when the paper printed a story about how the First Lady is actually a space alien?”
“Nobody’s ever been able to prove otherwise, now have they?”
Brandt shook his head, probably not in denial of what she had said but more likely in amazement at her audacity.
They had almost reached the long black limo. Jessie knew she was running out of time. She wanted to get in one more question. “What do you have to say to those who claim you obtained your fortune through unethical or perhaps even illegal means?”
He opened the rear door of the limo—the driver didn’t get out to do it for him, Jessie noticed—but paused to look at her before he got in. His steely eyes flashed as if he were angry at her, and she suddenly worried that she might have pushed him too far. Something about this man told her she didn’t want him angry at her.
But then he seemed to relax, although it took a visible effort for him to do so. “Nobody’s ever been able to prove it, now have they?” he asked, paraphrasing what she had just said to him.
With the slam of the door and a purring surge of the limo’s expertly tuned engine, he was gone, leaving Jessie to stare after the departing vehicle.
Michael settled back against the luxuriously upholstered rear seat. The vehicle’s smooth acceleration as it pulled away from the curb testified to the driver’s skill. He looked at Michael in the rearview mirror and asked without the deference usually associated with a chauffeur, “Who was that?”
“The woman? Just another reporter.”
“I saw the way she was chasing you along the sidewalk.” The big blond man chuckled. “I thought I might have to get out and help you, but then I figured you could take care of her yourself.”
Michael frowned. “What do you mean by that, Max?”
“Well, she was pretty good-looking, in a persistent sort of way.”
“I didn’t notice,” Michael lied.
The truth was, he had noticed how attractive Jessie Morgan was…more than he wanted to. With everything else going on in his life right now, he didn’t need any distractions—especially from a nosy reporter, no matter what she looked like. The resort deal was a delicate and important one, and the attack on him in the elevator proved that he couldn’t let his guard down even for an instant. Not that he would have, even if Carl Williams hadn’t tried to kill him. Years of living with violence and danger had ingrained caution in him. No one got too close to him except the handful of people in the world he trusted…and sometimes he kept his distance even from them.
He wished he had kept his distance from Charlotte. He wished that every day of his life.
“How did the meeting go?” Max asked, and Michael was grateful for the question since it got his mind off those painful memories.
“All right. The lawyer said his client wasn’t interested in selling, but we all know what that means.”
Max grunted. “Everybody’s got their price. You just have to find it.”
“Exactly.” Michael paused, then went on. “Something interesting did happen on my way out of the building.”
“Besides having a hot lady reporter chasing you, you mean?”
Michael tried to ignore the reference to how hot Jessie Morgan was, even though images filled his mind. Her long legs in those sleek-fitting jeans. Her breasts in that silk shirt. Her dark, intriguing eyes…especially those eyes. He forced the images away.
“Carl Williams tried to kill me.”
“Son of a—” The limo lurched a little as Max instinctively hit the brakes. “Williams? He’s in town?”
“Not anymore,” Michael said. “Only his body. It’s at the bottom of an elevator shaft now.”
“Huh.” Max shook his head as he resumed piloting the limo through Dallas traffic with sure, steady skill. “I told you I should have gone upstairs with you. I guess you handled things all right, though, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“That’s right.” Michael fingered the tear in the leather briefcase, annoyed that he would have to replace it. He wasn’t sure why that bothered him; he could afford another briefcase, even a custom-made one like this. He could afford a thousand just like it and never even miss the money.
Maybe it wasn’t the briefcase, or the resort deal, or the fact that his enemies were on his trail. Maybe it was the flicker of something he hadn’t felt in a long time, something he didn’t want to feel. In their brief conversation, even though he had done his best to brush her off, Jessie Morgan had roused something in him, and not just the physical stirrings of desire to which he was no more immune than any other man in the presence of a beautiful woman.
He had wanted to talk to her, he realized now. He’d wanted to open up to her. Could be that she simply had the reporter’s knack of getting people to say more than they should.
But just in case it was more than that, just in case she had stirred up something within him that was better left dormant, he was damned glad that he would never see her again.
It wasn’t enough, Jessie thought. It wasn’t nearly enough. She couldn’t get even a news item out of the information she had about Michael Brandt, let alone a feature. She sat at the kitchen table in her studio apartment with her laptop open and connected to the Internet, searching for something she could add to her file about him.
No reporter had ever been able to determine exactly where or when he had been born, leading to speculation that Michael Brandt wasn’t even his real name. The press had first noticed him in Europe about ten years earlier, when he was apparently in his early twenties. Despite his youth he had quickly made a name for himself on the Grand Prix circuit as a daring and often victorious driver. Evidently he had plenty of money to start with, because from the first he stayed in the finest hotels and squired around the loveliest young women on the Continent. His faint Midwestern accent marked him as unmistakably American, though.
He had returned to the States and continued to race, but in addition he sought the thrills of the stock market and the financial wars. Real estate, computers, communications, other high-tech electronics—Michael Brandt had a finger in all those pies. Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. And if that wasn’t enough, he was linked romantically with beautiful singers and Hollywood actresses and heiresses. He was the proverbial young man who had it all.
But who was he, really? And where had he come from? Jessie was determined to find out, because her readers wanted to know. And maybe someday if she broke enough big stories—even if they were in the pages of a tabloid like Super-nova—the editors at a real newspaper would notice her, would look beyond the impoverished childhood on the reservation and the education at a junior college and a second-rate state university and see her potential as a reporter and writer.
She might have lived up to that potential already if she had been able to accept the scholarship to Oklahoma University that had been offered to her as a senior in high school. Unfortunately, it was a private scholarship endowed by one of the local oil tycoons. Jessie’s writing on her school newspaper had caught his eye, he claimed. But it was really her looks that had caught his eye, and once she realized that the scholarship carried a high price tag, she’d turned it down flat and settled for the best education
