Last Chance at Love

Last Chance at Love
Gwynne Forster

How Much Will She Risk For Love?Fired from her prestigious job, journalist Allison Wakefield is now working for a tabloid newspaper and she’s desperate to find a way to get her career back on track. Her new assignment, an explosive story involving mysterious bestselling author Jacob Covington, could be the answer. When Allison first encounters the author while visiting her aunt’s home on Idlewild Lake in Michigan, she realizes that Jacob is one subject she wouldn’t mind getting to know more intimately…But as they work side-by-side during Jacob’s book tour, Allison finds herself falling in love—and in a dilemma about what to do. The exposé is her ticket to success, but revealing the truth about Jacob’s past as a State Department undercover operative could jeopardize his career—and destroy a summer romance that holds the promise of a lifetime of happiness.

How Much Will She Risk For Love?

Fired from her prestigious job, journalist Allison Wakefield is now working for a tabloid newspaper, and she’s desperate to find a way to get her career back on track. Her new assignment, an explosive story involving mysterious bestselling author Jacob Covington, could be the answer. When Allison first encounters the author while visiting her aunt’s home on Idlewild Lake in Michigan, she realizes that Jacob is one subject she wouldn’t mind getting to know more intimately.…

But as they work side by side during Jacob’s book tour, Allison finds herself falling in love—and in a dilemma about what to do. The exposé is her ticket to success, but revealing the truth about Jacob’s past as a State Department undercover operative could jeopardize his career—and destroy a summer romance that holds the promise of a lifetime of happiness.

Last Chance at Love

Essence Bestselling Author

Gwynne Forster

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Acknowledgments

To the memory of my beloved husband, Professor George Forster Acsadi, and to my stepson, Peter, who, in spite of the tremendous demands of his own profession, supported and relieved me during the difficult time of my husband’s illness.

Contents

Chapter 1 (#uf2580d8f-cb17-55c9-a2a3-9f105b6c7234)

Chapter 2 (#u4653ab12-8633-57d3-a482-ee3c02e22cf9)

Chapter 3 (#uc4ad2fc2-c805-555c-998a-fe2ccba5a7c4)

Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 1

“I want you to bring me a day in the life of Jacob Covington. He’s hot copy and I want your story to sizzle.” It was an order, and Allison Wakefield knew that Bill Jenkins, editor of The Journal and her boss, meant what he said. The Journal was known for its titillating accounts of the lives of celebrities.

“You said you wanted a story on a typical day in his life. Are you telling me to dig into the man’s privacy, to snoop? I’m a reporter, Bill, not a private eye, and I’m not interested in digging up anybody’s skeletons.” She’d heard that careers were destroyed hourly in Washington, D.C., and after her own experience, she didn’t doubt it. She brushed her long brown fingers back and forth beneath her chin and straightened her shoulders.

“I can’t stoop to that, Bill. I won’t.”

He lifted his shoulders in what appeared to be a careless shrug. “You said you didn’t want any more assignments on the wives of visiting dignitaries; you wanted hard news. Well, this is your chance. You’re after a story, and whatever you find had better go in it.” He paused, allowing a grin to slide over his face. “But if you’re chicken...” He let the thought dangle, but she understood what he didn’t say.

“Refusing to muckrake is not the same as being cowardly.” She knew she should hold her tongue, because she didn’t want to leave The Journal until she had another job.

Oblivious to the implied insult, his gaze swept over her. “A reporter has to be tough, Allison. So get used to it. If you don’t, the job’s not for you. Bring me the story.”

Allison turned away from her editor without thanking him for the chance of a lifetime. She collected her briefcase and pocketbook from her office several doors away and walked out of the building. Pausing in front of the eight-story structure at Fourteenth and H Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C., she breathed deeply of the warm, late June air. She hadn’t regained her status as a top reporter, but she still had her soul. Maybe she should have shown some gratitude, but why thank him for the double-edged gift when she knew it could be her undoing?

Jacob Covington had an impeccable reputation, or at least that was the opinion of other reporters who had interviewed him since he’d become a bestselling author. Cut him to pieces? She knew her uneasiness was well founded; Bill Jenkins kept The Journal afloat with scandal, searing his subjects, and if she let him, he’d treat this story no differently; he wanted the dirt. Muckraking was what he expected, and she’d need all of her wits to circumvent him. Top-of-the-line editors didn’t hire reporters who built their reputations on sleazy copy, and she wanted another chance at working for one of the best newspapers. But she couldn’t do that until she erased that blot from her record. She meant to show her detractors that she could reestablish herself as a journalist, and she wouldn’t trash Jacob Covington’s reputation to do it.

* * *

Warren Jacob “Jake” Covington paused in front of his town house near the Ellington School of the Arts in Georgetown and took a deep breath of warm, dry, early morning air, appreciating the unusually low humidity for the nation’s capital. Returning from the steaming tropics, the type of climate he least liked, he walked into his house and dropped his luggage at the closet door in his bedroom. After hanging up his jacket and kicking off his shoes, he stretched out on his bed and gloried in the feel of his own hard mattress under his back.

He had just completed his first trip for the department in four years, and the experience increased his appreciation for his current job as the department’s chief policy analyst. He wondered how he ever thought of his former job as an undercover agent as exciting and fascinating. He wanted no more of it.

An hour later, at the beginning of the working day, he reached for the phone on his night table and dialed his chief. “I got home an hour ago,” he said. As a policy, he didn’t identify himself over the phone. “We can’t expect success with the present strategy. I’ll have to come up with a better plan. I’ve got some ideas.”

“All right. Glad you’re back,” the chief said. “Get some rest and check in with me tomorrow morning.”

Jake stretched out again and grasped at sleep, only to have it elude him. As always, hours passed while he tried to climb down from the emotional high that consumed him when he was on a department mission. Long before he changed assignments, he had begun to tire of the ever-present danger and to want a home and family, something that he couldn’t contemplate as long as he held that post.

“We don’t have anyone else who can do this as well as you can and get back here safely,” his chief had said, trying as usual to inveigle him back into his former job. Well, if he got caught or died, they’d find someone else; he wasn’t indispensable. He had paid his dues, and he was out, a fact of which he intended to remind the chief as soon as he saw him.

* * *

Allison had never feared an assignment; indeed, the prospect of digging into a topic or an individual and finding something new and interesting always excited her. But she hadn’t worked for a newspaper that touted the sensational or for a boss who reveled in it.

Roaming around her small town house in Alexandria, she considered giving her boss an ultimatum: take her off that assignment or accept her resignation. But until Bill Jenkins hired her a month earlier, she hadn’t worked in eighteen months, had lived off her now-depleted savings.

I’ll write the story, but I won’t scandalize the man, and I won’t cover up for him, either. That’s a lesson I don’t have to learn again.

The muffled sound of the telephone interrupted her musings. “Hello? Auntie! How are you?”

“Lazy. I just caught a huge striped bass, and that set me to thinking about you. Fishing’s real good right now. You ought to come up here for a few days. It ought to be nice this weekend.”

Allison thought for a second. “You know...that’s not a bad idea. I’ll be starting a new assignment in a few days, and it wouldn’t hurt to rest up. I’ll fly to Reed City, pick up a rental car, and get to Idlewild around eight Friday evening.”

At exactly seven-thirty in the evening, Allison’s rented Toyota stopped in front of her aunt’s house, a yellow frame structure built in the 1920s, but renovated and well preserved. Frances Upshaw, tall and regal at eighty, rushed off the front porch to greet her niece who, along with Allison’s brother, Sydney, constituted the total of the family members that she cared about. She made it a point to tell her friends that the other members of her family were “too supercilious” for her taste.

“We’ve got another hour before dark,” she told Allison. “You’re just in time for us to get our supper. Mr. Hawks passed here a few minutes ago with a good dozen catfish and pike. They must be jumping.”

“Okay,” Allison said, hugging her aunt. “Let me put on some sneakers. I have to wear leather soles when I drive.”