Buch lesen: «Too Wild»

1

WHAT JENNA CALVERT NEEDED was a large, tattooed man with a look of death in his eyes. Perhaps someone with a prison record and an intimate knowledge of firearms. Some guy named Spike or Duff.

But even Bodyguards for Less was out of her price range. Jenna listened a second time to the phone recording that described the business’s services. No way could she swing the eighty dollars per hour the burly voice on the recording stated was the base price without additional services—and what additional services could a bodyguard provide, anyway?

She hung up and exhaled a ragged breath.

Without a bodyguard, the only protection she had was Guard-Dog-In-A-Box. For twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, she’d purchased as much peace of mind as she could afford—a sorry amount indeed. Thirty bucks had bought her a motion-sensing device that simulated the sounds of killer dogs barking at any unsuspecting intruders.

Unfortunately, it also barked at neighbors passing in the hallway, at pizza delivery men and at Mrs. Lupinski’s many elderly lovers traipsing in and out of the building at all hours of the day and night.

Jenna hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a week, and everyone else in the building was getting tired of her canned guard dogs, too. Even Mrs. Lupinski, who was normally otherwise engaged, had yelled obscenities out her door at Jenna last night when she had heard her in the stairwell.

Guard-Dog-In-A-Box had looked so promising there on the shelf at the store, but now that she’d lived with her faux protection for a week, she saw just how desperate she’d become to even buy it.

She was cooked meat.

She never should have started researching the underbelly of the beauty-pageant industry. Ever since she’d begun the research a month ago, her life had been turned upside down by someone who didn’t want her writing the story. Jenna had racked her brain trying to figure out who among the people she’d interviewed or spoken with might wish her harm, but no one jumped out as a likely culprit. She hadn’t even uncovered any information that seemed worthy of death threats. But the voice-altered phone calls and the threatening mail had included comments like “back off the story” and “you’re risking your life if you write it.”

Jenna surveyed her apartment, wishing now that she had a roommate, or at least a parakeet. Someone to comfort her and tell her that it wasn’t such a bad thing to get three death threats in the past month. Someone who could also remind her that it was really quite normal to nearly get run down by a car in San Francisco. Two days in a row.

Yes, a roommate would be nice right about now. A roommate, a bodyguard and a really big weapon. But all Jenna had was Guard-Dog-In-A-Box. She resisted the urge to hurl the waste of money across the room and eyed the double locks on the apartment door. If anyone really wanted to get in, they wouldn’t have much trouble. The wood of the door frame was rotting away in places, and the locks looked as if they’d been installed before Jenna was born.

Sure, the front door of her apartment building was supposed to remain locked to nonresidents, but Mrs. Lupinski liked to prop it open for her lovers and the ever anticipated sweepstakes-prize delivery people. Getting buzzed in on the rare occasions it was locked was as easy as claiming to be a pizza delivery guy.

Jenna leaned against the decrepit door and closed her eyes. She let her mind drift to happier days, when home security was the least of her concerns. Only two months ago she’d been a relatively carefree journalist who’d made a decent career of writing for women’s magazines, and she was embarking on the story she was sure would finally turn her career from decent to well paying. No more squeaking by on a paltry freelance income that barely paid the high rent in the city. The beauty-pageant exposé was supposed to be her ticket to success.

When the buzzer on the door sounded, she jumped so hard that Guard-Dog-In-A-Box clattered to the floor and began barking. It sounded about as menacing as tin-can recorded dog barks could sound—that is, not menacing at all.

Her hand shook as she pressed the intercom button and said, “Who is it?”

“Ms. Calvert? My name is Travis Roth. I need to talk to you about your sister, Kathryn. May I come up?”

Kathryn? Jenna stared at the intercom, dumbfounded. She hadn’t heard from or spoken to her twin sister in years. Could this be a ploy someone was using to get inside the building?

“What about her? Just tell me now.”

“I really need to speak with you face-to-face. It’s a sensitive matter.”

A sensitive matter? Did bloodthirsty criminals talk like that?

“Haven’t you ever heard of the telephone?”

“I’ve been trying to call you for days with no answer.”

Oh. Right. She’d unplugged the answering machine after the strange calls started coming in, and finally she’d just stopped answering the phone.

“Look, if you’re here about the pageant story, I don’t have any idea what your problem is with it!”

She turned off the intercom and pushed her sofa against the door, then climbed on top of it and pulled her legs to her chest. She was beginning to think journalism had been the wrong career choice. What she needed was a nice, safe job. Maybe in forestry, or library science.

No, that was just fear talking. She loved her work. She’d always dreamed of being a freelance writer, and now she was one. Was she really such a coward she’d let someone bully her out of writing the truth? Scared as she might be, in her gut, Jenna knew she wasn’t about to stop working on the article.

Fifteen minutes later, she was still sitting in the same spot staring at her chipped toenail polish when she heard Mrs. Lupinski hollering about the whereabouts of her free pizza, a sure sign that the guy with the sensitive matter to discuss had gotten into the building.

Someone knocked at the door, and in spite of herself Jenna jumped again.

“Ms. Calvert, this is urgent. It’s about your sister’s wedding.”

Kathryn was getting married? No surprise there, if he was telling the truth. Her sister had been dreaming of a rich Prince Charming ever since they’d been old enough to date.

“She needs your help.”

“Right, now I know you’re lying. And why isn’t she here asking for my help herself if she needs it?” Kathryn would no sooner ask for Jenna’s help than she would wear a designer knockoff dress.

“I’ll explain, if you’ll just give me a chance.”

“Go away before I call the police!”

She peered through the peephole at him to see his reaction. Yow! What a cutie. Smoky green eyes, sand-colored hair streaked with blond and cut meticulously short, the kind of stern, masculine mouth that begged to be kissed into submission. Not exactly the face of a thug, but what did she know? Maybe criminals were going for the GQ look this year.

“I understand you and Kathryn haven’t spoken in some time, and you didn’t part on friendly terms.”

Okay, somehow he’d found some personal information to make his cover seem authentic. Jenna sank back down on the couch and chewed her lip.

“Jenna, this is really urgent. Open the door.”

She eyed the fire escape. Today was not a good day to die. For one thing, her roots were starting to show, and she had a zit on her chin. She’d look like hell in a casket. Maybe this guy was legit, but she couldn’t afford to find out. It would only be a short drop from the bottom of the fire escape to the ground.

She hopped off the couch, grabbed her backpack purse, slid her feet into the nearest pair of sandals and hurried to the fire-escape window.

The gorgeous maybe-assassin started pounding on the door, and Jenna pushed her window open and squeezed through it. Her breath came out ragged, and she imagined herself in an action movie as she climbed down the fire escape and dangled herself over the bottom edge for the drop. Five feet, no problem. She let go and landed with a thud in the scraggly mess of weeds that made up her building’s backyard vegetation.

Now what? She hadn’t exactly formulated an escape plan. Jenna eyed the tall chain-link fence that surrounded the backyard and tried to envision herself scaling it. No way—she wasn’t risking it unless there were no other options.

If she hurried, she might be able to go out the alleyway to the street and slip away before he realized she wasn’t in her apartment anymore. Jenna hurried to the rusty gate and eased it open, then ran down the alley to the sidewalk.

She’d only made it past the neighbor’s house when she heard a man’s voice call after her, “Jenna, wait!”

Him again. What, did he have X-ray vision? Jenna ran, and the sound of footsteps quickened. He caught up with her as she rounded the corner of the next street.

“Kathryn said you’d resist helping, but she didn’t tell me you were crazy,” he said over her shoulder, and something about the perplexed tone of his voice made Jenna stop and look at him.

He was even more gorgeous in person without his features distorted by the peephole. Up close, he was half a foot taller than her, and he stood with the kind of assurance that suggested he was accustomed to being in charge. Jenna’s fear was suddenly overcome with a pang of desire. Wow, did she ever need to pay more attention to her love life, if her would-be assassin was suddenly turning her on.

His clothes—a navy wool sport coat, an open-collared white oxford and a pair of beige summer wool slacks—were tailored, expensive. The way they fit, the way he looked so carefully put together, gave Jenna the urge to muss him up.

He was studying her, probably trying to make sense of the differences between herself and her high-society identical twin. “You are Jenna Calvert, right?”

Jenna kept her hair long and dyed various shades of red—this month it was Auburn Fire—while Kathryn had always been fond of short debutante haircuts in their natural blond color. And Jenna had always asserted her independence and uniqueness from her twin through her wild wardrobe, while Kathryn’s taste tended toward the classic and exorbitantly priced.

“Yes,” she said, secretly thrilled that she’d managed to distinguish herself from her identical twin so well.

“I’m Travis Roth. It’s good to finally meet you.” He withdrew a business card from his pocket and offered it to her. Jenna took it and read the raised black lettering on a tasteful white linen card. Travis Roth, CEO, Roth Investments.

Whoopee. Any bozo could get business cards made up and call himself a CEO.

Jenna stuck it in her pocket.

“What color are Kathryn’s bridesmaid dresses going to be?”

“Excuse me?”

“The colors in the wedding—dresses, flowers, everything. If you know that, I’ll talk to you.”

He appeared to be giving the matter some thought. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

Jenna wished she’d remembered to grab a kitchen knife on the way out the window. “If you know Kathryn, you’d know what colors are in her wedding.”

A look of understanding softened his features. “Some kind of purple? Lavender, right?”

Lavender was Kathryn’s signature color. Ever since they were kids, she’d worn lavender, while Jenna’d had to wear identical outfits in pink. But that was one of their many differences—Kathryn had embraced being dressed up as a sideshow act by their mother, while Jenna had hated every moment of it. She still couldn’t look at the color pink without feeling slightly nauseated.

Kathryn could never understand why Jenna had felt the need to differentiate herself from her twin with wild clothes and different hair colors, while Jenna couldn’t understand her twin’s obsession with being one of an identical pair.

“Okay, so what’s your connection to my sister and her wedding?”

“I’m her fiancé’s brother, and I’ll explain everything if you’ll just give me a half hour of your time.”

Her curiosity was piqued now that she had some assurance this Travis guy wasn’t a hardened criminal. What sort of urgent matter could bring Kathryn to turn to Jenna for help? And why had she sent her fiancé’s brother to talk to her?

She looked Travis up and down. Okay, considering his sex appeal, he was a pretty good messenger. She could stand to spend a half hour with him, though she could think of much more interesting things to do with him than talk about Kathryn and her prenuptial problems.

“I’ll listen, if you’ll buy lunch,” she said, her stomach rumbling because she’d skipped breakfast. “There’s a diner around the corner.”

TRAVIS DID HIS VERY BEST to focus on the business at hand, but Jenna Calvert had thrown him completely off track. She wasn’t at all what he’d expected. Yes, Kathryn had described her as a rebellious type, as someone who liked to shock others and be contrary just for the sake of conflict, but she hadn’t mentioned how damn sexy Jenna would be.

A waitress with three nose rings and threads of purple in her braided hair arrived to take their order, and Travis tried to take his mind off Jenna long enough to choose a lunch. His gaze landed on meat loaf, and he wasn’t sure if he’d ever even tasted it, but he’d seen it on TV and decided that’s what he was having.

“I’ll have the meat loaf, and…” Certainly wine wasn’t the appropriate beverage. “Iced tea.”

“You want green tea or black?” This was San Francisco, after all.

“Green will be fine.”

He caught himself staring at Jenna’s lush pink lips as she placed her own order for a cheeseburger, chili fries and a chocolate shake, and when the waitress disappeared, he forced his gaze back to Jenna’s eyes.

The gorgeous redhead had managed in the space of ten minutes to muddle his thoughts and set his senses on high alert. It took a monumental effort to keep from letting his gaze fall even lower than her sensuous mouth to the front of her tight black tank top—to keep from thinking about the fact that she apparently wasn’t wearing a bra.

And curse the guy who invented bras if all women could look like that without them.

She wasn’t even remotely his type. Her look wasn’t classic Coco Chanel, as he’d always preferred, but rather rebel-without-a-Nordstrom-card. With her dyed burgundy hair; her short, unpolished fingernails and her tight, faded jeans, she was about as opposite to Kathryn Calvert as she could get and still be the woman’s twin sister.

When he looked into her ice-blue eyes, he saw sparks of fire that weren’t present in her sister’s. Perhaps Jenna had spirit, something he suspected lacking in Kathryn. Travis was undeniably intrigued by this wilder twin, and he was curious to know her in spite of his suspicion that she probably had a tattoo hiding somewhere on her body.

Where and what that tattoo might be—the possibilities were endless. A little red rose on the satin skin of her inner thigh, or a tiny heart hiding beneath her panties…Whoa, mama.

What on earth was going on here? He didn’t like tattoos, and he didn’t even know if Jenna had one. But she certainly had his imagination in the gutter all of a sudden.

There was no sense in fantasizing about Kathryn’s bad-girl twin anyway, because if she agreed to his offer—and he knew she would—then she would be transformed in the next few days into an exact replica of her sister. It was his unwelcome job to make that happen.

Jenna sat across from him with her elbows propped on the table, her slender arms sporting two chunky bracelets in various stones and faux gems, displaying an utter lack of grace that Travis found oddly charming. As he explained his acquaintance with Kathryn Calvert and her engagement to his younger brother, Blake, she listened closely, never taking her gaze away from his eyes.

But next came the sensitive part, the reason he’d driven all the way from Carmel in the hope of bringing Jenna back with him.

“The wedding plans were moving along just fine until last week, when Kathryn flew to Los Angeles for what she claims was supposed to be a week-long spa treatment. She decided to get some minor plastic surgery while she was there, and—”

“What kind of plastic surgery?” Jenna’s eyes had grown perfectly round.

Their conversation was interrupted by the waitress delivering their meals and drinks. Jenna continued to watch him as she dug into her burger.

When the waitress left, Travis continued. “Some kind of procedure where the doctor takes fat from one part of your body and injects it into the cheeks and lips. Kathryn is outraged with the results, and she refuses to come home until the problem has been corrected.”

Jenna laughed out loud. “What, her face is too fat now?”

Travis smiled. “Something like that. She says she looks lumpy.” He couldn’t begin to understand why anyone would endure such a procedure, especially not for beauty’s sake, but of all the people he knew, Kathryn was the easiest to imagine having fat injected into her face.

“Now I’ve heard it all.”

“The problem is, we can’t postpone the wedding or any of the prenuptial events. For one thing, Kathryn doesn’t want my family to know she was off having facial enhancements done. My mother hasn’t exactly welcomed her into the family.”

“I can imagine how important it is for Kathryn to impress her future mother-in-law.”

“She has a long list of people to impress, I’m afraid. Kathryn initiated a project with Blake to establish a women and children’s shelter through the Roth charity foundation, and she is supposed to meet with a couple interested in donating land for the project later this week.”

“So reschedule.”

“They’re already hesitant about the project thanks to Blake’s reputation for flakiness. Kathryn doesn’t want to give them any reason to back out, because such a prime piece of land so central to the Bay Area is nearly impossible to come by.”

Jenna frowned. “Sounds like she’s got herself in a real bind.”

“Not just herself, but my business, too. Our family’s investment firm has suffered recently as a result of Blake’s inability to handle responsibility, and this wedding is our chance to give some of our clients a better impression of him, to leave them feeling warm and fuzzy about Roth Investments. We need everything to come off without a hitch.”

Jenna’s expression turned wary as she bit into a French fry. “Why can’t you just tell everyone that the bride has come down with pneumonia or something and is too sick to go through with the wedding?”

Travis took his first bite of meat loaf and decided he’d been missing out all these years. He made a mental note to ask the family chef to prepare the dish regularly.

“Any postponement will look like flakiness on the family’s part, no matter what the excuse, and that’s an image we have to avoid at all costs. Several of our biggest clients have threatened to leave because of Blake’s unreliability. This marriage will show them that he’s settling down and becoming a family man.”

“Why doesn’t someone just fire your brother?”

If it were only so easy. “My father has forbidden it. Blake is Dad’s favorite.”

“This all sounds a little crazy, and I don’t understand how you think I can help.”

“The doctors have assured Kathryn that her face will look normal before the wedding, but she still refuses to come home until the damage has been undone.”

“So you just have to hope she’ll come back in time for it.”

“And that’s exactly what I’m doing, except that still leaves us without a bride for the prewedding events my parents have planned, along with the land donation meeting.”

“Does your brother know about Kathryn’s little problem?”

“No, and he cannot find out. He’s awful at keeping anything secret. He’s expecting Kathryn back from her trip on Monday, but she obviously won’t be back.”

“Isn’t he going to notice when his bride doesn’t show up for the rehearsal?”

Travis took a deep breath. “That’s where you come in. We need you to impersonate Kathryn until she returns.”

Jenna dropped her cheeseburger onto its plate and stared at him as if he’d just sprouted antennae.

“You’re out of your mind,” she said matter-of-factly, her cheek full of half-chewed cheeseburger.

“You haven’t even heard my offer yet.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to help Kathryn or the dimwit who agreed to marry her.”

Kathryn had never explained why she and Jenna were estranged from each other. Apparently the rift was a deep one, judging by Jenna’s reaction, but Kathryn had mentioned how she and her twin had switched places many times as children—how it had in fact been one of their favorite games.

“You’ll be quite well compensated.” He noted a gleam of interest in her eye that she quickly subdued.

“I’m earning a good living already. I don’t need anyone’s charity.”

From the looks of Jenna’s neighborhood, Travis was willing to bet she was barely scraping by on her meager freelance earnings, and that she could definitely use the money he had to offer.

“Not charity. Payment for a job completed.”

“Yeah, whatever. I still won’t do it.”

“You don’t even know what the compensation will be.”

“Not enough.” She turned her attention to her milk shake.

He could tell by the tenseness in her narrow shoulders that he had to pull his final punch. “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Chocolate milk shake spurted from her mouth across the table and onto the lapel of his favorite jacket. She stared at him wild-eyed.

He dipped his napkin into a glass of ice water and dabbed at the spot until it disappeared, and when he looked back up, she was scooting out of the booth.

“Where are you going?”

“Away from you and whatever crooked scheme you’ve cooked up.” She stood and shrugged on her small leather backpack.

Travis stared after her as she headed for the door.

He hadn’t anticipated her walking away once he’d started to talk money. Nor had he imagined he’d be so mesmerized by the sway of her hips in those faded Levi’s that he’d be frozen in place, speechless and unable to form complete thoughts. No, things weren’t going the way he’d planned at all.