toward the terminal entrance to get better reception, he spoke loudly so his brother could understand. “I don’t want to buy the woman’s house, I want to stop her damn book.” Speaking as he stepped inside, his raised voice garnered the attention of a number of people. This was so not his day.
“A book? Max, I’m talking about Trouble.”
Max strode into the private pilot’s lounge, which was, thankfully, deserted. “Tell me about it. I know I’m in trouble.”
“You are? You’re there? Then you’ve seen him?”
“Seen who?”
“Grandfather.”
Grandfather. Ah…that explained Morgan’s excited mood. If anything could send his level-headed older brother into a tailspin, it was their wildly flamboyant grandfather, the elderly man who’d raised them after their parents died. “Where is he and what has he done now?”
“I just told you, he’s in Trouble.”
“Yeah. I got it. He’s gotten himself into another mess.”
“No.” His brother’s voice was impatient. “You don’t get it. Grandfather is in a small town called Trouble.”
Max had to laugh. Because if there was anywhere Mortimer Potts was destined to be, it was in a town with that dubious name. “Okay. So he’s visiting a weird town. That’s nothing new.”
“He’s not on vacation,” Morgan said. “He owns it, Max.”
“Huh?”
“Our grandfather has purchased an entire town. He now officially owns Trouble, Pennsylvania. One of us has to fly there right away to get him out of this mess.”
One of us. Max could tell by his brother’s voice which one of us he meant. And it sure wasn’t Morgan—or their younger brother, Mike.
He was about to refuse, knowing there was too much at stake with the merger to take off on an unexpected vacation. Then he thought it over. Maybe getting out of town for a while would be a good thing. He could disappear—away from more crazy, horny old moneybags like Mrs. Coltrane. And in the meantime, get the best attorney he could find to stop publication of Grace’s book.
Besides, his grandfather was always a lot of fun. Right now, he could use some fun…not to mention the distraction. A false identity wouldn’t hurt, either, at least until this book thing was taken care of.
Neither would a sip of alcohol.
Forget it. He didn’t do that anymore—couldn’t do that anymore. Not ever.
If the eccentric old man who’d raised him was in a bad way, well, there wasn’t much Max wouldn’t do for him. Wasn’t much his brothers wouldn’t do for him, either. They were family, after all, the four of them. Had been for eighteen years, since Max, Morgan and Mike had lost their dad to the first Gulf War and their mom to cancer.
“All right. I’ll do it,” he said, trying to look on the bright side. “It’s not a bad time for me to get out of Dodge.”
“What’s wrong? Is there a problem?”
Max suddenly didn’t want to talk to his brother about the Grace Wellington situation. Considering his older sibling had been hounding him since they were young about the scrapes Max got into with women, he couldn’t give the other man the satisfaction.
He had to laugh at the irony. His grandfather’s new town was aptly named for Max, too. Though he’d done everything he could to stay out of trouble for the past few years, he just seemed destined to keep landing in it.
“I’m okay,” he finally replied. “After I make some arrangements here, I’ll be getting the old man out of trouble. Figuratively and literally.”
Two weeks later
SABRINA CAVANAUGH had heard the old saying about a place being so small you’d miss it if you blinked. But she’d never realized it could really be true of an entire town.
She couldn’t have driven through Trouble and not realized it, could she? That awkward conglomeration of falling-down houses, boarded-up businesses and doleful people hadn’t been her destination, right? Because she came from a dinky little Ohio town, population twelve, and it still seemed bigger than this.
Pulling her rented car over, she parked on the side of the dusty, two-lane road on which she’d been traveling since leaving the interstate. The road that had none of the shady trees, 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