The Reluctant Heiress

“They might know who I am,” she conceded, “but I don’t have to talk to them.”

“That’s not going to stop them from invading your life. That’s why I’m here,” he emphasized, needing her to grasp the gravity of the situation. “My job is to help you with the media that’s going to descend the minute they discover your identity.” And to put the proper spin on what you say, he admitted to himself. If she knew that, though, she’d only want to get rid of him that much faster. “They will arrive,” he assured her. “If not today, then tomorrow for certain. As difficult as it may be to accept, you can’t avoid any of this.”

The woman clearly had no idea how vulnerable she was. Hoping he didn’t sound impatient with her, he deliberately gentled his tone.

“William wants you to know he’s not about to leave you to the wolves. And that’s exactly what you’ll think has happened once your phone starts ringing with requests for statements and interviews.” He slowly shook his head. “This really isn’t something you want to try to handle alone.”

For a moment Jillian said nothing. She found it disconcerting enough to be face-to-face with one of her famous father’s associates. But Ben Garrett was unsettling in his own right. The man was confident to a fault, incredibly persuasive in his arguments and utterly convinced of his certainty of what was about to happen. Yet, even more disturbing than his absolute insistence was the physical impact of his presence.

He possessed the same compelling aura of authority and influence she’d sensed in William when she’d met him, only in a more elemental and infinitely more disquieting way. He stood nearly ten feet from her, yet she could almost feel the energy that radiated from him like a force field. That raw power sensitized her nerves, tugged hard at something low in her belly.

She didn’t doubt for an instant that he was a man accustomed to achieving exactly what he set out to accomplish. He was the alpha other men envied and women turned stupid for—just as her mother had done with William. But turning stupid over a total stranger wasn’t on her list of back-to-school resolutions. Nor was she about to have a stranger tell her what she should do. Especially one she strongly suspected wanted only to cover William’s tracks.

Feeling a definite need for the situation in general and this unnerving man in particular to go away, she adopted the end-of-discussion tone she used when a student was being particularly obtuse.

“Mr. Garrett,” she began, “please tell your client I appreciate his concern, but I can manage on my own. If I can handle thirty second-graders on a sugar high after a class birthday party, I can probably deal with a few reporters.”

“It’ll be more than a few.”

“Then, I’ll handle however many there are,” she insisted, only to immediately soften her tone. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way for nothing. I’m sure you’re very qualified to do whatever it is you do, but I don’t want anything from William. Not even his help.

“No offense to you,” she concluded, because she didn’t believe in shooting the messenger—even if the messenger was part of the reason her stomach was jumping.

She’d seen something that looked suspiciously like sympathy in his disturbing blue eyes moments ago. She caught a glimpse of it again before he glanced away. She just couldn’t tell if it was real or calculated.

She never should have gone to see William, she thought, reaching to stuff the last of the stones and twigs into the bag. Loss and anger had pushed her. That alone should have told her seeking him out would be a mistake.

The chirping of birds joined the rustle of plastic as Ben prepared to argue his position. The woman really had no concept of what she was about to face. He’d seen seasoned politicians and corporate heads cave under the media’s badgering, and he had no clear idea of what she would say or do when the press found her. But pressing his point didn’t seem like such a good idea just then. Jillian Hadley might be as naive as a newborn about what was to come, but there was a sense of independence about her—or maybe it was simply stubbornness—that told him pushing too hard would only push her farther away. He needed her cooperation. He wouldn’t get it by badgering her.

With his first efforts frustrated, Ben prepared to retreat. He wasn’t admitting defeat by any means. He would simply let time work in his favor.

Reaching inside his jacket, he pulled out a pen and one of his business cards. Using the table beside him, he wrote his cell phone number on the back of the card. Two steps later he held it out to her.

The breeze shifted. As it did, it caught her scent, something elusive, faintly exotic and far more sensual than he would have expected a woman who worked with small children to wear.

A muscle in his jaw jerked.

“Call me when you change your mind.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Jillian assured him, but took the card anyway. Anything to get him on his way. “But thank you.”

With a nod of his dark head, he murmured, “You’re welcome,” and turned to stride back the way he’d come.

Not until he’d disappeared around the side of the house did Jillian realize she’d been holding her breath. Realizing it now, it escaped in a rush as she stuffed his card in her skirt pocket and grabbed her sack.

Considering the amount of doom he’d predicted, she hadn’t expected him to give up and go so easily. Just glad that he had, she hurried toward her back door with her chest feeling far too tight and a sense of foreboding fast on her heels. If the press did find her, the next few days could be a little unsettling. But she had weathered upsetting days before.

For months after her mom had been diagnosed and she’d lost both her mom and Eric, she’d felt as if she’d been in a total, stomach-dropping free fall. Nothing about her world had felt the same. Not even the parts that had kept her from feeling as if she had nothing to latch on to, nothing to keep her life from spinning completely out of control. Now that she’d finally gotten her feet back under her, and the dark cloud that had hung over her head had lifted, she was not about to let her life get messed up again. Especially not by William Kendrick.

She could handle this, she assured herself over the squeak of her back screen door as she pulled it open. And she could handle it on her own. She did not need Ben Garrett.

Or so she thought before she found herself rather desperately needing to seek his advice less than twelve hours later.

Chapter Two

In the five minutes since Jillian had scrambled from her car into her duplex, her telephone had barely stopped ringing. It rang now as she paced behind the low moss-green sofa dividing her normally tranquil living room from her kitchen and dining area. Her teacher’s copies of the textbooks she would be using that year lay scattered over the sofa’s cushions. She’d dumped them there on her way across the room to yank closed the drapes.

Opposite the sofa, the offending instrument summoned her from the end table between two barrel chairs. In between, sat the coffee table holding a trio of lime-scented candles, the latest cooking magazines and Cosmo, and the faucet knob that had come off in the shower that morning.

She had intended to mention the broken knob to her landlady when she returned from school that afternoon. Her phone conversation a minute ago with Irene White, however, had not been about the plumbing.

Holding Ben’s business card between two fingers, she nervously flicked it with her thumb.

Had she known anyone else who would know what to do, she would call them and beg for help. She just couldn’t think of a single person who’d had any experience being followed by a pack of rabid reporters.

She paced back past the phone, nerves jumping. It was no longer possible to believe she could somehow escape recognition, or that she could handle the press alone. Hoping that the matter would simply go away had been a total waste of energy. So had been praying for a miracle. The “matter” had arrived. It was literally on her doorstep—and the only person she knew with the expertise to deal with it was the six feet of disturbing, urban masculinity that William Kendrick had sent to deal with her.

Hating the position she felt forced into, she snatched up the phone seconds after it stopped ringing and punched in the cell phone number Ben had written on the back of his card. She was staring at his handwriting, thinking that the bold, confident strokes suited his personality perfectly when he answered on the third ring.

“Ben Garrett.”

She would have recognized the deep, authoritative tones of his voice even if he hadn’t identified himself. Pacing to the window facing the street, she peeked between the heavy beige drapes she’d closed only minutes ago.

“It’s Jillian. I have a…situation.”

Over a faint crackle in the connection, he calmly asked, “What’s going on?”

“Do you want to know what’s going on now? Or what’s been going on all day?”

“You choose.”

“In that case,” she replied, more irritated at William by the minute for putting her in this position, “a gray SUV followed me to school this morning. I thought I was just being paranoid when I first saw it because of what you’d said yesterday about the press showing up, but there was a black car behind it. It followed me, too.”

She found it impossible to remain still. Nerves had her turning from the drapes to pace around the coffee table. “They both parked outside the school and both were still there when I left. In between, one of the teachers told me after lunch that a reporter was in the school office asking personal questions about me. He apparently had a picture of me and William.

“The principal asked him to leave,” she continued, feeling her grip on calm slip, “but there were more guys with telephoto lenses on their cameras hanging over the schoolyard fence when I left. I think most of them followed me home. I know the first two guys did. They’re out front with the reporters who were waiting for me when I got here.”

The muffled honk of a horn filtered over the phone line. A moment later a brushing noise made her think he must be in his car and had just switched his phone to his other ear.

“What did you say to them?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Nothing?”

“Not a word.” She couldn’t even recall all the queries that had been hurled at her as she’d darted from her little Beetle to the door of her carport. All she’d cared about just then was that none of the half-dozen people thrusting microphones toward her had managed to block her way to her side door.

“Look,” she continued, having paced back to peek between the drapes again. There were now television cables on her front lawn. “I have a dozen strangers outside my door, my phone has been ringing since the minute I got here, and Mrs. White is threatening to call the police because her mums are getting trampled. She tends those plants as if they were her children.”