rolling hills or charming scenery she’d seen since leaving Philadelphia this morning. Then she reached for her map.
“Darn.” She had missed it. That small cluster of buildings she’d barely noticed out of the corner of her eye must have been the town she was looking for.
Maybe it wasn’t so surprising. The closer she’d gotten to Trouble, the more her mind had filled with doubt. The whole idea for this trip had seemed ridiculous when she and her senior editor at Liberty Books had conceived it, and it was much more so now.
“Yeah, right,” she muttered, “a rich, hot pilot is really going to fall down with desire for a small-town minister’s granddaughter turned junior book editor.”
Why on earth had she ever gone to her boss and convinced her that she could do this? That she could stop a womanizing playboy from suing them for libel by proving he was a womanizing playboy?
She really needed to stop watching old movies—this was so Rock Hudson/Doris Day. Maybe it would have worked for Doris, but no way was it going to for Sabrina Cavanaugh.
She was in way over her head. Unless wanting it to happen was enough. Because Sabrina did. She desperately wanted Max Taylor to fall crazy in lust with her. Not so she could have wild, passionate sex with the man—liar, liar—but so she could nail him for the womanizing deviant Grace Wellington’s book made him out to be. The book that was right now in jeopardy since the rich, slimy playboy had hired a shark lawyer to threaten a lawsuit.
“What man wouldn’t want to have his wickedly erotic sexual exploits glorified in a well-written memoir?” she mused.
Okay…sort of well written.
Apparently not this man. He, it seemed, had pulled out an angel costume and hired the best lawyer he could. Taylor’s lawyer was demanding that publication be stopped, threatening a libel lawsuit over Grace’s descriptions of their wild and kinky affair, her subsequent heartbreak and Max’s jaded lifestyle. And in the post–James Frey era of memoirs, Liberty was threatening to pull the book altogether.
“Oh, no, you will not ruin this for me,” Sabrina muttered, determined all over again to out the man for the reprobate he really was.
It was only because of the book—because of how important the success of that book would be for Sabrina. It had absolutely nothing—zero, zilch—to do with the man himself.
Keep telling yourself that, kid.
Sabrina never had been able to lie well, despite having a lot of experience with it as a kid. Lying had been a necessity for a troublemaking rebel trapped in the body of a small-town minister’s granddaughter who wasn’t allowed to wear jeans and had been called a harlot by her grandfather the first time she wiped a streak of pink lipstick across her mouth.
God help her if the old man had ever found out Sabrina was the one who’d put twenty packets of red Kool-Aid mix in the fountain outside his church. And had thrown one of her grandmother’s old wigs in with it so the whole thing resembled a murder scene.
She’d had a vivid imagination as a child.
Glancing in her rearview mirror, Sabrina noticed the buildings a few hundred yards back—a gas station, and a sagging, cone-shaped hut that had once either sold ice cream or developed film. Farther back, she thought she remembered driving by a restaurant, a drug store and a small courthouse supported by a ring of dirty cement columns, pitted with age spots and faintly green with mildew. There had also been an overgrown playground with swings that would require a child to get a tetanus shot before climbing aboard.
It seemed exactly the kind of place that would be called Trouble. Especially considering that the barren landscape surrounding it was too marshy for farming and too rocky for developing. Reportedly there was no coal in the three mountains ringing the small valley or even a decent slope for skiing.
Just one sorry little town with a cocky name, her home for the next week or two. Or as long as it took to track down Mr. Taylor and get him to come out of hiding as Prince Charming and put on his Hugh Hefner robe.
She was about to swing the car around and head back when she got a welcome distraction. Grabbing her cell phone out of her purse, she recognized the number on the caller ID.
“Nancy, I don’t know anything yet, I just got here,” she said. Her boss, senior editor Nancy Carazzi, had called for hourly updates all morning.
“Are you sure he’s there?”
“How could I be sure of that when I’m still in my car?”
“By the trail of women lying in satisfied puddles of lust around the town square?”
Sabrina chuckled at Nancy’s droll tone. She wasn’t surprised by the question. Though her boss—and friend—had no use for men, in or out of the bedroom, even she had been intrigued by the stories about one Maxwell Taylor, the stud of southern California—at least according to Grace Wellington’s book.
Neither of them had seen a decent picture of the man, since his airline Web site only featured a group shot taken from a distance. Posed beside a fleet of planes, the owner of Taylor Made Air Charters had been indistinguishable from his staff. All of them wearing dark glasses against the sun, they had formed a solid block of blue-uniformed flyboys.
But Grace’s descriptions had been evocative to say the least. And Sabrina could picture him in her mind.
He was suave. Sophisticated. James Bond in a pilot’s cap, with an elegant, lean body and smoothed-back dark hair. He had high cheekbones, a strong chin, and deep, knowing eyes. She just knew it. Because she’d seen him in her dreams. A lot.
“You still there?”
Sabrina cleared her throat and pulled her thoughts off the book. That part of it, anyway. “I haven’t spied any women stripping and throwing themselves naked at a man’s feet.”
“Is that your plan?”
“I’m not the least bit…”
“Can it,” Nancy said. “You think I didn’t notice the dreamy look you got on your face when you were reading the Max chapter of the book? You were intrigued, Sabrina. Hell, I haven’t had any use for a penis since I decided as a kid that Betty should end up with Veronica instead of Archie, and I was intrigued.”
Laughing, Sabrina mentally admitted she’d been more than intrigued. She wouldn’t say so out loud, but in her mind she could acknowledge that her curiosity about Grace Wellington’s former lover had become all-consuming.
“It’s just curiosity,” she insisted, not sure which of them she was trying harder to convince. “Plus a lot of skepticism. And a little bit of disgust.” Okay, she could mentally admit it was titillated disgust when it came to some of the seedier details of the wicked pleasures Max had introduced Grace to.
Wiping her brow with the back of her hand, she wasn’t surprised to find moisture there. Even with the car’s air-conditioning, memories of those scenes made her break out in a sweat. But she gamely declared, “I’d never get involved with someone like that.”
“Who said anything about getting involved? That man was born to inspire clothes to drop, not dreams of wedding rings.”
Unfortunately, sex did mean getting involved
