I want to live down to his image of me!”
He chuckled. “Boy, are you mad,” he said. “You don’t have fights with anybody.”
“Wait,” she promised, glaring after the man.
“He reminds me of somebody,” he said.
“Probably the devil,” she muttered. “I hear he’s got blue eyes. Somebody wrote a song about it a few years ago.”
“No,” he mumbled, still thinking. “Didn’t he seem familiar to you?”
“Yes, he did,” she admitted. “I don’t know why. I’ve never seen him before.”
“Are you kidding? You don’t know who he is? Haven’t you recognized him? He’s famous enough as he is. But just think, Janie, think if he had gray makeup on.”
“He could pass for a sand crab,” she muttered absently.
“That’s not what I meant,” he muttered. “Listen, they call this guy Mr. Software. Good grief, don’t you ever read the newspapers or watch the news?”
“No. It depresses me,” she said, glowering.
He sighed. “Mr. Software just lost everything. For the past year, he’s been involved in a lawsuit to prevent a merger that would have saved his empire. He just lost the suit, and a fortune with it. Now he can’t merge his software company with a major computer chain. He’s down here avoiding the media so he can get himself back together before he starts over again. He’s already promised his stockholders that he’ll recoup every penny he lost. I bet he will, too. He’s a tiger.”
She scowled. “He, who?”
“Him. Canton Rourke,” he emphasized. “Third generation American, grandson of Irish immigrants. His mother was Spanish, can’t you tell it in his bearing? He made billions designing and selling computer programs, and now he’s moving into computer production. The company he was trying to acquire made the computer you use. And the software word processing program you use was one he designed himself.”
“That’s Canton Rourke?” she asked, turning to stare at the already dim figure in the distance. “I thought he was much older than that.”
“He’s old enough, I guess. He’s divorced. Karie said her mother ran for the hills when it looked like he was going to risk everything in that merger attempt. She likes jewelry and real estate and high living. She found herself another rich man and remarried within a month of the divorce becoming final. She moved to Greece. Just as well, probably. Her parents were never together, anyway. He was always working on a program and her mother was at some party, living it up. What a mismatch!”
“I guess so.” She shook her head. “He didn’t look like a billionaire.”
“He isn’t, now. All he has is his savings, from what they say on TV, and that’s not a whole lot.”
“That sort of man will make it all back,” she said thoughtfully. “Workaholics make money because they love to work. Most of them don’t care much about the money, though. That’s just how they keep score.”
His eyes narrowed. “You still haven’t guessed why he looks familiar.”
She turned and scowled at him. “You said something about gray makeup?”
“Sure. Think,” he added impatiently. “Those eyes. That deep, smooth voice. Where do you hear them every fourth or fifth week?”
“On the news?”
He chuckled. “Only if they had aliens doing it.”
His rambling was beginning to make sense. Every fourth or fifth week, there was a guest star on her favorite science fiction show. Her heartbeat increased alarmingly. Her breath caught in her throat. She put a hand there, to make sure she was still breathing.
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. She smiled nervously. “No, he doesn’t look like him!”
“He most certainly does,” Kurt said confidently. “Same height, build, eyes, bone structure, even the same deep sort of voice.” He nodded contemplatively. “What a coincidence, huh? We came here to Mexico to get you away from the television so you could write without being distracted by your favorite villain. And his doppelgñuanger turns up here on the beach!”
Chapter Two
“I don’t like having you around that boy,” Canton told his daughter when they were back in their beach house. “His mother is a flake.”
Karie had to bite her tongue to keep from blurting out the truth. Obviously the Curtis duo didn’t want it known that they were little brother and big sister, not son and mother. Karie would keep her new friend’s secret, but it wasn’t going to be easy.
Her eyes went to the new hardcover murder mystery on the coffee table. There was a neat brown leather bookmark holding Canton’s place in it. On the cover in huge red block letters were the title, “CATACOMB,” and the author’s name—Diane Woody.
There was a photo in the back of the book, on the slick jacket, but it was of a woman with long hair and dark glasses wearing a hat with a big brim. It didn’t even look like their neighbor. But it was. Karie knew because Kurt had told her, with some pride, who his sister was. She was thrilled to know, even secondhand, a big-time mystery writer like Diane Woody. Her father was one of the biggest fans of the bestselling mystery author, but he wouldn’t recognize her from that book jacket. Maybe it was a good thing. Apparently she didn’t want to be recognized.
“Kurt’s nice,” she told her father. “He’s twelve. He likes people. He’s honest and kind. And Janine’s nice, too.”
His eyebrows lifted as he glanced at her over his shoulder. “Janine?” he murmured, involuntarily liking the sound of the name on his lips.
“His…mother.”
“You learned all that about him in one day?”
She shrugged. “Actions speak louder than words, isn’t that what you always say?”
His face softened, just a little. He loved his daughter. “Just don’t go wandering off with him again, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And don’t go to his home,” he added through his teeth. “Because even if he can’t help what he’s got for a mother, I don’t want you associating with her. Is that clear?”
“Oh, yes, sir!”
“Good. Get dressed. We don’t have much time.”
In the days that followed, Kurt and Karie were inseparable. Karie, as usual, agreed with whatever her father told her to do and then did what she pleased. He was so busy trying to regroup that he usually forgot his orders five minutes after he gave them, anyway.
So Karie and Kurt concocted their “sea serpent,” piece by painstaking piece, concealing it under the Rourke beach house for safety. Meanwhile, they watched World War III develop between their respective relatives.
The first salvo came suddenly and without warning. Kurt had gone out to play baseball with Karie. This was something new for him. His parents were studious and bookwormish, not athletic. And even though Janine was more than willing to share the occasional game of ball toss, she wasn’t a baseball fanatic. Kurt had grown to his present age without much tutoring in sports, except what he played at the private school where his parents sent him. And that was precious little, because the owners were too wary of lawsuits to let the children do much rough-and-tumble stuff.
Karie had no hang-ups at all about playing tackle football on the beach or smacking a hardball with her regulation bat. She gave the bat to Kurt and told him to do his best. Unfortunately, he did, on the very first try.
Canton Rourke came storming up onto the porch of the beach house and right onto the open patio without a knock. Janine, lost in the fifth chapter of her new book, was so foggy that she saw him without really seeing him. She was in the middle of a chase scene, locked into character and time and place, totally mindless and floating in the computer screen. She stared at him blankly.
He looked furious. The blue eyes under that jutting brow were blazing from his lean face. He had a hardball in one hand. He stuck it under her nose.
“It’s a baseball,” she said helpfully.
“I know what the damned thing is,” he said in a tone that would have affected her if she hadn’t been deep in concentration. “I just picked it up off my living-room floor. It went through the bay window.”
“You shouldn’t let the kids play baseball in the house,” she instructed.
“They weren’t playing in the damned house! Your son slammed it through the window!”
Her eyebrows rose. Things were beginning to focus in the real world. Her mind lost the last thread of connection with her plot. Before she lost her bearings too far, she saved the file before she swung her chair back to face her angry neighbor.
“Nonsense,” she said. “Kurt doesn’t have a baseball. Come to think of it, I don’t think he knows how to use a bat, either.”
He threw the ball up and caught it, deliberately.
“All right, what do you want me to do about it?” she asked wearily.
“I want you to teach him not to hit balls through people’s windows,” he said shortly. “It’s a damned nuisance trying to find a glass company down here, especially one that can get a repair done quickly.”
“Put some plastic over the hole with tape,” she suggested.
“Your son did the damage,” he continued with a mocking smile. “The repair is going to be up to you, not me.”
“Me?”
“You.” He put the ball down firmly on her desk, noticing the computer and printer for the first time. His eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”
“I’m writing a bestselling novel,” she said honestly.
He laughed without humor. “Sure.”
“It’s going to be great,” she continued with building anger. “It’s all about a—”
He held up a big, lean hand. “Spare me,” he said. “I don’t really want to hear the sordid details. No doubt you can draw plenty of material from your years in the commune.”
“Why, yes, I can,” she agreed with a vacant smile. “But I was going to say that this book is about a pompous businessman with delusions of grandeur.”
His eyebrows lifted. “How interesting.” He stuck his hands into his pockets and she fought a growing attraction to him. He really did have an extraordinary build for a man his age, which looked to be late thirties. He was lean and muscular and sensuous. He didn’t have a male-model sort of look, but there was something in the very set of his head, in the way he looked at her, that made her knees go weak.
His eye had been caught by an autographed photo peering out from under her mousepad. She’d hidden it there so that Kurt wouldn’t see it and tease her about her infatuation with her television hero. Sadly when she’d moved the mouse to save her file, she’d shifted the pad and revealed the photo.
His lean hand reached out and tugged at the corner. He didn’t wear jewelry of any kind, she noticed, and his fingernails were neatly trimmed and immaculate. He had beautiful hands, lightly tanned and strong.
“I like to watch the television series he’s in,” she said defensively, because he was staring intently at the photo.
His gaze lifted and he laughed softly. “Do you?” He handed it back and in the process, leaned close to her. “It’s one of my favorite shows, too,” he said, his voice dropping an octave, soft and deep and sensuous. “But this is the villain, you know, not the hero.”
She cleared her throat. He was close enough to make her uncomfortable. “So what?”
“He looks familiar, doesn’t he?” he murmured dryly.
She glared up at him. He really was far too close. Her heart skipped. “Does he?” she asked. Her voice sounded absolutely squeaky.
He stood up again, his hands back in his pockets, his smile so damned arrogant and knowing that she could have kicked him.
“Don’t you have a business empire to save or something?” she asked irritably.
“I suppose so. You can’t get that show down here, at least not in English,” he added.
“Yes. I know. That was the whole purpose of coming here,” she murmured absently.
“Ah, I see. Drying out, are we?”
She stood up. “You listen here…!”
He chuckled. “I have things to do. You’ll see to the window, of course.”
She took a steadying breath. “Of course.”
His eyes slid up and down her slender body with more than a little interest. “Odd.”
“What?”
“Do you mind if I test a theory?”
Her eyes were wary. “What sort of theory?”
He took his hands out of his pockets and moved close, very deliberately, his eyes staring straight into hers the whole while. When he was right up against her, almost touching her, he stopped. His hands remained at his side. He never touched her. But his eyes, his beautiful blue eyes, stared right down into hers and suddenly slipped to her mouth, tracing it with such sensuality that her lips parted on a shaky breath.
He moved again. His chest was touching her breasts now. She could smell the clean, sexy scent he wore. She could feel his warm, coffee-scented breath on her mouth as he breathed.
“How old are you?” he asked in a deep, sultry tone.
“Twenty-four,” she said in a strangled voice.
“Twenty-four.” He bent his head, so that his mouth was poised just above hers, tantalizing but not invasive, not aggressive at all. His breath made little patterns on her parted lips. “And you’ve had more than a handful of lovers?”
She wasn’t listening. Her eyes were on his mouth. It looked firm and hard and very capable. She wondered how it tasted. She wondered. She wished. She…wanted!
“Janine.”
The sound of her voice on his lips brought her wide, curious eyes up to meet his. They looked stunned, mesmerized.
His own eyes crinkled, as if he were smiling. All she saw was the warmth in them.
“If you’re the mother of a twelve-year-old,” he whispered deeply, “I’m a cactus plant.”
He lifted his head, gave her an amused, indulgent smile, turned and walked away without a single word or a backward glance, leaving her holding the ball. In more ways than one.
She got the glass fixed. It wasn’t easy, but she managed. However, she did dare Kurt to pick up a bat again.
“You don’t like him, do you?” he queried the day after the glass was repaired. “Why not? He seems to be good to Karie, and he isn’t exactly Mr. Nasty to me, either.”
She moved restlessly. “I’m trying to work,” she said evasively. She didn’t like to remember her last encounter with their neighbor. Weakness was dangerous around that tiger.
“He’s gone to California,” Kurt added.
Her fingers jumped on the keyboard, scattering letters across the screen. “Oh. Has he?”
“He’s going to talk to some people in Silicon Valley. I’ll bet he’ll make it right back to where he was before he’s through. His wife is going to be real sorry that she ran out on him when he lost it all.”
“No foresight,” she agreed. She saved the file. There was no sense working while Kurt was chattering away. She got up and stretched, moving to the patio window. She paused there, staring curiously. Karie was sitting on the beach on a towel. Nearby, a man stood watching her; a very dark man with sunglasses on and a suspicious look about him.
“Who’s that? Have you seen him before?” she asked Kurt.
He glanced out. “Yes. He was out there yesterday.”
“Who’s watching Karie while her father’s gone?”
“I think there’s a housekeeper who cooks for them,” he said. “He’s only away for the day, though.”
“That’s long enough for a kidnapper,” she said quietly. “He was very wealthy. Maybe someone wouldn’t know that, would make a try for Karie.”
“You mystery writers,” Kurt scoffed, “always looking on the dark side.”
“Dark side or not, he isn’t hurting Karie while I’m around!” She went right out the patio door and down the steps.
She walked toward the man. He saw her coming, and stepped back, looking as if he wasn’t sure what to do.
She went right up to him, aware that her two years of martial arts training might not be enough if he turned nasty. Well, she could always scream, and the beach was fairly crowded today.
“You’re on my property. What do you want?” she asked the man, who was tall and well-built and foreign looking.
His eyebrows rose above his sunglasses. “No hablo inglñaes,” he said, and grinned broadly.
She knew very little Spanish, but that phrase was one she’d had to learn. “And I don’t speak Spanish,” she returned with a sigh. “Well, you have to go. Go away. Away! Away!” She made a flapping gesture with her hand.
“Ah. ¡Vaya!” he said obligingly.
“That’s right. Vaya. Right now.”
He nodded, grinned again and went back down the beach in the opposite direction.
Janine watched him walk away. She had a nagging suspicion that he wasn’t hanging around here for his health.
She went down the beach to where Karie was sitting, spellbound at the scene she’d just witnessed. “Karie, I want you to come and stay with Kurt and me today while your dad’s gone,” she said. “I don’t like the way that man was watching you.”
“Neither do I,” Karie had to admit. She smiled ruefully. “Dad had a bodyguard back in Chicago. I never really got used to him. Down here it’s been quieter.”
“You do have a bodyguard. Me.”
Karie chuckled as she got up and shook out her towel. “I noticed. You weren’t scared of him at all, were you?”
“Kurt and I studied martial arts for two years. I’m pretty good at it.” She’d didn’t add that she’d also worked as a private investigator.
“Would you teach me?”
“That might not be a bad idea,” she considered. “Tell you what, Kurt and I will give you lessons on the sly. You may not want to share that with your dad right now. He’s mad enough about the window at the moment.”
“Dad isn’t mean,” Karie replied. “He’s pretty cool, most of the time. He has a terrible temper, of course.”
“I noticed.”
Karie smiled. “You have one, too. That man started backing up the minute you went toward him. You scared him.”
“Why, so I did,” Janine mused. She grinned with pride. “How about that?”
“I’m starved,” Karie said. “Maria went to the grocery store and she won’t be back for hours.”
“We’ll make sandwiches. I’ve got cake, too, for dessert. Coconut.”
“Wow! Radical!”
Janine smiled. She led the way back to the beach house, where an amused Kurt was waiting.
“Diane Woody to the rescue!” he chuckled.
She made a face at him. “I’m reading too much of my own publicity,” she conceded. “But the man left, didn’t he?”
“Left a jet trail behind him,” her brother agreed.
“What are you working on…oh! It’s him!” Karie gasped, picking up the photo of the television star in makeup that Janine had left on the desk. “Isn’t he cool? It’s my favorite show. I like the captain best, but this guy isn’t so bad. He sort of looks like Dad, you know?”
Janine didn’t say a word. But inside, she groaned.
She was feeding the kids coconut cake from a local store, and milk when a familiar threatening presence came through the patio doors without knocking. She gave him a glare that he simply ignored.
“Don’t you live at home anymore?” he asked his daughter irritably.
“There’s no cake at our place,” Karie said matter-of-factly.
“Where’s the housekeeper? I told her to stay with you.”
“She went shopping and never came back,” Janine said shortly. “Your daughter was on the beach being watched by a very suspicious-looking man.”
“Janine scared him off,” Karie offered, with a toothy grin. “She knows karate!”
The arrogant look that Canton Rourke gave her was unsettling. “Karate, hmmm?”
“I know a little,” she confessed.
“She went right up to that man and told him to go away,” Karie continued, unabashed. “Then she took me home with her.” She glowered at him. “I could have been kidnapped!”
He looked strange for a space of seconds, as if he couldn’t quite get his bearings.
“You shouldn’t have been out there alone,” he said finally.
“I was just lying on my beach towel.”
“Well, from now on, lie on the deck,” he replied curtly. “No more adventures.”
“Okay,” she said easily, and ate another chunk of cake.
“It’s coconut cake,” Kurt volunteered. “That little grocery store has them. Janie gets them all the time for us. They’re great.”
“I’d offer you a slice of cake, Mr. Rourke, but I’m sure you’re in a terrible hurry.”
“I suppose I must be. Come on, Karie.”
His daughter took a big swallow of milk and got up from the table. “Thanks, Janie!”
“You’re very welcome.” She glanced at Canton. “Housekeepers don’t make very good bodyguards.”
“I never meant her to be a watchdog, only a cook and housecleaner. Apparently I’d better look elsewhere.”
“It might be wise.”
His eyes slid down her long legs in worn jeans, down to her bare, pretty feet. He smiled in spite of himself. “Don’t like shoes, hmmm?”
“Shoes wear out. Skin doesn’t.”
He chuckled. “You sound like Einstein. I recall reading that he never wore socks, for the same reason.”
Her eyes lifted to his face and slid over it with that same sense of stomach-rapping excitement that she experienced the first time she saw it. He did so closely resemble her favorite series TV character. It was uncanny, really.
“Are you sure you don’t act?” she asked without meaning to.
He gave her a wry look. “I’m sure. And I’m not about to start, at my age.”
“There go your hopes, dashed for good,” Kurt murmured dryly. “He’s not an illegal alien trying to fit in with humans, Janie. Tough luck.”
She flushed. “Will you shut up!”
“What did you do with that autographed photo?” he asked as he passed the desk.
“Oh, she never has it out when she’s working,” Kurt volunteered. “If she can see it, she just sits and sighs over it and never gets a word on the screen.”
He scowled, interested. “What sort of work do you do?”
“She’s a secretary,” Kurt said for her, gleefully improvising. “Her boss is a real slave driver, so even on vacation, she has to take the computer with her so that she can use the computer’s fax modem to send her work to the office.”
He made an irritated sound. “Some boss.”
“He pays well,” she said, warming to Kurt’s improvisation. She sighed. “You know how it is, living in a commune, you get so out of touch with reality.” She contrived to look dreamy-eyed. “But eventually, one has to return to the real world and earn a living. It really is so hard to get used to material things again.”
His face closed up. He gave her a glare that could have stopped traffic and motioned to Karie to follow him. He stuck his hands into his pockets and walked out the door. He never looked back. It seemed to be a deep-seated characteristic.
Karie grinned and waved, following obediently.
When they were out of sight along the beach, Kurt joined her on the patio deck.
“What if that man wasn’t watching Karie at all?” she wondered aloud, having had time to formulate a different theory. “What if he’s a lookout for the pothunters?”
Kurt scowled. “You mean those people who steal artifacts from archaeological sites and sell them on the black market?”
“The very same.” She folded her arms over her T-shirt. “This is a brand-new site, unexplored and uncharted until now. Mom and Dad even noted that it seemed to be totally undisturbed. The Maya did some exquisite work with gold and precious jewels. What if there’s a king’s ransom located at the dig and someone knows about it?”
Kurt leaned against the railing. “They know it can happen. It did last time they found a site deep in the jungle, over near Chichñaen Itzñaa. But they had militia guarding them and the pothunters were caught.”
“Yes, but Mexico is hurting for money, and it’s hard to keep militia on a site all the time to guard a few archaeologists.”
“Dad has a gun.”
“And he can shoot it. Sure he can. But they can’t stay awake twenty-four hours a day, and even militia can be bribed.”
“You’re a whale of a comfort,” Kurt groaned.
“I’m sorry. I just think we should be on our guard. It could have been someone trying to kidnap Karie, but they’ve just as much incentive to kidnap us or at least keep a careful eye on us.”
“In other words, we’d better watch our backs.”
Janine smiled. “Exactly.”
“Suits me.” He sighed. “What a shame your alien hero can’t beam down here and help us out. I’ll bet he’d have the bad guys for breakfast.”
“Oh, they don’t eat humans,” she assured him.
“They might make an exception for pothunters.”
“You do have a point there. Come on. You can help me do the dishes.”
“Tell you what,” he said irrepressibly. “You do the dishes, and I’ll write your next chapter for you!”
“Be my guest.”
He gave her a wary look. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Wrong. Go for it.”
He was excited, elated. He took her at her word and went straight to the computer. He loaded her word processing program, pulled up the file where she’d left off, scanned the plot.
He sat and he sat and he sat. By the time she finished cleaning up the kitchen, he was still sitting.
“Nothing yet?” she asked.
He gave her a plaintive stare. “How do you do this?” he groaned. “I can’t even think of a single word to put on paper!”
“Thinking is the one thing I don’t do,” she told him. “Move.”
He got up and she sat down. She stared at the screen for just a minute, checked her place in the plot, put her fingers on the keyboard and just started typing. She was two pages into the new scene when Kurt let out a long sigh and walked away.
“Writers,” he said, “are strange.”
She chuckled to herself. “You don’t know the half of it,” she assured him, and kept right on typing.
Chapter Three
Janine was well into the book two days later when Karie came flying up the steps and in through the sliding glass doors.
“We’re having a party!” she announced breathlessly. “And you’re both invited.”
Janine’s mind was still in limbo, in the middle of a scene. She gave Karie a vacant stare.
“Oops! Sorry!” Karie said, having already learned in a space of days that writers can’t withdraw immediately when they’re deep into a scene. She backed out and went to find Kurt.
“What sort of party?” he asked when she joined him at the bottom of the steps at the beach.
“Just for a few of Dad’s friends, but I persuaded him to invite you and Janie, too. He feels guilty since he’s had to leave me alone so much for the past few years. So he lets me have my way a lot, to try and make it up to me.” She grinned at Kurt. “It’s sort of like having my own genie.”
“You’re blackmailing him.”
She laughed. “Exactly!”
His thin shoulders rose and fell. “I wouldn’t mind coming to the party, if you’re having something nice to eat. But Janie won’t,” he added with certainty. “She hates parties and socializing. And she doesn’t like your dad at all, can’t you tell?”
“He doesn’t like her much, either, but that’s no reason why they can’t be civil to each other at a party.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do. He’ll be on his best behavior. Did you know that he reads her books? He doesn’t know who she really is, of course, because I haven’t told him. But he’s got every book she’s ever written.”
“Good grief, didn’t he look at her picture on the book jacket?” Kurt burst out.
“I didn’t recognize her from it. Neither will he. It doesn’t really look like her, does it?”
He had to admit it didn’t. “She doesn’t like being recognized,” he confided. “It embarrasses her. She likes to write books, but she’s not much on publicity.”
“Why?”
“She’s shy, can you believe it?” he chuckled. “She runs the other way from interviews and conventions and publicity. It drove the publishing house nuts at first, but they finally found a way to capitalize on her eccentricity. They’ve made her into the original mystery woman. Nobody knows much about her, so she fascinates her reading public.”
“I love her books.”
“So do I,” Kurt said, “but don’t ever tell her I said so. We wouldn’t want her to get conceited.”
She folded her arms on her knees and stared out to sea. “Does she have a, like, boyfriend?”
He groaned. “Yes, if you could call him that. He’s a college professor. He teaches ancient history.” He made a gagging gesture.
“Is he nice?”
“He’s indescribable,” he said after thinking about it for a minute.
“Are they going to get married?”
He shrugged. “I hope not. He’s really nice, but he thinks Janie should be less flaky. I don’t. I like her just the way she is, without any changes. He thinks she’s not dignified enough.”
“Why?”
“He’s very conservative. Nice, but conservative. I don’t think he really approves of our parents, either. They’re eccentric, too.”
She turned to look at him. “What do they do?”
“They’re archaeologists,” he said. “Both of them teach at Indiana University, where they got their doctorates. We live in Bloomington, Indiana, but Janie lives in Chicago.”
“They’re both doctors?”
He nodded and made a face. “Yes. Even Janie has a degree, although hers is in history and it’s a bachelor of arts. I guess I’ll be gang-pressed into going to college. I don’t want to.”
“What do you want to do?”
He sighed. “I want to fly,” he said, looking skyward as a bird, probably a tern, dipped and swept in the wind currents, paying no attention to the odd creatures sitting on the steps below him.
“We could glue some feathers together,” she suggested.
“No! I want to fly,” he emphasized. “Airplanes, helicopters, anything, with or without wings. It’s in my blood. I can’t get enough of airplane movies. Even space shows. Now, that’s really flying, when you do it in space!”
“So that’s why you like that science fiction show Janie’s so crazy about.”
“Sort of. But I like the action, too.”
She smiled. “I like it because the bad guy looks like my dad.”
He burst out laughing. “He’s not the bad guy. He’s the other side.”
“Right. The enemy.”
“He’s not so bad. He saved the hero, once.”
“Well, so he did. I guess maybe he isn’t all bad.”
“He’s just misunderstood,” he agreed.
She chuckled. They were quiet for a minute or two. “Will you try to get Janie to come to our party?”
He smiled. “I’ll give it my best shot. Just don’t expect miracles, okay?”
She smiled back. “Okay!”
As it turned out, Janine had to go to the Rourke party, because for once her little brother dug in his heels and insisted on going somewhere. He would, he told her firmly, go alone if she didn’t care to go with him.
The thought of her little brother in the sort of company the Rourkes would keep made her very nervous. She didn’t socialize enough to know much about people who lived in the fast lane, and she’d never known any millionaires. She was aware that some drank and used drugs. Her sheltered life hadn’t prepared her for that kind of company. Now she was going to be thrust into the very thick of it, or so she imagined. Actually she had no idea what Canton’s friends were like. Maybe they were down-to-earth and nice.
She hadn’t anything appropriate for a cocktail party, but she scrounged up a crinkly black sundress that, when paired with high heels, pearl earrings and a pearl necklace that her parents had given her, didn’t look too bad. She brushed her flyaway hair, sprayed it down and went to get her black leather purse.
“I didn’t even have enough warning to go and buy a new dress. I hate you,” she told Kurt with a sweet smile.
“You’ll forgive me. I’ll bet when he’s dressed up, he’s really something to look at,” he replied.
“I’ve seen him dressed up.”
“Oh. Well, he’s supposed to be the stuff dreams are made of. Karie says half the women in Chicago have thrown themselves at him over the years, especially since his wife remarried.”
“They live in Chicago?” She tried to sound disinterested.
“Part of the time,” he affirmed. “They have an apartment in New York, too, in downtown Manhattan.”
“He may not ever be super rich again,” she reminded him.
“That doesn’t seem to discourage them,” he assured her. “They’re all sure that any man who could make it in the first place will be able to get it back.”
There was a sort of logic to the assumption, she had to admit. Most men who made that sort of money were workaholics who didn’t spare themselves or any of their employees. Given a stake, there was every reason to believe Canton Rourke could rebuild his empire. But she felt sorry for him. He wouldn’t ever know who liked him for himself and who liked him for what he had.
“I’m glad I’m not rich,” she said aloud.
“What?”
“Oh, I just meant that I know people like me for myself and not for what I’ve got.”
He folded his arms across his neat shirt. “Do go on,” he invited. “Tell me about it. What was that invitation you got back home to come to a cocktail party and explain how to get published to the hostess’s guest of honor, who just happened to have written a book…?”
She sighed.
“Or the rich lady with the stretch limo who wanted you to get her best friend’s book published. Or the mystery writer wannabe who asked for the name of your agent and a recommendation?”
“I quit,” she said. “You’re right. Everybody has problems.”
“So does Mr. Rourke. If you get to know him, you might like him. And there’s a fringe benefit.”
“There is?”
“Sure. If you nab him, you can buy him a plastic appliance like the one your favorite alien wears and make him over to suit you!”
The thought of Canton Rourke sitting still for that doubled her over with laughter. He’d more than likely give her the appliance face first and tell her where she could go with it.
“I don’t really think that would be a good idea,” she replied. “Think how his board of directors might react!”
“I suppose so. We should go,” he prompted, nodding toward the clock on the side table.
She grimaced. “All right. But I don’t want to,” she said firmly.
“You’ll enjoy yourself,” he promised her. “Nobody knows who you are.”
She brightened. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Now you can.”
He opened the door for her with a flourish and they walked down the beach through the sand to the Rourke’s house. It was ablaze with light and soft music came wafting out the open door of the patio. Several people holding glasses were talking. They all looked exquisitely dressed and Janine already felt self-conscious about her own appearance.
Kurt, oblivious, darted up the steps to his friend Karie, wearing a cute little dress with a dropped waistline and a short skirt that probably had cost more than Janine’s summer wardrobe put together. As she went up the steps, she paused to shake the sand out of her high heels, holding onto the bannister for support.
“Need a hand?” a familiar velvety voice asked. A long, lean arm went around her and supported her while she fumbled nervously with her shoe, almost dropping it in the process.
“Here.” He knelt and emptied the sand out of the shoe before he eased it back onto her small foot with a sensuality that made her heart race.
He stood up slowly, his eyes meeting hers when they were on the same level, and holding as he rose to his towering height. He didn’t smile. For endless seconds, they simply looked at each other.
“This was Kurt’s idea,” she blurted breathlessly. “I didn’t even have time to buy a new dress…”
“What’s wrong with this one?” he asked. His lean hand traced the rounded neckline, barely touching her skin, but she shivered at the contact.
“You, uh, seem to have quite a crowd,” she faltered, moving a breath away from him.
“Right now, I wish they were all five hundred miles away,” he said deeply, and with an inflection that made her tingle.
She laughed nervously. “Is that a line? If it is, it’s probably very effective, but I’m immune. I’ve got a son and I’ve lived in a com…”
He held up a hand and chuckled. “Give it up,” he advised. “Kurt is twelve and you’re twenty-four. I really doubt that you conceived at the age of eleven. As for the commune bit,” he added, moving close enough to threaten, “not in your wildest dreams, honey.”
Honey. She recalled dumping a glass of milk on a pushy acquaintance who’d used that term in a demeaning way to her. This man made it sound like a verbal caress. Her toes curled.
“Please.” Was that her voice, that thin tremulous tone?
His fingers touched her cheek gently. “I’m a new experience, is that it?”
She shivered. “You’re a multimillionaire. I’m working for wages.” Not quite the truth, but a good enough comparison, she thought frantically.
He leaned closer with a smile that was fascinating. “I gave up seducing girls years ago. You’re safe.”
Her wide eyes met his. “Could I have that in writing, notarized, please?”
“If you like. But my word is usually considered equally binding,” he replied. His hand fell and caught hers. “As for the multimillionaire bit, that’s past history. I’m just an ordinary guy working his way up the corporate ladder right now. Come in and meet my guests.”
His fingers were warm and strong and she felt a rush of emotion that burst like tangible joy inside her. What was happening to her? As if he sensed her confusion and uncertainty, his fingers linked into hers and pressed reassuringly. Involuntarily her own returned the pressure.
As they gained the top of the steps, a vivacious brunette about Janine’s age came up to them with a champagne glass in her hand. She beamed at Canton until she saw him holding hands with the other woman. Her smile became catty.
“There you are, Canton. I don’t believe I know your friend, do I?” she asked pointedly, glancing at Janine.
“Probably not. Janine Curtis, this is Missy Elliger. She’s the daughter of one of my oldest friends.”
“You’re not that old, darling,” she drawled, moving closer to him. She glared at Janine. “Do you live here?”
“Oh, no,” Janine said pleasantly. “I live in a commune in California with several men.”
The other woman gaped at her.
“Behave,” Canton said shortly, increasing the pressure of his fingers. “This is Janine Curtis. She’s here on vacation with her little brother. That’s him, over there with Karie. His name’s Kurt.”
“Oh.” Missy cleared her throat. “What a very odd thing to say, Miss…Curtsy?”
“Curtis.” Janine corrected her easily. “Why do you say it’s odd?”
“Well, living in a commune. Really!”
Janine shrugged. “Actually it wasn’t so much a commune as it was a sort of, well, labor camp. You know, where they send political prisoners? I voiced unpopular thoughts about the government…”
“In America?!” Missy burst out.
“Heavens, no! In one of the Balkan countries. I seem to forget which one. Anyway, there I was, with my trusty rifle, shooting snipers with my platoon when the lights went out…”
“Platoon?”
“Not in this life, of course,” Janine went on, unabashed. “I believe it was when I was a private in the Czech army.”
Missy swallowed her champagne in one gulp. “I must speak to Harvey Winthrop over there. Do excuse me.” She gave Canton a speaking look and escaped.
Canton was trying not to laugh.
Janine wiggled her eyebrows at him. “Not bad for a spur-of-the-moment story, huh?”
“You idiot!”
She smiled. He wasn’t bad at all. His eyes twinkled even when he didn’t smile back.
“I’m sorry,” she said belatedly. “She’s really got a case on you, you know.”
“Yes, I do,” he replied. He brought up their linked hands. “That’s why I’m doing this.”
All her illusions fell, shattered, at her feet. “Oh.”
“Surely you didn’t think there was any other reason?” he mused. “After all, we’re almost a generation apart. In fact, you’re only a year older than Missy is.”
“So I’m a visual aid.”
He chuckled, pressing her fingers. “In a sense. I didn’t think you’d mind. Enemies do help one another on occasion. I’ll do the same for you, one day.”
“I’m not that much in demand,” she said, feeling stiff and uncomfortable now that she understood his odd behavior. “But you can have anyone you like. I read it in a magazine article.”
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Diana Palmer
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Tycoon Canton Rourke, was beset and besieged – and all because of his neighbor, Janine Curtis. The woman was out to get him, he was sure of it. He′d come to Cancun, Mexico, with his daughter to relax, not catch bandits, track kidnappers…or save the woman from any other fine mess she landed herself in!Her neighbor′s opinion was not a secret to Janine. So she was determined to live down to his image of her…while trying to ignore how her knees buckled every time he rescued her. Was she falling in love? The man was a mystery…would a lifetime of love prove an answer?