Man Trouble

by Melanie Craft

  “What emergency situation?” Carter asked.

  “He didn't tell me,” Molly said, “and I didn't ask.”

  Carter looked disappointed. “You should have gotten the details. It's obviously a business crisis—I could get some mileage out of that, even if I don't come away with anything else from this trip. Did he say anything more about the book?”

  “No,” Molly said. “He only wanted to talk about his own plan.”

  “It's clever,” Elaine said thoughtfully. She folded the wet napkin and began to dab her wrists and forehead with it. “He's a very intelligent man. This is exactly the sort of news that would make headlines after his breakup with Skye Elliot. It certainly is unconventional, but if his public image really is so closely linked to the company's image—and I assume that he knows what he's talking about—then it just might work.”

  “Do you think he read my clippings?” Carter persisted. “Because I think my talent speaks for itself. Tell him that the book isn't the only possible project. I'm flexible. An interview would be enough. One interview. His first ever. Exclusive rights. Yes! When are you talking to him again?”

  “I'm not,” Molly said. “I told him that I wasn't interested in helping him, and since we're going home tomorrow, I doubt that I'll ever see him again.”

  “What?” Carter gasped. “But…Molly, how could you?”

  “Oh, damn,” Elaine muttered. “I might have known. Doesn't anyone under the age of forty have any sense?”

  “Are you crazy?” Carter demanded. “You can't say no. Don't you understand what this means? Three months inside the world of Jake Berenger? The material! The scoop! Look, I'm sure it's not too late. You can change your mind. Call him. Call him now.”

  “I'm not crazy,” Molly said defensively. “And I'm not going to call him. How could I agree to do something like that? It would completely disrupt my life.”

  “Molly, dear,” Elaine said. “A little disruption is not necessarily a bad thing. We need to have a talk about the fact that handsome young billionaires don't come knocking on a girl's door, proposing marriage, every day of the week.”

  “He didn't propose marriage!” Molly said. “Isn't anyone in this room listening to me? He proposed a fake engagement. That's different.”

  “A fake engagement can be leveraged into a real one,” Elaine said. “You may not know this, but men are lazy. They don't like to leave home unless they have to. Achieving close proximity is half the battle.”

  “I can't believe this,” Molly said. “You're telling me that after three months of having me around, Jake might decide to marry me because he's lazy and I would be convenient?”

  “Yes, if you're clever about it,” Elaine said. “The man is forty years old, and he needs a wife.”

  “But I don't want to marry him. I don't even like him.”

  “Dislike means nothing,” Elaine said firmly. “I could name several lucrative, long-term relationships where the two people involved actually loathe one another.”

  “Don't tell me that,” Molly said. “I don't want to know. Anyway, spending the next three months pretending to be Jake's fiancée would get in the way of my teaching schedule. I'd have to live with him, and—”

  “Live with him!” Carter howled. “The opportunity! The access! Give me the Sandra wig, I'll be his fiancée. I love him. I'd make a beautiful bride.”

  “No, you wouldn't,” Molly said. “And there's a confidentiality agreement involved, so neither you nor I could ever publish a word about it.”

  “Those agreements don't always hold up in court,” Carter said.

  “I don't care,” Molly said. “I spent the last year of my life hiding from the press, and I have no intention of now becoming part of someone else's PR campaign.”

  “But—” Carter said.

  Molly shook her head. “I don't want to talk about it. Remember when you said that even if nothing else worked out, we'd still have enjoyed a week at a five-star resort?”

  “Yes,” Carter said gloomily. “I remember.”

  “Good,” Molly said. “Because I'm going to change into my swimsuit, and then I'm going down to the beach to try to pack a week of enjoyment into the rest of today. Are you coming with me?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Molly's parents still lived in the house where they had raised her, a blue and cream Victorian on the edge of the tiny town of Belden. They had bought it as newlyweds, more than forty years earlier, when Stanford Shaw had arrived to take his position as the youngest member of the Belden College history faculty. The house had seemed too large for just a professor and his wife, but the Shaws had planned to fill it with a dynasty of brilliant, successful children.

  It was the only time—to Molly's knowledge—that Fate had ever dared to cross her father. She was an only child, born after ten years of failed attempts, and so the responsibility for filling the house with awards and achievement had fallen entirely onto her shoulders. She had never questioned this duty, or wondered about the limitations of her father's definition of achievement.

  It was December 31, and the Social Sciences' New Year's Eve party—traditionally hosted by her father and catered by her mother—was in full swing. It was the usual crowd of professors, their spouses, the dean, his wife, the department secretaries, their spouses, and a handful of diehard students who had stayed on campus for the holidays and wanted everyone to know it. It was just before ten P.M. and most of the guests were tipsy on spiked eggnog, except for Professor Crump, who—as he had done every year for as long as Molly could remember—had consumed half a punch bowl of grog and passed out on the couch under the mistletoe. He was snoring gently, and someone had put a Santa hat on him. Molly knew from experience that most of the group would vanish before midnight—the older faculty home to bed, the younger faculty home to relieve the babysitter, and the students to the local pub. Professor Crump, widowed for the past five years, would spend the night on the couch and have New Year's breakfast with the Shaws in the morning.

  Molly had never liked or disliked the party; it was just something that happened annually, like her dental checkup. It was the same every year, so she had assumed that it would always be the same, in perpetuity. She had never considered the possibility that she herself might change, even if the party didn't.

  “I can't believe how different you look,” Rachel Feinstein kept saying whenever the crowd circulation brought her close to Molly, which was by then three times more often than Molly would have liked. Rachel was Molly's age, had been hired shortly after Molly, and was “Preparation H,” as the academic community admiringly described someone with both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate from Harvard. She and Molly had been rivals from the moment that each laid eyes on the other's curriculum vitae. Only one of them was likely to be offered tenure at Belden, and they both knew it.

  The fight for academic dominance was getting ugly. Rachel's area of expertise was Elizabethan England, and for the past year she had been attempting to prove that Shakespeare's plays had actually been written by his sister. It was a shameless publicity ploy, and unfortunately it was working. Rachel's research had made headlines in the popular press and had just earned the department a large grant from a private foundation called the Society for Revisionist Herstory.

  “You bleached your hair,” Rachel said smugly. “It looks much lighter. It's almost blond.”

  “It's caramel,” Molly said. “Not blond.”

  “And your dress…I've never seen you look so…”

  “Yes?” Molly asked.

  “Fashionable,” Rachel said.

  “Thank you,” Molly said, although she knew that it wasn't meant as a compliment. She was wearing a black cashmere dress with long sleeves and a plunging V-neck. Elaine had picked it out a few days earlier, during a shopping trip in Chicago. She had also guided Molly toward a black push-up bra that Molly wanted to hand over to the Belden Physics department, because it seemed to create matter where there was none.

  Her new look c
aused even more of a stir than she had expected. Her haircut and color raised stunned eyebrows, and the bra and dress unleashed a rumor that she had actually been in the hospital the previous week, getting breast implants. There was also talk that she was having a torrid affair with a graduate student. Professor Crump told her in slurred tones that she looked like Hedy Lamarr, then spilled a cup of grog on her.

  Her father had pointedly avoided saying a single word about her appearance, but her mother had pulled her aside and whispered that she looked beautiful. Molly had hugged her, and then asked her who Hedy Lamarr was.

  “I heard that you just got back from a trip to the Caribbean,” Rachel said, staring suspiciously at Molly's chest.

  Molly nodded. “And I heard that you turned up new evidence that Shakespeare kept his sister locked in the attic while she worked.”

  “That's not true,” Rachel said. She looked upset. “Who told you that?”

  Molly sighed. “Nobody. I was joking.”

  “Oh. What were you doing in the Caribbean? Research, I assume? Do you have a new project?”

  “No,” Molly said. “Actually, I was vacationing.”

  “You're joking again,” Rachel said. “I can tell. You do have a project. What is it?”

  “Oh, okay,” Molly said. “You're right. I have a project, and it's big. Very big, but I can't tell you what it is. Sorry.”

  Rachel frowned. “Why can't you tell me?”

  Molly made a show of looking covertly from side to side. “Because,” she said in a low, dramatic voice. “It would expose you to terrible danger. There is a lot of money involved.”

  She smiled mysteriously, then slipped away into the crowd, leaving Rachel to wonder what she'd meant. Molly didn't know either, but it had sounded good. It was funny—until that moment, it had never occurred to her that despite her colleagues' professed disdain for money, most of their time was spent obsessing over ways to get it, in the form of various grants and cash awards. Scholarly recognition was nice, but it was Rachel's big grant that had earned her an invitation to a personal lunch at President Dickerson's house. Molly had eaten a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich at her desk that day and thought about downloading a virus onto Rachel's computer while she was gone.

  Interesting, Molly thought. The world was in better focus these days, and it wasn't entirely due to her new contact lenses. It seemed that she had uncovered part of her brain along with half of her chest, and she was beginning to understand things that she had never understood before. Slowly, she made her way through the crowd, heading for the front door. She had had enough for one night, but she felt good. Tired, and a little shaky, but with her new bravado intact. She waved to the various people who were staring at her, and slipped through the doorway into the cold, clear air of the approaching New Year.

  New Year's Day was hot and sunny at Gold Bay, but Jake was too exhausted to enjoy the weather. He had spent the past week more or less living on his Gulfstream jet, shuttling back and forth between Antigua, Miami, and New York City, having emergency meetings with his senior executives, the company lawyers, and the Berenger board, as they worked to develop a strategy to block the hostile takeover by Atlas Group. So far, he had managed to avoid going to Atlas's corporate headquarters in Atlanta by delegating the job to Oliver Arias, who had a cooler head. Jake could handle a phone conversation with Ed Thatcher, but he knew that if he looked the man in the eye, Ed would see through him in a second. So far, they had stalled Atlas by feigning interest in a friendly deal, and by leveraging the excuse of the holiday week to keep meetings and negotiations crawling forward at the slowest possible pace.

  But tomorrow was January second, and that tactic would no longer be viable. The stock price hadn't dropped any further, but it hadn't gone up, either, and at Berenger's current market value, the company was a sitting duck. It had not—to say the least—been a pleasant holiday.

  After Molly Shaw had refused his proposal, Jake had briefly reconsidered Cora's suggestion that he use Amanda for their PR campaign, but his instincts warned him off. Amanda wasn't the right person for the job. Molly, on the other hand…

  She was perfect, damn it. She had an image that the press would love—he could see his PR department directing the Cinderella story like a feature film: “Small-Town Teacher Swept Away by Big City Prince.” It was all hype, of course. He was no prince, and Molly was no small-town teacher, but people seemed to like stereotypes in their headlines.

  He exhaled, frustrated. It might be time for another try. By now, she had had more than a week to cool off and reconsider the idea. It was very possible that she was now regretting her haste in rejecting his offer. She might even be hoping that he would call her to negotiate. He swiveled his chair to face his computer and logged into the Gold Bay reservations database. Molly's contact information wasn't there, but Carter McKee's was, and that was all Jake needed.

  “You!” Molly Shaw exclaimed. “What do you want?”

  “Happy New Year,” Jake said. She didn't sound very pleased to hear from him. Maybe a week wasn't a sufficient cooling-off period.

  “How did you get my number? It isn't listed.”

  “I called your friend Carter. He gave it to me.”

  “Did he,” Molly said grimly, and Jake imagined dire consequences for Carter McKee.

  “Are you always this friendly on the phone?” he asked.

  “I'm friendly when I have a reason to be. But you rank just below telemarketers in my caller hierarchy. That person that you paid to ask about me…do you know what he said when he called my neighbor, Mrs. Olsen?”

  Uh-oh, Jake thought. “What?”

  “He told her that he was from the FBI! He said that he was investigating me, but it was too classified to talk about. She's eighty-seven years old, and she's sure that it must be something to do with drugs, because all the young people are on drugs these days. Now she won't speak to me, and she's been slipping ‘just say no’ pamphlets into my mailbox. Thanks a lot.”

  “Sorry about that,” Jake said.

  “Sure you are. Why are you calling me?”

  “I wanted to discuss the offer I made before you left Gold Bay. Now that you've had some time to think it over, I wondered if you might have reconsid—”

  “No,” Molly said.

  Jake exhaled slowly, reaching for his patience. “I don't know why your neighbor thinks you need those pamphlets. I've never met a woman as good at saying no as you are. Will you at least let me finish?”

  “No,” Molly said again. “I'm not interested. I don't want anything to do with you, and that includes talking to you on the phone.”

  “This is crazy,” Jake exclaimed. “You're the one who tricked me. You're the one who was stalking me—you and your friends! If anybody here has a right to be angry, I do. But I'm trying to make you a new offer. If you'll spend the next three months posing as my fiancée, I'll give you until April at the old plantation, and I'll add a cash payment to the deal. How about—”

  “I don't need your money,” Molly said. “Use it to hire someone else. The new semester starts in two weeks, and I have a full teaching load scheduled.”

  “You told me that you were planning to write a book about Mary Morgan,” Jake said. “I thought that you academics were always looking for new research projects. What about ‘publish or perish'? This would be better for your career than spending a semester teaching.”

  Molly was silent for a long moment, and Jake hoped that he had stumbled onto something. Finally, she spoke.

  “Would you be willing to sign a legal document stating that if I find proof in the next three months, you'll turn the Morgan plantation into a museum?”

  Jake did a quick mental calculation of odds and costs. Rezoning the golf course would cost more than he wanted to spend, as would polishing up the old site to make it safe for tourists. He didn't like the idea of being legally required to do either. But there was always the chance that the plantation hadn't belonged to Mary Morgan, or that Molly woul
d be unable to prove that it had. His top priority was to keep his company out of Atlas's hands. If he couldn't manage that, whatever happened at Gold Bay in three months would be a non-issue. For him, at least.

  “Yes,” he said. “I'll sign a document stating exactly what you just said. Three months. If you have proof by then, I'll make it a museum.”

  “And you'll start the Mary Morgan Foundation to maintain and preserve the site.”

  “The what?”

  “I'll be honored to accept the position of executive director,” Molly said. “Thank you so much for thinking of me.”

  “I don't believe this,” Jake said, annoyed. “All right. Fine. I'll do it. Now will you—”

  “And you'll give Carter the first interview about the engagement. He gets to break the news.”

  “No. My PR people will break the news. That's not negotiable.”

  “What about Carter?”

  Jake hesitated. He didn't like Molly's friend, and he had no desire to see the man again, much less to spend time talking to him. But it would be pointless to stall the deal over that. There wasn't a reporter on earth who he did want to talk to, but he no longer had a choice. “One interview,” he said. “Sometime after the news has been released. He can peddle it wherever he likes, but that's the most I'll agree to. All right?”

  “That sounds reasonable,” Molly said.

  Jake felt a surge of relief. “Great,” he said. “It's settled, then. You'll do it.”

  “No,” Molly said sweetly. “Sorry. I told you, I'm not interested.”

  “What? Then why the hell were you—”

  “I was just wondering if you were getting desperate.”

  “God damn it,” Jake snapped. “I'm not desperate. You aren't the only woman I know. There are plenty of others—”

  “So I've heard,” Molly said.

  “—who would be happy with a cash payment and some media attention. They wouldn't ask me to build them museums, and set up foundations…”

  “Wonderful,” Molly said. “I hope that you and they have a very nice engagement. Good-bye, Jake.”