Mad About The Man

by Stella Cameron

  MAD ABOUT THE MAN

  Stella Cameron

  HE WANTED EVERYTHING

  Jacques Ledan was the King of Candy, the man whose passionate sweets were indescribable sensations. He was also a conqueror, whose next conquest was to wake up the sleepy town of Goldstrike… and seduce his adversary, Gaby MacGregor.

  Jacques was certain the tiny Sierra Nevada town would soon erect a statue in his honor. And even more certain that Gaby would swoon at his foolproof tools of seduction. How could one person be so wrong?

  Goldstrike's fiery leader had launched her own attack. Gaby was good at strategy… but even she wasn't prepared for Jacques's secret weapon!

  Prologue

  "Taste it, Jacques, taste it."

  "Convince me I want to."

  Rita laughed and leaned closer. "Let your tongue convince you, darling. We both know what a voluptuary you are."

  "Mmm. Voluptuaries enjoy being persuaded." He watched her fingers move—slender, clever fingers practiced in the small nuances of temptation. "Show me how good you are. Make me want what you're offering so badly it hurts."

  Her subtle scent reached him—summer roses. Jacques let his eyelids drift down a fraction. Creamy roses. Curving petals that begged to be cupped, just as the velvet fullness of a passionate woman's breasts begged to be cupped by a lover's hands.

  Soft breath touched his face. She was very near. "I can make you want this, Jacques. Open your mouth."

  "You haven't convinced me."

  "But I have aroused your jaded appetites, haven't I? Go with me, Jacques. Let me lead you. Let me seduce you."

  "I've always made a better leader than a follower."

  Her smile was lazy. "I've never met a sensual man who couldn't be turned on by a little female mastery. Forced seduction, Jacques. Come on, don't tell me it'll be the first time you were taken rather than the taker."

  "You could be right. Why don't you tell me exactly how you intend to do it, sweetheart? Guide me through, step by step."

  "My pleasure." Moistening her lips with the pointed tip of her pink tongue, Rita rested a forearm on his thighs. "First we do a little touching."

  "Do we?"

  "Oh, yes. Textures excite, Jacques. You know that. Sensation is everything."

  Oh, yeah. "I'm bored, Rita. Can you give me sensations that'll help me forget just how bored I am?"

  "Guaranteed. Relax." Her fingertips stroked little circles. "I guess I missed a step. Before we can touch we have to get rid of the wrappings. To touch, we need naked, Jacques, naked things the tongue wants to curl around."

  "Naked is one of my favorite words."

  Now Rita held her tongue between her teeth and went to her knees between his legs. "I'm going to loosen this, Jacques—it'll help you get deeper into the mood. Aah…" She tossed back her hair and those nimble fingers went to work again. "Better? Do I have your attention now?"

  "I'm only human," he murmured and shifted in his seat. "How long is this going to take?"

  "In a hurry now?"

  "Let's just say I feel something's going to present itself at any second and I'm not going to be able to avoid dealing with it."

  "Ah, Jacques—you do live up to your reputation. Always ready to go. I'm ready, too, darling. Open your mouth."

  "Why?"

  "Because I've got something you're going to want to fill it with." She peeled away satiny red and silken white. "See. Can you tell me these aren't perfect enough to make a man hungry?"

  "Rita—"

  "Open your mouth."

  Sighing, he did as she asked.

  "Come on. Draw it in. Yes. Yes! Oh, yes! That's the way."

  Jacques closed his eyes.

  "Ah, ah, ah. Slowly, darling, slowly. Make it last. Roll your tongue around it and over it and… Yes! Tell me you like it, Jacques. Tell me you can't get enough of it. Sweetheart, there's plenty more where that came from."

  He swallowed and looked into her flushed face. "Nice try, Rita. You gave it your best shot. If anyone could breathe some life into me, it's you."

  "But?" With a thump, she sat on her heels. "But, Jacques? Don't do this to me. I can't stand it."

  "You're going to have to. I just can't get it up anymore—the enthusiasm is gone. It's been gone for a long time. I'm bored with the whole process."

  "You can't be." She pouted.

  "Oh, but I can. Watch my lips while I make the words, sweetheart."

  Frowning, Rita crossed her arms. "I'm watching."

  "If I ever have to taste another candy I'm going to puke."

  1

  "No! He's not getting away with it!"

  "Gaby, Gaby, don't do this to yourself." Char Brown, elderly, graying and oozing creative talent, trotted in Gaby McGregor's wake.

  "Take one man, add too much money and not enough to do with it—or with his time—and what d'you have?"

  "Gaby—"

  "I'll tell you what you have. Trouble. Trouble with a capital T."

  Char edged rapidly around Gaby and faced her in the window of the millinery workroom. "Forget Jacques Ledan. Forget the whole issue. You can't stop a man like him."

  "He wants to turn Goldstrike into some sort of destination tourist trap." Frustration boiled in Gaby. "Char, he's buying this town. He plans to form one great big club and we're all getting a membership whether we like it or not. It's going to be 'join or leave.' I'm not leaving, and I'm not giving up on this without a fight."

  "Let it go. Who buys what in this town and what they do with it isn't your problem."

  "It is my problem. It's a problem for every one of us who lives here. Things may be financially depressed, but we're used to that. Great as Knott's Berry Farm is, we don't want to become California's next down-home fun spot."

  "Gaby, this isn't something you can change."

  "The hell it isn't! I live here. My best friends live here. Hell, my daughter lives here!" And for the first time in her life, Gaby really liked where she was and who she was with.

  "Gaby, what's happened to your language?"

  "Once the rot gets in it spreads. First he bought up the old schoolhouse. Then Bartlett's Feed Store… I'm not the only one who thinks they'd have held on if he hadn't made an offer they couldn't refuse. Next it'll be the abandoned fire station. He'll gobble up any little businesses that go under—" she paused for breath "—and on and on until Goldstrike looks like Carmel, only tackier."

  "You're getting carried away." Char's dark eyes were bright with worry. "He'll never make it work, anyway. And a lot of people think Carmel's cute. It's got Clint Eastwood. But this isn't Carmel. We don't have an ocean to run to. This is central California and it's dirt, yellow, plain—and everyone knows it."

  "The hell—I happen to like the way this little town looks." In fact, she loved it, had adored it from that first day, almost six years ago, when she'd been on a trip going nowhere, coming from nowhere she wanted to go back to, and had stopped for gas. The radiator in her old Chevy station wagon had chosen that moment to spring a leak, and a gas stop turned into an overnight stay that led to a permanent address change—for Gaby and her then one year-old daughter, Mae.

  And Gaby loved the place.

  "I like Goldstrike, too," Char said quietly. She jabbed a pin repeatedly into the cushion she wore on a band around her wrist—a sure sign she was more upset than she wanted Gaby to guess. "Forget Jacques Ledan and his megaresort plans. Think fruit. Keep your mind on fruit. This is the year of the fruit theme at Gaby's. Fruit is great." She snatched up a black velvet pillbox-shaped hat and coiled a spray of silk strawberries on the crown.

  For a moment the only sound in the room was the whir of wooden blades in the overhead fans.

  "The fruit is great?" Gaby said carefully, narrowi
ng eyes she'd been told, usually by people not destined to be great friends, could resemble green drill bits.

  "Great," Char repeated. "Absolutely." She nodded the mass of wiry, gray-peppered dark curls that reached her shoulders.

  Gaby settled a hat on her head and pulled the straight brim far down over her eyes. The black straw matador number had a band fashioned from a string of miniature wax bananas. "Yesterday," she said deliberately, "yesterday the fruit stank. Today it's great. Did you get a brain transplant since you stepped out of here last night, or what?"

  Char hunched her thin shoulders. "I thought it through, okay?"

  "Not okay." Giving the hat brim an added downward tilt, Gaby dropped into a chair. She had made wearing her own creations a trademark. Every day a different hat. She pointed at Char. "I know diversion tactics when I see them. They won't work. Ooh, wait till I get my hands on this bozo."

  "He owns Ledan Confectionery and he's no bozo. You can't call a multimillionaire a bozo."

  Gaby raised her jaw. She knew the hat suited her. With her long, straight black hair drawn back from a finely boned face dominated by great green eyes and a full mouth, her inner eye told her exactly the picture she made: dramatically elegant. She wasn't vain, just savvy. If customers liked what they saw on her, they wanted to duplicate the effect for themselves. That sold hats and that was her business. Goldstrike was a small town, once a gold-panning settlement, that had been dying for longer than any of the current inhabitants remembered. Fruit farmers and the handful of businesses needed to support them; that's what Goldstrike was about. These people didn't need fancy hats. But there were women among them who needed and wanted the work Gaby's one-woman whirlwind operation could provide, and the whole town benefited from the people who traveled long distances just to buy and own a genuine "Gaby." Those customers came, spent enough money to be of slight help to Goldstrike's economy and left. And they didn't stay long enough to change anything the natives didn't want disturbed.

  "I think," Gaby said after consideration, "that there's absolutely no reason I can't call some idiot from Los Angeles a bozo just because he's got a gold-plated rear."

  Char tossed aside the black velvet and grabbed her iced tea. "You're going downhill, my girl. Your losing it. Gold-plated rear?"

  "Yeah. He wallowed in money so long it worked its way through his skin, and since he made his bucks in candy, he's gotta be a taddy bit porky, which means he has to sit on his rear a lot because he's too tired to move. Gravity pulls, right?"

  "Uh-huh." Char crossed her arms.

  "Right. Okay. So a lot of the money in his skin turned to gold and sank to the lowest point of gravity. His backside is pure fourteen carat and since money is what occupies his brain—one hundred percent—that's where his brain is. What would you call a guy who keeps his brain there?"

  "All the years you lived with that wild crowd in Los Angeles spoiled you."

  "Probably." They certainly caused her to marry a man because he looked good enough to eat, even though he had nothing in common with her. But without Michael there wouldn't have been a Mae, so she guessed she wouldn't change a thing about all of that. "Don't forget it's the Los Angeles contacts who keep us going up here. And you and I found each other in LA. Have you met this Ledan guy?"

  "No."

  "Who has?"

  Char frowned and shook her head.

  "Someone must have. He's been all over town trying to buy up real estate."

  "No one's mentioned actually meeting him."

  Gaby sniggered. "Like I told you. He sits in his Los Angeles office… or his Paris office or up there in that great big ugly house of his in our mountains—" she indicated the nearby foothills of the Sierra Nevada "—and that's all he does… sit. And think up ways to make even more money and make our lives miserable in the process. He can't even get out and do his own dirty work."

  "I'm sure the man doesn't deliberately try to dream up things we won't like."

  "No. He doesn't think about us at all. We don't exist to Mr. Jacques Ledan. Ooh, I hate him. I may just go up and speak to him myself. Once he sees what he's up against he may decide to take his resort and… take it elsewhere."

  Char laughed. "You are pretty terrifying."

  "I may not look particularly… robust, but I can stand up for myself." Gaby glowered at the other woman. All her life she'd been told how fragile she looked, and she detested being seen as a delicate, exotic flower of a woman. Her personality was anything but soft.

  A distant jingle sounded. The workroom was behind a small showroom that fronted on the street. Locals came to the back entrance. The bell announced a customer.

  Char looked surprised. "Another drop-in? Two in one day?" Since Goldstrike wasn't on a main highway, very few sales were to casual customers.

  "Your turn," Gaby said quickly.

  "Uh-uh." Char picked up the strawberry vine once more. "I took the other one. This is your chance to shine." She flipped the brilliantly striped skirt of her loose cotton dress and sat down, tucking thin, brown ankles around the legs of her chair.

  Without another word, Gaby got up and swept between empty worktables. On Saturdays she and Char worked alone and traded off turns dealing with any buyers.

  Entering the shop, her flat sandals making slapping sounds on stone tiles, Gaby was confronted by a tall, auburn-haired woman with penetrating brown eyes, a full figure in a red suit, noticeably good legs all the way down to high, high-heeled red shoes… and a frown that would compete with Gaby's renowned best efforts. To the woman's left, apparently fascinated by one of the hats in the window, stood a huskily built blond man. A flash of sun on a tinted windshield drew attention to a navy-blue limousine outside.

  "Good morning." Gaby looked from the pointed-crowned, claret-colored velvet evening hat the woman balanced on a forefinger, to those piercing eyes. "Looking for something for the theater… the opera, perhaps?"

  The claret hat featured a swathe of net veiling dotted with tiny crystal beads and discreetly edged with shiny red currants. Gaby was very pleased with her fruit theme.

  "Who on earth wears something like this around here?" The woman's voice held no malice, only genuine curiosity.

  Gaby hitched at the slipping shoulders of her wide-necked overblouse. "No one around here does." She didn't bother to add that the congresswoman who'd ordered the hat would wear it at a gala charity concert in Washington.

  "Oh." The woman's gaze slid from Gaby to the hat and back to Gaby. "I see. Are you Gaby McGregor?"

  "The same."

  The man, thirtyish, blue-eyed and boyishly handsome, aimed a charming smile in Gaby's direction before settling into a black wicker chair meant more for decoration than actual use.

  "You don't look… Are you from Goldstrike?" the woman asked.

  "Oh, yes. This is home." She didn't owe anyone her life history, particularly not some overdressed fruitcake.

  "I'm Rita Nagel." Still balancing the conical hat on her left forefinger, the way a plate juggler would, the woman thrust out her right hand.

  Gaby shook hands, not without noting long, perfectly manicured nails… and a surprisingly firm grip. "Hi, Rita."

  "How many people work for you?"

  The question took Gaby aback. "Um—it varies, depending upon the orders." She wasn't about to tell her the exact number.

  Rita Nagel eyed the flashy creation on her finger. "I guess your people fiddle around with stuff like this when there isn't enough to do."

  Her own frown, Gaby was certain, must rival Rita's. "Not exactly." Almost every hat in the showroom had been commissioned. They were merely kept there for convenience and to act as window dressing when people came to pick up orders.

  Sighing, Rita set the hat down on one of the gold wire, head-shaped cages that were arranged in spot-lighted alcoves around the shop. "I think you're going to be very interested in my reason for being here," Rita said, a tight smile jerking up the corners of her small, red mouth. "I expect you'd love to be busy enough to
need every one of your employees full-time—and then some."

  The man beat a tattoo on the tiles with the toes of his shiny, Gucci loafers. Dressed in a fashionably relaxed-looking gray linen suit, a khaki shirt and beige tie, he would definitely be much more at home on Rodeo Drive.

  "Ms. McGregor?"

  Gaby dragged her attention from the silent, smiling man "Yes?" Someone should tell Rita about making introductions—if he couldn't make them himself.

  "You've probably heard the name Jacques Ledan." Rita inclined her head toward her companion.

  Gaby stared at Ledan with unwilling curiosity. "Probably," she told Rita without enthusiasm.

  "Are you aware of his proposed project in Goldstrike?"

  "Project?" She darted a glance at the blond man, who nodded pleasantly.

  "So you don't know very much." Rita's eyes took on the glaze of a woman experiencing a satisfying inner vision. "Mr. Ledan is a very forward-thinking man. I'm sure you've heard of Ledan Confectionery."

  How forward thinking did you have to be to keep on making the candy your family had been selling forever? "I've heard of it."

  "What's your favorite?" Ledan's mellow, all-American accent surprised Gaby. He turned his blue eyes toward the ceiling. "Let me guess. You're either a Latin Lover's Cordial or—and this is probably the one—Sinful Sensations." His smile shone upon her once more. "For the woman who likes a selection?"

  Gaby detested glib men… particularly glib, egocentric men. "I guess you haven't noticed that in Goldstrike we're strictly on the simple side. Around here it's a treat to buy caramel apples at Artie's Grocery. This is definitely not the place to come if you're a Ledan's type."

  "It will be," the man said, grinning complacently.

  She hated him… had already hated him. Now she detested the man.

  Rita snapped her fingers for attention. "As I was saying, Mr. Ledan is a man of vision. He sees potential in this town. And need. He intends to make it his mission to bring Goldstrike into the twentieth century."

  Almost too amazed to respond, Gaby eyed Rita's fingers, still poised in snapping mode. "I'm very busy… so if you don't mind…"