LEGEND Read online

  “Ha!”

  She ignored him. “But my life has changed in the last months, changed drastically, and it’s all because of your family. Not mine. Yours! I made a promise to a very nice woman that I would try to find her descendants, and I did that. Then she sent me a letter from her grave begging me to help her. And since she has gone to so much trouble to give me the power to help her, I’m going to try. Here’s the deal, Mr. Midas, you help me and you get the money back, every penny of it. You don’t help me and I keep it. All of it. Take it or leave it.”

  He stood there staring down at her for a while, and for a flash of a second Kady was frightened of him. But not because she feared he’d purposely harm her. No, she was frightened that the intensity of being so near those hot, dark eyes of his might consume her.

  Kady’s heart seemed to leap to her throat, and for a second she thought he was going to kiss her. But the moment passed, and he stepped back, then reached into his pocket, withdrew a set of keys, and put them on a glass-topped table. “It’s yours,” he said. “All of it is yours. I wish you the best, Miss Long.”

  With that, he walked out the door, leaving Kady alone in the expensive, cold apartment.

  After he left, it was as though all the energy left the room and her body. Collapsing onto the sofa, she sat there for a good half hour in stunned silence.

  And while she was sitting there, she started to come to her senses. Tarik Jordan had been right to be angry with her. Utterly and absolutely right. It was his family’s money, and she had no right to so much as a penny of it. Furthermore, she had no right to attempt to blackmail him. Ruth had asked Kady to help, no one else.

  She gathered her things and left the apartment.

  When she returned to her hotel, she called Mr. Fowler and told him she wanted to give everything back to C. T. Jordan, and she wanted to do it immediately! The only thing she wanted to keep was the ownership of the town of Legend, Colorado, and twenty-five thousand in cash to pay for her expenses. She had no idea what she was going to do when she got to Legend, but she’d try her best to help in some way.

  When she told the man she wanted the papers by eight the next morning, all he’d said was, “Yes.” Smiling as she hung up the phone, Kady knew there were some things she was going to miss about being rich.

  As promised, the papers arrived by messenger at eight. Minutes later, as she was reading them, there was a knock on the door of her hotel room, and when she opened it, she was faced with a young man who told her he was a process server. He then handed her a thick stack of papers. It didn’t take much reading to see that C. T. Jordan was suing her for everything he thought she had “stolen” from him.

  Right away, she called Mr. Fowler, and he told her not to worry about anything, that it would all be taken care of. Of course, he was a lawyer and lawsuits were an everyday thing to him. But not to Kady, who thought that Tarik Jordan had wasted no time in attacking her, had he? She asked Mr. Fowler how she could present the papers to the man in person.

  It seemed that Jordan owned more than one apartment in New York, and until Kady signed the papers returning ownership of everything to him, she owned both buildings.

  By the time she was dressed, Mr. Fowler had sent an escort that would help her get past building security.

  Now, days later, traveling in the Range Rover up the mountain to Legend, Kady frowned in memory. She’d gone to his apartment, yet another penthouse, put her finger on the doorbell and left it there. Several minutes later she was rewarded with his throwing open the door, his face drawn into a dark scowl.

  “What the hell is—” he began until he saw her; then his look changed to one of astonishment. “And what do you want from me today?” he asked, amused. “Space travel? Or shall we try to find out what happened to the little princes in the tower?”

  He had a remarkable ability for making Kady feel like an idiot. Looking at him, she saw that he was wearing only a bathrobe; he looked as though he hadn’t shaved in a week, and Kady was pleased to see that she had obviously awakened him. Glancing behind him, she saw that in the marble floored foyer was an eighteenth-century table, and even Kady, with her limited knowledge of antiques, could see that it was real. This apartment was quite different from the other one, and, incongruously, she wondered which apartment was the real him.

  “I wanted to return these to you,” she said, frowning up at him, refusing to succumb to the surge of attraction she felt for him. Obviously, he thought she was a crackpot.

  “And what papers are they?” he asked, but did not take them. “Come, Miss Long, you couldn’t be suing me, could you?”

  “Suing you?” she gasped. “You are the one—” She cut herself off because he was smiling again and that smile had the odd power of making her want to fling herself onto him and kick him, both at the same time.

  With her mouth made into a tight line, she glared up at him. “Do you ever give anyone a chance to explain?”

  “Not usually,” he said, eyes twinkling. “One of my tricks of business. I like pictures. Flashy video presentations.”

  Now he really was making fun of her, and the words “little cook from Ohio’ echoed in her ears. And no matter what he said or how he laughed at her, the truth was in her hands. He’d brought a lawsuit against her without so much as asking her to return the money.

  Since he was blocking the doorway so she couldn’t enter the apartment, Kady dropped the whole stack of papers regarding his lawsuit on the floor, but he didn’t so much as look down at them.

  She then held up the few sheets that Mr. Fowler and his assistants had spent the night drawing up. “If you had had the courtesy to call me, to talk to me, you would have been told that yesterday I decided to give everything back to you. No strings, no blackmail, and, especially, without asking for any help from you.”

  She held the papers aloft, but still he didn’t take them. He just stood there silently staring at her. And Kady had to give it to him, because he had a look of complete innocence on his face. She could almost believe he didn’t know what a lawsuit was. She could also almost believe that he found her nearly irresistibly attractive. But it was one thing for lonely silver miners to lust after her, but a man like C. T. Jordan, who could have any woman on earth, who could—

  “C.T., honey,” came a purring voice from behind them, and Kady looked around the man’s broad shoulders to see a woman standing there. She was tall and thin; only constant starvation could make a person that thin. She was also quite, quite beautiful in that blonde, elegant way that reeked of money. She was wearing an ivory silk bathrobe that Kady was willing to bet cost more than she made in a month. “Is everything all right?” the woman said in an educated voice that sounded as though it had been trained in boarding school.

  “Fine,” Jordan said in a tone that was almost a snap. But he still didn’t move, just stood there looking at Kady.

  The woman glided over to Tarik, her robe falling away to reveal long thin legs, and she took his arm in hers, holding it tightly to her.

  “Darling,” she purred. “Is this the little cook you told me about?”

  At that Kady gasped. It wasn’t any of her business what Tarik Jordan talked about with his mistress, but maybe it was because she’d seen him so many, many times in her life that his “betrayal” of her hurt.

  “I am glad I gave you some amusement,” she said softly, handed him the papers, then turned on her heel to push the elevator button.

  “Kady,” she thought she heard behind her, but the woman’s tones drowned out anything she thought he might have said.

  “Perhaps we can hire her,” the woman said loudly. “As an under-chef to Jean-Pierre. I’m sure he’d like some help in the . . . kitchen.” She said the last word as though it were a euphemism for “garbage scow.” Whatever else was said, Kady didn’t hear because the elevator arrived and she got into it, her back still to Tarik and his skinny lover.

  Once in the elevator, once she was out of Tarik’s mesmerizing presenc