Man Trouble Read online

  “A problem?” he repeated. It was an amazing question, reflecting how utterly brainwashed she had been by her community. “No, your notoriety is an asset. Unlike your dean, I consider media interest to be a valuable tool. This adds a whole new dimension to the story. It's going to be very useful.”

  “Of course,” Molly said slowly. “That makes sense.”

  Jake thought that he heard a sudden chill in her voice, but a moment later it was gone, replaced with businesslike briskness.

  “I want to make sure that my terms are clear. I won't do this unless you agree to sign a legal document stating that you'll turn the plantation into a museum.”

  “If you find proof in three months.”

  “Right. And the Mary Morgan Foundation? And my directorship?”

  “We've already been through this. Proof first, then your museum and foundation. We'll draw up a legal document defining ‘proof in a way that's acceptable to both of us. I'm impressed to see that the change of circumstances hasn't weakened your spine, Professor.”

  “I'm not desperate,” she said stiffly, having interpreted his tone as mockery. “I don't need money, so the circumstances don't matter. Either we do this my way or we don't do it.”

  “That was meant as a compliment,” Jake said. “I really am impressed. You negotiate like a pro.” Would she also accept defeat like a pro if her proof never materialized? He wasn't so sure about that, but if luck stayed on his side, he would find out in three months.

  He heard her take a breath, as if she were preparing to dive from the high board. “Okay,” she said. “We have a deal. I'm yours. What do you want me to do?”

  “I think it would be best if you came back to Gold Bay. That way, we can control your media exposure. Unless you'd rather stay in my Miami condo and face the paparazzi every time you leave the building.”

  “No,” Molly said immediately. “I don't know how to handle that kind of thing. You'll need to brief me on exactly what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. This is not familiar territory for me.”

  “Don't worry,” Jake said. “I'm not going to send you out there alone or unprepared. Can you be ready to leave tomorrow?”

  “I'm ready to leave anytime, starting now.”

  “Good. I'll send my plane for you. Are you close to an airport?”

  “Yes, but I have one more request.”

  Christ, Jake thought, annoyed. The woman wouldn't quit. He hoped that she wasn't about to throw in a deal-killer at the last minute. “What?”

  “I'd like you to send a helicopter to bring me to the airport.”

  That was all she wanted? He shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Thank you. There should be enough room to land it on the Belden College quad.”

  “What?” Jake said, surprised. “On the quad? Are you serious?”

  “Very serious. Can you do it?”

  He began to laugh. Now he understood what she wanted, and why. “It would be my pleasure, Professor,” he said. “It won't be easy, but I think I can talk my pilots into it. A very large, very loud Berenger corporate helicopter will come up from Chicago and meet you tomorrow in the middle of the Belden College quad. I guarantee that your departure will not go unnoticed. Does noon sound good to you?”

  “Yes,” Molly said. “Noon would be perfect.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The heat from the studio lamps was making Molly perspire. She was sitting on a beige couch next to the interviewer, and everything immediately surrounding her was drenched, almost drowned, in relentless incandescence. Just beyond the lights was the man with the television camera. Molly had been instructed to look at the interviewer, not at the camera, but her peripheral vision caught the glassy shine of the lens. If you looked into the lens, you could see a dot of darkness in the center of it, like a blood vessel channeling away your recorded image. It was no wonder, Molly thought, that some primitive tribes still believed that a camera could steal your soul. Her own was feeling very loosely attached these days.

  “Now tell me,” said the interviewer, “was it love at first sight?”

  “Yes,” Molly said. “The moment I laid eyes on Jake, I knew he was the one.”

  The interviewer exhaled impatiently. “No, you didn't,” he said.

  She blinked. “But—”

  “Ken, stop the tape. Molly, remember the message. You need to stay on message. Don't improvise. I gave you the answer to that exact question forty-five minutes ago.”

  “You did? Oh. I don't—”

  “You fell in love with Jake after you got to know him. The real Jake Berenger is very different from the public image. You fell in love with the real man, the family man underneath the playboy image. You look blank, babe. Is this ringing any bells?”

  Molly nodded. “I remember now. Sorry. May I have a glass of water? It's very hot in here.”

  The interviewer assessed her condition with a glance. “Kill the lights, folks,” he said briskly. “We're going to take a break. Somebody get our girl a drink—she's fading.”

  The spotlights went out with a startling pop, plunging them momentarily into darkness, until someone opened the curtains and natural sunlight flooded the room again. They were at Gold Bay, in the basement of Cora Berenger's villa, which normally served as a screening room. But the comfortable armchairs had been moved out and audio/video equipment moved in to create a makeshift television studio for the purpose of giving Molly a crash course in media performance. The camera was recording onto videotape, which Molly would soon be studying together with her new coach, Tom Amadeo, the man who had just been posing as a talk-show interviewer. He was in his early fifties; tall, burly and intense, with a clipped black beard speckled with gray, and piercing green eyes set under bushy brows. A former television producer, he had started his own PR firm at about the same time that Jake had started Berenger. Cora had explained to Molly that as a longtime friend, Tom had been the logical choice to run the unconventional campaign that he had immediately dubbed “Operation Family Man.”

  Someone handed her a glass of ice water. She took it, drank it straight down, and asked for another. She had been at Gold Bay for four days, and had been doing this kind of training for two of them. She didn't mind—she was grateful to have a distraction to keep her from thinking about what had happened in Belden. She didn't like to think about it, because when she did, she felt a strange numbness that disturbed her. She knew that she should be angry, but she wasn't. She was just numb, as if she didn't care.

  “Feeling better?” asked Tom Amadeo. “Ready to get back to work?”

  He had a boundless energy that made Molly feel feeble by comparison, and his goal was to arm her with a ready answer to any question that she might be asked “on the record.” The news of the engagement had already been released to the press, right on the heels of the outing of Sandra St. Claire, and the size and tone of the resulting headlines had pleased Jake, Tom, and Cora very much. Skye Elliot was refusing to comment, her sudden silence an indicator that she was “busted and disgusted,” as Tom put it.

  To Molly's surprise, the sudden publicity had caused the sales of Pirate Gold to jump, lifting the paperback to number two on the mass-market best-seller lists. Her agent e-mailed her to say that he humbly apologized for all of the times that he had scolded her for refusing to promote the book, because he now understood that she was some kind of Zen master of publicity who knew exactly what she was doing. A national book-signing tour had nothing on an engagement to a celebrity billionaire. Plus, her hair looked great. And what about that sequel?

  Despite having her name and photograph (a new and improved version created with the help of a stylist, a hairdresser, a makeup artist, and a lighting specialist, all of whom had been awaiting her when she arrived at Gold Bay) plastered all over the news, Molly hadn't yet come face-to-face with a single reporter. Jake had been the one handling the media so far, as well as dealing with a “serious business issue,” as Cora cautiously described it. As a result, Molly hadn't seen h
im at all. She was being flown to Manhattan to meet him on Saturday, where she was due to be “launched,” like a book or a ship, at the opening of the new Berenger Grand hotel on Fifty-sixth and Fifth. The Grand was a New York landmark, but it had slumped into disrepair until Berenger acquired it. They had closed the hotel fifteen months ago for a complete renovation, and the reopening was expected to be one of the major social events of the year. The Operation Family Man team had agreed that it would be an ideal venue for the press to meet Jake's fiancée.

  “Tom, Molly needs a real break,” said Cora Berenger from the periphery of the room. Molly looked up, surprised. She hadn't realized that Jake's mother was there. Cora had been supervising the proceedings since Molly returned to Gold Bay, and this was not the first time that she had stepped in to rescue Molly. Molly had become convinced that Tom Amadeo was able and willing to work twenty-four hours a day, neither eating nor sleeping, and that without Cora's intervention, he would have demanded the same from her.

  Tom looked annoyed. “Not yet, we're behind schedule. We still need to cover”—he checked his clipboard—“Wedding Date questions, Do You Feel Like Cinderella questions, and Are You Intimidated by Famous Ex-Girlfriends questions.”

  “That may be so,” Cora said pleasantly, “but it's teatime.”

  Ten minutes later, Cora and Molly were sitting under the bougainvillea arbor on the terrace, drinking tea and eating the small sandwiches that Molly had enjoyed during her week at the resort. Tom had surrendered without a second protest, which was no surprise to Molly. It had taken only one day at the villa before she realized who was in charge at Gold Bay. Jake might be at the helm of Berenger Corporation, but Cora was Queen of the Island, and woe to anyone who forgot it.

  Molly liked Cora Berenger's stately dignity, her down-to-earth sense of humor, and the fact that she didn't have the surgically sculpted look that was so common among women of her social class. Cora wore her own face, lines and all, with an old-world elegance that made her seem more attractive and more formidable. She was the absolute opposite of Molly's anxious, submissive mother, and Molly was fascinated by her.

  Cora poured her a fresh cup of tea and offered her the plate of sandwiches. “You were starting to look pale in there, my dear. I admire Tom's work ethic, but he forgets that normal people need to rest. He doesn't understand that teaching is like watering a plant. You have to regulate the stream, giving it time to soak in, or else it all overflows and you end up with mud.” She smiled. “But you're a teacher, of course, so you already know that. Don't let Tom—or me—bully you. If you need a break, just say so. You're doing us a favor, after all.”

  “Not really,” Molly said. “I think it's a pretty fair trade.”

  “Do you? All this work for a gamble on an island museum and the directorship of a small foundation? I hope that you don't mind my frankness, but is that really why you agreed to help us? It doesn't seem worth it.”

  “You're forgetting the impact on my book sales,” Molly said. “Your son is single-handedly pushing me up the bestseller lists.”

  “Yes, I know. Did you expect that to happen? Forgive me, but you don't seem very…marketing-minded.”

  “That would be considered a compliment at Belden.”

  “But you're not at Belden anymore.”

  “No,” Molly said. “I'm not. So I need to learn how to operate in the real world, and I thought that this would be good training. My anonymity was already gone, so I had nothing to lose by working with Jake, and I knew that the publicity would be good for Pirate Gold.”

  “Hmm,” Cora said thoughtfully. “Well, that certainly was a bargain for us. Book sales or no, if I were you, I would have asked for something more concrete than a promise of a possible museum.”

  Molly smiled slightly. “Would Jake have agreed to the museum and the foundation if I'd made it an unconditional demand?”

  “Oh, I don't think so,” Cora said. “He's gambling, just like you are. He doesn't want to redo the plans for the golf course. It would be expensive for the company, and he would look very careless for not foreseeing the problem. That's the last thing he needs right now.”

  Molly nodded. She had guessed as much, despite Jake's early attempts to placate her by telling her that he had a soft spot for historical sites. Their last conversation at Gold Bay, when he had threatened to expose her as Sandra St. Claire if she tried to block the golf course development, had made his true colors very clear.

  He had signed the agreement, betting that she wouldn't find proof that Dyer's Fortune had belonged to Mary Morgan. What he hadn't known was that she had already found it. She had two documents in her suitcase, courtesy of her friend at the British Library. The first was a copy of a marriage certificate dated 1722, joining one Mary Dyer to Captain Frederick Morgan of His Majesty's Royal Navy. Mary was sixteen years old at the time, and Molly now had a good idea of where she had picked up her sailing skills.

  The second was an old will, dated 1749, in which Ephraim Dyer of St. Anthony's Parish, Antigua, did bequeath his lands and property to his “dear and affectionate” daughter, Mary, for her sole use and benefit forever.

  Frederick's fate remained a mystery, but the connection between Mary Morgan and the Dyer name was clear. It had taken three pages of legalese to define “proof in a way that satisfied Jake, who had made it as narrow and specific as possible, thinking that he was making a safe bet. But he had greatly underestimated the power of the academic network.

  Molly could have warned him that the British colonies had been wonderfully efficient at record keeping and—with the exception of documents lost through fire, shipwreck, or other disasters—most of what had been written down in eighteenth-century Antigua now resided in various archives in London.

  She didn't know when she would break the news to Jake, but she did know that she would enjoy his shock and dismay. He would look like a fool when he was forced to relocate his golf course. It wasn't exactly an eye for an eye, but it would be a satisfying blow.

  “I still think that you should have been a little more practical, dear,” Cora said. “That old plantation obviously means a lot to you, but Jake is a very stubborn man, and he always puts the company first. He won't give an inch on this, believe me. What will you do if you don't find your proof?”

  Molly tried to give a guileless smile. “Well,” she said, “if my plans for the museum don't work out, I'll still consider myself lucky to have enjoyed so much time at Gold Bay.”

  She saw a slight frown touch Cora's forehead, as if the older woman wasn't convinced. Molly did feel guilty for lying to her, but she had no choice. She could hardly confess to Jake's mother that she was planning to pay him back for the loss of her job and her reputation. The pieces were all in place, and she had Jake right where she wanted him. He didn't know it yet, but messing with Molly Shaw was going to turn out to be more embarrassing and more expensive than he had ever expected.

  CHAPTER 21

  Jake's apartment in the new Berenger Grand had been designed by Sir Harry Smythe, the famous British architect whose firm had handled the remodeling of the entire hotel. Spanning one-third of the forty-fifth floor, and reachable by its own private elevator, the apartment was an ultramodern loft-style space, with soaring glass outer walls buttressed by stainless-steel beams. Downtown Manhattan lay spread out below, and Jake's interior designer had worked hard to create a living space that echoed, but did not compete with the glittering magnificence of the city. The furnishings were modern and minimal, with leather and steel furniture, and textured area rugs that covered sections of the sandstone floor. The inner walls were decorated with huge black-and-white abstract prints, and most of the color came in dramatic splashes from tall arrangements of orchids.

  It was all new, and had all been chosen, purchased, and arranged by Jake's staff, from the sheets on the bed to the soap in the bathroom to the shirts in the closet to the spatulas in the kitchen drawer. The lack of his own personal touch didn't bother Jake at all—his real
home was in Miami, and this apartment was intended to be a showplace, not a cozy retreat. Besides, it was shockingly beautiful, and it amused him to open random drawers to discover what he owned.

  “What the hell is this thing?” he asked, holding up a small gadget made of a cheap-looking plastic base attached by a hinge to a frame strung tightly with parallel wires.

  Tom Amadeo squinted at it. “Cockroach torture instrument,” he said.

  “No, it's not. It's a hard-boiled egg slicer,” said Molly. She was perched on the edge of a kitchen bar stool, trying to avoid crushing her gold taffeta gown. It was Saturday night, and downstairs in the ballroom the party was in full swing. They were due to make their entrance soon, and Molly was rigid with tension. Her hair had been styled into an elaborate updo, and a makeup artist had spent an hour painting her face into a seemingly airbrushed perfection. Technically, she was beautiful, but between her glassy-eyed expression and the overall stiffness of her dress and hair, she looked more like a department-store mannequin than a woman. Jake and Tom were doing what they could to amuse and relax her while they waited, and somehow they had all ended up in the kitchen.

  “Okay, how about this one?” Jake displayed another mysterious-looking item.

  “Cockroach juicer,” said Tom.

  “It's a garlic press,” Molly said. A tiny smile touched the edges of her mouth.

  “Forget about it,” said Tom, shaking his head. “This is New York City. Sooner or later, it's all about the roaches.”

  Molly laughed, and Jake and Tom exchanged looks of relief. Jake was feeling more than a little uptight himself. The campaign's first week had been very promising, but this was the big night. Just as Cora had predicted, the news media had been delighted by the story of the playboy's taming at the hands of the professor, and the fact that the professor had been maintaining a secret life as Sandra St. Claire added extra spice to the stew. Molly's own notoriety suddenly rivaled Jake's own, and the ballroom was filled with people hoping to get a look at her. Berenger stock was up one point, and Tom had arranged for the New York Times to publish the first personal interview with Jake, a favorable profile called “Hospitality's Terrible Tycoon Comes of Age.”