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Ironically, the person of most interest to the press of late was Ellie, a petite redhead who’d caught the eye and captured the heart of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor. But the immense size and remote location of Granite Ridge Ranch, Fitz and Ellie’s home in Southwest Montana, prevented the press from prying too deeply into their private lives.
“What engagement?” Burke asked again.
“Not an engagement, exactly. More like an assignment.” Fitz stood and headed toward the miniscule kitchen. He selected one of the beers he himself had stocked in the cubelike refrigerator and waved a bottle of water at Burke.
Burke shook his head. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear. “And just what is this assignment?”
Fitz popped the bottle cap and took a long, slow sip. “What did Greenberg want?”
“Your head on a platter.”
“And?”
“Nora’s signature on that contract.”
The movie she’d filmed last summer in Montana with Fitz would open soon, and all indications were it was going to open big. She had her choice of scripts right now, and Fitz and Greenberg were pressuring her to choose theirs.
His, actually. Burke was the one who’d chosen the script for the classic screwball comedy, sold his bosses on the idea and secured the studio’s blessing to launch the presale phase of production. He was the one who’d suggested Nora for the lead.
Nora Daniels was an actress poised on the brink of stardom. Men loved her lush, exotic features; women loved her sparkling, impetuous personality. Everyone loved her story: the daughter of an Argentinian heiress and an Irish entrepreneur who’d eloped to New York and gambled away their fortunes on a series of bad investments. When their marriage had crumbled, they’d both fled the country in the company of wealthier partners and left their beautiful baby daughter in the erratic care of a series of nannies and tutors, in a succession of hotels and flats.
At sixteen, she’d ditched an afternoon ballet lesson to sneak into a Broadway theater during an open call. Her audition performance had become a legend.
Audiences were enthralled with her style and flash, and she floated easily from the stage to the screen and back again. So far she’d preferred supporting roles, selecting those that would showcase her talent without compromising the progress of her career. She chose her work situations with equal care, seeking the company of an intimate group of friends, finding at rehearsals and on sets the relationships she’d craved during her childhood.
Two years ago the thirty-year-old actress had married an ambitious businessman, a restaurateur who’d assembled a talented staff in a stylish establishment, attracting a chic clientele. She’d believed she’d found a man who’d give her a family and a home. Instead, he’d deserted her when she was three months pregnant, leaving her alone in the house she’d purchased for them both.
Fitz’s shoulders lifted and fell in a deep sigh. “She’s talking about putting her house on the market.”
Burke stilled. “Sorry?”
“Her house. The one in the Hills.”
“She won’t do it.” Burke shoved off the desk and strode to the window, staring blindly at the glare of security lights on wet, black pavement. “She loves that house. It took her years to find it.”
His lips twitched at the image of Nora dragging her samples about in the bulging handbags she preferred, driving them all insane with her constant requests for opinions about wallpapers and fabrics. “It’s going to take her years to redecorate it.”
“I don’t think she’s coming back.”
“Back here?” Burke felt as though he’d been run through with a lance of ice. “But—but she lives here.”
“She hasn’t lived here since Thanksgiving.” Fitz set his bottle on the counter with a loud clink. “She’s dug in so deep in the guest cabin I don’t think I could blast her loose with a stack of dynamite.”
“You’re the one who invited her.” Burke turned and aimed an accusing look at his friend. “‘Come for the holidays,’ you said. ‘Stay as long as you want.’”
“I didn’t invite her,” said Fitz. “That was Jenna’s doing.”
Nora had struck up a friendship with Fitz’s mother-in-law during the location shoot. Burke suspected Jenna Harrison Winterhawk had played a valuable supporting role for Nora during her pregnancy, and had probably continued in that role since Nora had given birth, in Montana, to a daughter of her own. Jenna was probably serving as a real-life model for the kind of mother Nora had never known.
“You were the one who told her she could stay,” Burke pointed out.
“I didn’t think she would!” Fitz flung his arms wide as he paced. “She’s been there nearly four months. Four months!”
“I know how long it’s been.”
Burke slipped his hands into his pockets. He’d missed her, oddly enough. He’d never thought he’d admit such a thing to himself, but he did.
He’d missed her energetic conversation and her lusty laugh, the way she could sweep into a room like a whirlwind and set things spiraling out of control. He’d enjoyed the way she’d shower him with praise for bailing her out of her latest spot of trouble, the way she’d bat her eyelashes at him like the outrageous flirt she was and tell him he was her knight in shining armor.
She deserved a knight, whether that man wore armor or not. She was a dear and special friend, and he treasured her for that as much as for her company.
“I’m surrounded, out there at the ranch.” Fitz collapsed on the sofa, legs sprawling. “I’m surrounded by gestating, lactating, menstruating women.”
“God.” Burke moved to the refrigerator and snatched a bottle of water to wash away the disagreeable sensation that had crept up the back of his throat.
“Did I tell you Jody got her period?”
Burke nearly choked. “Did you hear me ask?”
“All those hormones.” Fitz sighed. “The aches and pains. The tears.”
Burke tipped the bottle back and swallowed again, hard. “When do you go back?”
“Not soon enough.” Fitz slumped against the cushions. “God, I miss them.”
“I suppose one does get used to being surrounded,” said Burke, just to be polite, though he didn’t see how such a thing was possible.
“Yeah, well, you’ll get your chance.”
Burke froze. “I beg your pardon.”
“That’s the assignment I was talking about.”
“Fitz.” Burke lowered his bottle. “You can’t seriously be suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m telling you.” He stared at Burke, and he was as serious as Burke had ever seen him. “Someone has to get Nora’s signature on that contract.”
“You’re her friend.” Burke hated the note of desperation in his voice, and he willed it away. “You live there. You like it there. You’ll go for a visit, you’ll ask her to come back and sign the contract. She’ll do it for you.”
“I’ve already asked her, several times.” Fitz sank even lower on the sofa. “The last time I brought up the subject, I must have pushed a little too hard or said something the wrong way, because she—” he rubbed a hand over his eyes, his mouth twisting in a pained grimace “—she cried.”
“God.” Burke pinched the bridge of his nose, knocking his glasses out of place. “Let me get this straight. You want me to fly out to Montana in the dead of winter.”
“It’s not the dead of winter.” Fitz shrugged. “Not exactly.”
“But there will be snow. And temperatures below freezing.”
“It doesn’t feel that cold when you’re working in it.”
“Which I won’t be doing, since I don’t know how to do ranch work.”
The thought of ranch work—of disgusting things done to half-wild animals that outweighed a man by several hundred pounds, of incomprehensible chores involving tools and machinery that could mangle a body in innumerable ways, all accomplished in conditions reeking of manure and worse—made him draw a deep, calming breath.
Which was immediately followed by a second wave of dread. “You want me to walk into that stew of female biological processes and press a new mother for a business decision?”
Fitz nodded. “That just about sums it up, yeah.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re you.” Fitz gave him a reassuring grin. “The original ice man. Mr. Calm-Cool-and-Collected. And because Nora trusts you.”
“About that trust factor…” Burke dumped the remainder of his water down the tiny bar sink. “If I convince her to do this, will I be acting in her best interests?”
Fitz narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think I like the implications in that question.”
Burke met his friend’s glare with one of his own. “I didn’t think you would, but I thought it needed to be asked.”
“All right.” Fitz nodded. “Here’s another question loaded with uncomfortable implications. If you don’t push her to do this, will you be acting in your own best interests?”
Burke dropped his empty bottle in the dustbin. “Is my job at stake?”
“No, your job is secure.”
“Because of my association with you?”
Fitz’s silence was filled with implications.
“I think Greenberg resents that fact even more than my snotty Brit attitude.”
“You leave Greenberg to me.”
“I bloody well won’t.” Burke shoved his hands into his pockets before he was tempted to ram them into something else. “I know I wouldn’t have this job if I hadn’t started as your assistant. But I’ve got it now, and I intend to do it as well as I can. As well as you expect me to. As well as Greenberg thinks it should be done.”
“So,” said Fitz with a grin, “you’re going to Montana.”
“It appears I am.” Burke lifted a hand to settle his glasses over his nose. “God help me.”
CHAPTER TWO
NORA LOWERED her knitting needles to her lap with a mournful sigh. “It’s snowing again.”
Jenna twitched back one of the lace curtain panels draped in the deep, three-windowed bay in the second parlor of the Harrison family home. The beam of a lamp on the tea table at her side captured the silver threaded through her honey-gold hair and highlighted the tiny lines at the corners of her blue eyes as she peered at the view beyond the glass pane. Rolling pastureland, buried beneath several inches of snow, stretched to the timbered foothills of the Tobacco Root Mountains.
“So it is,” she said in her muted Texas twang.
“Burke isn’t used to driving in snow.”
“Doesn’t it snow in England?” Jenna turned her attention back to her own needlework project, a cross-stitch keepsake for one of the babies due in early summer. Her former daughter-in-law, Ellie, was expecting a baby a few weeks before her daughter, Maggie Hammond.
“Burke’s from London,” said Nora, though she didn’t know much more about his past than that. “I’m sure they don’t let the snow pile up in the streets there. And it’s getting late. And colder. And I don’t think he knows how to put on chains.”
Jenna knotted a strand of pink floss and snipped off the end. “You seem mighty anxious about Burke’s arrival.”
“That’s because I have a good idea why he’s coming.” And that idea, with its dark and complicated twists and turns, was enough to make her throat close up and her palms sweat. Facing Burke meant facing her insecurities about her future.
She scrunched the beginnings of a tiny sweater to the end of one needle before stabbing them both into a ball of fuzzy pink yarn. “It’s like he and Fitz are playing the good cop, bad cop routine. And Burke’s the bad cop.”
She knew she was overacting it, wringing the situation for every dramatic drop. And from the look Jenna sent her, it was obvious that Jenna knew it, too. But an actress had to stretch every once in a while to stay in shape. Besides, her friends here at Granite Ridge often seemed amused by her excesses.
“Well, you don’t have anything to worry about.” Jenna tidied her things and set them aside. “You’re not a criminal.”
“No,” said Nora. “Just a fugitive.”
A door slammed on the far side of the rambling, Victorian-era house. “Gran!” called Ellie’s daughter, Jody, a few moments later. “I got an A on my math test.”
“I’d better go catch her,” said Jenna, “before she and her aunt Maggie decide that’s reason enough to celebrate and spoil their dinners. Those two can empty the cookie jar when their after-school snacking gets out of hand.”
Nora glanced out the window again, fretting over the fat white flakes falling from a darkening sky. Burke was supposed to arrive in time for the evening meal, but perhaps the snowfall would delay him. Or maybe he’d lose his way. He hadn’t been here since Fitz and Ellie’s wedding, and things looked different under all that white.
They looked clean. Clean and pure, and lovelier than anything she’d ever seen. Everyone she’d met here—and everyone back in California—had warned her that winter in Montana could be harsh, but Nora loved it. She loved everything about this place and the people who lived in it.
No one here measured her worth by her looks or her talent or her box office draw, no one criticized her choices or questioned her decisions. No one here expected her to be anything but herself—and they’d given her the space and the freedom to begin to rediscover who that person was.
Maybe she’d abused Fitz’s hospitality a bit too long while hiding from Hollywood’s spotlight through the worst days of her divorce. And maybe she’d relied on Jenna a bit too much for help with her baby. But she’d needed that time and that help while she prepared to face the next phase of her life and take the next steps in her career.
She hadn’t figured on having to face Burke.
Fitz’s long-suffering assistant had always been one of her favorite people, a man she could tease with a safe and sisterly affection. A paragon who could patiently smooth every wrinkle and methodically clip every loose thread. The idea that all that patient efficiency would soon be aimed in her direction was a bit unnerving.
“My, don’t you look domestic.” Maggie sauntered into the parlor, an oversized sugar cookie in one hand and a tall glass of milk in the other. “Seeing you like that makes me feel as warm and fuzzy as that yarn.”
Nora smiled as she tucked her knitting into the tapestry satchel Jenna had given her for Christmas. Warm and fuzzy were the last words she’d choose to describe her friend. Maggie might have had her mother’s coloring, but there was nothing soft or countrified about the woman who stood before her in a short-and-sassy layered hairstyle, a silk-and-velvet kimono-style top and pencil-slim designer jeans.
“Is that for me?” Nora reached for the snack Maggie offered. “My, aren’t you generous.”
“Only because I helped myself to plenty before I came out here. And I’ve got this.” Maggie pulled another cookie from a deep pocket and sank into the chair Jenna had vacated, crossing her model-length legs. “Mom’s fussing over dinner. When is Burke going to show?”
“Any minute now.” Nora sipped the milk and stared past the curtains. “If nothing happened to him.”
“You mean, like a blizzard or an avalanche or some other natural disaster? That’s about what it would take to stop him.”
“He might get lost.”
“Bet he’s got GPS on that phone of his. He’s got practically everything else, including the private numbers for every Hollywood exec, European fashion model and Fortune 500 zillionaire.” Maggie’s mouth turned up in a crooked grin. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he had a gizmo in some pocket that holds a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the launch codes for our intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
Nora’s smile stretched around a bite of cookie. “You make him sound like a comic-book character.”
“If the colored tights fit…” Maggie leaned back and stacked her stylish heeled boots on a needlepoint stool. “Actually, I think they’d fit pretty well. And look damn good on him, too.”
