Ask Anyone

by Sherryl Woods

  Unfortunately, though, her sneakiness seemed to have been for naught. The man she’d been told to contact—the one who owned the riverfront property and was looking to develop it—was steadfastly refusing to see her. His secretary claimed he wasn’t seeing anyone yet, but Jenna suspected it was because she was a female. In the development business, she ran across a lot of macho males who ignored anything a woman had to say unless it pertained to sex. Since sex had been nothing but trouble for Jenna, she had no intention of indulging again, at least not in the foreseeable future. Better to concentrate on things she understood, like riverfront development.

  Whatever the real story was behind Bobby Spencer’s refusal to see her, this morning she had taken steps to snag his attention. She’d sent the man an extraordinarily rare carousel horse, part of an elaborate 1916 Allan Herschel carousel with a Wurlitzer organ that had cost her every penny of her savings and the entire trust fund her mother had left her. She’d considered it an investment in her future. Given the current state of the stock market, it probably wasn’t as risky a decision as it seemed.

  If all else failed, she assumed she could auction off the carousel—currently under lock and key in a Maryland warehouse—and at least get her money back. If she succeeded, it would become the centerpiece of this project, and Bobby Spencer would pay handsomely for it.

  Of course, in an attempt to prove to her father that she could be sensible when necessary, she had also sent along a guard to protect the expensive antique from the sticky fingers of curious kids and the remote possibility that a knowledgeable thief would try to make off with it.

  The whole plan had been a stroke of genius, if she did say so herself. Too bad she’d had to keep it from her father. He might have been proud of her, for once.

  Jenna sat in her car down the block and happily watched the crowd on Spencer’s lawn growing, despite the halfhearted attempts of two policemen to get it to disperse. Heck, if she’d thought to open a concession stand on the block, she could have sold enough lemonade on this hot July morning to pay the guard’s salary.

  She’d give it another half hour, let Bobby Spencer begin to see what a draw an old carousel could be for the town, then she’d seize the moment to demand an appointment to make her complete presentation.

  Despite years of being regarded as a second-class citizen in her own family’s company, Jenna had complete confidence in her design for the Trinity Harbor boardwalk. In her favor, she had an abiding nostalgia for all the old-fashioned beach towns she’d ever visited. People could get gaudy seaside entertainment in Ocean City. They could find more elaborate amusement parks just down the road from here at Kings Dominion or Busch Gardens. What a quaint little town like Trinity Harbor required was charm, and nobody understood charm better than a woman who’d spent her whole life with a bunch of men who were clueless on the subject.

  But despite her self-confidence about the end result, Jenna resented the fact that she’d had to go to such an extreme just to put herself on Spencer’s radar. What kind of businessman ignored the overtures of an expert? His behavior didn’t bode well for their working relationship, but she was desperate. She’d work with the worst CEO in corporate history for this chance.

  More dispiriting, though, than being dismissed by a stranger was having to jump through such elaborate hoops to prove to her father that she understood the business as well as he did and that she deserved to be more than decoration for the front office. If she’d been another son, he would have taken these things as a given. Dennis and Daniel had never had to prove themselves. They just showed up and made a pretense of working. As long as beachfront condos went up and didn’t fall down, her father was content. It annoyed the daylights out of Jenna that he never saw her brothers’ flaws—and never forgot hers.

  Not that her father didn’t have more than ample reason to distrust her judgment, she conceded reluctantly, but he bore some of the responsibility for her disastrous elopement himself. Randall Pennington had been an overprotective single dad who’d never had the first inkling about how to raise a daughter. After Jenna’s mother had died, he’d settled on boarding school and tough love for his only daughter, while his sons had stayed at home under his watchful but indulgent eye.

  As a result, Jenna had abandonment issues. She also had control issues. Big ones. She’d never had to consult a shrink to figure that out. A couple of episodes of Oprah had done it.

  In an act of pure rebellion—and teenage lust—she had married the most irresponsible boy on God’s green earth. To this day, he hadn’t held a job more than the six months it took for boredom to set in. She shouldn’t have been surprised that his attention span for women was no longer.

  But to an eighteen-year-old girl who’d lived a sheltered boarding school life, Nick Kennedy had seemed wild and sexy and dangerous. His ability to make her father see red just by walking in the door had been one of his primary attractions.

  Nick had also been a helluva kisser, which had led to her second mistake in judgment. She’d gotten pregnant so fast, it must have set some kind of a record. Her only consolation was that it had been after the wedding ceremony, not before. Nick was already straying before their daughter’s birth, which had provided Jenna with her second dose of abandonment issues.

  Now she had a precocious nine-year-old who was the spitting image of her daddy in looks and temperament. If Jenna had allowed it, Darcy would be pierced and tattooed in every conceivable spot on her plump little body. Jenna shuddered at the thought of what might happen the next time Darcy went to visit Nick, whom she could twist around her little pinky. Discipline and good sense were not among Nick’s strengths. And in recent years he’d been given a tab at his neighborhood tattoo parlor.

  But the final nail in her coffin as far as her father was concerned had been her divorce. He didn’t believe in divorce. Not ever. Mistresses were just fine, apparently. It was an odd set of moral values, in Jenna’s opinion, but there it was. Leaving Nick was another black mark on her record with dear old Dad, even though he hated the guy. Another incomprehensible incongruity, to Jenna’s way of thinking. Trying to keep up with all of them gave her hives, but she did try.

  She could have moved out of her father’s house—where a housekeeper was now looking after Darcy—and away from Baltimore, struggled to find some kind of work for which she was qualified and probably lived happily ever after, but Jenna was stubborn. She still craved her father’s approval and her rightful share of the company. Hoping for his love after all these years was probably a wasted effort, but she even harbored hopes of that, which was why she was still living under his roof and accepting the paltry, nonliving wage he used to keep her there.

  She had worked for Pennington and Sons for the last seven years, ever since her quickie divorce in Reno. She was bound and determined to make her father regret that he’d only acknowledged the existence and contributions of her two worthless brothers in naming the business. She knew more, worked harder and had more vision than Dennis and Daniel combined, but all she got was a paycheck and the occasional patronizing pat on the head when she saved their sorry butts after they’d overlooked some little detail that could have cost the company a fortune. In fact, she was just about the only person in the firm who actually seemed to read and comprehend the fine print of their contracts.

  This Trinity Harbor job was her chance to prove herself creatively, and no male chauvinist jerk was going to deprive her of it. If she had to take Darcy out of her current school come September and move down here so she could get in Bobby Spencer’s face 24/7 until he caved in and gave her the deal, then that’s what she’d do.

  And after seeing him on his front lawn in his boxers, his body bronzed and his brown hair bleached by the sun, a rakish diamond glittering in his ear, the prospect promised to be a whole lot more entertaining than she’d envisioned when she’d driven away from Baltimore towing that antique horse in a trailer behind her beat-up Chevy.

  She’d been thinking arrogant, crotchety old
man, and, instead, she was going to be going toe to toe with a body—a man—so gorgeous he could make her forget her longstanding resolution not to even think about sex again until she hit menopause. Given her history of mistakes in judgment, her luck was not necessarily taking a turn for the better.

  2

  Bobby stared at the fancy little gift card that Tucker had brought inside. The guard had apparently handed it to him.

  “’There’s more where this came from,’” he read aloud, then looked at his brother. “What does that mean?”

  “I think it means you’d better keep an eye on the front lawn or you’ll wind up with a whole amusement park out there,” Tucker said. “Won’t be any need to develop the boardwalk. You can just invite folks over here, put a few burgers on the grill and make a fortune without ever leaving the house. There won’t be another town in the entire state that can compete with that kind of down-home atmosphere. They’ll be writing this place up in Southern Living.”

  Bobby shot a sour look at him. “The card’s not signed,” he noted.

  “I imagine that’s to keep you guessing,” Walker chimed in with another of those annoying grins.

  “Looks to me like a woman’s handwriting,” Tucker added. “Thought I smelled a trace of perfume, too.”

  “Is that the kind of top-notch investigative work the people of this county can expect from the sheriff?” Bobby inquired. “I could figure out that much.”

  “Any time you want to sign up to be a deputy, let me know,” Tucker retorted.

  Bobby scowled at him. “Didn’t the guard have any idea who’d hired him?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did, but he wasn’t inclined to share it,” Tucker said, snatching Bobby’s cooling food from in front of him and shoveling it down.

  “Hey,” Bobby protested, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Having breakfast,” Tucker said blandly. “The mayor rousted me out of bed, and I’m starved. Besides, you weren’t eating it. This is the least you can do after spoiling my day off.”

  “I’m not the one who called, and I was going to eat that myself,” Bobby countered.

  Tucker shrugged. “It would have been too cold. Fix yourself something else. Last I heard you were a professional cook.”

  “I’m a chef, dammit, and that’s not the point.” Bobby sighed heavily. “Aren’t the two of you on duty? Isn’t it your job to find the woman who sent this card?”

  “Actually, I’m not officially on duty. As for the rest, sometimes the smartest, most efficient thing a cop can do is nothing. I’m thinking the woman behind all this will find you,” Tucker said. “Got any bacon? I’m in the mood for some nice, crisp bacon.”

  “Fix it yourself,” Bobby said, then looked toward his brother-in-law. “Since my brother is more interested in filling his stomach than using his brain, what about you? Do you have any bright ideas about this?”

  “Tucker’s right. If someone went to this much trouble, they’re going to show up to see how it turned out,” Walker said, then added, “Damn, I’m sorry Daisy’s missing this. Your sister would have to pick this weekend to take Tommy off to Williamsburg for an educational adventure.”

  “Thank God for small favors,” Bobby grumbled. He’d forgotten about that trip. It was the only reason his sister wasn’t in the thick of things. “Having the two of you here is bad enough. I don’t need Daisy putting in her two cents. And Tommy’d be out there right now trying to charge people to take pictures. That boy has a true entrepreneurial spirit.”

  Finally thinking of something to smile about, Bobby said to Walker, “By the way, I’ll bet you twenty bucks that those two haven’t done an educational thing since they got to Williamsburg—unless you consider riding the roller coaster at Busch Gardens to be some form of higher education.”

  “That’s a sucker bet,” Walker said. “No question about it.”

  Just then the doorbell rang. Bobby frowned and didn’t make a move to answer it. He’d had about as much unwanted company as he could take this morning.

  “Well?” Tucker prodded when it rang again.

  “Well, what?”

  “Aren’t you going to answer it? Remember what I said, that mysterious woman is likely to come looking for you. That could be her. Your mystery could be solved right here and now.”

  Bobby considered the possibilities. Tucker could be right. Or, more likely, it could be his father, urged to interfere by the mayor. It could even be some kid with a bunch of unanswerable questions. Or his buddy Richard, wanting some kind of a comment for this week’s edition of the Trinity Harbor paper to go with the pictures he’d no doubt snapped of the chaos outside. When news happened in Trinity Harbor, Richard’s journalistic instincts kicked in within seconds. He wouldn’t miss this.

  Bobby wasn’t interested in dealing with any of them, not even the woman responsible for disrupting his peaceful Sunday morning.

  “Nope,” he said, and poured himself another cup of special blend French roast coffee. He was beginning to feel almost human, and he wasn’t about to ruin it.

  Whoever it was leaned on the doorbell.

  “I can’t stand it,” Walker said finally. “I’ll get rid of them.”

  Instead, five seconds later he returned to the kitchen looking vaguely bemused by a voluptuous redhead wearing a power suit and slinky three-inch spike heels. The dichotomy wasn’t lost on Bobby. Clearly the woman hadn’t gotten sidetracked on her way to church. She looked like a cross between a politician and a hooker.

  When she teetered on those heels, he was forced to reconsider. He began to lean toward the image of a kid playing dress-up. There was something vulnerable in her eyes to back up that opinion. He really, really hoped this was not the woman responsible for that horse. He was a sucker for female vulnerability. His protective instincts rushed into action, overriding every defense mechanism he worked to keep in place.

  “Nice job,” Bobby said to Walker, who merely shrugged over his inability—more likely, disinclination—to get rid of the interloper.

  “You must be Bobby Spencer,” the woman said, offering her hand and a dazzling smile.

  Bobby’s gaze narrowed. Reluctantly, he shook her outstretched hand. “I am.”

  “I’m Jenna Kennedy of Pennington and Sons.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Bobby said, recognizing the name of the Baltimore-based company that had been pestering him for a week now for an appointment. His secretary hadn’t been happy about his repeated refusal to talk to the woman. Maggie had thought she sounded sincere. Maggie was an annoyingly soft touch, which was why Bobby frequently wound up in meetings he didn’t want to have.

  He forced a stern expression. “Sorry you wasted your time,” he told her. “But I don’t conduct business in my kitchen, especially not on a Sunday morning. Call my office.”

  To her credit, she didn’t turn tail and run at the lack of welcome. “I would, but it’s the funniest thing. No one there seems to be able to give me an appointment without your say-so. Either you’re a control freak, you’re stonewalling me in particular for some reason or you’re just generally rude and bad at business.”

  “Or maybe I’m just busy,” he said mildly, not liking her accusations one bit. Especially the one about rudeness, since it seemed to echo Maggie’s assessment. He prided himself on being a gentleman. Good manners was one of the things King had drilled into all his children, right along with respect for their Southern heritage.

  Of course, the truth was, he had been stonewalling Jenna Kennedy. Though he hadn’t settled on a specific plan for his boardwalk project, he knew one thing for certain—he didn’t want to deal with a woman. Not that he had anything at all against women. His sister was one, after all. And some of his best friends were females. But ever since his childhood sweetheart had run off with his best friend, he hadn’t been inclined to get close to another woman. He had trust issues galore, according to Daisy.

  Once burned, twice shy. That was the expression his sister us
ed when she was scolding him about being skittish and telling him it was time to get over it and move on. She also added a lot of hogwash about his obsessive compulsion to take over the town being a bid to prove that he would have been the better choice for his old girlfriend. Like he really gave a rat’s behind what that traitorous female thought of him, especially after all these years.

  “Not every woman you fall for is going to go running off with your best friend,” Daisy usually pointed out.

  “Especially now that he’s already married to my former fiancée,” he generally retorted.

  He frowned at Ms. Jenna Pennington Kennedy. “Look, I’m assuming that carousel horse was your idea.”

  “It was,” she said.

  “It was a nice touch, but I really don’t think this will work out,” he said.

  “Why? You haven’t even heard our proposal.”

  “It just won’t,” he said flatly. “Walker, could you show Ms. Kennedy out?”

  Walker looked as if he wanted no part of this, but he dutifully said, “Ms. Kennedy,” and stepped back to give her room to pass. She didn’t budge.

  In fact, she scowled first at Walker, then at Bobby, and planted her sexily shod feet a bit more firmly on the floor.

  “Not just yet. Mr. Spencer, I don’t know what your problem is, but it’s my understanding that you want the kind of riverfront development that will put Trinity Harbor on the map. I can give you that.”

  “Really?” Bobby said, not bothering to hide his skepticism. His attention kept drifting back to those shoes and her well-turned ankles. He almost missed the rest of what she had to say.

  “You don’t want gaudy,” she said with impressive confidence. “You don’t want Ocean City. You want something that won’t overwhelm the size of the community, something with charm, some green space and a sense of the town’s history. Am I right?”

  To Bobby’s deep regret, she had intuitively pushed all the right buttons. “Yes,” he conceded with a great deal of reluctance. “But if you understand that, why is there an antique horse on my front lawn disturbing the Sunday peace and quiet?”