by Lexi Eddings
“Once or twice.” He gave her a long look. She got the sense that he could see past the assured face she tried to present to the world. That he was able to look inside her, to comb through her hurts and insecurities and see the real Heather, the one she hid from everybody.
No, if he could do that, surely he wouldn’t still be calling me Stilts. Michael Evans may be trouble, but he’s not intentionally cruel.
When they reached her car, he opened the door for her. “What about you, Miss ‘Or Something’ of Nursing? Do you ever take your scrubs off long enough to realize you’re alone without a crowd?”
“What do you mean?” she said as she folded her legs into the space below the steering wheel. Even with the seat set as far back as it would go, it was still a tight fit. Especially in heels. “I have a full life, a very full life, thank you.”
She pulled the car door closed, slamming it a little harder than she intended. He’d struck a nerve.
He rounded the car and climbed into the passenger seat. “So you’re just not willing to share this very full life with anybody.”
“That’s not true. I have friends. Your sister, for one.” The Taurus sputtered to life, and she peeled out of the hospital lot. The sooner she dropped him back at the high school, where his motorcycle was parked, the better.
“As long as you mean Lacy, I’ll count that,” Michael said. “Crystal doesn’t have friends. She has minions.”
“That’s a terrible way to talk about your sister.”
“She’s sort of a terrible sister.”
“You’re not winning any ‘Brother of the Year’ awards yourself.”
“Point taken.” He raised his hands in surrender. “But you’ve still only named one friend.”
“Then there’s Jake and Glenda and all the members of the Coldwater Warm Hearts Club and the folks in the Methodist choir. Which reminds me.” Time to put him on defense again. “You used to sing in glee club. Our director is always looking for more men and we’re starting Christmas music next Wednesday. Since you’re staying in town at least until the wedding, you may as well sing with us till then.”
“Last time I looked at a calendar, Christmas comes after Thanksgiving. I only agreed to stay till the wedding.”
“Your mother would be so pleased.” Heather played her trump card. “And by then, she might actually be done with her cancer treatments and feeling well enough to enjoy seeing you in the choir.”
“Don’t start. Man, a guy can’t get a break around here. It’s one thing when my mom guilts me into things. I don’t need you to do it, too.”
Heather pulled back into the high school parking lot and stopped beside Michael’s Harley. If he was the poor homeless guy Lacy had told her to expect, how was it he was riding such an expensive machine? “I wouldn’t have to guilt you into anything if you’d just say yes.”
“All right. I’ll do it.” He opened the car door, but didn’t get out. “On one condition.”
Score! She still had that competitive edge, and she didn’t need to be “Stilts” to win. “What condition?”
“On your next day off, you and me, the Talimena Byway and”—he hitched a thumb in the direction of his Harley—“the hog.”
Chapter 6
The hardest part of coming home is the last few steps.
—Lester Scott, formerly homeless Vietnam
vet and recovering alcoholic who
discovered he still loves his wife
Michael turned on the lights in the Ouachita Inn ranch house. The great room was a study in old leather and wood with a heavy patina. A Remington bronze of a bucking bronc and a cowboy hanging on for dear life dominated the space from its perch on the deep mantel. A cowhide served as a rug in front of the river-rock fireplace.
Mike strode in and plopped down on the couch before the flickering fire. It had been upgraded to gas, one of the few outward concessions to the current century.
Speaking of this century . . .
Michael pulled out his cell phone and punched the number before he thought about the time difference on the East Coast.
“Hey, Jadis. Sorry to be calling so late.”
“Not a problem,” his assistant answered. “I was up anyway, working on the graphics you requested. Sending them to you now for approval.”
His phone gave a happy little chirp that said it had received the data. “So if you’re working, I should be working too?”
“Something like that,” she said. “How is your mother?”
“She came out of surgery OK. The doctor doesn’t think the cancer has spread, but he has no way to say for sure. Mom’s taking no chances. She’ll start chemo and radiation soon.”
“The company jet is still in Tulsa. Do you wish me to have it reconfigured for patient transport so your mother can be transferred to the Mayo Clinic? Shall I have a mobile nursing team assembled for the flight to Rochester as well?”
That had been Michael’s first inclination. He’d wanted to whisk his mother off to someplace where she’d have world-class care. But he realized she wouldn’t be happy away from her family and friends while she underwent treatment. Home was a powerful medicine all its own.
“No, I think the hospital here has it covered.” Besides, with Heather in charge of the nursing staff, he was sure his mother would get more personalized care at Coldwater General, where everyone knew her. “I’ll talk to her doctor and see if there’s anything more cutting edge than chemo and radiation for my mother’s type of cancer.”
“Researchers are making great strides with gene therapy,” Jadis said.
“Look into it and whatever it costs, I’ll foot the bill. We can hire a concierge oncologist and fly the meds in along with the people to administer them if we have to. Either way, my mom will be OK in Coldwater Cove.”
“Very well,” Jadis said. Michael heard the soft click of keys that told him she was taking notes on their conversation. “I will also send some white light in your mother’s direction.”
Mike’s assistant was pretty eclectic in her faith. They’d had a few theological discussions, but Jadis refused to be pigeonholed into any one belief system.
“It is a wise person who knows that they do not know, Michael,” she’d always say. “No one can claim exhaustive knowledge of God.”
Mike would settle for understanding the little he did know of God. Regardless of their differences, Jadis had the most calming presence Michael had ever encountered. He wondered what his mom would think about the “white light” headed her way. Shirley Evans was a pretty dogmatic theologian. “I’ll tell her you said a prayer for her. She’ll understand that.”
“As you wish. The intent is the same. My hope for your mother is great good health.”
“Now to business. I’m happy to report the Bubble Wrap app has gone about as far as it can go,” Michael said. “They’re even using it here in Coldwater Cove.”
Jadis laughed. “If it has reached maximum saturation, it is a good thing MoreCommas has another set of apps coming out.”
“Yeah, but I had no idea the reach of this thing was so huge,” Michael said with excitement. “Tell marketing and get them to up the price of ads on the next-gen apps first thing tomorrow.”
“I assume low-key, soft-sell rules still apply?”
“Of course.” There was no point in a relaxation app that constantly bombarded consumers with blatant “Buy Me!” pitches. “And preference will still be given to products meant to encourage the user to take a pause and make healthy choices.”
Jadis made approving noises. “You have come a long way since you first discovered what your grandmother meant when she said you need more commas.”
Michael’s grandma had been suffering from Alzheimer’s at the time, so when she’d told him he needed more commas, it hadn’t made any sense. Then he finally realized she wasn’t talking about punctuation. She meant his life needed more commas, more pauses for reflection, more chances to consider what needed changing.
; Maybe his mother’s illness was another one of those commas. If it was, he needed to embrace the speed bump it represented.
“When can we expect you back in New York?” Jadis asked. “You have a meeting with the investor group on Thursday.”
He wanted to tell her to push it off, but he couldn’t. The group had been clamoring to meet with him for months. “That’s early, isn’t it?”
“7:00 a.m. Breakfast meeting at Blue Fin. Private room. Sales says the investor group is getting concerned about our reluctance to accept advertising from the highest bidder. It may take some convincing on your part to get them to understand your vision.”
“That’s because they don’t get the MoreCommas brand. It’s a different business model than most. If they aren’t ready to come on board without demanding a say in how I do things, I don’t want their money.” If Michael had to sell his conscience, he’d look for investors elsewhere. He’d already made enough to self-fund the company for a long time, but he didn’t have the liquidity to expand toward an IPO. Besides, taking on investors was Michael’s idea of paying it forward, spreading around the opportunity that had been so good for him.
“Put the flight crew on standby for a turn and burn,” Michael said. “I’ll leave here Wednesday night in time to be there for the meeting on Thursday morning, but afterward I’m coming straight back here.”
The silence on the other end of the connection was eloquent.
“The company doesn’t need me on-site,” he said.
More silence.
“Things are . . . delicate with my mother right now. Once she starts her treatment, I should be able to pull away more, but in the early phases, I need to be here . . . for a couple of weeks, anyway.”
It wasn’t only for his mother’s sake. He’d made that deal with Heather Walker, too.
“One ride on the Harley and you’ll sing with the choir for Christmas?” she said, eyeing him as though she could tell what was true and what was bullroar.
“One ride.” Of course, he hadn’t specified how long the ride was going to be.
“All right. I’ll do it. On my next day off.”
“You got a deal. The Methodists will figure you earned a star in your crown, Stilts. You bagged another baritone for your choir and at the low, low price of a motorcycle ride.”
She rolled those big brown eyes. “Why do I get the feeling I just made a deal with the devil?”
Heather was so sure he was still the bad boy of Coldwater Cove. Michael smiled to himself. He wasn’t that guy anymore.
Not most of the time, anyway.
“You are the heart’s blood of MoreCommas, Michael,” Jadis reminded him, pulling him out of his Heather daydream. “The team will not function as well without you.”
“But it will function. Make it work without me for a while,” he ordered his assistant in a tone that brooked no refusal. “I’ll be in touch.”
Then he punched out of the conversation and turned his phone off completely.
What was the point of being the boss if you couldn’t act like it sometimes?
* * *
Judith Hildebrand drummed the eraser of her pencil on the desk and stared at her phone as if that would make it ring. She’d paid enough for this investigator. It was time for him to come through with something more damning than pictures of the subject tipping his doorman at the trendy SoHo building where he occupied the penthouse loft.
Judith, on the other hand, shared a pint-sized studio with her African gray parrot, Emmy. The apartment was located in a part of Manhattan so sketchy, an invisible force she called “condo gravity” kept her inside once the sun went down.
That and the occasional drive-by shooting.
“This is all Michael Evans’s fault,” she complained to Emmy. The bird was molting, and not looking its best made it even more bad tempered than usual. Emmy was named for the award Judith had hoped to win once she was promoted from general gofer to producer. Unfortunately, her career was more tattered than Emmy’s feathers at the moment.
“Stiletto Girl, Stiletto Girl,” the bird chanted.
“Shut up,” she said sourly. “Stiletto Girl” was the nickname Michael Evans had given her on camera when he made a brief appearance on the reality show at a tattoo parlor she was working for some years ago. The homeless guy with his cowboy accent had taken issue with her spiky Manolo Blahniks and made her a laughingstock. And not just with viewers of the show.
Yeah, like all ten of them at the time.
Her producer and the rest of upper management made sure the nickname stuck. Even though the show did OK for a season, no one took her seriously after the “Stiletto Girl” episode.
She was a joke. A sound bite. Judith had used up her fifteen seconds of fame when she flipped off Michael Evans on camera. Since that time, she couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal a chance to show what she could really do.
But it wasn’t her fault. It was Michael Evans. He was the start of her downward spiral. The guy had a gift for getting under people’s skin and making them crazy.
While her career took a nosedive, the life of Michael Evans suddenly skyrocketed after the show was taped. Judith had recently learned that somehow, he’d quietly put together one of the hottest new dot coms to hit Wall Street since Facebook. MoreCommas was a back-to-the-basics, discover-the-secret-to-life phenomenon, and the man behind it had successfully remained in the shadows most of the time.
Who knew the heart of a mathematical and marketing genius lurked beneath the T-shirt and leather jacket she’d made him wear for the show?
No one.
Michael Evans was not Steve Jobs. He was no grandstander. He shunned the spotlight. For years, it was hard for anyone to find out who had even started MoreCommas. His employees were fiercely loyal and, worst of all, tight-lipped. Even once he was outed as the CEO, the man himself had flown under the radar, refusing to give interviews or even acknowledge that, yes, he had once been part of a reality show that featured people telling their stories while getting a tattoo.
After a while, most media outlets wearied of the chase.
Not Judith. She was determined to get some face time with him in front of a camera. There must be a reason he was harder to gain an audience with than the Dalai Lama.
Michael Evans had a secret.
And it must be a doozy.
Toward the end of his reality episode, when Evans had removed his shirt for the tat, the cameraman had gotten a close-up of a wicked scar that sliced across the guy’s ribs. He’d adamantly refused to answer the tattoo artist’s question about the scar.
Judith’s crap-detector began pinging.
Secrets were a reality producer’s best friend. If she could only uncover how he’d come by that scar, she could go back to the network and pitch her idea for a new series—a show-all, tell-all, where-are-they-now exposé of past reality stars called Reality Bites Back.
And what better way to kick off the series than with an undercover sting on the elusive self-made multimillionaire Michael Evans?
Reality Bites Back would be bigger than The Bachelor. Judith would get that Emmy for sure.
The sudden blast of her ringtone shattered Judith’s dreamy musings.
“Yeah,” she barked into it.
“Your boy made an unexpected move.”
“What? Did he tip the doorman a fifty instead of a hundred this time?”
“No, he flew out of state in the corporate jet.”
“Let me guess. Off to Fiji for some R & R.”
“No. I pulled some strings and got a look at the flight plan. He headed to a general aviation airstrip in Oklahoma.”
“Back to his roots, huh?” Judith twirled her pencil through her fingers like a mini baton. “Interesting.”
As far as Judith had been able to discover, Evans hadn’t returned to fly-over country since she’d crossed paths with him. Something important must have happened to send him racing back there.
Maybe it had something to do with how he go
t that scar....
“So, look, you haven’t paid me for the last week of surveillance,” the PI said.
“Oh, did you send an invoice?” It was lying on Judith’s desk along with her delinquent rent, unpaid utility bill, and a cancelation notice on her Visa card.
“I sent you the bill twice,” the man said gruffly. “I’m done being your eyes until I see some green.”
“You’re done anyway unless you plan to follow him to the Land of Oz.”
“You’re thinking of Kansas. Or maybe Australia. Anyway, I’m telling you, the guy went to Oklahoma.”
“Whatever. I can’t pay a bill I haven’t received. And write up a decent report if you expect to see a dime.” She clicked off, and when her phone rang back immediately, she let it go to voice mail. Judith tucked the private investigator’s bill under the stack of other unpaid ones.
“Get in line, buddy.”
She stood and started pacing her studio apartment.
“Get in line, buddy,” her parrot repeated. “Get in line.”
“Shut up.”
The bird turned its back to her and tucked its head under a wing, clearly in a sulk. Judith wondered how much she could get for Emmy if she decided to sell her. The parrot wasn’t good for anything except eating, pooping, and mind-numbing chatter.
Kind of like most of the people I know.
Judith opened her browser and checked her bank account online. It was more depressing than a month of rainy weekends.
Michael Evans could fly anywhere he wanted in his fancy corporate jet. Judith made do with the subway to get around. But the MTA didn’t stretch clear to Oklahoma, and that was where she had to go.
She couldn’t afford to hire a cameraman and certainly couldn’t pay for one to accompany her all the way to the back of beyond. She’d need to make do with a concealed camera she could wear on her lapel.
After searching multiple airlines for a cheap coach seat, she decided even that was too rich for her blood at the moment. After all, she didn’t know how long she’d have to camp out in some horrid little motel while she tracked down the secret of Michael Evans’s scar. She was going to have to get to Oklahoma by alternate means.