Holly Read online

  “Blackmail,” Holly had muttered more than once after her stepsister had dumped yet another unpleasant task on her.

  One of Holly’s jobs was to go to the house her parents had rented before her father’s heart attack and oversee the movers. Dutifully, she had left her studies to go to an atrocious house in the Smokey Mountains to pack everything up. When she saw the pink and white house, with its matching boathouse, she was appalled. To her, any house built after 1840 wasn’t worth living in.

  So now she was in the little resort area around Lake Winona and waiting for the movers to show up. Everything in the house except for one bed had been boxed or crated and all that was needed now was to put it all on the truck. But the truck had broken down somewhere and they’d called to tell her they would be late, but that they’d be there for sure by 3:00 P.M.

  Now, at noon, Holly was in the little general store near the house and trying to decide what to buy for dinner. She could get lunch at the little diner at the front of the store, but she’d cook dinner. She had a jar of pasta sauce in each hand and was trying to decide between the two when she looked over the counter into the dark blue eyes of an extraordinarily handsome man. He had black hair that swept across his forehead, rather like Superman’s, and a full-lipped mouth set over a cleft chin.

  “Oh!” Holly said, then ducked down to grab the jar of sauce she’d nearly dropped. When she stood up again, the man was gone. Turning, she saw him walk toward the glass doors. He was tall, lean, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped.

  On the other hand, he had on paint-spattered old blue jeans and a torn T-shirt that said TRUCKERS LIVE IN HEAVEN. He’s from the other side of the lake, she thought. The people who lived in the “real” houses.

  She put the jars of pasta sauce back on the shelf and decided she’d grill some shrimp instead. Maybe she should go into town and get a bottle of wine or two. Just because she was alone was no reason to live on jarred pasta sauce, she told herself.

  She took a seat at one of the three tables at the end of the store, and waited while the woman at the cash register finished with the customers before she took Holly’s order. While she waited, she looked out the window. “He” was there, the beautiful man she’d just seen. There were several people in the graveled parking lot and three big motorcycles. “Hogs,” she thought. That’s what the big motorcycles were called and the women, with their over-bleached hair and sleeveless leather vests, were “biker chicks.” At least she thought those were the correct terms. With her past, she was more likely to know the name of the Queen of Lanconia’s best friend (Dolly) than motorcycle slang.

  The woman at the register was still busy with customers so Holly kept watching the scene outside. The man she’d seen—who she’d nicknamed “Heaven” because of his shirt—didn’t seem to know the others in the group. He had a bag of groceries and seemed to want to be on his way, but the bikers kept blocking him.

  Why? she wondered. As the big-bellied bikers talked to the man, the two women circled behind him, looking him up and down, then laughing and nudging each other. Holly smiled to herself. If she were with them, she’d be laughing, too. He was a gorgeous man!

  “Honey, you don’t want anything to do with the likes of him.”

  Startled, Holly looked up at the waitress. “I, uh…” she began, unsure of what to say.

  “You’re Ambassador Latham’s daughter, right?”

  Holly nodded. She was used to people knowing “who” she was.

  “He’s good to look at, but he’s a friend of Leon Basham’s, so you don’t want to get involved. Besides, a girl as pretty as you are doesn’t need his kind.”

  “I wasn’t—I don’t—” Holly said, frowning, but then couldn’t resist asking, “Who’s Leon Basham?”

  “A thief, a liar, and a cheat,” the waitress said. “He’s one of those truck racers. They have these big, ugly trucks that they race up hills on the weekends. They take the things all over the country to race them.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Holly said. She couldn’t stop glancing at the man. There was a way he carried himself, the way his shoulders stood back at attention, the way he looked the other people in the eyes, that intrigued her.

  “Leon’s different. He robbed half a dozen places in a fifty-mile radius of here before he got caught. He did odd jobs around the area to make enough to live on, but it wasn’t enough to pay for that truck.”

  “What does this guy Leon have to do with him?” Holly nodded toward the scene outside. Now it looked as though the men were trying to get “Heaven” to ride one of their motorcycles.

  “He’s staying in Leon’s place. You can’t call that shack a house.”

  “Yeah, but he’s got that barn,” said a man who walked past them.

  Holly saw the woman sneer and could tell that she hated her employer. He was dressed like the locals, in T-shirt and jeans, but the waitress was dressed like Holly: khaki trousers, cotton knit shirt with a collar, and a striped belt. Holly would have thought the woman was a college student with a summer job, except that she was probably in her early forties.

  “My husband thinks it’s noble to dedicate your life to a truck,” she said in a tone of disgust.

  Holly was just thinking that the two of them were certainly mismatched as a couple when their attention was caught by what was happening outside. One of the women took the groceries from Heaven, and the man put one long leg over a huge motorcycle.

  The waitress put her hand on the table as she looked out the window. “It’s a trick. It’s a test. That machine is souped-up, so if he touches the gas petal he’ll go flying off the back. They know he’s living in Leon’s house, so they want to see if he’s worthy of having a key to the barn.”

  “What’s so important about the barn?” Holly asked, never taking her eyes off the man. Was he about to be thrown into the gravel? Would he land on his beautiful face? On the other hand, maybe she’d have to administer CPR to him.

  One of the biker men started to explain the controls, but Heaven pushed his hand away.

  “He seems to know what he’s doing,” Holly said.

  “He’d have to if Leon let him have a key,” the woman’s husband said. He’d moved to stand beside his wife, who turned on him.

  “You know that Leon’s in jail. Carl probably gave the man a key and Leon doesn’t even know he has it.”

  “Carl’s not stupid. He knows Leon would kill him if he did that.”

  “Over a key to a barn?” Holly asked.

  “Yes!” the man and woman said in unison.

  The three of them turned back to watch the man on the motorcycle.

  “Five he falls,” the woman said.

  “Ten he makes it,” Holly said before the man could speak. She didn’t see the waitress frown at the back of her head.

  As the bikers stood back, smiles on their faces, Heaven kick-started the machine—no electric ignition—and seconds later left the parking lot in a blaze of flying gravel, then hit the pavement at full speed.

  For a moment the bikers looked chagrined, but as the seconds passed, they seemed to worry that he’d never return with the bike. If he was the thieving Leon’s friend, had he stolen the motorcycle?

  Several long minutes later, the man returned from a different direction and, again in a flurry of gravel, stopped the bike exactly where he’d taken off. Calmly, he dismounted and took his groceries from the woman who was still holding them.

  “You owe her ten bucks,” the man said to his wife, “and get her something to eat.” He sauntered away, obviously pleased.

  As the woman removed a ten-dollar bill from her apron, Holly said, “You don’t have to pay me. It was all in fun.”

  “I pay my debts,” she said tersely, and Holly knew she was angry at her husband. “Now, what can I get you? And before you ask, we have no pasta salad—or any kind of salad to speak of.” Her voice was rising so her husband could hear. “All we have is pork. If we serve it, it has pork in it or on it. Even the ch