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Especially since she almost certainly would never return to her hometown again. Not unless her little sister was welcome, too…which didn’t seem likely. Not after the way their grandparents—and even their mother—had reacted to Allie’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy. And to Sabrina’s so-called culpability in the affair. After all, she’d been the one who’d brought that vermin-in-sheep’s-clothing into their lives.
She hated Peter Prescott for going after her sister to get even with Sabrina for breaking up with him—and for turning him in to their employer for his dishonest activities. But she positively loathed him for costing both sisters their family. Judgmental and old-fashioned or not, they were the only family Sabrina had. And she truly missed them.
Well…most of them.
“I know enough about engines to know you’re never going to be able to get to that green wire.” She pushed his hand out of the way and slipped her fingers into the crevice, catching a frayed wire between the tips of two fingers. She might not always be able to walk in big-girl shoes, but she knew how to use her hands.
And she’d sure like to use them on him….
“Excellent,” he murmured. “I scraped the rust off the receptor—can you reattach it?”
She did so, pretending she didn’t notice the warmth of his breath against her hair. Nothing, however, could make her forget feeling it.
Once she’d accomplished the task, Sabrina leaned out of the way, allowing the stranger to get back to work. He focused on the motor for a few minutes, until she almost thought he’d forgotten she was there.
Then, under his breath, he asked, “Are you from Trouble?”
“No. You?”
He shook his head. “Just visiting.”
“Hot time in the big city?” She didn’t bother keeping the dry tone out of her voice.
“What can I say?” he said with a small laugh. “I love life in the fast lane.”
“I think a horse and buggy would be too fast for this town, so I don’t imagine you’re going to stumble over any Hooters restaurants or wet T-shirt contests.”
His lips twitched as if he was about to laugh at her quip, but he didn’t. Instead, a slight frown tugged at his brow and his mouth pulled tight with disapproval. “I can’t imagine such a thing. It’s awful to think women would degrade themselves in such a way or that men would enjoy it.”
Surprise made her jaw drop. He was shocked by the idea?
Wow, this had to be one amazing guy if he thought bouncing breasts in wet cotton were utterly shocking when she, Reverend Caleb Tucker’s oldest granddaughter, did not. For a man who looked like this one, even Sabrina might forget that a wet T-shirt wouldn’t look so great over the push-up bra she wore when she needed to pretend she had some cleavage.
“You know, I hear the old movie theater opens once a month,” he offered, his eyes wide and innocent. “Third Saturday…that’s coming up. Better keep your calendar clear.”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
His eyes widened in surprise. “But, well, I don’t even know you, ma’am.”
She almost gnashed her teeth, embarrassed as hell. He wasn’t being insulting and she hadn’t shocked him. He simply sounded a little surprised, as if he wasn’t used to such a forward female.
Ha. Nancy had been telling her for four years—since she’d hired Sabrina right out of college—that she was about as romantically aggressive as a guppy. Why this man—who had obviously in no way been making sexual comments earlier—was making her behave in such a way, she had no idea.
“I was just joking,” she mumbled, wondering if the heat in her cheeks had made her face flame red. And if there was any way he’d interpret such redness as her skin crisping under the bright sun. One could hope.
“So why are you here, anyway?” he asked.
She thought of her cover story, the one she and Nancy had concocted. From all reports, Max Taylor’s eccentric—some said mad—old grandfather had just purchased this entire town. And his grandson was here trying to get the man out of the deal, or else resell the property.
She didn’t like carrying on the charade when Taylor wasn’t around to hear it, but since she needed to maintain the facade for as long as she was here, she stuck to her story. “I’m just looking the place over, for possible investment purposes. This is the town that was advertised in the New York Times, isn’t it, with lots of potential for investors?”
His eyes flared and the man reared back, almost tumbling to his butt on the dusty ground. Then a broad smile brightened his face, setting those green eyes to sparkling and sucking the last coherent thought right out of Sabrina’s head.
“You bet it is, and you won’t regret making the trip. Do you need a tour guide? I’d be glad to show you around.” Rising to his feet again, he reached down to help her up, as well.
She shouldn’t have taken his hand. Shouldn’t have let skin touch skin. At the feel of his rough, warm fingers against her own, she mentally crossed the big giant T in her brain that reminded her she was in big trouble. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the name of the godforsaken little town.
No. She was in trouble because now, when she could least afford it, she’d stumbled over the kind of male distraction she’d almost given up on finding. A distraction who was looking at her like she was his guardian angel and Playboy fantasy woman all rolled into one.
She yanked her hand away, clenching then unclenching her fingers to get them to stop tingling.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re here. Have you seen all the public buildings yet? Been inside that movie theater? There’s a huge amount of potential there.”
Sabrina, still reeling from the way she’d reacted to his simple touch, remained silent.
“What a fortunate coincidence that we met,” he added, his enthusiasm so boyishly charming that she couldn’t help smiling in response.
“Why is that?”
“Because I’m exactly the man you need to see.”
She did need to see him. Naked. And soon. No matter what her brain was telling her about why he was the wrong kind of man, her sexual self wanted nothing more than to watch his clothes come off piece by piece, to reveal that incredible body under the bright, sunny sky.
But he couldn’t know that…she hoped. Which meant he was referring to something else.
“How so?”
“Because I happen to have an ‘in’ with the owner of this place and I can guarantee he’d love to meet you.”
The 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.”
Her hawk-eyed sister noticed. “You’re blushing.”
“Where’s Daddy?”
“Why? Where were you? What aren’t you telling me?” Ivy braced her hands on the table. Pushing herself up with her strong, wiry arms, she rose on her spindly legs. She tottered over on those ridiculous high-heeled shoes that her vanity kept her from tossing into the trash heap where they could rest with Ivy’s youth.
The heels put her nose to nose with Ida Mae—another reason Ida hated them—and Ivy took full advantage. Staring so hard her eyes almost bugged out, Ivy pasted on that mulish expression that said she wasn’t going to give up until Ida Mae came clean with her secret.
But, no. Not this one. She wouldn’t.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, she didn’t have to.
“It’s a man!”
Damnation, her sister was a know-it-all.
“Who? Who? Who?” Ivy chirped, like a greedy baby hoot owl opening its mouth for a still-wiggling worm dangling from its mama’s beak.
“Don’t be so foolish…”
Ivy grabbed the front of Ida Mae’s blouse—her favorite one, with the little birds stitched on the collar. She knew how much Ida Mae liked birds because Ivy had stitched the thing herself as a Christmas gift. “Bye-bye, blackbird,” she whispered in a singsong voice as she began to pluck at the threads with the long tips of her nails.
“Stop it.”
“Who is he?”
Ivy wasn’t going to stop. She’d tear the delicate birds right off her blouse, then move on to something else Ida Mae loved, until she got what she wanted. The name. Ida Mae knew it…because she’d have done exactly the same thing.
“All right,” she snapped, determined that one day she would learn to keep a secret.
A joyful smile took ten years off Ivy’s face. Ida Mae made a mental note to not tell any funny stories around her sister when eligible bachelors were in the vicinity.
“Really? You’ll share?”
She’d rather share a bowl of rat pellets. But there would be no stopping Ivy now. “Yes.”
“Who?” her silver-haired sister asked, almost bouncing on her toes like a debutante.
Ivy always had been man-crazy. Unlike Ida Mae, who simply liked men so much she sometimes felt the need to marry one for a while. “Just a stranger.”
“A handsome one?”
“No.”
“Liar. Where’d you meet him?”
