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Body Movers: 2 Bodies for the Price of 1
Stephanie Bond
Two-for-One Trouble!With fugitive parents, a brother dodging loan sharks, a hunky cop who’s made her outlaw family his business, a buff body mover looking to make a move on her, and her ex-fiancé back in the picture, Carlotta Wren thought her life couldn’t get any more complicated. And then… Her best friend jumps on the body-moving bandwagon. Her fugitive parents phone home. Her identity is stolen by a look-alike. Her look-alike is found, well…dead.Under suspicion for murder, Carlotta discovers that her devious double might have been bumped off accidentally—and that she could be the real target! Throw in dealing with her motley crew of family, friends and wannabe lovers, and Carlotta begins to think that jail isn’t such a bad alternative after all…
For a limited time only: men up for grabs!
Retail maven Carlotta Wren loves nothing better than to shop, but with her scandalous—and debt-ridden—background, she’s been too busy trying to keep her head above water to have the luxury of shopping for a man!
Now she has three men in her life—a sexy cop hot on the trail of her fugitive parents, a fascinating body mover who has secrets of his own and her repentant first love who’s back with his heart in his hands. Thrust into the middle of yet another crisis, the once-lonely Carlotta finds herself surrounded by lots of prime male merchandise! One man she’ll try on for size …
One man she’ll save for a special occasion …
And one man will make her an offer that’s hard to refuse …
Look what people are saying about
BODY MOVERS
“Bond has successfully switched to the crime genre, bringing along her trademark humour and panache.”
—Booklist
“Here’s to Carlotta’s future misadventures lasting a long time.”
—RT Book Reviews (4 1/2 stars)
“This is a series the reader will want to jump on in the very beginning. It’s witty, sexy and hilariously funny.”
—Writers Unlimited
“The exciting start of a new series.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“Body Movers is signature Stephanie Bond, with witty dialogue, brilliant characterisation, and a wonderful well-plotted storyline.” —Contemporary Romance Writers
“I devoured this book and loved it!”
—FreshFiction.com
BODY MOVERS:
2 BODIES FOR THE PRICE OF 1
STEPHANIE BOND
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
As with every book, there are certain people who made the journey easier. First, thanks to my editors Brenda Chin, Margaret O’Neill Marbury and Dianne Moggy for their assistance in getting the Body Movers series off the ground running, and for the guarantee that, as of this date, the series will last for at least four books. Thanks, too, to my agent Kimberly Whalen of Trident Media Group for handling the logistics, to my critique partner, Rita Herron, for her unflagging support, and to my husband, Christopher Hauck, for his glowing cover quote.:)
Thanks, too, to the booksellers who have recommended this series to their customers, and to all of you readers who e-mailed asking when the second book would hit the shelves—I hope you enjoy 2 Bodies for the Price of 1! Keep those e-mails coming!
Prologue
Hi, there. My name is Carlotta Wren. I’m a whisper away from being thirty years old. I work for Neiman Marcus in Atlanta. And I’m single. You’re probably thinking, Sounds pretty normal. But let me tell you, friend, you won’t believe what I’ve been through in the last ten years.
I was barely eighteen, a senior in a private high school, living in a mansion in a tony area of Atlanta known as Buckhead, engaged to a handsome rich young man named Peter Ashford and on my way to college when my father was charged with investment fraud. The world as I knew it crumbled around us as my family lost every worldly possession and we were forced to move into a grubby townhouse in a less tony part of town.
My father said he was framed but instead of staying to face down his problems, he decided to skip bail—and town—and my drunken socialite mother went with him. I haven’t seen them since. And here’s the kicker: They left me to raise my nine-year-old brother Wesley. Can you imagine? I was barely an adult and ill-equipped to finish raising myself, much less a sensitive kid with a genius IQ.
But I regrouped. College was obviously out, so I started a retail job and discovered that my life as a rich kid had at least prepared me to sell expensive things to my former friends. Yes, I said “former.” As soon as my father’s scandal hit the papers, my friends fled—and so did my boyfriend—Peter dumped me like last year’s handbag.
But Wesley and I made it through somehow and one day I looked up to discover that he was a grown man. As you can imagine, Wesley and I are close, but we do disagree on a few things. Wesley is convinced my father is innocent and is hiding out until he can prove it … I’m convinced my father is an asshole and is hiding out on a tropical island.
Another area in which my brother and I disagree: Wesley, now nineteen, has an aversion to working a regular job—he’d rather play Texas Hold ‘Em poker and hang out with the wrong sort of people. In fact, he’s up to his—and my—neck in debt to two loan sharks. And recently he was arrested for hacking into the courthouse computer database to delete speeding tickets for his friends. When I went to post bail, I met the arresting officer, Detective Jack Terry, and we didn’t exactly hit it off.
Wesley’s arrest caught the attention of the D.A. who’d arrested our father and decided to take it out on Wesley. My dad’s former attorney—and lover, sheesh—stepped in to help Wesley and he got off with probation and a fine—yay, more debt. But with the Wren family back on the radar, the D.A. decided to reopen my father’s case and assign it to none other than Detective Terry.
Deciding that Wesley needed a little tough love, I told him to get a job or get out. And he got one—moving bodies for the morgue! His boss, Cooper Craft, was cuter than I expected a man who ran a funeral home and moved bodies would be, but still, it’s a creepy way to make a living.
Meanwhile, I decided to crash an upscale party—I do that occasionally, but I’m not proud of it—and ran into my old flame, Peter Ashford, who had married a former friend of mine and was doing very well for himself working for the firm where my father had once worked. Problem was, Peter wasn’t happy in his marriage and he felt bad about the way he’d dumped me and wanted to pick up where we left off.
Then—and this is where things get hairy—his wife was murdered and I was implicated because she and I had had a little spat. And of course none other than Detective Jack Terry led the investigation. It looked like Peter had actually murdered his wife—in fact, he confessed to it! But I knew he was innocent so I did some investigating on my own and the real killer was eventually caught—after a few bullets were exchanged and Detective Terry sort of saved my, as he put it, “ungrateful behind.”
So suddenly I had three new men in my life: Peter, Jack and Cooper. Wesley swore to me that he’d given up gambling. Things were looking up. I’d even begun to think my life was getting back to normal—and then my long-lost father called.
1
“Sweetheart, it’s me … Daddy.”
Carlotta Wren stepped off the up escalator in the Atlanta Neiman Marcus department store where she worked, so shocked by the sound of the voice on the other end that she dropped her cell phone. It landed on the shiny, waxed floor with a smack, bounced and skidded away. With her heart in her stomach, she frantically scrambled after the fleeing phone, the baritone of her long-lost fugitive father ringing in her ears.
Was it really him calling after ten years of silence? Ten years during which she’d put her life on hold to finish raising herself and her younger brother Wesley after her parents had skipped bail—and town—on investment fraud charges. Ten years of feeling alone and abandoned after her friends and even her fiancé had withdrawn their affection in light of the scandal.
The tiny phone spun away like a mouse scurrying for cover. Carlotta gulped air as she clambered after it, brushing the shoulders of people in her path, darting between racks of clothing. The foot of a striding customer struck the phone and sent it spinning in another direction. Carlotta hurtled after it, feeling her father slip farther from her grasp with every agonizing second that passed. She was practically hyperventilating when she fell to her knees, curled her fingers around the elusive phone and jammed it to her ear. “Hello? Daddy?”
Dead air. If it had been Randolph Wren on the other end of the line, he was gone.
A sob welled up in her chest. “Daddy, can you hear me?”
She couldn’t bring herself to hang up, unwilling to sever the only connection she’d had with her father in over a decade. Then she realized that he might be trying to call her back and stabbed the disconnect button. Sitting under a rack of beaded bathing-suit sarongs, Carlotta stared at the phone, willing it to ring again, thinking how ridiculous she would seem to an onlooker—an almost thirty-year-old woman sitting on the floor waiting for a call back from her long-lost daddy.
Somewhere between her nonexistent career goals, her brother’s legal problems, their hulking debt to loan sharks and her confused love life, she’d made the transition from pitiful to pathetic.
Suddenly she remembered the callback feature and realized with a surge of excitement that she’d at least be able to see what number he’d called from. She stabbed at buttons on the phone, but was rewarded with a rather sick-sounding tone and noticed with dismay that the display was interrupted by a hairline crack. Liquid gathered in one corner, much like when Wesley had broken his Etch-a-Sketch when he was little.
“You can’t be broken,” Carlotta pleaded, blinking back tears. What would she tell Wesley? That their father had finally made contact and she’d hung up on him? Wesley still believed that their father was innocent and that he and their mother would return some day to clear his name and unite their shattered family. Carlotta felt less forgiving, especially toward her mother Valerie, who hadn’t been charged with a crime, yet had chosen a life on the lam over her own children.
“Ring,” she whispered, hoping that only the display had been compromised. She sat on her heels for five long minutes, her thumb hovering over the answer button, perspiration wetting her forehead. A shadow fell over her. When she looked up, she winced inwardly to see the general manager, Lindy Russell, standing with her eyebrows raised.
Minus ten points.
Next to Lindy stood a tall, narrow blonde, conservatively coiffed down to her upper class hair flip and wearing a haughty expression. Carlotta recognized her from sales meetings; she was new and worked in accessories next to the shoe department where Carlotta’s friend Michael Lane worked. Patricia somebody or another.
“Carlotta, is there a problem?” Lindy asked.
Carlotta pushed to her feet and straightened her clothing. During the dash for her phone she’d lost a shoe. “No.”
“Glad to hear it. You know you’re not supposed to be using your cell phone while you’re working the floor.”
“Yes,” Carlotta said, her throat closing. “But this is a—an emergency.”
“Oh?” Lindy crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Are you on an organ-donor list?”
“No.”
“The phone-a-friend for a contestant on a national trivia show?”
“No.”
“Waiting to hear back from your next employer?”
Patricia snickered and Carlotta swallowed. “N-no.”
Lindy extended her hand. “Hand it over. You can pick it up at the end of your shift.”
“But—”
“No buts, Carlotta. You’re already skating on thin ice around here.”
Carlotta bit her tongue. Lindy had been more than fair to give her a get-out-of-jail-free card for buying clothes on her employee discount, wearing them to crash upscale parties, then returning the fancy outfits for full credit. Ditto when she had been involved in a knock-down drag-out fight with a customer right here in the store—and been implicated in that customer’s subsequent murder. That particular misunderstanding had since been cleared up, but Carlotta’s once-stellar sales record had slipped badly in the interim. It hadn’t helped that the murdered woman had been a high-volume customer.
She was lucky that she hadn’t been canned weeks ago, and since she and Wesley depended on her paycheck for little things like paying the mortgage … with a shaky smile, she handed the phone to Lindy.
“Carlotta, have you met Patricia Alexander?”
“Not formally.” She extended her hand to the blonde. “Hello.”
The woman’s hand was just as cold as her smile. “Hello.”
“Patricia is number one in sales this week,” Lindy said.
“Congratulations,” Carlotta murmured, stinging with the knowledge that not too long ago, she had owned that number one spot.
“Thanks,” Patricia said, then laughed—a sound that reminded Carlotta of a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. “No hard feelings, I hope.”
“Why should there be?”
The woman angled her head. “Because I plan to break your sales record. Better watch your back.” Her frosty smile didn’t match her breezy tone.
Lindy gave Carlotta a pointed look, then dropped the phone into her jacket pocket. Carlotta watched the women walk away, along with all hopes of talking to her father today.
Had it really been him? And if so, would he think she’d hung up on him purposely, that she didn’t want to talk to him? Worrying her lower lip, she wondered—did she?
If anyone had asked what she would do if her father called out of the blue, Carlotta would’ve sworn that she would hang up on him. Over the years her anger had grown into an almost tangible mass, like a tumor. Yet at the sound of his voice, she had regressed to Daddy’s little girl—the entitled, spoiled teenager she’d been when he’d disappeared, the naive, young woman who couldn’t conceive that her parents would desert her and her nine-year-old brother. With a mere four words uttered from his mouth, she’d been ready to accept his explanation and his apology … assuming he’d had either to offer.
She covered her mouth to suppress the aching wail that lodged in her throat. Knowing that her father still had that much power over her made her feel even less in control than usual. How dare he dive-bomb back into their lives like that?
Perilously close to losing it, Carlotta backtracked to find her shoe, but was blinded by tears of frustration. She wiped at her eyes angrily and swore under her breath.
“Is this what you’re looking for?”
She winced, then turned at the unmistakable noise of Detective Jack Terry’s voice. She blinked away the moisture to find him studying her red Dior stiletto-heel slide with the same intensity that she’d seen him study evidence at crime scenes. Wesley’s job as a body mover had thrown her and the detective into close proximity at a couple of crime scenes, with abrasive results. Jack Terry was the one person she didn’t want to see right now—the brute had recently reopened her father’s case.
“Yes,” she snapped, snatching the shoe out of his big hand. “What are you doing here?”
“Irritating you, apparently.” Then he suddenly looked sheepish and she realized he was dressed too casually to be on duty. He cleared his throat. “If you must know, I need a monkey suit for a bigwig department dinner and I could use your … uh … help … picking out something.”
Her anger receded. He had no idea what had just transpired. And wouldn’t know unless she told him … or unless he’d made good on his threat to put a trace on her and Wesley’s phones. He wasn’t convinced that a handful of postcards was the only contact they’d had with their missing parents.
He gestured over his shoulder. “Maybe I should just go to the place where I usually shop.”
“I didn’t realize that Dick’s Sporting Goods sold formal wear,” she said dryly.
“This was a bad idea.” He turned to go.
“No, Jack. Wait.” He stopped and Carlotta wondered if he realized it was the first time she’d called him anything other than Detective Terry—or one of the several unsavory nicknames she had uttered privately. But recently he—and one of her collectible Judith Leiber breastplate necklaces, circa mid-1980s—had saved her from the bullet of a murderer, and in the aftermath, something electric had passed between them. She felt that confusing jolt now, at a loss to explain why she would be attracted to this good old Southern boy who—between arresting her brother for hacking into the Atlanta courthouse records, resurrecting her father’s case and grilling her about her customer’s murder—seemed to have made her family’s lawlessness his pet project.
“What?” His nose flared and she sensed that he too felt the unwelcome sexual energy bouncing between them.
To break the moment, she narrowed her eyes. “No way are you going to deny me the pleasure of seeing you buttoned into a tux.”
Jack frowned. “Sadist.”
She smiled and dropped her shoe, trying to compose herself as she pushed her bare foot inside. Her father would call back … of course he would. She wobbled and Jack reached out to steady her.
He gave a little laugh, his gold-colored eyes narrow with sudden concern. “Are you all right? You seem on edge.”
Carlotta stared at his big hand on her arm, reminding herself that if Jack Terry appeared concerned for her well-being, it was only because he was trying to get on her good side in the hope that she would lead him to her parents.
She pulled away. “I’m fine, Detective. Follow me.”
2
During the ride down the escalator, Carlotta’s neck burned with a fiery itch. She was certain Jack Terry could tell she was keeping something from him.
But the brawny detective appeared preoccupied himself. He wore what she was coming to recognize as his off-duty uniform: black T-shirt, worn jeans and black cowboy boots. And, she conceded begrudgingly, he wore it well. His rugged profile, close-cut dark hair and bronze skin made for a compelling view, yet he seemed completely unaware of women’s heads turning as they stepped off the escalator and headed toward the men’s department.
