owner. Max Taylor’s grandfather. The one who lived with the spoiled, sexpot pilot himself.
Though shaking inside, Sabrina maintained a calm expression. It was time to focus on her mission—getting Grace’s book into print as written—and to forget about handsome mechanics with laughing eyes and killer chests. Time to get into character and do what she’d come to this lousy town to do: pretend to be an investor. Pretend to be rich. Get Max Taylor to come after her and prove himself as big a fiery sex maniac as Grace made him out to be.
Without getting herself burned in the process.
Maybe she should just call this Mission: Impossible?
Too bad she’d put on a simple pair of jeans and sneakers for the drive here today—she certainly wasn’t dressed for seduction. But she wasn’t about to let this opportunity slip away, not when she was finally so close to Max Taylor she could almost smell him.
“Okay,” she forced herself to say to the dusty mechanic, who she could no longer afford to lust after, even mentally, “that would be wonderful. Can we go now?”
She held her breath, and almost groaned in frustration when the man shook his head. “He’s not home right now, but if you want to come by tomorrow, I promise I’d be happy to introduce you. You can’t miss the house—it’s right there.”
He pointed through the woods toward a small hill. She could just make out the top floor of a three-story monstrosity looking like something out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story. A famous millionaire lived there?
Sabrina hid her surprise. “Okay. What time?”
He shrugged, looking at the carousel and at the hammer in his hand. “I have the feeling I’ll be here all day. So come on by whenever you want and I’ll walk you up.”
“Perfect,” she said, meaning it. That would allow her the chance to find the B&B where she’d made a reservation, get settled in and prepare to accomplish her objective.
A good night’s sleep would be helpful before going on a clandestine sex campaign.
Hopefully, by tomorrow, Sabrina would have gotten a grip on her libido and would be able to shove her attraction to this sweet, sexy mechanic aside. And focus only on the wicked, soulless playboy she’d come here to expose.
CHAPTER THREE
IDA MAE MONROE AND Ivy Helmsley—better known as the Feeney sisters—had been fighting over men since they were two willowy slips of girls. It had started way back in forty-three when Ida Mae was fourteen and her sister Ivy only twelve and Ida Mae’s beau, Buddy Hoolihan, threw Ivy’s lunch pail down the well at his daddy’s farm. Ida Mae laughed, though she did feel a bit bad for Ivy, ’specially since their mama had made corn bread for their lunches that day.
But sisters were only sisters and boys were better. So, deciding she’d give Ivy her pretty new yellow hair ribbon later that night, Ida Mae cheered Buddy on during his tormenting.
Then Ivy began to cry like her heart would break. Just like that, Buddy went all gooey-soft. He apologized to Ivy, put his arm around her and looked at a still-laughing Ida Mae like her heart was black as coal. Ivy batted her lashes at him, stuck her tongue out at Ida Mae…and silently declared a war that lasted for more than half a century.
The sisters had battled over Buddy throughout grade school, but moved on to other boys—and men—as the years progressed. Usually bloodlessly. But not always.
Eventually, after their mama had died, they both left town, married fellas from the outside, and each tried to keep her husband away from her man-stealing sister.
They’d realized, however, somewhere around 1980 when they’d both been widowed—Ivy more than once—that life just wasn’t as much fun without a sister around to love to hate. So they moved back to Trouble and promptly resumed their feud.
Ida Mae called Ivy the black widow spider.
Ivy called Ida Mae the cold-hearted bride of Satan.
But God forbid anyone else call one of the sisters as much as miserly, for the other one would let loose a razor-blade tongue to defend her.
They lived next door to each other, on the north side of town in two ramshackle old houses that had once been Victorian but could now only be called sorry. Some days they sat in Ida Mae’s kitchen drinking tea while arguing over who Buddy Hoolihan had loved more. And some evenings they sat on Ivy’s front porch drinking bourbon while arguing over which of them had the tinier waist back in the day. Sometimes they merely sipped daisy wine and reminisced about the men they’d killed.
Most often, though, they talked about Mama. How she’d laughed. How she’d made the best pumpkin bread. How she’d tanned them when they were bad. How she’d taught them which poison to use on a man who was a little too free with his fists, or who couldn’t keep his man-parts safely buttoned in his own trousers or between his wedded wife’s legs.
This would inevitably lead to arguments about their daddy, whom both of them had loved to pieces when they were children. Whether Mama really murdered him, and whether Daddy truly had deserved it.
Ida Mae thought she did and he probably had.
Ivy thought she did but he definitely had not.
The argument—or any number of other ones—would eventually lead one of them to steal the beautiful Sears, Roebuck urn with the glossy faux mother-of-pearl handles—which was full of Daddy’s ashes—and hide it so the other one couldn’t say good-night to him. Which was why Ida Mae was currently tugging all the flour, sugar, stale chocolate chips and dried-up boxes of prunes out of Ivy’s dusty pantry.
“It’s not your turn to take care of Daddy, it’s mine. I have him until tomorrow night, sundown!”
Ivy was smiling as she watched from the other side of her kitchen. Curling her fingers together and resting her hands on the cracked linoleum surface of her faded, yellow kitchen table, she merely watched, a satisfied gleam in her eye. “Seems to me that he was feeling a little ignored.”
Ida Mae glared at her sister, knowing by Ivy’s expression that she wasn’t even close in her hunt for Daddy’s ashes. Ivy wouldn’t be smiling like that if she were. If her sister had put Daddy on the roof again and Ida Mae had to climb out the third-story window, she was going to snatch her bald.
“I haven’t ignored him.”
“You were gone for two hours yesterday,” Ivy replied. “Two whole hours and heaven only knows where you were. I thought we were going to start talking about the next book we’re going to write.”
Ivy had it in her head that the two of them could be the next Agatha Christie, even though the one murder book they wrote a few years back never had gotten sold anywhere. “Nobody’s been killed around here in years, so we don’t have anything to write about,” Ida Mae retorted, hoping to change the subject.
It didn’t work. “We’ll discuss that later. Now, tell me what sneaky things you were up to yesterday.”
Ida Mae felt hotness in her cheeks, the kind of heat she hadn’t had rush through her since she’d gone through the change twenty-five years ago. “I don’t know what you mean.”
