“Nothing in my life, nothing,” Jillian stressed, “is the same any more.”

She’d thought Ben would understand. He’d seemed so understanding of everything else.

“I even look different. The Kendrick women are tall and blonde and poised and self-confident, but I’m short, brunette, and so… not.”

Reaching out, Ben grabbed her wrist. “Trust me,” he insisted, as his eyes shifted from her mouth to the skin exposed by the vee of her top. “The last thing you ever need to worry about is how you compare to your half-sisters.”

Beneath his fingers, Jillian felt her pulse give a betraying little leap. Too aware of his big body, she took a step back, turned away.

“You don’t need to humour me, Ben. That’s not what I want from you.”

When she met his glance, his smile was gone.

“I’m not humouring you, Jillian. I meant exactly what I said.” His blue eyes narrowed as he cautiously searched her face. “Now that you’ve mentioned it, what do you want from me?”

CHRISTINE FLYNN

admits to being interested in just about everything, which is why she considers herself fortunate to have turned her interest in writing into a career. She feels that a writer gets to explore it all and, to her, exploring relationships – especially the intense, bittersweet or even lighthearted relationships between men and women – is fascinating.

Dear Reader,

The bulletin board above my desk is a mess. The green bamboo backing that I thought looked better than plain cork is barely visible. It’s covered with reminders, schedules and little bits of inspiration. That inspiration includes an 8x10 of an incredibly hunky guy – the hero for my work in progress – and dozens of quotes. Some of those quotations make me smile. Most make me think. One inspired this story.

“Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.”— Attributed to Karen Kaiser Clark

We know we can’t always control what happens to us. And sometimes it takes us a while to realise that our response to a situation is as important as the change itself. Change can be difficult. Growth can be a struggle. That’s why my first response to a crisis is to head for anything chocolate…and take it from there.

Love,

Christine

The Reluctant Heiress

CHRISTINE FLYNN

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Prologue

Jillian Hadley always waited until September to make her New Year’s resolutions. Where the rest of the world planned new beginnings on January first, she waited for the start of the new school year to compile her annual list of the faults she would fix, habits she would break and objectives she would pursue.

She wasn’t rebelling against convention, though she definitely marched to her own drummer. She wasn’t asserting herself, either. The little quirk affected no one but herself. The independent streak she’d been raised to protect simply found the timing more logical. A new school year was a fresh start in itself. January came in the middle of it.

As had become her habit, she’d turned on the television in the living room for company the minute she’d walked into the cozy little duplex she called home. Accompanied by a persuasive male voice promising her better gas mileage, she lugged the luggage she’d taken on her trip into her bedroom, flipped on the overhead light to illuminate the purely feminine space and tossed her suitcase and carry-on bag onto her white eyelet-covered bed.

Only once in her eight years of teaching had she returned to Thomas Jefferson Elementary without her usual, lengthy list of items geared toward self-improvement. That had been last year; her very own personal year from hell. It had actually been closer to eighteen months, but there were details she preferred to overlook about that time as she unzipped her suitcase and started to unpack.

Within three months, her mom had become seriously ill, her now ex-fiancé had informed her that he had no intention of marrying her and her mom had died. It seemed as if bad news had simply been heaped on worse to the point where numbness had become a constant state of being. She hadn’t even realized how much of a fog she’d drifted in until the pain and numbness had finally, mercifully begun to dull over the past summer.

She lifted a slightly squashed, pale-pink orchid lei from atop a stack of shorts and tank tops. As of now, as of that very moment, she was declaring that horrible time officially over. Done. Finished. The loss of her mom, she would feel forever. Beth Hadley had been her friend, her champion and the strongest woman she’d ever known. Eric Chandler, she had long since concluded, she could easily survive without.

It was her awareness of how completely she was over the man she’d once thought she would grow old with—and the realization that her biological clock hadn’t stopped running just because the rest of her life had gone on hold—that led straight to her first resolution.

This year, she decided, hanging the lei over a post of her four-poster bed, if Coach Gunderson asked her out again, she would go. He was a nice guy. A little bald, but nice. And heaven knew how hard it was to find a decent guy anymore. One that wasn’t married, involved or gay, anyway. She would also avoid the doughnuts in the teachers’ lounge, learn to play the guitar she’d bought four years ago, and seriously consider getting her long, impossibly curly hair straightened. If she was feeling particularly adventurous, she might also get the unmanageable mass cut and dyed some color other than the uninspiring shade of plain old dark brown that it was.

The reemerged optimist in her could practically feel all manner of change coming on. Her vacation—a major, much-needed splurge—was now officially over. Other than the lei and a bunch of little paper drink umbrellas, all she had left of those ten days on Maui was a hibiscus-print sarong she’d probably never wear, the postcards and photo books she’d brought back to share with her students and the great tan she’d acquired because she’d kept forgetting to reapply sunscreen.

It didn’t matter that her vacation was now nothing but a memory. She felt none of the letdown she would have experienced even a few weeks ago at returning to her ordinary, rather predictable life. Even tired from eleven hours in the air, three plane changes and interminable waits in airports, she found herself looking forward to the new school year, to meeting her new students, to putting her resolutions to work. She didn’t even mind that before she could go to bed, she needed to do laundry so she could wash the top she wanted to wear to school tomorrow.

In the interests of time, she dumped the remaining contents of the suitcase into her laundry basket and headed for the washer and dryer behind the louvered doors in her kitchen. Thinking she should check the messages on her blinking answering machine, she’d just passed the assortment of herbs and a fern she’d left in water in her sink when the disembodied male voice on the evening news brought her to a halt.

With her heart beating a little too rapidly, she turned to the television opposite the sofa dividing the area in half.

“…affair early in my marriage. That affair took place more than thirty years ago and resulted in a daughter I didn’t know I had until she approached me after her mother’s death last year. The photographs taken by Bradley Ashworth were of that meeting. As you know, Bradley was married to my youngest daughter, Tess. When Tess told him she wanted a divorce to escape his mental and physical abuse, he told her I was having an affair and used those photographs to blackmail her into silence.”

On the screen, a distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman spoke in solemn tones from behind a bank of microphones. His sharp gray eyes peered intently toward his audience of millions.

With her pulse beating in her ears, Jillian tried to concentrate on the man’s words. He was saying that to protect her family’s relationships and reputation, his daughter Tess had allowed the world to believe what Ashworth had claimed; that she had left him because she’d become bored with marriage and wanted other men.

Jillian remembered the scandal that had erupted when the beautiful Tess Kendrick had taken her young son and left the country last year. At the time, Jillian had thought the woman the epitome of spoiled self-indulgence. Because of the relentless media coverage, so had everyone else. Beyond that recollection, though, little else about the woman and what was being said to clear her name computed just then.

The entire nation knew the man on the screen. The powerful former senator was one of the richest men in the country. As a young man, he had charmed a princess into giving up a kingdom to marry him and he, his glamorous wife and their four pampered and privileged offspring had been treated by the press as America’s royalty ever since.

Jillian had grown up with the media stories about their fairy-tale lives right along with everyone else. In high school, she and her girlfriends had devoured everything printed about the family, especially the girls. Ashley had been younger than Jillian by only a couple of years. Tess, by maybe two more. They had worn designer clothes and ball gowns. They’d attended the best private schools, had bodyguards, servants, staff. They’d spent summers in their royal grandmother’s tiny European kingdom of Luzandria. Their older brothers were gorgeous. The girls themselves had grown up to be as stunning as their mother, the elegant ash blonde the cameras now revealed to be sitting supportively at William Kendrick’s side.

Jillian’s heartbeats turned to sickening thuds. Her mom had been the only person she knew who seemed to ignore everything about the Kendricks and their celebrity. She’d never heard her comment on any of the magazine or news articles about any member of their family. If Jillian brought them to her attention with some publication’s picture of the girls all decked out for a charity ball or riding horses on their fabulous estate in Camelot, Virginia, her only remark would be a seemingly preoccupied “how nice,” or something equally innocuous before changing the subject entirely.

Jillian had simply thought that the lives of the rich and famous held no interest at all for her very practical, hardworking mom. At least, she had until two days before her mom had died.

That was when she’d finally told Jillian who her father was.

She was the illegitimate daughter the man on the screen was talking about. And he had promised he would tell no one she existed.

His somber image gave way to a reporter who looked properly grave himself as he proceeded to recap what William had just said about Tess Kendrick having been abused by her ex-husband, then blackmailed into silence with supposedly incriminating pictures of William and an unidentified woman.

It barely registered to Jillian that she had been mistaken for William’s lover. She barely even noticed that her name hadn’t been mentioned. All that mattered was that William Kendrick had just broken his word to her.

The basket of laundry had slid from her arms, bits of pale neutrals and pastels now scattered over beige carpet. She had met him only once. Grief, resentment and a whole host of bitter and unidentified emotions had driven her to seek him out a few weeks after her mom’s death. As ambivalent as she had felt about him, and because she’d had no desire to become tabloid fodder herself, she’d made it unquestionably clear that she didn’t want their relationship made public. As quickly as he had agreed, she’d felt certain he hadn’t wanted that, either, if for no other reason than to avoid the scandal such news would create. He had promised her—promised—that he would tell no one other than his wife that she existed.

She pressed her fingers to her mouth, realized she was shaking. She wasn’t sure if she felt sick, furious or numb as the newscaster began to speculate about who—and where—the daughter from his affair might be. All she knew for certain was that her mother had never stopped loving William Kendrick. The admission had come with nearly her dying breath. Yet, as much as Jillian loved and respected the woman who had held her head high and raised her illegitimate daughter alone, Jillian couldn’t imagine ever feeling anything remotely resembling affection for the man who had fathered her. Because her mother had shied from involvement with any other man, she suspected that he had hurt her badly. And now he had betrayed Jillian herself.

The change she’d felt coming on minutes ago no longer seemed welcome at all. As she watched the image on the screen cut to archive footage of Tess and Bradley, then to William as a young senator to capitalize on the dual scandals coming to light, what she’d felt now was more like the beginning of a nightmare.

Chapter One

Ben Garrett did his best work under pressure. He thrived on challenges, deadlines and delivering the impossible. Obstacles were nothing more than hurdles to be jumped, shifted or removed as he saw fit. But the part of the game he loved best was developing strategies to alter or influence the public’s perception, and he always played the game to win.

His clients paid him handsomely to see that he did.

The hard muscles of his athletic frame shifted beneath his tailored three-piece suit as he moved from the unanswered front door to the side gate of the modest beige duplex in the working-class suburb Hayden, Pennsylvania. The toylike, earth-green Volkswagen he recognized as Jillian Hadley’s sat parked under the carport that belonged to her unit. It was a good bet that she was around there somewhere.

Ben’s specialty was media relations for The Garrett Group’s high-profile clients; Washington, D.C.’ s movers and shakers, and the rich and famous—or infamous—who wanted their images enhanced, subdued or altered completely. In the fifteen years since he’d earned his MBA from Yale, he’d also earned a reputation in those rarefied circles as the expert at damage control. That ability was why his father, the senior partner in their prestigious public relations firm, and William Kendrick, his father’s close friend and a longtime client, had both insisted that he handle Miss Hadley himself.

The good news was that he would get to her before the press descended on her like vultures on carrion. The bad news was that the information he’d been given about William’s newly disclosed daughter left him little to work with. All he knew about Jillian Hadley was that she taught grade school, that her sole meeting with William had not gone well and that no one had been able to reach her to warn her about yesterday’s press conference. What concerned him most, though, what concerned them all for that matter, was that she was a potential powder keg in the scandal that had broken twenty-four hours ago.

There hadn’t been a newspaper, television station or radio talk show in the country that hadn’t jumped on the stories about William’s youngest daughter, Tess, being blackmailed by her ex-husband, and about William’s newly revealed affair and offspring. The gossip had gone international at the speed of light. The London Daily Star had announced the Crisis in Camelot in bold type on its front page. Headlines in Paris, Rome and on the Internet had leaned toward the theme of Tess paying for the sins of her father and speculation about whether his unnamed daughter had been paid for her silence.

Since no one had any idea what Jillian might say, it was Ben’s job to keep the powder keg she represented from blowing. Part of his job, anyway. William had also been adamant that she be protected from the media for her own sake as much as to protect him and his family from any potentially damaging comments she might make.

He reached a small side gate in the white picket fence surrounding the backyard. Letting himself through, he strode past the neat, profusely blooming flowerbed at the side of the house. He had allotted himself twenty-four hours to accomplish his goal with Miss Hadley. As he absently checked the date and time on his Rolex, he hoped fervently that this aspect of the “affair situation,” as it was being referred to in the office, would go as smoothly as the press conference he’d arranged and scripted yesterday. He was in the middle of a little family crisis of his own.

He rounded the corner of the tidy little yard that looked much like the small yards on either side of it. Fruit trees and flower beds took up most of the space both sides of the duplex apparently shared. The bulk of his attention, though, settled on the slender brunette standing barefoot in the grass by a redwood picnic table.

He recognized her delicate cameo-like profile from the photos of her he’d seen yesterday. And her hair. The long, wild curls tumbled past her shoulders in a cloud of unrestrained dark silk.

In the space of seconds his glance shifted over her gentle curves. The white tank top and the khaki knee-length skirt she wore were the antithesis of the corporate, chic and designer attire worn by most the women in his sphere, the sophisticated Kendrick women included. If she was wearing makeup, he couldn’t tell. As she sensed his presence and glanced toward him, she simply looked tanned, healthy and far younger than the thirty-three years he knew her to be.

Still assessing her, he felt himself frown. He hadn’t expected her to appear so…natural. He didn’t expect how cheated he felt, either, when the smile of greeting that curved her lush mouth and lit her beautiful dark eyes died at the sight of him.

From that soft smile, she’d clearly expected him to be someone she knew. At the very least, she hadn’t expected to be faced with a total stranger.

Not wanting to alarm her by getting close enough to offer his hand, he stopped near the opposite end of the table and motioned toward the house.

“I rang your doorbell but no one answered,” he told her, explaining his presence in her backyard. “I’m Ben Garrett, Miss Hadley. William Kendrick’s public relations manager.”

Jillian’s heart gave an unfamiliar little lurch as the lean hunk of dark-haired, blue-eyed perfection in the expensively tailored suit gave her an easygoing smile. The rich, deep tones of his voice held equal notes of reserve and friendliness. So did the strong, decidedly handsome lines of his face. The combination might have struck her as rather remarkable to achieve had she considered it. As it was, she was too busy dealing with dismay at his presence to worry about his effect on her pulse.

“William said someone was coming when he called this morning.” William Kendrick had actually called her twice before that. So had his secretary. Theirs had been four of the messages waiting for her last night on her answering machine. “I’m sorry he didn’t reach you in time.”

One dark eyebrow slowly arched. “In time?”

“To tell you that coming here was unnecessary.”

She looked back to the rocks and twigs she’d gathered for her classroom’s new terrarium and began placing them in a plastic bag. The kids wouldn’t return to school for a few days. This week was for teacher preparation. Yet, rather than class sizes and curriculums, it seemed every conversation she’d had or overheard had included gossip about William Kendrick’s mystery daughter and the affair tainting what had been long regarded as his and Katherine Kendrick’s perfect marriage. Sympathy had leaned heavily toward the wronged party, the beautiful Katherine. After all, her husband had cheated on her. Worse, he’d had a child by that other woman.

That woman was her mother.

Jillian had stayed as far from those conversations as she could and tried to tune out what she couldn’t help overhear. When Carrie Teague, her teaching partner for the past two years, had noticed her lack of participation in the discussions and asked point-blank what she thought about the scandals, Jillian had offered the excuse of being too jet-lagged to care about anything but school and sleep. That comment had, mercifully, led to questions about her vacation and the uncomfortable subject had been dropped. Temporarily, anyway.

From the messages Jillian had listened to last night, she now knew that William had made an honest effort to reach her before his broadcast, to explain what he felt he had to do. Deep down, she supposed she even understood that he’d done the only thing he could do to protect and to clear the name of his real daughter, as she thought of Tess. She had also been infinitely relieved to learn when William had called that morning that he hadn’t divulged her name or anything about her to the press. None of that changed her opinion of him, though. Her other reasons for feeling so resentful toward him remained firmly in place.

In an ideal world, she would never even have heard the Kendrick name. And Ben Garrett wouldn’t be standing in her backyard messing with her heart rate.

He hadn’t offered anything remotely resembling a goodbye. He’d done nothing but remain with his size-elevens planted firmly on the lawn studying her as a scientist might some intriguing, or unexpected, specimen he needed to identify and catalogue.

“Actually, I’m afraid my presence is necessary. Or will be.”

His too-thorough scrutiny unnerved her. Preferring that he didn’t notice how her hands were shaking, she left the sack on the table and crossed her arms. “You said you’re in public relations?”

“I am.”

“Then, honestly,” she insisted, “we really don’t have anything to discuss. I don’t deal with the public. Not in the sense you do. William said no one knows who I am,” she said, not knowing what else to call the man she refused to refer to as “my father.” “I’m perfectly happy to remain anonymous. The Kendricks have their lives. I have mine. I’d prefer it remain that way.”

Her gaze remained direct and uncompromising. Like her words, that expression spoke more of conviction than challenge. It was her body language that told him how valiantly she was trying to hide how upset she was with William and what he’d done.

It also seemed as obvious as the uneasy way her glance finally flicked from his that she lacked either the sophistication or the practice to effectively pull off that feat. Anxiety had her hugging her arms tightly enough to leave white marks on her skin.

It relieved him to know she wanted to remain unknown. She wouldn’t get her wish, but that desire meant she wasn’t interested in running out to sell her story, whatever it was, to the highest bidder. That desire, however, also gave him a new concern. All she would have to do is repeat in public what she’d just told him and the press would be all over her preference to have nothing to do with the Kendricks. As persistent as the media tended to be, they’d hound her into the ground trying to find out why.

Rubbing the side of his nose, he considered how best to help her face how complicated her life was about to get. “Things aren’t quite that simple, Miss Hadley. William didn’t tell the press who you are,” he confirmed, deciding to simply lay it all out. “But you won’t be able to avoid them. I figure you have somewhere between a couple of hours and a couple of days before reporters show up here.”

Her expression held infinite patience as she cocked her head. “If he didn’t tell anyone who I am, then how will they find me?”

“One of William’s attorneys learned this morning that a tabloid paid an undisclosed source a small fortune for copies of the photographs. The ones William refused to describe or show during his press conference,” he explained. “One of those pictures contains a shot of the two of you in what looks like an embrace…”

Confusion entered her tone. “There was no ‘embrace.’ He might have tried to put his arm around—”

“Another shows you in what looks like an argument,” he continued without pause. “Both show the two of you beside a Volkswagen with Pennsylvania plates. William said the car was yours.

“The tabloid probably already knows who you are,” he warned. “And any news editor who gets his hands on those photos will use his contacts to run those plates just like William’s attorney did.”

Confusion gave way to uneasy comprehension. “Is that how you found me?”

He shook his head, stepped closer. “We already knew you lived in Hayden. You’d told William,” he reminded her. “Locating you was just a matter of plugging your name and town into the Internet.”

“I’m on the Internet?”

“Just about everyone is,” he assured her. “Anyway,” he continued, more interested in making his point than in her apparent ignorance of what could be obtained for five bucks from the right search site, “the attorney ran your plates just to see what anyone else running them would come up with.

“What they’ll get is your name and address and the name of the lien holder on your little Beetle out there. Once they know who and where you are and you’re recognized as the woman in those photos, your anonymity will be history.”

Ben’s first impression of the woman he’d been sent to guide and protect was that she was the sort of person who went through life flying under the radar. Considering her and her modest surroundings, she appeared to be a quietly attractive woman of average means, one whose life was as relatively uncomplicated as she appeared to be herself. She didn’t want the world to know her. She didn’t want notoriety or fame. From what she’d rather emphatically made clear to him, all she wanted was whatever it was she had now.

It wasn’t his fault her life was about to be upended. Yet, something about the way she struggled to mask her apprehension as she searched his face brought an unexpected twinge of sympathy. And guilt. She was looking to him for help. Just not the kind he was prepared to offer.

“The pictures were sold?” Looking as if she absolutely did not want to believe what she’d heard, she lifted her hand, pushed her fingers through the wild tangle of her incredible hair. “Who else had access to them?”

Her motions drew the soft cotton of her tank top taut below the fullness of her breasts. Ben felt his breath stall. He was already more aware than he wanted to be of the litheness of her feminine body, the delicacy of her shoulder blades, the long length of her shapely legs. He preferred women who looked refined, sophisticated, sleek. Standing barefoot in the grass with the soft, golden skin of her slender limbs exposed and her thick curls uncontrolled, she looked more like a young earth mother. He could easily see her wandering down a beach or through the woods with a dozen little kids in tow.

Still, there was no denying the quick tightening low in his gut as he met the anxiety in her eyes once more. As cynical as he’d become, the sympathy he felt for her was disconcerting enough. The last thing he wanted was the reminder of just how long he’d gone without a woman.

“Tess Kendrick’s ex-husband. Bradley Ashworth,” he said, burying his responses to her the way he did anything else he didn’t want to think about. “We suspect he sold them in retaliation for William exposing him as the louse he is.”

A little panic on her part wouldn’t have surprised him. At the very least, he expected a little more cooperation.

“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.”

“Who’s Mrs. White?”

“My landlady. She lives in the other half of this duplex.” Her disquiet compounded itself. A woman with a camera crew just crossed the street to knock on Hal Pederson’s door. Hal worked graveyard shift at the grocery warehouse and slept from two o’clock in the afternoon until ten. He wouldn’t appreciate being awakened after having just gone to sleep.

The two news vans at the curb in front of her house had been there when she arrived. A third van pulled up, the satellite dish on its roof already rotating to seek the strongest signal.

“CBS just got here,” she told him, identifying the logo on the side of the vehicle as someone knocked on her front door. “And there’s a woman with a microphone at the house across the street. It’s one thing to have them outside my door, but now they’re disturbing my neighbors. Should I call the police?” she asked him, her distress mounting as the knock repeated. “Or would that just make this all worse?”

“I’ll call. The police can’t stop the press from talking to your neighbors, but they’ll get them off of their lawns. And yours. I’m on my way,” he told her. “Don’t open the door until I get there. I’ll come around back.”

The line went dead before she could do much more than open her mouth. She’d been about to ask how long he would be. The address on his card indicated his office was in Washington, D.C.

Thinking it could be nearly three hours before he arrived, she hung up the phone—only for it to start ringing again.

She didn’t recognize the name on the caller ID. But then, except for Mrs. White’s, she hadn’t recognized the names or numbers of any of the other people who’d called since she’d come home, either.

Feeling besieged, needing an ally, she thought about calling Stacy Fisher. It was Stacy who’d talked her into blowing some of the money she was saving to buy a house on the week with her in Hawaii.

“You need to do something fun for yourself,” her ever-adventurous—and only single—friend had insisted. “You can buy a house when you’re married. You need to lie on a beach and drink mai tais while some buff, bronzed hunk rubs suntan lotion on your back.”

The beach and the mai tais had materialized. So had the hunks, actually. Jillian hadn’t been as receptive to them as Stacy had, though. She preferred men who could converse without staring at her chest or feeling compelled to impress her with what kind of cars they drove and how well their stocks had performed last quarter. Or without using the words dude, righteous and gnarly.

Stacy had said she just needed more practice. She’d been stuck in the Eric rut so long before she’d had the good sense to dump him, that she’d forgotten about the frog-kissing a woman had to do.

She hadn’t talked to Stacy since they’d returned from Hawaii a couple of days ago, so the fearless, bubbly blonde she’d known since college had no idea what was going on. Still, Jillian knew she could always count on her for solid, no-nonsense advice. Stacy, who now taught seventh grade at a middle school on the other side of town, had once taught in the inner city where lock-downs and crowd control had been as common as chalk dust. Her advice on how to handle the intruders outside her door would probably be to turn a hose on them, so she’d be no help there. But being the people person she was, she could give her a little practical perspective on how to deal with her colleagues at school.

That morning, talk about the Kendrick scandals had pretty much been an echo of yesterday. Gina Wasserman, the librarian, had claimed, again, that there was no way she could have sat in front of a camera and listened to her husband tell the world he’d been unfaithful to her. “Katherine had to be devastated,” she’d insisted, speaking of the man’s wife as if she were her dearest friend, “but she showed such class.”

“Unlike whoever that other woman was,” had sniffed the grand dame of fifth grade, Yvonne Bliss. “She knew he was married. She knew he had a family. What did she think? He was going to leave Katherine Kendrick for her?”

According to Carrie Teague, Jillian’s outspoken teaching partner, some women simply didn’t think in those situations. They were attracted to the power. What Carrie had been more interested in was how much his “secret daughter,” as the press had started calling her, had been paid to keep quiet. The married mother of two was absolutely certain it must have been a fortune.

The gossip had changed tone, however, after the reporter had shown up. Thanks to Yvonne, who’d been in the office at the time and who also happened to be the biggest gossip in the school, news of his presence and his photograph had spread through the halls like an annual virus.

Once word was out about Jillian’s identity, some staff had practically tripped over themselves explaining that they’d never have said what they had if they’d known they were talking about her and her mother. Others had chosen a speculative silence. Or outright skepticism.

Ted Gunderson, the built and balding coach who’d smiled broadly every time he’d seen her the past couple of days had walked up to her in the hall with his hands on his hips and a frown on his face.

“You’re not really his daughter, are you?” he’d asked.

Since there was no denying what certain lawyers, reporters and a tabloid already knew, she’d reluctantly admitted that she was.

His only response had been to consider her with an even deeper frown—before he’d turned and walked away.

So much for him asking her out.

There had been a few others who’d jokingly asked her not to forget them now that she was famous. Yvonne had glared at her as if she had been the one to come between William and her much-admired Katherine. Carrie, who in the two years Jillian had taught with her had rarely had an unspoken thought, had decided it was obvious that Jillian hadn’t been paid off since she was still working and living in her duplex. She’d also wanted to know if she was coming into money now and what she planned to do with it and if she would share.

The phone stopped ringing. Desperately needing a friendly ear, she grabbed it before it could start again and punched in Stacy’s number.

Hearing her friend’s recorded voice when her answering machine picked up, she blew a breath and punched the off button.

The phone immediately started to ring again. Not recognizing that incoming call, either, she reached behind the table and unplugged the line from the wall jack.

She’d just slipped the now mercifully silent instrument back onto its base when voices from outside penetrated the walls and another knock rattled her front door.

The only way she could think to block the intrusive sounds was to turn on the television in the entertainment unit, raise its volume and escape into her bedroom.

With the sounds outside finally muffled, she headed down the short hall behind the living room wall and turned into her room.

The drapes she’d opened that morning framed a view of the flower-filled yard Mrs. White so lovingly tended—and a tea-saucer-size black photo lens pressed to the outside of the multipaned glass.

Her heart jerked as adrenaline surged. All she could see of the man holding the camera were his bony fingers and a head of wiry red hair. Behind him approached a mountain of muscle with no neck wearing a dark ball cap.

The camera flashed even as she grabbed the door handle and jumped back into the hall. The door slammed so hard it rattled. The bones in her body seemed to rattle, too, when her back hit the wall behind her.

Moments ago she’d felt under siege. With the privacy of her home invaded, she felt violated and vulnerable. A total stranger had been photographing the room where she slept, the room that was, to her, the most personal.

She had always felt safe in her home, rented though it was. And as physically secure as she was likely to feel anywhere. Hayden was a relatively quiet town. Her little corner of it was quieter still. But just then all she felt was surrounded. And angry. And trapped.

The blinds were open in the kitchen, too.

Remembering that, she hurried from the hall, her footsteps pounding along with her heart. When she’d closed the drapes in the living room, her only concern had been with what had been going on out front. Obviously, fences and gates meant nothing to the press Ben had described as “persistent.”

She apparently needed to pay more attention to his assessments.

Her kitchen was a small, efficient ell of white counters and appliances that held her considerable collection of cookbooks and cooking gadgets. Ceramic canisters painted with ivy sat beneath a rack crowded with spices and herbs. When she couldn’t sleep, she baked. Cookies, cakes, lasagnas. Everyone at the school knew when she’d had a bad night, too, since they were the beneficiaries of her insomnia.

She’d done pretty well sleepwise lately. At least, she had before William had made his little announcement.

She dropped the blinds over the sink and was calling herself six kinds of idiot for having ever sought out William Kendrick when a hard knock on her back door almost sent her back into the little hall.

It was only the muffled voice that shouldn’t have sounded so welcome that stopped her.

“Jillian, it’s Ben.”

Relief that he’d arrived canceled any concern about how anxious she appeared to him when she ripped back the chain and yanked open the door.

He looked much as he had yesterday as he slipped inside, glancing over his shoulder as he did. Tall, confident and more attractive than a man had a right to be. He even wore the same beautifully cut navy suit that so perfectly fit his lean, broad-shouldered frame. The shirt and tie were different, though. Crisp white had given way to a light blue that picked up the flecks of silver in his deep-blue eyes.

He could have been built like a tire and had eyes like a rabbit for all she cared. Now that he was there, she just wanted him to tell her how to get her privacy back.

A faint tension radiated from his body as he slipped the chain back in place and glanced at her. That tension seemed to snake toward her, through her. Disconcerted by the oddly intimate sensation, uneasy enough already, she moved farther from the door. And him.

“You didn’t go back to Washington.”

“It seemed more practical to stay in Hayden.” Dismissing the fact that he’d obviously known he would be back, he flicked an assessing glance over her uneasy features. “I was already on my way over here with your other bodyguard when you called.”

“Other bodyguard?” She had bodyguards?

“You have two. One of them is the man you saw following you in the gray SUV this morning. Steve Schroeder. Big guy. Blond. Blue ball cap. The other just got in.” The dark slashes of his eyebrows merged. “Didn’t you get my message?”

As rattled as she’d been when she’d arrived home, she’d totally ignored the blinking light on her answering machine. “I haven’t checked my messages yet.”

“I left you one at seven-thirty this morning.”

At seven-thirty she would have been getting ready for school. They were on late schedule this week. “I must have been in the shower.”

She had bodyguards. The thought seemed inconceivable to her.

“The police should be here soon,” he continued, taking in the impeccably neat space. His glance landed on the one object in the room that didn’t look almost painfully ordered; the refrigerator she used for a bulletin board. The front and what was exposed of the sides were covered with postcards, pictures of children and magnets holding up reminders to herself to do whatever it was she apparently knew she’d forget without a note.

“Mr. Garrett…”

“Ben.”

“Ben,” she conceded, as anxious to distract him from his perusal of what she thought important as she was to get his advice, “how do I get rid of them? You said yesterday that you were here to stop them from invading my life. That’s what they’re doing, so…please,” she said, stepping back to clear his path to the front door, “stop them.”

He remained right where he was, partway between her round white dining table with its vase of bright-yellow sunflowers and the back of the sofa that cut the open area in half.

“What I said is that my job is to help you with them. And I will,” he assured her over the voices of a television talk show. “We just need to talk first.”

“About what?”

“About what you want to say to them.”

“I don’t want to say anything to them. I want them to go away!”

His forehead pleated as he motioned to the entertainment center. “Can we turn that down?”

She turned on her heel. She had the distinct feeling that this would have all been easier if she’d let him help her yesterday. No doubt he’d had something preemptive in mind. But it was clearly too late to beat anyone to the punch. Just as clear, from the level way he regarded her after she’d hit Mute on the remote control and turned back to him, was that he would be a gentleman and not point that out.

Grudgingly grateful for that courtesy, she watched his focus shift from the V of the pale coral T-shirt she wore with brown linen capris to the closed drapes by the barrel chairs.

She supposed she should ask him if he wanted to sit. As agitated as she felt, she much preferred to stand herself.

“The best way to get rid of reporters is to give them what they want,” he advised, before she could make the offer. “What they want are answers to their questions. Or a statement. If you’d like, I can help you write one.”

“I don’t have anything to say. How I feel about William Kendrick is private. What happened between William and me is private. So is what happened between him and my mother.

“I don’t even know that much about what went on with them,” she admitted. “What little I do know I’m certainly not going to share with rest of the world. I don’t want my mom’s name dragged through the dirt. And it will be,” she insisted as the sense of urgency she felt identified itself. “My mother was the ‘other woman.” ’

She had no idea what to make of the way Ben’s eyes narrowed on her. In some ways he reminded her of a predator calculating his prey, biding his time until a weakness or lack of guard betrayed itself. She didn’t doubt for a moment that behind that sharp, intelligent gaze, he was processing everything she’d said and figuring out the perfect way to get around it, or use it to his advantage.

Turning from those unnerving prospects, she closed her eyes and snagged her hair back with both hands. She’d barely considered just how unmerciful the public might be when she felt the weight of his hands settle on her shoulders.

Without a word, he aimed her toward one of the slat-backed chairs at the table, pulled it out and turned her around.

He had felt her stiffen the moment he’d touched her. Dismissing the odd disappointment he felt at that, he nudged her down to the seat. More conscious than he should be of how fragile her bones felt beneath his fingers, of the softness of her hair brushing his hands, he deliberately drew away.

He’d caught her fresh, provocative scent the moment he’d come up behind her. He could have sworn he caught a whiff of coconut in there, too. In her hair, maybe. From her shampoo.

Uncomfortably aware of the effects she seemed to have on his body, he pulled out the chair next to her, swung it around to face her and sat down himself. Leaning forward, he clasped his hands between his knees.

“Jillian,” he said, practically leaking the patient control he prided himself on maintaining, “if it’s your mother you’re concerned about, you’ll have far more control over how the public views her if you speak about her first. The same goes for how you will be perceived yourself. Public perception is very much about first impressions. You can get by with a ‘no comment’ today, but you’ll be better off in the long run to come up with some tidbit for the press before they put their own slant on your silence. And they will. I promise you that.”

He’d promised yesterday that the press would find her.

She held the certainty in his eyes only long enough to feel her stomach knot. She needed time. Time to digest what he’d said. Time to decide what she could possibly say to defend her mom when she knew in her heart that the only defense her mother had for sleeping with a married man was that she’d loved him. And that was no defense at all.

The thought of talking to the press made her positively queasy.

“They’ll go away if I just say ‘no comment’?”

“You’ll have to give them a little more than that,” he conceded. “You’ll have to tell them you’ll be available for an interview tomorrow. Or that you’ll give them a statement then,” he added, holding up his hand to stop her when she started to protest. “If they know they don’t have a chance of getting anything today, the big guys will go home.”

“The big guys?’

“The networks and their affiliates. They’re the ones out there with news vans and camera crews. They might leave a reporter behind to see if he can catch you leaving, but the stations will probably send their crews on to other stories. It’s hard to say what the newspaper reporters will do. It depends on how close they are to deadline and what else they need to turn in.” His mouth momentarily thinned. “The paparazzi won’t go anywhere. I don’t know how many are out there, but you have at least one that’s been on your tail since this morning.”

“The guy in the black sedan,” she concluded. The one with the wiry red hair who’d been photographing her bedroom.

Ben gave a confirming nod. “Schroeder…the guard who took up his post about midnight,” he clarified, “spotted him when you left for school this morning.

“There will be more,” he told her, utter certainty in the calm tones of his voice. “The first pictures of you will be worth a small fortune, so you can count on paparazzi doing everything short of dropping down your chimney to get those shots.”

He could have told her it would be worse if she was reclusive. The harder a target tried to escape the prying lenses of the cameras and the fewer pictures there were to sell, the more valuable the target became. From the way her soft-brown eyes held his, he had the feeling he didn’t need to mention that inescapable fact. She’d already figured it out.

She couldn’t seem to stay still. Chair legs scraped against beige linoleum as she rose to move away. From him. From the situation.

“So,” she said, seeming to weigh all she’d just heard, “if I do that…if I tell them I’ll give them a statement tomorrow, the news crews will stop bothering my neighbors?”

“Unfortunately, no. They want information about you, and your neighbors are the logical first source.”

“But the police…”

“All the police can do is cite them if they park illegally or ticket someone for trespassing if someone in the neighborhood phones in a specific complaint. Worse comes to worst, they can probably block off your street to all but residents if you wind up with a crowd out there. But right now, there’s nothing to stop a reporter from using a walkway to approach a front door and knock on it.” He looked from where she stood beside him to the gold watch on his wrist. “I’ll talk to them when they get here. It shouldn’t be too long now.”

The knocking on her door had stopped about the time Ben had arrived. She wondered now if her bodyguards were responsible for that. The man she’d noticed coming up behind the paparazzo at her bedroom window must have been one of them.

“How long do you think it will be before I can leave without being followed?”

Rising, he gave a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Weeks. Months, possibly. It depends on how interested the public becomes in you.”

“I have to live with this for months?”

“Or longer.”

It seemed as clear as the distress in her eyes that his conclusion wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear. Equally clear was that the slightly chaotic circumstances provided the perfect opportunity for him to accomplish one of the judiciously unmentioned goals on his agenda. He’d known yesterday that he hadn’t had a snowball’s chance in the Sahara of talking her into a meeting with William. Not only had she barely tolerated the sound of the man’s name, she’d been dead certain she could handle the press on her own. With that naive assumption put to rest, he could use her concern for her neighbors and her clear desire for privacy to his advantage.

“They can’t follow you if they don’t know where you are,” he pointed out. “Once they figure out that you’re not here, your street will get a whole lot quieter, too.

“If you’ll go pack a bag, I can have you away from all this in no time. There’s a room reserved for you at the Four Seasons in Washington,” he continued, fairly certain she’d see the wisdom in leaving. “William would very much like to talk to you.

“We thought you would be more comfortable in neutral territory,” he explained when she visibly stiffened. “He didn’t want to impose himself on you by showing up unannounced at your door, and we were both certain you wouldn’t want to meet on his turf. Washington is about halfway for both of you. We can be there in a little over an hour.”

Jillian said nothing. She didn’t even ask how he planned to cut the drive time to D.C. in half. Despite his and William’s apparent consideration for her comfort, she didn’t care at all for being manipulated and maneuvered. As her defenses toward William rose even higher, she had every intention of letting his very practiced and professional cohort know that, too.

“I’m not talking with William.” Ever again, she thought. “Feel free to pass that on, too. And I’m not leaving Hayden,” she informed him, her agitation rising. “I have school tomorrow and a principal who will not be happy with me if I’m not where I’m supposed to be. Even if I didn’t love my job, I have an obligation to it, the other teachers and to my students. That job is all that kept me sane after my engagement got canceled and my mom died and I’m not about to blow off my responsibilities to it.”

Ben’s eyebrows bolted into a single slash.

“Your engagement?” The information was news to Ben. It also raised a definite sense of caution and about a dozen red flags. “Who called it off?”

Totally confused by his concern, she said, “I did.”

“Was the breakup amicable or ugly?”

“What possible difference does that make?”

“I need to know if there’s anything potentially embarrassing your ex-fiancé might say. Or show,” he emphasized as she frowned at him. “The press is sure to track him down once they learn about him. And they will,” he assured her. “If he doesn’t come forward himself, someone you know will mention him.”

Uncertainty clouded her face as Jillian cocked her head. “Show?”

Ben didn’t even blink. “Nude photographs or videos. Letters or e-mails that detail anything erotic or kinky. Is he in possession of anything you wouldn’t want anyone else to see?”

“Of course not!” Jillian was dumbfounded. “The split hurt, but I can’t imagine that Eric would say anything to embarrass either one of us. And recording our lovemaking was definitely not something we were into. As for kinky, I don’t even like to make love with the light on.” Coloring to the roots of her hair, she took a step back, threw up her hands. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”

Wishing to end it, she turned away.

“Did you know this Eric well enough to be sure he hadn’t taken pictures of you without you being aware of it?”

The question stopped her cold. Turning back, she faced the man who seemed to have no qualm at all invading the very depths of her privacy. The paparazzi had nothing on him.

“Incriminating photos of unsuspecting partners wind up on the Internet all the time, Jillian. Especially when revenge is involved. Most especially,” he emphasized, “when a person is the item de jour for the press because the tabloids pay so well for anything remotely sensational.”

His eyes remained hard on hers. From the way he refused to look from her face, it seemed almost as if he was forcing himself not to let his glance move down her body.

He lasted about six seconds before his eyes drifted downward anyway.

Not caring to imagine what he might be considering about her just then, she tried to ignore the knot his presence put in her stomach and turned to pick up the books she’d dumped on the sofa. She had always liked order. In her surroundings. Especially in her life. She didn’t always get it. There had been times when she hadn’t even came close. But she could at least control the state of her possessions.

Gathering the books in her arms, she set them in two neat stacks on her coffee table.

“Eric would never do such a thing,” she insisted, straightening the already perfectly aligned trio of citrus-green candles. She added the faucet knob to the top of one stack. “He’s not a criminal sort of louse like Tess Kendrick’s ex-husband. He’s just the run-of-the-mill sort. Asking me to marry him had just been a way to keep me around.

“He kept balking at setting a wedding date,” she explained, if for no other reason than to divert him from her so not adventurous sex life. “So I finally asked if he ever intended to marry me. He said he didn’t know. What he did know was that he didn’t want the kids that were so important to me. That’s when I broke up with him. He strung me along, but I can’t see him trying to hurt me in any other way. There’s nothing for him to seek revenge for.”

“You’re certain.”

She reached to straighten one of the half-dozen throw pillows on the sofa. His skepticism stopped her short.

The man didn’t seem to be hearing her at all.

“I’m quite certain.” He wasn’t just not listening to what she said, he wasn’t accepting it. She doubted he had any idea how much he’d just revealed about himself. “But if that’s the sort of faith you have in people, then I really feel sorry for the woman in your life.”

“I’m divorced. That gives me a certain insight into just how little a person can truly know about someone else’s character.”

There was no mistaking the bitterness in his tone. That quiet hostility fairly coated his words, tightening them right along with the lean, chiseled line of his jaw.

It seemed she wasn’t the only one who’d come away scarred from a relationship. But she felt ready to move on, to leave the past and its hurts behind. Ben, apparently, did not. She’d glimpsed more than his bitterness. She’d seen pain. And loss.

Wondering if he simply hadn’t had time to heal, if maybe his hurts had been more recent, she watched him deliberately look away. It seemed he knew what he’d so inadvertently exposed and wasn’t about to reveal anything more.

Yet he already had. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that all the subterfuge and maneuvering he must encounter in his work played pure havoc with his faith in people, too.

“I’m sorry.” The unexpected twinge of pity she felt for him softened her voice. “I guess I operate from a different level of trust than necessity dictates to you.”

He had been thinking the same thing about her, and wondering if she had any idea how dangerous such naïveté could be. She didn’t seem to have a clue what some people would do for a buck, or that infamous fifteen minutes of fame. His ex-wife had gone for both.

“Let’s just say I have a hard time giving people the benefit of the doubt.”

“You have a gift for understatement.”

“Thank you.”

The muscle in his jaw tensed once more. He had forcibly blocked the mental images of her driving some guy wild in bed. He worked now to do the same with the defenses that had slammed into place at the sympathy still in her eyes. That sympathy was misplaced. The wounds meant nothing to him now. The scars had hardened, and so had he.

“So,” he continued, preferring her baggage to his own, “can you think of anyone else who might know anything incriminating about you?” Despite his skepticism, he felt somewhat appeased by what he’d just heard. It didn’t sound as if her ex-fiancé had a specific reason to rush forward with an exposé of her past, their relationship or whatever it was he might care to share in an interview. That didn’t mean there wasn’t someone else out there with some detrimental little detail he should be aware of. “Another lover? The disgruntled parent of a student?”

Disbelief flashed in her eyes. “There’s nothing incriminating for anyone to know! What kind of person do you think I am? Do you think I have some torrid past that will come to light and embarrass your client? Are you afraid the…”

“Jillian, I’m just—”

“…world is going to hold him responsible…”

“It’s not like that.”

“…for something I’ve done that might not reflect well on him?”

“Will you listen?”

“I have been! And so far I haven’t heard—”

“I didn’t mean to insult you!”

The room suddenly went quiet. In that deafening stillness, Ben pushed his fingers through his hair, then jammed his hands on his hips. His negotiating skills were usually far superior to this.

“I didn’t,” he repeated quietly. “And I’m sorry that I obviously have. I’m only asking these questions because it’ll be easier to help you if there are no surprises.” He was growing more certain by the moment that what a person saw with her was exactly what he got. The realization caught him a little off guard. He hadn’t thought that such unprotected openness existed in any human past the age of twelve. “I really am sorry. Okay?”

If the wary way she watched him was any indication, she wasn’t overly anxious to accept his regret. She really wasn’t, however, like any of the women he knew. Rather than make him stand there and squirm, repeat himself or otherwise grovel, she gave a small, cautious nod.

“Okay,” she conceded, sounding as guarded as he felt. “I’ll accept your apology…but only if you stop worrying about what some reporter might dig up, and tell me how I’m going to get to school tomorrow without being followed.”

“That’s not going to happen. You will be followed. But we’ll get to that in a minute.” Having almost blown his welcome, what he needed to focus on was her resolve to not budge from her house. That refusal was keeping him from taking her to meet with William. It was also threatening to cut into the time he’d promised his grandfather he’d spend with him.

“You said you hadn’t listened to any of your messages.” Wanting her to appreciate how much worse things would be before they got better, he motioned to the blinking answering machine by the oddly silent phone. He would have bet his box seats at the symphony that the thing would have been ringing right off its base. Or so he was thinking before he noticed that the phone was unplugged. “I think we should listen to them now.”

Chapter Three

Checking the messages on her answering machine just then seemed pointless to Jillian. She knew from what she’d seen on her caller ID and from what she’d heard before she’d turned down the speaker volume so she couldn’t hear what was being recorded, that at least some of the calls had been from the local newspaper. Since Ben seemed to think listening to them was important, though, and since he was arguably more experienced than she with the logistics of such situations, she punched the play-messages bar on the phone base and crossed her arms over the knot in her stomach.

An electronic voice told her she had fourteen messages. As she moved from the phone, Ben pulled a small notebook and pen from his inside jacket pocket, sat down in one of the barrel chairs and propped one ankle on his opposite knee.

The first three calls were hang-ups. The next began with a female voice efficient in tone and broad on vowels.

“Ms. Hadley, this is Karen Mabry, Nina Tyler’s assistant with Good Morning, USA.” The woman named the major television network in New York that produced the nationwide newscast-cum-talk show. “We’d like to interview you tomorrow on our program and will make whatever accommodations you need to get here. If tomorrow is a problem for you, we’ll work with you to get a more compatible date. Please call me at 1-800-555-6000 when you receive this message. I look forward to hearing from you.”

Jillian looked toward Ben. She listened to GM, USA, as it was known to its viewers, nearly every morning while she got ready for the day. Nina Tyler and her cohost were as familiar to most of the general public as sports figures and rock stars. Yet Ben didn’t appear at all impressed or disturbed by the show’s interest in her. His features revealed nothing as he wrote down the woman’s name and number and listened to the beep that preceded the next message.

The next call was from the assistant of a nationally known afternoon-talk-show host who wanted the same thing: an on-air interview.

The call after that was from a major television journalist wanting her for a special.

A publisher wanted to talk to her about a possible book deal before she talked to anyone else.

Vanity Fair wanted an exclusive.

In between there were more hang-ups and the calls from the newspapers she heard when she’d first come in. Nina Tyler’s assistant from GM, USA left another message.

Jillian had sunk to the sofa between messages from the journalist and the publisher.

She now blinked at the primary colors spelling out Fun With Math on the textbook atop the stack on her coffee table. Her life, it seemed, had just officially turned surreal.

Afraid to wonder how much more bizarre things could get, she watched Ben go back through his notes and add a mark by Nina’s name. He still didn’t look especially concerned about what he’d heard. If anything, she had the feeling that the messages were pretty much what he’d expected them to be.

Looking as if he’d written nothing more interesting than a grocery list, he tucked his gold pen back inside his jacket.

Beyond the walls of the duplex more vehicles arrived. She could hear the muffled sounds of their engines, of their doors being slammed. Voices raised and lowered outside her door. Unnerved by the continuing onslaught of press, she watched Ben turn his dark head toward her.

She was again looking to him for help.

Ben realized that the moment his eyes met the subdued panic in hers. He would have regarded that as a point in his favor, too, had the vulnerability he could also see not totally knocked the wind from the thought.

He was accustomed to dealing with people far more experienced with the cutthroat aspects of life in the corporate, political or media world. In her sphere, she was undoubtedly perfectly capable of holding her own. More than capable, he imagined, considering what she did for a living. Dealing with a brood of other people’s children while trying to funnel knowledge and discipline into their active little minds wasn’t a job for the weak or fainthearted. In his world, though, she was the proverbial lamb among wolves.

The odd and unfamiliar sympathy he’d felt for her yesterday was back. Still, he told himself it was only practicality pushing him when he decided not to ask what she wanted to do about the calls. He already suspected that the only way she knew to cope in such unfamiliar territory was to dig in her heels the way she had when she’d refused to leave. If she got to feeling too overwhelmed, she might dig in so deep that he’d never get her out of there.

Tugging at the knees of his slacks, notebook in hand, he crouched in front of her.

“You don’t need to worry about these messages right now. You have enough to deal with today.” Paper crackled as he ripped off the pages he’d written on. “Do you want these, or should I keep them?”

“I don’t want them.”

He gave her a nod. Folding the pages in half, more aware than he wanted to be of the effect of her soft scent on certain of his nerves, he tucked them and the notebook back into his jacket pocket.

“You do need to do something about the reporters outside, though,” he reminded her. “If you don’t want to tell them yourself that you’ll give them a statement tomorrow, I can take care of that for you.”

Would you? she thought. “I’d appreciate that,” she said.

With a faint smile for the relief she’d done her best to play down, he planted his hands on his knees. “Be glad to.”

“What are you going to say?” she asked as he rose.

“They’re going to want to know who I am. I’ll identify myself and tell them I’m with a media relations firm. They’ll want to know the name of the firm and who hired me. You or William. I’ll tell them that no questions will be answered today, but that you’ll have a statement for them by this time tomorrow.” He arched one dark eyebrow. “Is that okay with you?”

He clearly had all the bases covered. Terribly grateful for that, she gave him a nod and watched him head for the door.

Voices rose the moment he opened it.

Part of her wanted nothing at all to do with the circus out front. Another part needed to see for herself what the man who’d just closed the door behind him would do. Hurrying to the window, she edged the drape open a scant inch. She couldn’t see Ben, but she knew he’d stayed on the porch. Every set of eyes, all the cameras and a forest of microphones were aimed in that direction.

The police had arrived. Two officers in the city’s blue uniforms wove their way toward her door, waving reporters off the lawn and back onto the cracked sidewalk. They, too, seemed to be listening to the man who’d just taken command of the situation.

She couldn’t hear Ben, but she had to assume that he echoed what he’d told her he would say. Even if it hadn’t been evident from the way half the microphones withdrew that he’d just said no questions would be answered that evening, it was in his client’s best interests not to put words in her mouth about the situation. It would be too easy for her to publicly call him on them.

A frown pulled at her forehead. It wasn’t like her to think a person would deliberately betray her. It wasn’t like her not to give someone the benefit of the doubt. She had been deceived, let down and disappointed. Few women who had been around for over thirty years hadn’t. Yet, despite the scars and the hurts, despite the setbacks and disappointments in her own life, she wanted to believe that people were basically decent and true to their word. It would be too hard to go through life cynical and distrusting of everyone as Ben seemed to be.

At the moment, though, she had to admit that she couldn’t bring herself to trust the man who’d just entered her field of vision. Not where his motives were concerned, anyway. She knew where his loyalty rested, and despite his claim that he’d been sent to help, that loyalty wasn’t to her.

Mrs. White had come out. Feeling like a voyeur, she watched the seventy-something widow in the flower print muumuu work her way to the police officers as Ben and two men, each the size of Humvee’s, approached them himself. Cameras flashing, her short, rather round little landlady tipped back her curly white head and, talking a mile a minute, wagged her finger in the general direction of the mums lining the walkway.

The men with Ben had spread their massive arms to help the officers edge back the crowd when someone spotted her in the slit of the drape. With everyone turning toward her front window, she all but jumped back and sank to the sofa to wait.

“Your bodyguards are both staying tonight,” Ben told her. “They’ll keep an eye on your place, front and back, and chase off anyone who gets too close. These are their cell phone numbers in case you hear something you want them to check out.”

The men he’d introduced to her as Steve Schroeder and Moses Jackson had just checked her doors and windows and let themselves out. Both worked for Bennington’s, the exclusive personal security company the Kendricks had relied on for years for their own security needs. Both men were dressed in T-shirts and jeans to blend into the working-class neighborhood. And both assured her that they would see she was not disturbed that evening.

Ben placed a sheet of paper from his notepad next to the phone base on her end table. From beyond the windows came the sharp reports of car doors closing, the muffled hums of engines starting up.

“The police said this address will be on the patrol list tonight,” he continued, reiterating what the officers had told her themselves. “They’ll give a description of Jackson and Schroeder to the next shift, so whoever is patrolling will know they belong out there. I’ll have Schroeder take you to school in morning. What time do you need to leave here?”

It seemed to Jillian that she should feel relieved as the sounds of cars and vans begin to fade. The reporters were leaving. The bulk of them, anyway. She had two very large men watching out for her. She had the expertise of a ruthlessly efficient, undoubtedly very expensive publicist who seemed to think of everything, including arranging transportation for her so she could get to school. Yet, relief simply wasn’t there. She was no longer being hounded, harassed or pursued. She was now, however, a prisoner in her own home.

“I need to be there by eight.” Shoving her fingers through her hair, she swallowed the pride she feared would only come back to bite her, anyway. “Ten to will be fine.”

This time yesterday she would have flatly refused the offer of a driver. The bodyguards, too, for that matter. She wanted nothing from William. The past few hours, though, had taught her that her pride provided lousy protection from reporters, and even worse security. She might not want William to do her any favors, but she wouldn’t be in this position if it weren’t for him. Accepting a ride to and from school tomorrow and some muscle to keep the press at bay seemed only practical.

Then there was Ben. She didn’t want anything from him, either. She didn’t want to want anything, anyway. But at that moment, she honestly didn’t know what she would have done without him.

The moment he’d walked in, the growing panic she’d felt had actually lessened. It had all reasserted itself, but just knowing he could handle the ropes she’d probably hang herself with was huge.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “I know you’re just doing your job, but I appreciate you taking care of…everything.”

“Not a problem. Can you think of anything else you need tonight?”

“Just the ability to make myself invisible,” she muttered. “Either that or a transporter.”

“A transporter?”

“You know. One of those things that scrambles your molecules and moves you at light speed from one place to another.” She wouldn’t need a driver then.

“I thought a woman did that with the twitch of her nose.”

She met the hint of a smile in his eyes. “We obviously hang out with different types and age groups.” She tipped her head, gave a small shrug. “Since I don’t imagine you have an invisibility cloak or transporter with you, I guess your work here is done for now.”

The small smile she offered was guarded, a faint shadow of the sunshine-bright expression he’d glimpsed in the brief seconds yesterday before she’d realized who he was.

He should have felt relieved to get any smile from her at all. And he might have, had it not been for the strain behind it. Even with her lush mouth curved at the corners and a glint of light revealing the flecks of bronze and gold in her deep-brown eyes, she looked defeated somehow. Defeated, and a little lost.

He pulled his glance, his brow furrowing. “Is there anyone you want here with you tonight? A relative? A girlfriend?”

She shook her head, her mop of soft-looking curls swaying against her shoulders. The lock she’d pushed behind her ear sprang free to brush her cheek. “I’m my only family. And I’m not sure I’d be good company for any of my friends tonight.” She might try to reach Stacy again later. But she really didn’t feel like spending the whole evening talking about what she’d rather not think about at all. “I’m fine.”

The hell she was, he thought. “Then I’ll let Schroeder know what time to be at your door.”

“Thanks,” she murmured.

“You’re welcome,” he murmured back, and nudged the hair from her cheek.

His fingertips grazed her skin as he tucked the long curl behind her ear. The softness of it had barely registered when he realized that the motion had curved his hand at the side of her face—and that she had gone as still as he had himself.

His eyes caught hers. He had just breached a professional line he would never have crossed had he thought for a second about what he was doing. But he hadn’t thought, and that wasn’t like him at all.

Feeling the warmth of her skin penetrate his palm, he slowly pulled back his hand. As he did, she touched her fingertips to her cheek as if to hold in that small, unexpected contact.

It took a lot to unnerve him. What he had just done certainly had. But the thought that she might actually be feeling as lost as she looked just then unnerved him even more.

“I’ll meet you here after school tomorrow.” He had thought about asking if she wanted to work on her statement for the press. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he decided she’d dealt with enough for now. Not comfortable with how bad he felt for her, distance seemed like a better idea, anyway. “We can work on your statement then.”

Jillian quickly lowered her hand, gave him a nod. Judging from the six feet of silent space he’d put between them, what he’d just done had caught him as off guard as it had her.

She curled her fingers into her palm, thinking of the unexpected tenderness in his touch, hoping he didn’t realize how the simple gesture had affected her. “I’d rather you figure out a way for me to avoid having to give one.”

“I’ll call if I come up with anything.” Taking another step back, he gave her a guarded smile. “In the meantime, I’ll see you here about four.”

She’d barely given him a nod before he let himself out the front door.

Almost immediately, she heard a car door slam. Then another. Reporters were no doubt scrambling to see if they couldn’t get something from him after all.

The room suddenly seemed too quiet. Automatically she moved to the remote control for the television, raised the volume on Dr. Phil. She would lose herself in someone else’s problems for a while. Then, she’d go through her closet and sort out the stickers she’d stashed there, the ones for all the holidays and those that said Good Job! and Much Improved! Anything to avoid wondering why she hadn’t felt so alone until he’d touched her, or why she hadn’t pulled back first herself.

By eleven o’clock the next morning, her only thoughts of Ben were to wonder what influence he had with the National Guard. Thomas Jefferson Elementary school was a zoo. Isolated in the library, Jillian hadn’t been aware of the worst of it until Jan Nguyn, one of the third-grade teachers, rushed in to tell her that Roland, one of the janitors, had just chased a guy with a camera out of the girls’ room in Hall C. And that a reporter was wandering around Hall D looking for her.

Within seconds of that breathless announcement, Jillian heard the school secretary page her to the principal’s office.

Dr. Geraldine Webster was the principal who’d hired Jillian fresh from student teaching eight years ago. Considering what Jillian had heard from other teachers in other schools, the sixtyish PhD with the stylish gray bob and a penchant for pantsuits and brightly rimmed bifocals was a teacher’s dream. She championed her staff to the school board. She went to battle for them when necessary, commiserated with them when her hands were tied and truly seemed to hear their complaints and suggestions. She was fair and forthright and with few exceptions, most notably, Yvonne Bliss, the staff thought she could walk on water.

It was because Jillian knew the woman to be as rational as she was reasonable that she didn’t bother to point out that the mob scene of reporters and paparazzi in the schoolyard was hardly her fault. As she entered the woman’s office with its walls of filing cabinets, diplomas, certificates and commendations, she felt certain Dr. Webster already knew that.

“Dr. Webster,” she began, coming up behind one of the visitors’ chairs facing the principal’s file-stacked desk, “I just heard about the paparazzo and the reporter.” She’d all but run to the woman’s office after making sure the hall she’d had to use was clear. “I’m so sorry this is happening.”

“I am, too, Miss Hadley.” Concern added a few more creases to the woman’s rounded face. “As chaotic as it is here, I can only imagine what the situation has been like for you at home.

“Of course, I’ve called the police,” she continued. “Coach Gunderson is looking for the reporter now and will ask him to leave the building or face arrest. Roland said he thinks he can identify the man he chased out. Apparently, he has rather distinctive red hair. But even if he’s arrested for trespassing, he is only one part of the problem. I’ve had teachers tell me reporters have practically accosted them in the parking lot. I’m sure they would have been followed were we not keeping the doors so they could only be opened from the inside. As it is, three reporters came here wanting a copy of your employee file.” She gave a snort of disbelief. “As if I’m going to hand over confidential information just because someone flashes a badge identifying them as press.

“I asked them to leave,” she continued. Despite her displeasure with how easily her normally quiet little school had been invaded, she still looked most sympathetic. “Roland is checking all of the doors to see which one they came through and will lock it so no one else can get in. I’ve asked the police to arrest anyone on the property who isn’t here on official school business.”

The law didn’t allow anyone inside the school without permission. Except for special events, even parents had to be cleared by the office to access any area where students might be. It didn’t matter that the students wouldn’t be there until classes began the coming week. Rules were rules, especially where school security was concerned. Even though the kids weren’t there, the disruption to the other teachers clearly couldn’t be tolerated.

“Which brings me to why I asked you here. Please,” she said, walking around the front of her desk to lean against it, “sit down.”

Jillian would have much preferred to stand. At the request from her principal, however, she lowered herself into one of the chairs. Dr. Webster took the one beside her.

“Miss Hadley. Jillian,” she amended, personal concern slipping into her voice. “You know that it’s always been my policy not to pry into the personal life of a staff member as long as a person’s personal life didn’t call her integrity into question or affect her effectiveness as a teacher. I’m not going to pry now, either,” she assured her. “Your situation is…unique…to stay the least. I can only imagine the changes you’re dealing with right now.”

“None of which will affect my ability to teach,” Jillian insisted. “Except for that,” she said, motioning beyond the office walls, “nothing has changed.

“I hate all of this, Dr. Webster. I never dreamed anything like this would happen, and the last thing I want is all that out there. I just need time to figure out what I can say that will get them to back off.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t anything you can say. And your life has changed,” she pointed out mildly, “whether you can see that now or not.

“I understand that you need time,” she assured her. “But I don’t have time to give you. This isn’t a situation that will resolve itself anytime soon. I have four hundred students and a staff I need to think about. I have schedules that need to be maintained. First and foremost, I have an environment that I have to make sure is as secure as possible for all concerned. This building is old. It’s open and accessible to anyone who thinks his purpose is more important than ours and our rules.”

Genuine distress flashed through her eyes.

“We could address the immediate problem of security with city police on the grounds for a few days. But that’s only a temporary fix. We can’t have the students’ routine disrupted by reporters and cameras, so anything long-term would have to be with private security. Even if there was money in the budget for such an expense, that isn’t the sort of environment we want for our students.”

She kept saying “we.” That could only mean she’d already conferred with the school district’s superintendent.

“I need you to take a leave of absence,” she finally said.

For a moment, Jillian found it hard to breathe. “For how long?” she all but whispered.

“At least this school year. As I said, this situation won’t resolve itself quickly. I’ve requested interviewees to fill your position. I’m sorry, Jillian. You either take the leave or I’ll have to let you go.”

Jillian had ridden to school in the back of the gray SUV with the tinted windows that had followed her there yesterday morning. Schroeder, who epitomized the blond version of the strong, silent type, had delivered her to the main door while his equally watchful and silent colleague, Jackson, who’d followed them in his sedan, escorted her inside. Behind them had trailed the swarm of paparazzi who’d lined her sidewalk to snap pictures of her as she’d ducked into the SUV.

Now that same caravan along with an assortment of vehicles belonging to the reporters and paparazzi who’d been waiting at the school jockeyed for position behind Schroeder as he drove the SUV from the parking lot.

Jillian wasn’t with him. She sat in the backseat of the car being driven by the stalwart Jackson, feeling a little sick and lot angry while she waited for Ben to answer his cell phone. With everyone scrambling to follow the vehicle they’d seen her arrive in, they paid little attention to the dark sedan taking the driveway behind the Dumpsters.

“Schroeder will lead them around long enough for me to get you safely inside your home, Miss Hadley. I’ll have you there in five minutes.”

She thanked the man she’d yet to see crack a smile. Not that she felt anywhere near like smiling herself. As upset as she was, she didn’t even bother to marvel at how effortlessly the two men had coordinated her escape. All she cared about was that Ben had just answered.

“I was just put on leave,” she said without greeting, “because I’m William Kendrick’s daughter. My principal doesn’t think the public’s interest in me is going to die down anytime soon so she’s replacing me. She said my presence is a disruption and a security risk to the students because of all the press and paparazzi, and the school district can’t allow the chaos my situation is already causing. Do you have any idea how incredibly unfair and just plain wrong it is that I am now without a job because that man happens to be my father?”

“Jillian. Calm down. What happened?”

“I don’t want to calm down.” The very request offended her. “And I just told you what happened. If it weren’t for William, there wouldn’t have been reporters all over the school or a paparazzo lying in wait in the girls’ restroom. I don’t know if the creep was just hiding in there or planning to get a picture of me when I walked in, but teachers don’t even use the students’ restrooms. We have our own in the teachers’ lounge!”

She couldn’t believe she’d just explained that. But then, she couldn’t believe she didn’t have her job anymore, either.

She knew she sounded every bit as upset as she felt. She didn’t care. She grasped hard at her anger. She wanted to hold on to it, embrace it, as Stacy would say, because being angry felt infinitely safer than the awful, directionless sensation clawing inside her chest.

“Jillian.” Once more, Ben spoke her name with infuriating calm. “I’ll meet you at your place. Schroeder said Jackson should have you there in a couple of minutes.”

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