Unforgettable Heroes Boxed Set

by James, Maddie

  Watching Wes walking beside Mr. Lovejoy, in the place where she ought to be, Lillian silently cursed the friend who had assured her he could find someone to do this for her—and herself for believing she could pull it off.

  Granted, Wes Hatfield was the kind of man who populated her fantasies. Tall, confident and hot in a rough and tumble way, he was the total opposite of the men she usually dated. Her heart had caught when she walked into the conference room and found him there. Long and lean, in well-worn jeans that fit like a second skin and a simple black T-shirt, he was the last man she’d expected. She’d resigned herself to a middle-management type in a suit so she’d been speechless when she’d seen Wes.

  She should have known someone both sexy and sophisticated was too good to be true. The fair thing to have done, when she realized the misunderstanding, was to have torn up the contract, apologized and called some acting agency to send a replacement. But forcing the man to live up to an agreement he didn’t even know he was making had been her second mistake.

  Her first had been trusting her old friend Paul, who always knew someone somewhere who could take care of things. She’d been so desperate when he said could find someone to help her out, she hadn’t seen any choice but to believe him. One thing about Paul, he knew a lot of people. His family moved in next to hers when she was ten, and she’d watched him make instant friends with everyone he met ever since. She’d figured he’d use his country club contacts to find her a temporary spouse, though, not a guy who happened to be sitting next to him at a late-night poker game, and who also happened to know someone who could use a few bucks fast.

  “Calm down.” Paul’s voice had been reassuring. “I’ll find the right guy, you’ll wow with your presentation and when you get back we’ll celebrate with champagne.”

  Granted, she hadn’t given Paul time for a leisurely search. Then again, she hadn’t expected to produce the husband she’d mentioned to Lovejoy in passing, and certainly not to bring her supposed spouse along on this trip. He’d been adamant about meeting her spouse and she was too desperate to land this account to say no.

  She sneaked a peek at Wes standing off to the side, seemingly entranced by the baggage carousel. Being a little rough around the edges was part of his charm. A big part of his charm.

  Of course, he wasn’t a bad kisser, either.

  A blush warmed her cheeks. Just because he’d kissed her with no warning didn’t mean she should have kissed him back. Or wonder if he’d ever kiss her again. Or fantasize about all the other things that might happen if he did.

  “I’m ready any time you are, Lil.”

  Wes stood in front of her holding their bags. Lillian felt her cheeks deepen to an even brighter pink. She’d die if he knew what her hormone-charged body was ready for at this precise moment.

  “Well, then, let’s go.” She straightened her briefcase strap on her shoulder and fell in step beside Wes. For a few minutes anyway, until he moved up to walk beside the older man. For a guy his size, Frank Lovejoy could move fast. It didn’t seem to bother Wes, who had no trouble keeping up. Lillian found herself struggling to maintain the pace as they left the terminal and headed toward the parking lot. She wanted to blame their longer legs and her heeled pumps for the trouble, but she knew better. All she did was sit anymore. Behind her desk. At the conference table. In front of the television at night, watching reruns of old comedies and pretending she was happy. She should be happy. This was what she’d set her sights on long ago. Her life was following the pattern she’d laid out as a high school senior, determined not to waste her brain as every other woman in her family had. Her grandmother had dropped out of high school to get married, and her mother had quit after a year of junior college and settled into domestic life with her dad. She couldn’t count the number of times one or the other of them had lectured her about not wasting her own life catering to some man. So she’d made a plan, and she was sticking to it.

  Advanced classes in high school so she could get a bachelor’s degree in three years. Pushing herself hard to earn an MBA in another two. Internships all through college and a year of being a virtual slave at a piddling wage to learn as much as she could about the real world of public relations before she started up her own firm.

  “Doing okay back there?” Wes slowed a tiny bit. She pushed harder to catch up. He wasn’t going to get the best of her. No one was.

  It was exactly seventeen months ago that she’d first walked through that door with her name on it. She’d been sure all those contacts she’d so carefully cultivated would translate into big money. All she’d been able to land, though, were small accounts. She managed to make the rent and her assistant’s salary each month, with a little left for her. Things could be worse, she supposed, than eating peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and owning only one decent business suit. They’d be a whole lot better if Frank Lovejoy offered her this new ad campaign.

  The man seemed pleasant enough, she decided as she followed him through the gate to the short-term lot. She felt like she knew him, thanks to all the phone calls they’d shared, yet not well enough to guess how he’d react if she told him she’d never been camping. Or that she’d had to hire a husband.

  “Come on, honey. You can make it.” Wes had stopped and was waiting for her.

  She studied him as she walked to him. He was such an…interesting…man that he had to know all about tents and building fires and what to do if bears attacked. Too interesting maybe, She could see him hunkered down with Frank by the dying embers of a campfire, swapping stories about the fish they’d caught and moose they’d shot while she sat over by herself, dying a slow death from some disease city women got in the great outdoors.

  Okay, he wasn’t what she’d bargained for but as things turned out, he might be the perfect selection. Wes’s expertise would make up for her total lack of experience, and interest, in doing anything more outdoorsy than walking from her car to the mall. If she played her cards right, she could take advantage of those cozy moments by a fire with Wes to persuade Frank how absolutely perfect her campaign was. Once he saw her presentation, with its color graphics and sound bites….

  She stopped dead in her tracks. The entire presentation was stored on a flash drive. But if they weren’t going to a nice hotel, with electricity and an overhead projector, how in the world would she ever be able to show Frank what she had in mind?

  “Babe?” Wes’s impatient voice interrupted her thoughts. Her spirits sank again. She must have missed something important.

  “Lil, did you hear Frank?”

  Lillian forced a smile. “I’m sorry, dear. I’m so excited about this camping expedition that my mind was racing.”

  “There’s been a mix-up with the rental car,” Frank repeated. “I’d reserved a nice SUV for the two of you but it was rented to someone else.”

  “Oh.” Lillian looked stupidly from Frank to Wes. Neither man looked happy. Did they think she’d object to something smaller?

  “I really don’t care what kind of car we have,” she said. “Just as long as it has four wheels.”

  “What Frank is saying is that they don’t have any car for us right now,” Wes replied. “There’s some sort of horse sale going on. But Frank has an idea.”

  “You two kids won’t want to be running around anyway.” Frank led them down a row of parked cars. “I’ll take you on out to the campground and see what we can do about getting you a car later. That be okay?”

  “Fine.” Lillian made her stout reply without looking at Wes. “Maybe you’d like to stay after we get settled so we can talk about my ideas for the campaign.”

  “Let’s not hurry things.” Frank stowed their suitcases in the trunk of a long black sedan. “There’s plenty of time for that. Besides, my Bertie will have my head if I’m not back pretty soon. Her old college roommate is in town, and she’s made some sort of dinner plans.”

  He slapped Wes on the back. “Wait till you’re married as long as me, boy. Forty-two years. Gott
a give ’em what they want if you want any peace in your life. Get a woman mad, and all you’ll get in return is holy hell.”

  Wes joined him in a hearty laugh, as if all of womankind hadn’t just been insulted, and Lillian’s blood began to boil. All of married womankind, anyway. And to think that she’d actually begun to like Frank Lovejoy.

  “Here, babe, let me help you.” Wes opened the back door, grabbed her elbow and all but shoved her in with a smile pasted on his face the entire time. When she tried to jerk her arm away his grip only tightened.

  “You look like you’re about to bean him with your purse. Relax and act like the happy bride,” Wes whispered as he bent down to her. “If I’ve got to do damage control it’s going to be another fifty bucks.”

  Lillian stomped the arch of his foot, pressing the narrow heel of her shoe down just hard enough to bring an oof of pain. His grip lessened; she bolted out to climb into the front passenger seat. It wouldn’t hurt Wes a bit to sit in the back. He could sulk there all afternoon for all she cared. She was here to do business and she intended to take advantage of every opportunity to do just that.

  Forty-five minutes later, watching the endless scenery along the Interstate highway, she still hadn’t found a single opportunity to wrest the conversation her way. There’d been plenty of talking the whole time, but only from front seat to back and vice versa. A woman who avoided sports talk like the plague, she’d been forced to endure not only a rehash of the current baseball season but a dissection of what was wrong with the NFL.

  She sank back against the seat, closing her eyes and visualizing Wes Hatfield being chased by a bull across one of the fields that lined the road. Wes Hatfield in a red shirt. Screaming and waving his arms. A tiny smile lifted the corners of her mouth. It widened as she imagined Wes up in a tree, a mountain lion clawing the trunk as it climbed toward him. Wes in a boat in the middle of the lake they were supposedly going to, its motor dead and giant waves crashing around him.

  At some point, lost in her increasingly pleasant fantasies, she slipped off to sleep. She woke to the crunch of the car stopping on gravel and Wes’s hand shaking her awake.

  “Hey, babe, we’re here.” She blinked. Her door was open and Wes was leaning inside, close enough for her to touch him. Or kiss him, which was the first notion that popped into her sleepy head.

  Before she could act on either, Frank boomed, “Gotcha a great place here. Flat, lots of shade and all the privacy you lovebirds could want.”

  Reality slapped Lillian awake. In her dream, she’d been snuggled down in a soft hotel bed with a warm comforter over her and room service knocking at the door. But there’d be no comfy beds or meals from the kitchen for her here. She shuddered.

  She was going camping.

  Ignoring Wes’s outstretched hand, she climbed from the car and nearly tipped face first as her heel sank into the soft ground. She righted herself and looked around, forcing herself not to climb back into the car and lock the doors.

  It was worse than she could have imagined. The space was flat, just as Frank had said, and had lots of trees. The only other things it contained were a picnic table and some sort of iron ring filled with a nasty pile of ashes and charred chunks of wood. She saw the stack of stuff mounded on the picnic table, her eyes widening. Frank wore a big grin, which could only mean this was the new line of Lovejoy Family Outdoor Adventure gear. Most of it was in boxes with pictures of happy campers on the side. All of it was unassembled.

  “Are you sure you can’t stay?” She winced at the desperation in her voice.

  “Love to, but the missus is waiting.” Frank slapped Wes on the back and grinned. “You two have fun. I’ll see you in a few days.”

  A few days? The implication of those few words didn’t sink in until Frank’s car was a tiny image down the campground road. Then she felt like a sledgehammer whammed her.

  A few days. The kindly man she’d pictured during all those phone conversations had turned out to be a madman. Not only had he practically ordered her to bring along a husband, he had abandoned her in the middle of nowhere with boxes of stuff she’d never seen before and didn’t care to get acquainted with. She slapped at her head when a mosquito buzzed her ear, aware Wes was watching with an amused smirk on his face.

  “So you think this is funny?”

  She started toward him, planning to give him a gigantic piece of her mind, but she couldn’t move. Both heels were stuck in the turf. Forcing herself to ignore the ridiculously high price of the pantyhose she wore, she stepped out of her pumps and made a beeline for the table where Wes leaned back on both elbows, his eyes fixed on her.

  “Ow!” She grimaced and limped over to the opposite side of the table. Lifting her right foot, she carefully removed a prickly twig that had enmeshed itself into her hose.

  “You might want to be careful sitting there,” Wes said. “I saw a chunk of bird sh…poop.”

  Lillian jumped up and looked at the table bench. Sure enough, there was a gray smear. She reluctantly touched the back of the skirt and felt the small damp and gritty stain. Oh, yeah, she’d done it. Found the only nasty spot on the whole bench and sat right in it.

  “I suppose you think it’s funny.”

  “Yeah.”

  She glared at Wes. “Had it occurred to you to tell me before I sat down?”

  Wes nodded. “Yep. But since you haven’t paid attention to anything I’ve said all day, I thought I’d save my breath.” He stood and stretched. “I figure you’re about to throw a hissy fit, but keep it short. I don’t know much about camping except it’s a whole lot easier to put a tent up in the sunshine than the dark. We’re burning daylight here.”

  Lillian was suddenly aware of the pink streaks in the west. He was right. She’d give him this one. If he was putting up that blasted tent tonight, it better be now.

  “It won’t take you long to set it up, will it?”

  Wes shrugged. “How do I know? I’ve never done this before.”

  Lillian stared, a shiver of dread inching up her spine. “You’ve never used this kind of tent, you mean.”

  “Nope.” Wes ripped the end off a box and dumped the contents on the ground. “Never set up a tent. Or slept in one, either.”

  “But you’re a man,” Lillian protested. “Camping is a guy thing. Like drinking beer and belching.”

  “If you live in Podunk Junction, maybe. I’m city born and bred. I’m partial to neon lights, police cars cruising by and cable television. This is your idea of a good time, not mine. If I had my way, I’d be shooting pool down at Smokey’s and enjoying life.”

  “Trust me, if I wasn’t desperate, that’s where you’d be.” Lillian kicked the empty box with her foot, relishing the thud of the impact. If only it were Wes’s head….

  “Well, no use talking about that now.” She pasted a false smile on her face. “I’m sure you can handle this one little thing, a smart guy like you. I’ll see what else Frank left.”

  Wes walked over, took her hand and led her over to where a large square of cranberry nylon lay on the ground. Handing her a folded paper, he said, “Don’t think so, Lil. I’d hate for you to have to do anything strenuous, but you can probably read those directions without pulling a muscle.”

  Lillian bit back all the things she longed to say to him, starting with “Don’t call me Lil” and ending with “I hope you rot, you swamp digger.” She focused her attention on the assembly instructions, reading and re-reading them.

  “These make no sense.” She tossed the paper down on the top of the lump of canvas and started for the picnic table. But before she’d taken two steps, Wes’s arms snaked out to grab her none too gently.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” He shoved a bunch of long, thin poles into her hand. “Unless you intend to sleep on that table, you’re staying right here and helping me.”

  “I’ll help you all right,” she muttered under her breath, contemplating the poles as Wes started to read the directions aloud. She screwed Pole A
into Pole B and ran it through the nylon strip on his command, repeating the process until four poles crisscrossed the top of the nylon. She stared dubiously at the box the tent had come in, wondering if Frank was playing some sadistic joke on them.

  “It’s supposed to be round.” She looked back at what they’d created. “Or at least stick up in the middle.”

  Wes squatted down and stared at the tent. Finally, he said, “Maybe we’re supposed to put the poles in the ground first.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.” Lillian faced him, her hands on her hips. “And what? Slide the tent on from the top? Face it, Wes, this thing doesn’t work. It was made wrong or something.”

  “Need help, you guys?”

  Wes and Lillian turned as one to stare at the child on the bicycle behind them. She might have been all of ten, skinny with a mop of dishwater blond hair tied back in a ponytail. She straddled the bike, grinning as she looked from Wes to Lillian and back again.

  “This is a little too complicated for you, dear. It’s for grown-ups.” Lillian’s mood lightened a little. There had to be at least one more group of campers in this godforsaken place. This little girl couldn’t have appeared out of thin air.

  “Nah.” The girl dumped her bike on the ground and ran to them. “It’s just like mine, only bigger.”

  She grabbed the poles and started setting them into the soft earth, completely oblivious to the gawking adults as she made short work of what had driven them to total frustration. Three minutes later, she said, “There. I told you I could put it up.”

  “See? Even a kid can do it,” Lillian muttered in Wes’ direction. Turning to the girl, she said, “Thanks for your help. Is your family staying here, too?”

  The girl nodded. “At the other end of the campground. We got a new RV. But I get to sleep in my very own tent because my dad says I’m big enough now. My baby brother has to sleep with them. The dog, too.”

  A car horn beeped three times in the distance, and the girl said, “Gotta go now. That’s my dad.” She pedaled away, shouting over her shoulder, “If you need me to fix anything else for you, come get me. My folks won’t care. Or yell Mindy, that’s my name, and I’ll ride down here.”