The Stranger

“You’re writing a—” She swallowed, and, as if her fingers had gone limp, the book dropped to the wooden floor. She didn’t seem aware that she no longer held it. “A book? About those poor girls? Why?”

He retrieved the mangled paperback, which he saw was a copy of The Great Gatsby. “It’s what I do, Mallory,” he said quietly. “I’m a writer.”

She looked at him. She opened her mouth, as if she were about to say something. And then, without another word, without even taking her book from his hand, she moved past him and went out the side door. He heard her footsteps disappearing fast along the stairs.

Well, hell. What exactly was that all about?

He’d known that seeing her again would be awkward. He’d expected her to be angry that he was going to tear up her town again when the book came out.

And she had been angry, damn angry, at first. But then, after he mentioned the book…

He stared at the empty rectangle of light for a long moment, trying to sort through the signals his instincts were sending him. He had talked to a lot of people about a lot of difficult things, and he had learned to read them pretty well.

Unless he had completely lost his touch, Mallory Rackham wasn’t merely angry anymore.

She was flat-out scared.

A WEEK LATER, Mallory was on her way to the Windjammer Golf and Country Club. She was going too fast, and her thoughts were so agitated she almost drove her Volkswagen into the faux-marble haunches of one of the zebra statues that stood guard over the winding, green-bordered entry.

A caddy working the seventh hole glared at her, shocked that anyone would disrupt the pastoral harmony of this elite club.

But Mallory didn’t care. She almost wished she had hit them. Those zebra statues were stupid.

Not as stupid, however, as she was.

Yessir, Mallory Rackham took the blue ribbon in Abject Stupidity.

She shook her head, muttering to herself as she guided the car more carefully up toward the clubhouse. What fantasy world had she been living in? Had she really believed the blackmailer would just send her a nice thank-you note for the thousand-dollar payment and then scratch her off his list? Hadn’t she ever read a detective novel, or watched a crime show on TV? Heck, a five-year-old could probably tell you that, once you paid a blackmailer, he’d just keep coming back for more.

But not Mallory. Idiot that she was, she’d actually been stunned to hear the man’s electronic voice on her telephone again this afternoon.

He’d told her he wanted another thousand dollars. Only two weeks after the first payment.

When she’d asked him where he thought a small-town, small-business owner was going to get that kind of money, he had laughed—that horrible, tinny laugh she remembered so well.

Maybe, he’d said, she should consider taking up where Mindy had left off. Mallory might not be a teenager anymore, but she was still a good-looking woman. Did she know how to handle a whip?

Without thinking, Mallory had slammed down the phone, too furious to calculate the wisdom of such a move. But almost instantly she regretted it. During the long two or three minutes she’d waited to see if he’d call back, she was racked with fear that he might not, that the next call he made might be to Freddy Earnshaw.

Or what if he’d heard that Tyler Balfour was writing a book? How much, she wondered, would Tyler pay for juicy information like this?

Finally, the phone had run again. She picked it up, her fingers trembling. The metallic voice was colder and harder than ever. That little insult had cost her, he’d said slowly. Double the pain. This time he wanted two thousand dollars. Tomorrow.

But she didn’t have two thousand dollars. And, because she was a shortsighted fool, she hadn’t made any provisions for getting it. She could have taken another loan on the business, maybe, if she could persuade Doug Metzler at the bank to stretch the income/debt ratios a little. Or she could have accepted one of the offers for credit cards that clogged her mailbox daily. She could have sold some of her own collection of antique books—well, all her collection, probably.

But the point was, if she hadn’t been such an idiot, she could have done something.

Instead, she was going to have to get desperate. She was going to have to borrow the money from Roddy.

Not that Roddy cared. Roddy had been born middle-class, with a curious mind that got him into a ton of trouble as a child but had made him several million dollars as an adult. Roddy was always inventing things—things that weren’t necessarily sensible enough to make it to the market, but which were just interesting enough to bring in huge option purchases from big businesses.

His latest idea had been a “flip-flop clip,” which kept the cuff of your slacks from tucking under when you wore sandals. Even his best friend, Kieran McClintock, had laughed at that one, but when a major beachwear company had paid him a hundred thousand dollars for it, Roddy had thrown a bikini-beach party at the country club and invited the entire town of Heyday.

So, after running around mentally like a rat in a maze for a couple of hours, she’d finally called Roddy on his cell, taken a deep breath, and asked if she could borrow two thousand dollars. Today.

“Okay,” he said in his typical laid-back style. He was the only man she’d ever known who wouldn’t ask why. “Want to come get it now? I’d come there, but I can’t leave for another hour or two.”

She knew where he was, of course. He was always at the country club’s bar, the Gilly Wagon, after four o’clock, when he finished his last hole of golf for the day. He played poker, flirted with the married women, watched CNN and drank ginger ale for at least three hours every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday and Saturdays he switched to beer and single women.

And no one could tell him to leave. He’d single-handedly built the Gilly Wagon with the proceeds from his crazy idea for fake fingernails made of candy.

“You’ve got that much money on you?”

He chuckled. “Well, you know. In case I have to flee the country unexpectedly, that kind of thing. Come on over.”

“I guess I could,” she’d said. Wally could close up. “But, are you alone?”

“No. But I am amazingly discreet. Never fear, Mallory dear. The hand is quicker than the eye.”

And so here she was, parking the car at the country club and heading into the Gilly Wagon, which at this hour would, she hoped, be mostly empty.

It was. Other than a foursome in the corner arguing about how many strokes it had taken one of them at the ninth hole, Roddy and Kieran were the only ones there.

She said hi to the bartender, who doubled as the waiter and was hurrying over to seat her. She waved him off, pointing toward Roddy. The man nodded gratefully and went back behind the bar to finish washing the glasses for the coming rush.

“Hi, guys,” she said as she approached the table. Kieran, that handsome, golden-haired sweetie, half rose immediately and gave her a kiss.

She hugged him briefly. “Where’s Claire?”

Kieran chuckled. “She said she’d rather stick bamboo shoots under her fingernails than be a part of this little adventure of Roddy’s. But I assume she’s not actually doing that. She’s probably rolling Stephanie around the park, trying to get her to go to sleep.”

“Roddy’s little adventure?” Mallory turned to Roddy with a smile, noticing that he hadn’t bothered to rise, leaving the graceful manners to Kieran.

Roddy Hartland was nowhere nearly as classically handsome as the McClintocks, with his freckles and his unruly brown curls, but he was pretty darn sexy, once you saw the intelligent laughter in his eyes and the easy tolerance in his smile. And he had a wonderful, strong body.

Mallory and Roddy dated each other more often than either of them dated anyone else, but they both understood it would never come to anything. Though no words had ever been spoken on the subject, she knew that he’d always been half in love with Mindy. Sadly, the ten-year age difference had proved fatal. Roddy wasn’t willing to declare himself and risk rejection. Mindy, young and self-absorbed, had never even guessed.

“What trouble are you trying to stir up today?”

Roddy blinked innocently. “Trouble? Gosh, you say that like I do it all the time.”

“That’s because you do,” Kieran put in, his mouth full of ice. He held out his empty drink. The bartender nodded and turned to retrieve the bottle of imported single malt Scotch whiskey they kept on hand solely for the McClintocks, who might not be the only ones in Heyday who could appreciate it, but were just about the only ones who could afford it.

Kieran turned his gorgeous blue eyes toward Mallory. “Don’t tell Claire I was drinking. But this is one stunt I just can’t pull sober.”

“You’re not pulling it, you coward.” Roddy shook his head. “I am.”

Mallory growled. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”