the flight out here reading about.
Eve Palmer, he thought, and a muscle knotted in his jaw.
He sighed and loosened his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. This was not shaping up as a good day. Everything that could go wrong had, from the minute he’d hit the Denver airport. His plane had been late getting off the ground, the ride had been bumpy, and the much-touted in-flight telephone had worked only after the flight engineer had put in an appearance with a screwdriver and a roll of duct tape.
But the phone had worked then, well enough to bring Zach the information he’d needed to fill in the holes in the Triad file. What he’d learned had not made him happy.
Triad’s costs were up, its profits down, and it was easy to see why. His first guess had been right. The CEO, Eve Palmer, was about as qualified to head the company as she was to perform brain surgery.
“A woman CEO?” Cade had said, in the couple of minutes they’d had to compare notes this morning. His brother had grinned. “Yeah, I’ve got one to deal with in Dallas, too. When will these broads admit they don’t belong in business?”
Zach didn’t think that way. Women drivers were one thing, but he had no problem with women in the boardroom—if their ability was what had got them there.
And that was the problem. Eve Palmer had not climbed the corporate ladder, she’d scaled it on her back in a tangle of silken sheets. It was a mixed metaphor, but how else could you describe a woman who’d won her spot at Triad by becoming Charles Landon’s lover?
The facts were indisputable, starting with the file itself and some notes in his father’s hand.
“The Palmer woman is beautiful,” Charles had written. “Clever, and more than ambitious.”
Zach snorted. Calling her ambitious was understating it. The woman was twenty-five years old. She’d shown up in Hollywood in her teens, apparently from nowhere. Like a million other girls with a million other dreams, she’d been determined to become an actress. But she hadn’t figured on the endless supply of other Eves and Kims and Winonas who arrived on almost every bus.
Undeterred, she had taken other jobs.
She’d modeled. She’d waitressed. She’d sold panty hose and makeup. She’d been a secretary in an office and learned word processing, and in between, she’d even managed to land walk-ons in a couple of movies Zach had never heard of.
Then she’d lucked out. A temporary job as secretary to Howard Tolland, Triad’s former owner, had blossomed into a full-time position. And then Charles Landon had come along.
Zach’s mouth twisted. The rest, as they said, was history.
Whether she’d warmed the old man’s bed before or after he handed her Triad was unclear, but it didn’t matter. The file said it all. Charles had met her one day, taken her out that night. A week later, he’d moved her into the executive office.
Traffic was thinning. Zach shifted gears and let the Porsche build up some speed. Eve Palmer had to have a really special talent to have been able to play the old man for a sucker.
Maybe it ran in the family, he thought with a tight smile as he turned onto the exit ramp. Hell, he’d been taken in by a woman, too, one who didn’t care a damn about simple things like common decency and morality.
Not that it was anything personal. He was here to pull Triad back from the brink, make it an acceptable if not attractive part of the Landon package…but hey, if that meant that Eve Palmer ended up a casualty, who could blame him for taking some small pleasure from it?
All he had to do now was find Triad’s office. He frowned at the numbers on the vaguely run-down buildings that lined Sepulveda Boulevard. It had to be here somewhere.
There it was on the corner, a boxy cement building in a shade of pink so ugly it made his teeth ache.
Zach swung the Porsche into the parking area and shut off the engine. Then he stepped out onto the asphalt, grabbed his tweed jacket from the seat and headed briskly toward the front door.
Moments later, he was out in the parking lot again, frowning darkly. He’d made a point of telephoning ahead so that the Palmer woman would be waiting for him in her office. But she wasn’t. She was, her flustered secretary had said, out on location with the director, Francis Cranshaw.
“A problem came up on the set, Mr. Landon, and Miss Palmer had to go out there. She asked if you’d please make yourself comfortable and wait.”
Wait? Zach’s jaw tightened as he strode toward the Porsche. The hell he would wait. A problem on the set. Did she really expect him to believe that? Eve Palmer was either trying to avoid him or trying to bring him to heel, but he’d be damned if he’d let her do either.
It had been a job, prying directions to the set from her secretary.
“It’s a pretty remote area,” she’d said.
“I assure you,” Zach had said with what he’d hoped was a polite smile, “I’ll find it.”
He climbed into the Porsche, yanked on his mirrored sunglasses and stabbed the key into the ignition.
“Remote location, hell,” he muttered, and shot from the parking lot.
An hour later, Zach was driving down what no one in his right mind would have called a road, cursing under his breath and wondering if the secretary hadn’t deliberately sent him on a wild-goose chase.
What kind of film would anyone shoot in a place like this? For the past twenty minutes, there’d been nothing on the horizon but cactus, scrubby things he thought were trees and tumbles of reddish rock. He had not seen a car or a living soul, unless you counted a scrawny coyote that had trotted past without so much as a glance.
The Porsche whined in protest as Zach drove it across what looked to be a dry streambed lined with small rocks. If the secretary hadn’t deliberately misled him, he thought grimly, then Eve Palmer was even more incompetent than he’d imagined. She had to be, she and her director, Frances Whatsis. Both women would be nuts to shoot a picture in the middle of——
“Damn!”
Zach stood on the brakes as a galloping white horse and its rider suddenly materialized before him. The car skidded wildly, careered across the dusty track, lurched through a stand of prickly pear and came to a sickening stop inches from a pile of huge boulders. The engine coughed, coughed again and faded to silence.
After what seemed an eternity, Zach reached out and switched off the ignition. He took off his mirrored glasses, dropped them on the dashboard, undid his seat belt and only then remembered to breathe.
The white horse was gone, racing across the barren hilltop toward the far horizon. The horse’s rider was rising slowly to his knees in the dirt.
Zach muttered, rose in his seat and vaulted from the car.
“Hell, man,” he said as he hurried toward the fallen rider, “are you okay?”
“Yeah,” the rider said, after a minute, “yeah, I’m okay. You?”
Zach laughed, but it sounded more like a croak. “Except for a pair
