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  Two steps later he grabbed both her upper arms, then swung her around so she was headed back toward the shacks.

  “Keep your hands off of me!” she shouted.

  “All right, then go ahead. Be my guest.” With that he moved back, his arm outstretched, and she saw that she had almost stepped into what looked like the foundation of yet another shack. Whatever had been there, it was now only a deep hole barely covered with vines.

  “That’s dangerous,” she breathed.“ Some kid could—”

  “Right. There are lots of places of danger around here, but it takes man power to fix them. And man power costs money. And we get money from tourists who might come to see a mechanical alligator or from investors. Yesterday I had both of those, but today I have only one left.”

  He said all of this in a tone that implied that she was an imbecile.

  “You know,” she said quietly, “I don’t think I’ve ever disliked a man as much as I dislike you.”

  “I can assure you that the feeling is mutual. So now, shall we go before Roy packs up and returns to Texas?”

  Three

  The boat was no yacht. No, it was a beat-up old fishing boat that Roy said he’d had for twenty years. To Fiona’s tired eyes, it was an exact duplicate of Robert Shaw’s boat in Jaws—the one the fish ate. “Caught a lot of fish in this baby,” he said.

  “And I can smell every one of them,” Fiona said under her breath. When Ace gave her a look of warning, she coldly smiled back at him. After she’d walked out of that ruin that was laughingly called a park, Roy had been so overwhelmed by her resemblance to a woman he declared to be his all-time favorite movie star that thereafter Fiona could do no wrong.

  “They don’t make women like her today,” Roy had declared as he ushered Fiona along, leaving Ace to come or go as he pleased, since Roy seemed to have forgotten all about him. “Back then women looked like women. Today the actresses are just girls. Julia Roberts. That Guinevere girl. What’s her name?”

  “Gwyneth Paltrow?” Fiona said. “But you like women who look like women, right?” She said this last over her shoulder loud enough to awaken any birds that were still sleeping, but, gathering from the growing racket around the three of them, they were all awake.

  Roy didn’t seem to miss anything. “You’re just gonna have to tell me all about that first meetin’ you and Ace had. He say somethin’ you didn’t like?”

  “Horrible things,” she said, batting her lashes at Roy. Considering that he was at least four inches shorter than she was, this wasn’t easy. “I do so hope you’ll beat him up for me.”

  With a roar of laughter, Roy tried to put his arm around Fiona’s shoulders and pull her close. But his attempt was not successful because he had to lift his arm up, and besides, his arm wasn’t quite as long as his belly was wide. Easily, she escaped his grasp.

  There was a car waiting for them, and when Fiona bent to get inside, Ace said into her ear, “You want to stop playing the simpering maiden and behave yourself?”

  “What was that?” Roy said when she was inside.

  “What was what?” Fiona asked innocently.

  Ace got in the front seat next to the driver, while she and Roy were together in the back.

  “Ace, my boy, are you all right? I thought I heard you give a holler.”

  “He banged his shin against a hard object,” Fiona said, refusing to give in to her need to rub her heel that she’d used to give him a good swift kick.

  During the twenty-minute ride to the boat, Fiona had done little but ease Roy’s hands off various parts of her body. He would point out things along the highway, then lay his hand on her knee when she leaned forward to look. Next there was something on the other side of the car, so he’d leaned across her that way.

  Each time, Fiona would twist around in such a way that she eluded his many hands. And the one time when the car unexpectedly turned a sharp curve and Fiona went plowing into Roy, Ace had to turn around and see it. He gave Fiona a scowl that was meant to tell her to stop enticing the old man. She had no way to defend herself. What could she do, yell that the dirty ol’ man couldn’t keep his hands off of her? No, she thought as she tried to remember why she was there.

  Because she had been threatened and blackmailed, she thought. Her entire career was on the line. And probably everything she owned, if Ace was to be believed.

  “You sure are pretty,” Roy said under his breath, and Fiona could have kicked herself for “revealing” her resemblance to an old-time movie star. In her late teens, she’d loved being told that she looked like a glamorous movie star, so she’d studied Ava Gardner’s movies and her looks. She’d learned to make what was a strong resemblance into an impersonation that a drag queen would envy.

  But by the time Fiona hit twenty-four, she was tired of receiving attention because of looking like someone else, so she’d started playing down the resemblance. People didn’t realize that movie stars didn’t look like themselves when they first stepped out of the shower. It took work to look great. And when Fiona didn’t work at looking like someone else, she didn’t look like her. No one at Davidson Toys had ever said she looked like anyone else.

  And with this randy old man pawing her and trying to relive his youth when he’d lusted after a dark-eyed beauty, she wished she hadn’t played up the resemblance. But that odious man Ace had accused her of not being a woman so—

  By the time they reached the boat, she was sick of good ol’ boy Roy, sick of the black looks she was constantly receiving from the Birdman, and, all in all, sick of being blackmailed. In the last forty-eight hours she’d been blackmailed by two men, first by her boss, Garrett, then by a man who would step over anyone to get money.

  So when Ace gave her one of his quelling looks because she’d made an innocent comment about her concern about the safety on the old boat, she was tempted to push him overboard. In fact, she lifted her hands to do just that. But he sidestepped her.

  “Do you always solve everything with violence?” he asked, a curl to his upper lip. “Do you always strike first, then find out what you’ve done later?”

  “Me?” she managed to gasp. “You’re the one who held me against a wall and—”

  She broke off because Roy had called her to come admire his scaling knife—or some other thing he had in his possession.

  “If you mess this up for me, I’ll make you sorry,” Ace hissed as Fiona started toward the end of the boat, where Roy was beckoning her.

  “You’re going to have to cheer me up before you can make me sorry,” she snapped back at him, then kept going. Maybe if she found out why Roy had requested her presence (other than the fact that he lusted after women half his age and a head taller than he, that is), then she could leave earlier. As it was, three whole days of this and she’d be a blithering idiot.

  Roy was still calling her, but as she walked down the rotting old deck, for the first time she noticed the only other person on board. Eric was probably in his early thirties, short and not someone you’d notice or remember after you’d seen him. Even looking at him, she couldn’t describe him.

  “Hi,” Fiona said, giving him her most dazzling smile. Thanks to exorbitant dental bills paid by her father, her teeth were perfect.

  Eric looked up from where he was tying a rope to a shiny metal hook with an expression of, Are you talking to me?

  Fiona didn’t have time for chitchat. “Have you worked for Roy long?”

  “Long enough,” he said cautiously.

  I’m in a bad private-eye movie, she nearly said aloud, then took a deep breath. “I’m trying to find out why he wanted me to come on this trip.”

  The man pulled the rope tighter. “You’ll have to ask him. I just do the work; he doesn’t confide in me.”

  “But you drive a car for him, and now you’re on a boat with him, so you must have heard something.”

  He gave her a little smile as he looked her up and down in a way that let her know that if she wanted to visit his cabin, h